Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style

ISSN: 2045-2349

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 Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style
Volume 2 Number 2 September 2013

Contents
Letter from the Editor
Jacque Lynn Foltyn…………………………………………………………… iii

Losing Her Religion? The Use of Guadalupan Iconography in

Contemporary Mexican Street Fashion
Jessica C. Locke........................................…………………………………....... 1

Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion: A Clever and Subversive Technique

Cassandra Gero .............................................................................................. .. 21

Coming Out from Under the Crinolines: Raising the Hem on Literary
Representations of Shoes in Alcott, Dickens, Dreiser, Zola and Wharton
Sarah Heaton…………………………………………………………………..41

Britain’s Brand Story in the Fashion Films of the Central Office of

Information (COI)
Jo Stephenson …………………………………………………………............63

Branding Sustainability: An Interview with Designer-Entrepreneur

Sarah Van Aken
Natalie W. Nixon………………………………………………………………85

Exhibition Reviews:

Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity

(The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Vanessa Rosales .............................................................................................. 101

Hartnell to Amies: Couture by Royal Appointment

(Fashion and Textile Museum, London)
Cassandra Schrøder Holm .............................................................................. 107

Shoe Obsession
(The Museum at FIT, New York)
Ericka Basile ................................................................................................... 112

Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions ....................................................... 117

Book Reviews:

On the Button: The Significance of an Ordinary Item,

by Nina Edwards
Elizabeth Kaino Hopper ................................................................................. 121

Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being 2,

edited by Cristina Giorcelli and Paula Rabinowitz
Paola Colaiacomo .......................................................................................... 124

Briefly Noted Books ...................................................................................... 127

Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style, volume 2, no. 2, pp. iii-iv (2013) Inter-Disciplinary Press
ISSN: 2045-2349

Letter from the Editor

Fashion poses challenges for creative minds, and in this issue of Catwalk we probe the
importance of symbolism for the wearing, designing, manufacturing and promoting of fashion.
The first article, ‘Losing Her Religion? The Use of Guadalupan Iconography in
Contemporary Mexican Street Fashion,’ was written by Jessica C. Locke, Associate Professor
of Spanish at the University of Mary Washington, Virginia, whose research focuses on colonial
and contemporary Mexican literature, culture and society. I learned much from Locke’s
absorbing study of the ways in which the iconography of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico’s
patron saint, has migrated to fashion. Locke analyses how a traditional icon can be used to serve
fashion by removing meaning from its symbolism, and at the same time retain its symbolic
value for devotees wearing ‘Lupe-toons,’ cartoon versions of the brown-skinned icon of the
Virgin. Products bearing this likeness are now sold in religious stores that have traditionally
specialised in more ‘conventional’ images of saints, and some Catholic priests have approved
their appearance on T-shirts, bracelets and handbags as modern-day tools for proselytising and
communicating with the Church’s flock. I have no doubt that Locke’s article will further the
discussion of icons and their replication through globalisation and fashion.
Cassandra Gero, who works in conservation at The Costume Institute of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, also focuses on the symbolic importance of
images displayed on fashion items, but her subject is the clothes that fool the eye with optical
illusions. In ‘Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion: A Clever and Subversive Technique,’ Gero explains
how the ancient method, famously well-preserved on the frescoed walls of the villa at
Boscoreale near Pompeii and on many a Renaissance ceiling painting, came to be used by
designers as a form of fantasy, amusement and social commentary that can raise critical issues
about fashion and the nature of contemporary society. Gero provides well-chosen examples
from Elsa Schiaparelli, Roberta di Camerino, Franco Moschino, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac,
Martin Margiela and Thursday Friday of trompe l’oeil, depicting ‘bowties,’ ‘sequins,’ ‘jeans,’
and ‘It Bags,’ among other items. The technique has had its detractors, on a long continuum
with those like Plato who deplore any simulacrum. One such individual was Henry Cole, the
Victorian civil servant, design reformer and trade innovator, who condemned ‘fake’ printed
textiles that allowed working class people to dress in fashions similar to their ‘social betters.’
Like many woman, I admit to a love of shoes. Add to that a love of literature, and you
will understand why I enjoyed editing, ‘Coming Out from Under the Crinolines: Raising the
Hem on Literary Representations of Shoes in Alcott, Dickens, Dreiser, Zola and Wharton,’
written by Sarah Heaton, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Head of English at the University of
Chester, UK. Heaton’s analysis of the ‘aura,’ fetishism and symbolism associated with
women’s footwear, when it finally emerged from under the late nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century woman’s skirts, is insightful. Footwear production had been industrialized,
and shoes were displayed in the new department stores, detailed in the paintings of Giovanni
Boldini, and created as art works by the first celebrity shoe designer, Pietro Yantorny. Women’s
shoes emerge as a complex site of the simultaneously hidden and displayed, and are lusted after,
ogled, and the object of stolen peeks. In the novels analysed, ‘revealed’ shoes appear as
symbols of crisis, revelation, and female empowerment. Heaton begins the article with a
consideration of contemporary cultural engagement with women’s shoes in the television series
Sex and the City, to re-read representations of them in art and literature in a past culture.
In ‘Britain’s Brand Story in the Fashion Films of the Central Office of Information
(COI),’ Jo Stephenson, a films studies PhD student at Queen Mary, University of London,
traces the relationships among non-fiction film and media, the British fashion industry, and
iv | Letter from the Editor

British branding campaigns from World War II to the present day. Her subject is the films of
the Central Office of Information (COI) made in the post-war period to promote the British
fashion industry to overseas markets. Critical to the marketing campaigns were constructed
ideas of Britishness, especially the symbolic value of the Royal Family, the traditional red post
box, London, Carnaby Street, and the Swinging Sixties. By analysing COI films like Sixty Years
of Fashion (1960) and Miniskirts Make Money (1968), Stephenson evaluates what images
exactly are being sold and how they are informed by Britain’s history, politics, popular culture,
cultural geography and urban landscape. She also reflects on the methodological difficulties
inherent in any study of archival films and the multiple levels of their curation, and highlights
the gap in current fashion film criticism regarding non-fiction fashion films.
For the final article of the issue, ‘Branding Sustainability: An Interview with Designer-
Entrepreneur Sarah Van Aken,’ Natalie W. Nixon, Associate Professor in the Fashion
Merchandising & Management Program at Philadelphia University, Pennsylvania, had several
conversations with the eco-clothing designer and retailer Sarah Van Aken, whose company SA
VA is based in Philadelphia. Nixon talked with Van Aken about sustainability not simply in
terms of regenerative materials and the supply chain, but in terms of how a fashion business
with environmental ecology goals can be a business model for fiscal and environmental
sustainability and viability. Van Aken discusses the origins of her business, her decision in 2008
to move production from Bangladesh back to the USA, her interpretation of sustainability, and
the expansion goals for a fashion business in a major urban American city as a model for
economic development. The symbolic, as well as practical, value attached to these goals is to be
applauded in a time of globalism, debasement of the environment, and outsourcing.
The Reviews section of Catwalk is devoted to recent exhibitions and books, and I had
the pleasure of seeing Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, reviewed in the issue by
Vanessa Rosales, when it made its stop at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. British royals are
very much in the news, and Cassandra Schrøder Holm’s appraisal of Hartnell to Amies:
Couture by Royal Appointment, held at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum, reveals not only
the continued fascination with (some) royals and the ways they dress but also the ways in which
their clothing can mirror and support the fashion of a particular period. Ericka Basile, a regular
reviewer for Catwalk, visited The Museum at FIT and wandered in wonder through the galleries
of Shoe Obsession, a well-named follow-up to the fetishism of female footwear discussed by
Sarah Heaton. Information about exhibitions currently showing, or soon-to-be showing, follows
the exhibition reviews. The button, a humble item that keeps clothing closed, is the subject of
Nina Edwards’ book On the Button, a cultural history of the fastener, which Elizabeth Kaino
Hopper assesses. The second volume of Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being 2, edited by
Cristina Giorcelli and Paul Rabinowitz, is thoughtfully reviewed by Paola Colaiacomo.
Recently authored books by Kate Moss, Kate Irvin and Laurie Anne Brewer, Marco Pedroni,
Elizabeth L. Cline, Caroline Evans, and me follow in Briefly Noted Books.
I would like to thank Michael A. Langkjær for his diligent work as Catwalk’s first
Reviews Editor. Leonard R. Koos, Chair of Modern Languages and Literature, University of
Mary Washington, Virginia, and Sofia Pantouvaki, Professor of Costume Design for Theatre
and Film at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Finland, are taking
over the section. Special thanks too for Elizabeth Kaino Hopper, Leonard R. Koos, Desiree
Smal, Jess Berry and Lisa Howard for helping us put the issue together.

Enjoy!

Jacque Lynn Foltyn, PhD

Chief Editor, Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style
Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style, volume 2, no. 2, pp. 1-20 (2013) Inter-Disciplinary Press
ISSN: 2045-2349

Losing Her Religion? The Use of Guadalupan Iconography

in Contemporary Mexican Street Fashion

Jessica C. Locke

Abstract
The proliferation of Catholic religious iconography characterized the Colonial period in
Mexico, and the origins of Mexico’s most prominent religious, cultural, and national icon – Our
Lady of Guadalupe – can be traced to the post-Colonial period. Tradition holds that in
December of 1531, the virgen morena (‘brown-skinned Virgin’) appeared multiple times to the
Amerindian Juan Diego and asked him to visit the Bishop of Mexico, Fray Juan de Zumárraga,
and request a church be built in her honour. This ‘apparitions narrative’ institutionalized the
Virgin as an intrinsic component of the Mexican Church, and in 1754 Pope Benedict XIV
declared Our Lady of Guadalupe the Patron Saint of Mexico (then ‘New Spain’). During the
Mexican War for Independence (1810-1821) and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), Our
Lady had great appeal as a nationalist political symbol. War flags bearing her image were used
during these conflicts and, I will argue, are precursors to the popularity of new ‘banners,’ e.g.,
street fashions that celebrate Mexico and Mexico’s patron saint. In this article, I will examine
the use of Our Lady of Guadalupe in contemporary Mexican street fashion and the multiple
processes of symbolification undergone by this icon, from the sixteenth century to
contemporary times. I will detail specific Guadalupe street fashion products marketed in
Mexico and discuss the appropriateness – or lack thereof – of the use of the term ‘kitsch’ as a
criterion for the aesthetic judgement of dress and accessory items bearing her image. To
conduct this study, I visited multiple points of purchase of Guadalupe street fashion in Mexico,
predominantly in Mexico City. My methodology is also informed by analysis of existing data
from marketing companies and by content analysis of news articles and company websites
featuring Our Lady. My analytic framework is informed by my ongoing studies in the fields of
Mexican history, culture and society (sixteenth century to present), and by fashion and
consumption theories. Anthropological and sociological studies have provided critical sources
of information and insight.

Key Words
Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico, street fashion, religious iconography, Lupe-toon, Catholic
Church, apparitions narrative, kitsch, camp, Susan Sontag.

*****

1. Introduction
The proliferation of Catholic religious iconography significantly characterized the
Colonial period in Mexico, and the origins of Mexico’s most prominent religious, cultural, and
national icon – Our Lady of Guadalupe – can be traced to the post-Colonial period. Tradition
holds that in December of 1531, the virgen morena (‘brown-skinned Virgin’) appeared multiple
times to the Amerindian Juan Diego and entrusted him with the task of visiting the Bishop of
Mexico, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, to have a church built in her honour. This ‘apparitions
2 | Losing Her Religion?

narrative’ institutionalized this account of the Virgin Mary as an intrinsic component of the
Mexican Church, and in 1754 Pope Benedict XIV declared Our Lady of Guadalupe the Patron
Saint of Mexico (then ‘New Spain’), which facilitated her transition into a national symbol. Our
Lady gained great appeal as a nationalist political symbol during the Mexican War for
Independence in the early nineteenth century and during the Mexican Revolution, a century
later. War flags bearing her image were used during these conflicts and evoked the nationalistic
spirit and agenda of which these movements were born.1

Image 1: Our Lady of Guadalupe, Basilica of Our Lady

of Guadalupe, Tepeyac Hill, Mexico City Mexico.
 Jessica C. Locke | 3

Today, images of Our Lady of Guadalupe appear on different sorts of ‘banners.’

Sequined renditions of La Lupe, as she is often called in Mexico, give an eye-catching twist to
traditional Mexican market bags, and bracelets and scapulars bearing her image serve as
popular wrist-wear among teens and young adults. The immensely successful Mexican
company Distroller®, which specialises in personal and home accessories, school supplies,
jewellery, dolls and stuffed toys, markets numerous products featuring a cartoon version of Our
Lady. But years before the popularity of such products, La Lupe already adorned multiple dress
and accessorial items in Mexico; an iconic example of a consumer thereof is Alex Lora, the lead
singer of the Mexican rock band El Tri, who often dons Guadalupe T-shirts for Tri concerts.2
Curiously, the original object that bears the Virgin’s likeness and immortalizes the universally-
familiar image of the icon is also an article of clothing, Juan Diego’s coarse ayatl cloak, which,
according to tradition, is the same Guadalupe-imprinted garment currently displayed at the
Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City (Image 1).
In this article, I will examine the use of Our Lady of Guadalupe imagery in
contemporary Mexican street fashion. To contextualize the popularity of her likeness, I will
first analyse significant moments in the multiple processes of symbolification undergone by this
icon from the sixteenth century. I will then detail specific Guadalupe dress and accessory
products currently marketed in Mexico. Finally, I will discuss the feasibility of the term ‘kitsch’
as a categorical term of aesthetic judgement for evaluating Guadalupe-bearing dress articles and
accessories.
My study of Guadalupe street fashion involved several methodological and theoretical
approaches. I have conducted extensive field research in various cities in Mexico over the past
decade, most significantly in 2012 and 2013 in Mexico City. I visited multiple points of
purchase of Guadalupe dress and accessorial items, including markets, street vendor stands, and
retail stores, and purchased, photographed, and studied numerous Guadalupe-adorned products.
In addition, I analysed existing data from marketing companies, and conducted content analysis
of documented communications from news articles and company websites. My analytic
frameworks are informed by my ongoing studies in the fields of Mexican history, culture and
society (sixteenth century to present), by fashion theory and by consumption theory;
anthropological and sociological studies provided critical sources of information and insight.

2. The 1531 Apparitions Narrative and Guadalupe’s Dress Debut

The earliest written documentation of the Our Lady of Guadalupe apparitions narrative
can be found in two texts dating back to mid-seventeenth century Mexico. The first, a Spanish
text authored by the preacher Miguel Sánchez, was published in 1648 and is entitled Imagen de
la Virgen María, Madre de Dios de Guadalupe (Image of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God of
Guadalupe).3 The second, written in Nahuatl and published in 1649, is Luis Laso de la Vega’s
Huei tlamahuiçoltica omonexiti in ilhuicac tlatocacihuapilli Santa Maria totlaçonantzin
Guadalupe in nican Huei altepenahuac Mexico itocayocan Tepeyacac (‘By a Great Miracle the
Heavenly Queen, Saint Mary, Our Precious Mother of Guadalupe, Appeared Here near the
Great Altepetl of Mexico, in a Place Called Tepeyacac’).4 Though quite different from one
another in terms of ‘style and dramatic structure,’5 the two works present highly similar
versions of the narrative. Both relay the story of the December 1531 appearance of the Virgin
Mary to Juan Diego in Tepeyac, Mexico, and how at the Virgin’s behest, he subsequently
visited Bishop Fray Juan de Zumárraga to relay her petition for a church to be built in her
honour. After more than one failed attempt to convince the Bishop of the veracity of the
apparitions, Juan Diego was able to bring him a sign touched by the Virgin herself – flowers he
picked from Tepeyac Hill, taken by the Virgin into her arms, and then returned to Diego so that
4 | Losing Her Religion?

he could bring them to the Bishop.6 Once inside the Bishop’s palace, as noted in the Huei
tlamahuiçoltica, yet another miraculous ‘apparition’ occurred. Juan Diego:

spread out his white cloak, in the folds of which he was carrying the flowers,
and as all the different kinds of Spanish flowers scattered to the ground, the
precious image of the consummate Virgin Saint Mary, mother of God the
deity, was imprinted and appeared on the cloak, just as it is today where it is
kept in her precious home, her temple of Tepeyacac, called Guadalupe.7

The cloak is commonly referred to as la tilma,8 and, according to popular tradition, has
been preserved through the centuries despite the alleged impossibility of its survival. Donal
Anthony Foley, an authority on Marion apparitions, observes, ‘The Image itself is an
enigma…the rough tilma on which it was imprinted, made from maguey vegetable fibers,
should have disintegrated within a matter of decades – and yet it is still here nearly five
centuries later.’9
Thus, the Virgin first made her debut on an article of clothing nearly 500 years ago, a
claim that may appear to be a convenient coincidence in the examination of modern-day
Guadalupe fashion. However, the relationship between the sacred image of Our Lady and the
cartoon Virgencita that adorns backpacks, lunchboxes, bracelets, and watches has clearly been
a difficult one to reconcile for some members of the Catholic Church. To understand the
popularity of Our Lady of Guadalupe among all those who wear her image, we must first
consider her role not only as a religious symbol but as a cultural and national symbol, most
arguably Mexico’s most prominent national icon.

3. Holy National Icon: Guadalupe’s Transition into a National Symbol

The traditions surrounding the apparitions narrative have largely been built upon their
symbolic value, within the context of the post-conquest years and the complex process of
transculturation characterising that period. Certain aspects of the commonly-accepted story
have acquired great symbolic significance. Among the most prominent of these are that Our
Lady chose a humble Indian man to deliver her message to the Bishop and spoke to him in his
native tongue, Nahuatl, that she is morena (brown-skinned),10 and that she represented a
mother-like figure to Juan Diego and to the entire Mexican pueblo.11 Historians have also
associated her with pre-Columbian Mother goddesses, in particular, Tonantzin.12
The symbolic nature of these elements within the Guadalupan tradition illuminates the
historical circumstances in which the Virgin’s significance in Mexico was born. The Spanish
colonization of the Americas generated a need to reconcile the multiple cultures, histories,
religious belief systems, cosmovisions, customs, and traditions that had been forced into contact
with one another during the conquest period. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Mexican
writer Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera offered the following words regarding Our Lady’s
transformation into a national symbol.

The Virgin of Guadalupe is for us a symbol of the family and as a national

symbol. The poor Indian had nothing when She appeared. They had taken
away his property, his women, his children; they had stabbed his parents to
death, and now they could no longer believe in those gods that just stood by
as his people suffered with helpless resignation.13
 Jessica C. Locke | 5

The Virgin appeared to the humble Amerindian Juan Diego just ten years after the
Conquest of the Aztec Empire and is said to have provided a source of hope, acceptance,
belonging, and unity at a time when the indigenous communities of Mexico were experiencing
severe religious and cultural transitions. The fact that she appeared at the precise place where
the pre-Columbian mother deity Tonantzin is said to have been worshipped before the conquest
undeniably evokes the process of cultural, religious, and linguistic syncretism that occurred in
the post-conquest era.14
The role of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a source of national and cultural unification and
identification was consolidated over the centuries, and a key factor of her legitimacy is the
apparitions narrative. As the renowned Guadalupe scholar David A. Brading notes:

the apparition of the Guadalupan image signified that the peoples of Mexico,
not to say America, had been chosen for her protection. It was in recognition
of that unique distinction that it later became common to inscribe copies of
the image with an epigraph taken from Psalm 147, “non fecit taliter omni
natione,” “It was not done thus to all nations.”15

The concept of Guadalupe as proof of national privilege was firmly solidified with other
significant milestones in her history: first, the naming of her as Patron Saint of the territory of
New Spain by Pope Benedict XIV in 1754, and later, the use of her image by revolutionary
leaders like Father Miguel Hidalgo and Emiliano Zapata in the War of Independence in Mexico
and in the Mexican Revolution.16 Clearly, the representation of Guadalupe on the standards
carried by the armies fighting for Mexican Independence in the early nineteenth century and by
Mexican Revolutionaries at the beginning of the twentieth century contributed to the blurring of
the line between her religious and her patriotic affiliations.17
According to the Mexican historian Francisco de la Maza, ‘the cult of Guadalupe and
[Mexican] baroque art are the only authentic creations of the Mexican past.’18 Arguably, no
artefact is more uniquely Mexican than the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Whether painted
by an amateur artist’s hand on the side of a building or fashioned out of sequins to adorn a
hand-made market bag, she is an undeniably recognizable symbol of Mexico. Indeed, in
contemporary Mexican society, the presence of Guadalupe is all-encompassing. When one
travels through Mexico City, one can expect to see representations of her likeness a dozen or
more times a day, and many residents of Mexico have one or more versions of her likeness in
their homes. In 1958, the anthropologist Eric Robert Wolf noted that Our Lady is ‘celebrated in
popular song and verse’ and her ‘image adorns house fronts and interiors, churches and home
altars, bull rings and gambling dens, taxis and buses, restaurants and houses of ill repute.’19
While there is no doubt that Our Lady is revered in Mexican culture, some members of
the religious community object to the use of her image in non-religious contexts. Especially
controversial are the cartoon-Guadalupe products marketed by the Mexican brand Distroller®.
While observing that the images are very popular, especially among the young, Father Ricardo
Ledesma, the parish priest of a local church in Guadalupe Hidalgo, also claims that the
objective in their manufacture is solely to sell an appealing object to the public.

We as a Church can say that it is not a sacred image, the characteristics are
different; it should be a beautiful image that which invites us to devotion
[and] to communicate with God and with the Virgin, and that which makes
possible that encounter.20
6 | Losing Her Religion?

Such charges of exploitation reference the blurring of the boundaries between devotional
and non-devotional uses of the image, as well as the complexity involved in marking a line
between the two. While Father Ledesma asserts that the cartoon Guadalupe ‘is not a sacred
image,’ his judgement cannot determine that the image is for non-devotional use only. It is
reasonable to presume that some percentage of the population that consumes such products are
Guadalupanos, Guadalupe devotees. Indeed, a prayer component is a feature of some
Distroller® products of Our Lady. For example, on a Distroller® backpack, the text ‘Virgencita,
plis cuídame mucho y líbrame de tanta tarea’ (‘Virgencita, please take good care of me and free
me from so much homework’) appears above a cartoon image of Our Lady. Other Distroller®
products bear an expression of appreciation toward the Virgin; for example, a reusable
Guadalupe lunch bag reads, ‘Virgencita mil gracias por este lunch, seguro será una delicia
como siempre’ (‘Little Virgin, a thousand thanks for this lunch; surely it will be a delight as
always’). At the brand’s youth-oriented website, the home page in May of 2013 provided a link
to a ‘Fuente de Deseos’ (‘Wishing Well’), through a cartoon of a church; when one clicks on
the image, one hears a church choir hymn playing. Amparo Serrano, the founder of the
Distroller® brand, has responded to criticism about her profiteering off the use of the Virgin’s
image. In an interview with the Mexican newspaper El Economista, she defended herself by
claiming that ‘The creations were not made out of bad faith.’ ‘I do not want to convince
[people] to buy my products. I do this with respect for myself. It is like painting God.’21

Image 2: T-shirt purchased outside of the Basilica of Guadalupe

in Mexico City. © Image courtesy of Jessica C. Locke

Of course, products like those marketed by brands such as Distroller® represent a

divergence from traditional clothing and accessories bearing Our Lady’s likeness. Before
returning to the topic of these less conventional Guadalupe clothing and dress products, I will
examine other categories of Guadalupe street fashion that are widely marketed in Mexico. As
popular symbols, they do not follow a traditional ‘trickle-down’ class-based Veblenian model
of consumption.22 Rather, their consumption appears to be based on identification with other
 Jessica C. Locke | 7

types of groups23 that are largely unrelated to social or economic class. As the sociologist Fred
Davis, following Georg Simmel,24 has argued, fashion is actually about all sorts of other
identities: sexual, gender, age, ethnic, religious, and so on.’25 I will develop this line of
argument further after examining the following fashion trends that feature her image.

4. Guadalupe T-Shirts Rock

One of the most well-known figures who wears his love for La Lupe figuratively on his
sleeve and literally on his chest is another Mexican national icon, Alex Lora, of the Mexican
rock group El Tri. The Guadalupan T-shirts Lora dons at Tri concerts have become an essential
aspect of his image as a musician, so much so that the bronze statue of him created for the
shopping and entertainment centre Plaza México in Lynwood, California features a Guadalupe
T-shirt.26 Lora’s wearing of Our Lady T-shirts can be considered a devotional use, and he has
been referred to by Mexican newspapers, as ‘el popular devoto de la Virgen de Guadalupe’
(‘the popular devotee of the Virgin of Guadalupe’).27 Lora has expressed his devotion in
interviews and in public performances at celebrations commemorating Our Lady.28
While Guadalupe T-shirts are not marketed to or consumed by fans of El Tri, T-shirts
with her image, such as the ones pictured above and below (Image 2 and Image 3) are a staple
of Mexican street fashion, sold in marketplaces all over Mexico City. The most diverse
selection of the T-shirts is probably to be found in the vendors’ stands outside of the Basilica of
Guadalupe in Mexico City. The shirts vary in material (100% cotton vs. cotton-poly blends),
colour (both shirt colour and the colouring of the image of Guadalupe), style, stitching, sizing,
wording, and place of origin (many are not nationally made), etc. In general, the Virgin
depicted on these T-shirts bears a relatively close resemblance to the traditional image on the
tilma housed inside the Basilica.

Image 3: T-shirt purchased outside of the Basilica of Guadalupe

in Mexico City. © Image courtesy of Jessica C. Locke
8 | Losing Her Religion?

5. Wrapped Around My Heart and My Wrist

Bracelets bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe are also a highly-abundant
Mexican street fashion staple and, like the T-shirts, can be purchased at the Basilica and other
Mexican marketplaces, and are sold by street-vendors in non-market high tourist traffic
contexts. One popular type is composed of wooden squares or circles, joined together with
string, and bears figures common in Mexican Catholic iconography such as St. Jude, El Santo
Niño de Atocha, as well as one or more images of the Virgin Mary, at least one in her
Guadalupan form. Another type depicts only La Lupe. There are innumerable cloth bracelet
options. Like the T-shirts, they vary in colour, wording, and imagery; they even vary in width
(generally ranging between about 1-1.5 cm). On cloth bracelets one can find anything from a
traditional depiction of Guadalupe, with the simple slogan ‘Viva La Virgen de Guadalupe’
(‘Long Live the Virgin of Guadalupe’), to a cartoon rendition of the Virgin accompanied by the
full prayer of the Hail Mary in Spanish (Image 4). Small string scapulars of all colours, most
frequently bearing images of Our Lady of Guadalupe and of Jesus Christ, have become popular
wrist-wear for Mexican youth. Some wear several different bracelets on one wrist; for other
wearers, one Guadalupan wrist-tag is sufficient.

Image 4: Guadalupe bracelets. © Image courtesy of Jessica C. Locke

6. Virgencita, I’m Taking You to Market

Market bags bearing the figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe have long been popular in
Mexico and are sold in the same locations as the aforementioned T-shirts and bracelets. The
bags come in different shapes, sizes, materials and colour combinations and some even feature
sequins (Image 5). The sequined Virgin most often adorns the traditional mesh shopping bag
with plastic handles and plastic trim, while other renditions appear on plastic and even cloth
totes. The popularity of such bags both inside and outside of Mexico is undeniable, and there
 Jessica C. Locke | 9

are numerous websites from which all varieties of Guadalupe adorned totes may be purchased.
Some of these on-line companies recognize29 the value of the environmentally friendly products
and enhance their marketability and, ultimately, their eco-fashionableness by mentioning it.

Image 5: Sequined-Guadalupe market bag.

© Image courtesy of Jessica C. Locke

7. Lupe-Toons!
I will now return to the increasingly-popular products bearing cartoon images of Our
Lady of Guadalupe, as they represent some of the most fashionable Guadalupe dress and
accessory trends. Much like cartoon films produced all over the world, cartoon renditions of
Our Lady of Guadalupe are not consumed only by youth. Lupe-toons come in all shapes and
sizes and are created for a wide market of consumers. Cartoon Guadalupes adorn home
decorations, bumper stickers, backpacks, bracelets, T-shirts, pencils, notebooks, plastic dish-
wear, lighters, candles, key chains, and so on (Image 6). ‘Cartoonified’ images of Our Lady are
commonly referred to as Virgencitas, with the diminutive30 serving a double purpose, as it
frequently does in Spanish, to denote not only size or age (the cartoon-Lupes generally have a
child-like face) but also affection. The word Virgencita is often written or printed on the
product and this name is often accompanied by ‘por favor’ (please) or ‘plis’ (informal for por
favor) and a prayer, or by some other expression of endearment. A notable sub-trend of the
Lupe-toon phenomenon is found in the realm of homemade crafts, specifically in the form of
cartoon-esque Guadalupe table centrepieces, headboard decorations, wall hangings, etc. These
crafts are made of an assortment of materials easily purchased at any local arts-and-crafts store.
On YouTube, one can find instructional videos outlining the creation process for such crafts.31
The colour and style variations of the Lupe-toons are innumerable, and while some are
trademarked – such as those marketed by Distroller® – others are not. For this reason, many
Lupe-toons appear to be the property of whomever chooses to create and/or re-create her – or
alternately, are the property of no one. In terms of trademarking of these images, it may be a
matter of a ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ dilemma. Were the characteristics
10 | Losing Her Religion?

specific to the brand-name cartoon renditions of Guadalupe first in public domain and then
appropriated by the brands that have trademarked them? Or is the proliferation of products the
result of the success of trademarked items marketed by companies like Distroller®? Amparo
Serrano has addressed the topic of product piracy – not only in regard to her Virgencita
products but other signature Distroller® characters as well. In the aforementioned interview with
El Economista, she said, ‘They put something else [into or onto the image]. Another nose, for
example; and then it’s a different drawing. It’s something that frustrates me.’ Piracy is so
common that Serrano sees no solution. 32

Image 6: A Lupe-toon sticker, with text ‘Virgencita te quiero mil’

(‘Little Virgin, I love you tons’). © Image courtesy of Jessica C. Locke

Santitos®, another popular trademarked brand, also manufactures cartoon religious

character items, including those featuring Guadalupe. While the type of products marketed by
Santitos® and Distroller® differ to some degree – with Distroller® carrying many more bags,
purses, and backpacks, and Santitos® offering a much wider range of jewellery and of
traditionally devotional items such as scapulars and rosaries – they do share general product
categories such as personal and home accessories, jewellery, and dolls. Both also include a
prayer component on some of their products and/or as marketing tools. The Santitos® website
also features a ‘Tus Buenos Deseos’ (‘Your Well Wishes’ – much like Distroller®’s ‘Wishing
Well’) section on its website, in case ‘you have a loved one to whom you want to send a
message to support him/her in these moments.’33
 Jessica C. Locke | 11

Despite such similarities, Guadalupitas (and other religious characters) of Santitos®, and
Virgencitas of Distroller® are marketed somewhat differently. Many of Santitos® products are
advertised as gifts for religious or otherwise-celebratory occasions, and this intention is
reinforced on their website in the ‘Sobre Nosotros’ (‘About Us’) section: ‘some of us use
santitos to express ourselves with blessings [or] thanks or [to] celebrate our happiness, births,
confirmations, festivities, [or] marriages.’34 This particular marketing intention is absent in
Distroller®’s ‘target market’ information.35 While both the Sears and Liverpool department
stores in Mexico carry products manufactured by both companies, sometimes displaying them
in adjacent spaces, the upscale department store Palacio de Hierro carries only the Distroller®
brand, the products of which have a higher price point that Santitos®. Additionally, while there
are some individual Santitos® stores in cities throughout the country, individual Distroller®
stores are located more strategically, in large and often high-end commercial plazas with heavy
consumer traffic. While Santitos® has a website and an online catalogue, at present purchases
cannot be made online; in contrast, Distroller®’s online store is fully functional, and the
company’s products are even sold on eBay. (On 7 July 2013, forty Distroller® Lupe-toon items
were for sale on eBay.) Another way the companies differ is that Distroller® makes greater use
of social media and other online marketing resources such as Facebook and Twitter.
Creativity and innovation undoubtedly play a significant role in any Guadalupe themed
product’s success. As noted by the sociologist Joanne Entwistle, an intrinsic characteristic of
fashion is ‘change for change’s sake,’36 and current trends in Guadalupe-based fashion certainly
comply with this standard. A feature that allows a product to stand out among the many
iterations of a type can greatly increase its consumer appeal, marketability, and sale. A portrait
of Our Lady of Guadalupe hugging Pope John Paul II to her bosom or a snow-globe/pen-holder
Basilica of Guadalupe, featuring Our Lady and Juan Diego amidst gold glitter may be valued
for their uniqueness and novelty. But such creative twists and innovations also play a part in the
problematic classification of some Guadalupe-bearing products as kitsch.

8. Our Heavenly Queen of Mexican Kitsch?

Both within and beyond Mexico, the innumerable different mass-produced and
commercialized items bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, including but not limited
to the dress and accessory products discussed in this article, have been labelled ‘kitsch’ by
various commentators and cultural critics. Adriana Navarro makes immediate reference to
Guadalupe in detailing the origins of kitsch art in Mexico and claims that the kitsch art
movement developed in the Seventies ‘when artists acclaimed pop art objects, such as La
Virgen de Guadalupe or the decorations from trailer trucks, and exhibited them in museums or
galleries as objets d’art.’37 Paula N. Ilabaca, writing from Chile, refers to ‘the Mexican Virgen
turned kitsch in our Santiago de Chile, the one that we’ve seen multiply herself on mugs,
watches, T-shirts, paintings.’38
While the Navarro article is focused on a type of kitsch with officially recognized
aesthetic merit now valued as ‘art,’ the Ilabaca article appears to relegate the type of products I
have been discussing to the realm of ‘junk,’ along the line of original definitions of kitsch,
which emphasised its low quality, inexpensiveness, aesthetic inferiority, and attempts to
deceive or ‘dupe’ the public with sentimental, vulgar products.39 If one accepts this definition, it
could be argued that all mass-produced and mass-consumed articles bearing the image of Our
Lady of Guadalupe are kitsch in their imitation and commodification of the unique, singular
image of Our Lady on Juan Diego’s tilma, an icon considered sacred, miraculous, and
aesthetically precious. But this argument is highly problematic when dealing with imagery as
societally and culturally complex as Our Lady of Guadalupe and, in fact, becomes slippery
12 | Losing Her Religion?

when we recognize the subjectivity of the concepts involved, relating to aesthetics, price,
sentimentality, and the use for which such objects are intended. A good example would be the
aforementioned Guadalupe/Christ scapulars which are inexpensive, mass produced, and worn
as fashionable bracelets by teens and young adults in Mexico but also viewed as devotional
objects. The same can be said of several objects sold outside the Basilica in Mexico City.
Such subjectivity and ambiguity regarding the blurry boundaries around the term kitsch
has led some contemporary scholars to approach the term as a fluid and ever-shifting concept,
with ‘clusters of meanings.’ For example, scholars such as Kristin G. Congdon and Doug
Blandy refer to ‘objects identified as kitsch’ rather than to ‘kitsch objects’ and note that kitsch
has traditionally been ‘closely linked with fakery, depravity, sentimentality, vulgarity,
crassness, and the formulaic, but it is also about parody, irony, and satire.’40 But even with this
more forgiving non-definition of kitsch, there is a subjective and/or value-based socio-
economic-political assessment that does not lend itself well to achieving a clear analysis of
what constitutes kitsch. To assert that the vast array of mass produced street fashion products
have satirical intentions in their creation, marketing, and consumption is to blatantly
overgeneralise and deny the historical, cultural, and social complexity of the Guadalupan
symbol detailed in previous sections of this article. Guadalupe T-shirts, market bags, and
bracelets may be purchased indiscriminately by devout Guadalupanos on a pilgrimage to the
home of her sacred image, by international tourists wanting to take home a truly ‘Mexican’
souvenir, or by Mexican pre-teens buying into a local youth culture fashion trend. There is no
doubt that some of these objects are not of high quality and are of questionable ‘taste,’
depending upon one’s point of view, but that does not make them kitsch. In this sense, we may
consider that the intention, as well as the interpretation, of Guadalupe fashion trends is in the
eye (or heart, or mind, or ‘soul’) of the partakers and the beholders of such trends. I find the
following observation made by the anthropologist Daniel Miller regarding material artefacts in
general to be valuable.

Societies have an extraordinary capacity either to consider objects as having

attributes which may not appear as evident to outsiders, or else altogether to
ignore attributes which would have appeared to those same outsiders as being
inextricably part of that object.41

At this point, I would like to introduce the term ‘camp’ to my analysis. More
specifically, the camp I am referring to is the one defined by the literary critic Susan Sontag in
her influential 1964 essay, ‘Notes on Camp.’ I find camp to be a much more useful term than
kitsch when discussing the aesthetic merit of the Guadalupan objects of my study. Why? One of
the characteristics that Sontag attributes to camp is its ‘playful’ and even ‘comic’ nature, which
some of the Guadalupan street fashion objects I have been describing certainly possess.
According to Sontag, ‘The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful,
anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.”’
For Sontag, ‘Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical
comedy.’42 Sontag’s essay is particularly useful for understanding the intent behind the street
fashion items adorned with Lupe-toons.

Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the

sense, often, of being special, glamorous…. Camp turns its back on the good-
bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn’t reverse things. It
doesn’t argue that the good is bad, that the bad is good. What it does is to
offer for art (and life) a different – a supplementary – set of standards.43
 Jessica C. Locke | 13

Certainly Amparo Serrano of Distroller® does not appear to be concerned with criticism
about the aesthetic merit of her Guadalupe products; as discussed earlier she creates them
because she likes them and with ‘respect for self.’ In doing so, she has created an entirely un-
ordinary line of Guadalupe products that perhaps can be appreciated for their camp value and
has achieved extraordinary success within and even beyond the Mexican market.44

9. Conclusion: Is She Losing Her Religion?

The commercialization of Guadalupe-adorned clothing and accessory street fashion has
been criticised from many angles as being an exploitation of the use of a traditional Mexican
religious and national symbol for lucrative purposes. However, it is wrong to think that fashion
images of the Virgin have been divorced from their religious associations. According to
Professor Darío Armando Flores Soria of the University of Guadalajara, ‘Catholics do
‘consume this type of product …. If people buy it, it’s because they believe in it and they like
it.’45 In other words, there does not appear to be any danger that the commercialized Guadalupe
will ‘lose her religion.’ Far from posing a potential threat to her religious significance, the
commercialization of Guadalupe products – and particularly of the cartoon Virgencita – may be
enhancing religious faith and devotion to Our Lady, particularly among young people. Indeed,
the Administration of Religious Articles of the Archdiocese of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of
the Mexican state of Chiapas, found that the Catholic Church now offers cartoon images of the
Virgin in their religious stores and views them as a new ‘way of approaching Catholicism
among young people, who more greatly recognize this Virgin in the form of a cartoon.’46 It may
well be that clerics who criticise Lupe-toons are doing so because they view them as
competition as they are outselling traditional images of the icon, which the Catholic Church has
sold for centuries. 47
What I would like to emphasize is not the competition aspect of this assessment but
rather that there appears to be a certain level of acceptance within contemporary Mexican
society of alternative depictions of Guadalupe. The sale of new, alternative, cartoonified-
Guadalupe products in stores traditionally specialising in more conventional images of this and
other religious figures may indicate the occurrence of a ‘process of incorporation and
appropriation’ whereby, according to Barnard: ‘what was once a challenge to the dominant
system is appropriated or rendered harmless … to that system.’48 The great popularity of Lupe-
toons as a street fashion trend offers convincing testimony about the multiple associations and
identifications evoked by the figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the twenty-first century, a
century in which fashion and other aspects of consumer culture dominate economies and are
shaping the way ‘we are wearing our religion.’

Notes
1
Though the Guadalupe banners used during these historical conflicts do not qualify, strictly
speaking, as forms of dress, I maintain they may be interpreted as a sort of precursor to the
contemporary use of Guadalupe clothing and accessory products as fashion items, as they
evoked the sense of a collective, nationalistic and historically and culturally-rooted identity that
Guadalupe has come to represent. Guadalupan war banners, like contemporary Guadalupe dress
and accessory items, may function as a ‘bridge’ in accordance with Douglas’ and Isherwood’s
assertion regarding the social use of goods as ‘fences’ or ‘bridges’. M. Douglas and B.
Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London: Allen
Lane, 1979), 12; cited by Malcolm Barnard, Fashion as Communication, 2nd ed. (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 40. Malcolm Barnard elaborates on this concept: ‘Although Douglas and
14 | Losing Her Religion?

Isherwood say that goods may be used as fences or bridges: it is surely the case that items of
fashion and clothing may be used as fences and bridges; fashion and clothing delineate one
group from another at the same time as they identify common values within a
group….Bridges…are there to join or connect territories, they enable people to meet, to merge,
and to share identities.’ (Barnard, Fashion, 40).
2
As I will examine later on in this article, Alex Lora’s devotion to Our Lady is as much of a
component of his public image as is his music.
3
This text is discussed in detail in David A. Brading’s, Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of
Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 54-58; and Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole and James Lockhart, eds., The Story of Luis
Laso de la Vega’s Huei tlamahuiçoltica of 1649 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1998). As noted by Brading, Sánchez asserted that he relied significantly on oral tradition
narratives regarding the apparitions – specifically, ‘the testimony of “the eldest and most
trustworthy persons of the city”’ – in order to write his Imagen de la Virgen María. Brading,
Mexican Phoenix, 57.
4
Sousa, Poole and Lockhart, eds., The Story, 2. The authorship of the Huei tlamahuiçoltica is
actually highly disputed, but it was under Laso de la Vega’s name that the original 1649 version
was published. For a discussion on this matter, see Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 81-95, and
Sousa, Poole and Lockhart, The Story, 43-47. Sousa, Poole and Lockhart, The Story, 2, also
note that, whereas Miguel Sánchez’ version of the apparitions narrative ‘had primacy’ for long
after its publication, ‘beginning in the 18th century … his account was gradually eclipsed by that
of Luis Laso de la Vega … so that in more recent times the latter version has come to be
regarded by many as the seminal record.’
5
Brading details the differences he observes between the two texts in Mexican Phoenix, 83-88.
6
In Sánchez, the types of flowers are specified, and include ‘roses, lilies, carnations, violets,
jasmin, rosemary, irises and broom’, see Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 63. In the Huei
tlamahuiçoltica, they are simply described as ‘fine flowers in the Spanish style’ and ‘Spanish
flowers’. Sousa, Poole and Lockhart, eds., The Story, 85.
7
Ibid.
8
The Spanish term is derived from the Nahuatl ‘tilmatli.’ Diccionario de la lengua española,
22nd ed. (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2001), s.v. ‘tilma.’
9
Donal Anthony Foley, Review of Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and
Tradition across Five Centuries, by David A. Brading. Theotokos Books, 2002, accessed 3
November 2012, http://www.theotokos.org.uk/pages/breviews/dfoley/dbrading.html.
10
Susan Kellogg notes the cultural complexity of the concept of the ‘virgen morena.’ See Susan
Kellogg, review of The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega’s Huei tlamahuiçoltica of
1649, by Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole and James Lockhart, eds., Ethnohistory 46, no. 4 (1999):
842. Please also see note 14, below, for a definition of the term criollo (used here in Kellog’s
quote).
11
This concept is discussed extensively by Octavio Paz in his landmark collection of essays on
Mexican history and national identity entitled El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of
Solitude, 1950), and particularly, in his essay ‘Los hijos de la Malinche’ (‘The Sons of la
Malinche’).
12
Today, Guadalupe is very often referred to as ‘Guadalupe-Tonantzin,’ which clearly
evidences the long-standing popular association of Guadalupe, the Holy Mother of God in
Catholicism, with the Ancient Mexican Mother Goddess. There exists testimony to this
association dating as far back as the immediate post-conquest era: In the sixteenth-century text
Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, Franciscan Friar Bernardo de Sahagún wrote
 Jessica C. Locke | 15

a clear disapproval of such an association. See Carla Zarebska, ed., Guadalupe (Oaxaca,
Mexico: J. Dalevuleta, 2002), 76.
13
‘The National Symbol,’ El Mundo Magazine, September 13, 1896, cited in Carla Zarebska,
ed., Guadalupe, 235.
14
Raúl Fuentes Aguilar, La Guadalupana en la identidad nacional: Una visión laica (Mexico
City: Impresora Múltiple, 2001), 173. Historically, the term criollo in Spanish most frequently
referred to an individual born in the Americas to European parents, and mestizo, to an
individual of mixed race, most commonly, of indigenous and European descent. See
Diccionario de la lengua española, 22nd ed. (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2001), s.v.
‘criollo,’ ‘mestizo.’
15
In 1678, artist Cornelius Galle inscribed the phrase from Psalm 147 on an engraving of Our
Lady of Guadalupe. See Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 99.
16
Zarebska, ed. Guadalupe, 208-210; Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 313.
17
Jacques LaFaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National
Consciousness, 1531-1813, trans. Benjamin Keen, fwd. Octavio Paz (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1976), 299. The original French language text was published in 1974 by
Éditions Gallimard, Paris.
18
Francisco de la Maza, El guadalupanismo mexicano (México: Porrúa y Obregón, 1953) 9,
cited in Jacques LaFaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe, 299.
19
Eric Robert Wolf. ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol.’ The Journal of
American Folklore 71, no. 279 (1958): 34.
20
Original Spanish: ‘Ricardo dijo que este tipo de imágenes son ciertamente muy populares
entre niños y jóvenes, pero sólo tienen el objetivo de explotar la mercadotecnia y ofrecer un
producto que sea agradable al público. ‘Nosotros como iglesia, podemos decir que no se trata
de una imagen sagrada, las características son otras, debe ser una imagen bella que nos invite
a la devoción, a comunicarnos con dios y con la virgen y nos posibilite ese encuentro.’ Carlos
Espinoza, ‘Virgencita Plis, ni válida ni bendita’ (‘Virgencita Plis, Neither Valid nor Blessed’),
El Popular, accessed 29 September 2012, http://elpopular.mx/cultura-y-farandula/virgencita-
plis-ni-valida-ni-bendita/. The English translation of this quote in the body of this article is
mine.
21
Original Spanish: ‘“El reto más grande es la religión, porque se piensa que estoy lucrando
con la Virgen. Incluso han venido padres aquí a decirme que no van a bendecir mis imágenes
porque no se les hace correcto’ … Las críticas parecen no preocuparle. “Las creaciones no
fueron hechas con mala fe,” asegura Amparo, quien se describe como creyente. “Yo no quiero
convencer que compren mis productos. Yo lo hago con respeto para mí. Es como pintar a
dios”.’ Édgar Sánchez Sandoval, ‘Distroller, crecimiento guadalupano,’ (‘Distroller,
Guadalupan Growth’), El Economista, 15 September 2011, accessed 5 November 2012,
http://eleconomista.com.mx/industrias/2011/09/15/distroller-crecimiento-guadalupano.
Translation of this quote in the body of this article is mine.
22
In other words, Guadalupe fashion does not fundamentally ‘trickle down from the higher
classes to the lower classes.’ See Malcolm Barnard, Fashion as Communication, 130. Barnard
examines several problems relating to the ‘trickle-down theory;’ See Chapter 6 of Fashion as
Communication, entitled ‘Fashion, Clothing, and Social Revolution.’ One of the problems he
identifies is the fact that the ‘trickle-down’ theory “cannot account for fashions that do not
emanate from the elite, upper classes; it cannot account for the ways in which different and
various class groups, ethnic groups and gender groups, for example, may be the origins of
fashions.’ Barnard, Fashion as Communication, 131.
16 | Losing Her Religion?

23
See, also, Barnard’s elaboration on the relationship between the concepts of social groups and
fashion. He maintains that ‘any complex society will, by definition, consist of a number of
different groups, and…unless such a complex society exists, fashion will not exist.’ (Ibid., 41).
24
Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion,’ International Quarterly 10, No. 1 (1904): 130-143.
25
Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture and Identity, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992, 112, in
Malcolm Barnard, Fashion as Communication, 131.
26
Irma García, ‘Alex Lora dará el grito más estruendoso’ (‘Alex Lora Will Give the Most
Thunderous Shout’), Terra.com.mx, 20 November 2009, accessed 5 November 2012,
http://www.terra.com.mx/musica/articulo/169471/.
27
María Isabel López, ‘¿Quién grabará las apariciones de Alex Lora en TV?’ (‘Who Will
Record Alex Lora’s Appearances on TV?’), El Sexenio, 26 September 2012,
http://www.sexenio.com.mx/articulo.php?id=20011.
28
See, for example, María Teresa Peña Pérez, ‘Inician festejos de la guadalupana’
(‘Guadalupan Festivities Begin’), Sexenio, 11 December 2011,
http://sexenio.com.mx/articulo.php?id=11557.
29
See, for example, http://www.buganvillaimports.com and http://www.thrillomatic.com,
accessed 11 April 2013. Both online sites use the term ‘eco-friendly’ in their Guadalupe totes’
product descriptions.
30
Formed with the feminine diminutive suffix, cita.
31
For example, see: ‘F. Termoformado (Grito Guadalupano),’ 9 September 2011,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEd6IfY-IJs; and ‘Virgencita Termoformado,’
3 December 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5N7CzUt76E.
32
Original Spanish: ‘Le ponen otra cosa. Otra nariz, por ejemplo, y ya es otro dibujo. Es algo
que me frustra.’ Sánchez Sandoval, ‘Distroller, crecimiento guadalupano.’ The English
translation of this quote in the body of this article is mine.
33
Original Spanish: ‘tienes un ser querido al que deseas enviar un mensaje para apoyarle en
estos momentos…’ Santitos®, accessed 10 April 2013, http://santitosweb.com/Edicion2012/;
The English translation of this quote in the body of this article is mine.
34
Original Spanish: ‘algunos usamos a los santitos para expresarnos con bendiciones,
agradecimientos o celebramos nuestras dichas, nacimientos, confirmaciones, fiestas,
matrimonios.’ Ibid. Translation of this quote in the body of this article is mine.
35
See ‘Target’ tab of the ‘Mercadotecnia y Comunicación’ (‘Marketing and Communication’)
section of the Distrollerbisne website, accessed 10 April 2013,
http://www.distrollerbisne.com/mercadotecnia.html.
36
Joanne Entwistle, The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion: Markets and Values in Clothing and
Modelling (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 8.
37
Italics are Navarro’s. Original Spanish: ‘En México el arte kitsch surgió en los 70, cuando los
artistas aclamaban los objetos de arte popular, es decir, la virgen de Guadalupe o los adornos
de los tráileres, y las exhibían en museos o galerías como arte-objeto.’ Adriana Navarro,
‘Kitsch, lo popular fuera de contexto,’ (‘Kitsch, the Popular Our of Context’), La Gaceta, 3 July
2006, accessed 4 November 2012,
http://www.gaceta.udg.mx/Hemeroteca/paginas/443/443_O2-7.pdf. The English translation of
this quote in the body of this article is mine.
38
Italics are Ilabaca’s. Original Spanish: ‘la imagen preciosa de la Virgen mexicana devenida
kitsch en nuestro Santiago de Chile, esa que hemos visto multiplicarse en tazones, relojes,
poleras, cuadros.’ I have translated this quote, which was taken from the website ‘Cuerpos de
plástico/cuerpos de miel/cuerpos mediáticos: Presentación del libro Virgencita de
Guadalumpen de Oscar Hurtado Ramírez.’ Paula N. Ilabaca, ‘Plastic Bodies, Honey Bodies,
 Jessica C. Locke | 17

Media Bodies: Presentation of the book Virgencita de Guadalumpen by Oscar Hurtado

Ramírez,’ Letras.s5.com: Página chilena al servicio de la cultura, accessed 12 January 2013,
http://letras.s5.com/pi140809.html. English translation of this quote in the body of this article is
mine.
39
Abraham Moles, El kitsch: El arte de la felicidad (Barcelona: Paidós, 1971), 9.
40
Kristin G. Congdon and Doug Blandy, ‘“What? Clotheslines and Popbeads aren’t Kitsch
Anymore?” Teaching about Kitsch,’ Studies in Art Education 46, no. 3 (2005): 200.
41
Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987),
109.
42
Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp,’ Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1964), 288.
43
Ibid., 284.
44
Sánchez Sandoval, ‘Distroller, crecimiento guadalupano.’ There are presently two Distroller®
stores in Colombia and one in Ecuador, and some Distroller® products are sold by stores
elsewhere in Latin America, as well as in the United States and Europe, according to the article-
interview by Édgar Sánchez Sandoval in El Economista.
45
Original Spanish: ‘Por una parte están los que vieron a los católicos como mercado para
negociar y los católicos que consumen este tipo de productos…. Si la gente lo compra es
porque cree en ello y le gusta...’ Lorena Ortiz, ‘La Virgen de Guadalupe es un símbolo más
para comercializar,’ (‘The Virgin of Guadalupe is Another Symbol to Commercialize’),
Universidad de Guadalajara, 8 December 2009, accessed 6 November 2012,
http://www.udg.mx/node/3495. The English translation of this quote in the body of this article
is mine.
46
Original Spanish: ‘Ante el cuestionamiento de por qué la Iglesia católica oferta en sus
tiendas de artículos religiosos esta nueva imagen de la Virgen de Guadalupe, la
Administración de Artículos Religiosos consideró que sólo es una forma de acercamiento
católico en los jóvenes, quienes reconocen aún más a esta virgen en forma de caricatura.’
‘Exitosa comercialización de nuevo diseño de la Virgen de Guadalupe,’ (‘Successful
Commercialization of a New Virgin of Guadalupe Design’), El Heraldo de Chiapas, 30 March
2010. http://www.oem.com.mx/elheraldodechiapas/notas/n1576531.htm. The English
translation of this quote in the body of this article is mine.
47
Original Spanish: ‘La iglesia católica percibe a la imagen de Guadalupe en caricatura como
una competencia para el retrato que antiguamente se conoce….Este nuevo diseño ha logrado
rebasar las ventas del ya conocido retrato…que por siglos ha utilizado y comercializado la
Iglesia católica, según datos de la Administración de Artículos Religiosos de la Arquidiócesis
de Tuxtla Gutiérrez.’ Ibid. The English translation of this quote in the body of this article is
mine.
48
Barnard, Fashion as Communication, 138.

Bibliography
Barnard, Malcolm. Fashion as Communication. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Brading, David A. Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five
Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Congdon, Kristin G., and Doug Blandy. ‘“What? Clotheslines and Popbeads Aren’t Trashy
Anymore?” Teaching About Kitsch.’ Studies in Art Education 46, no. 3 (2005): 197-210.
18 | Losing Her Religion?

Davis, Fred. Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992.

De la Maza, Francisco. El guadalupanismo mexicano. Mexico City: Porrúa y Obregón, 1953.

Diccionario de la Lengua Española. 22nd ed. Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2001.

Distroller®. Accessed 11 April 2013. http://www.distroller.com/, and

http://www.distrollerbisne.com/.

Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods: Towards Anthropology of
Consumption. London: Allen Lane, 1979.

Entwistle, Joanne. The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion: Markets and Values in Clothing and
Modelling. Oxford: Berg, 2009.

Espinoza, Carlos. ‘Virgencita Plis, ni válida ni bendita.’ El Popular. Accessed 29 September

2012. http://elpopular.mx/cultura-y-farandula/virgencita-plis-ni-valida-ni bendita/.

‘Exitosa comercialización de nuevo diseño de la Virgen de Guadalupe,’ El Heraldo de Chiapas,

30 March 2010. http://www.oem.com.mx/elheraldodechiapas/notas/n1576531.htm.

‘F. Termoformado (Grito Guadalupano).’ 9 September 2011.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEd6IfY-IJs.

Foley, Donal Anthony. Review of Mexican Phoenix, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and
Tradition across Five Centuries, by David A. Brading. Theotokos Books, 2002. Accessed 3
November 2012. http://www.theotokos.org.uk/pages/breviews/dfoley/dbrading.html.

Fuentes Aguilar, Raúl. La Guadalupana en la identidad nacional: Una visión laica. Mexico
City: Impresora Múltiple, 2001.

García, Irma. ‘Alex Lora dará el grito más estruendoso.’ Terra.com.mx, 20 November 2009.
Accessed 5 November 2012. http://www.terra.com.mx/musica/articulo/169471/.

Hansen, Karen Tranberg. ‘The World in Dress: Anthropological Perspectives on Clothing,

Fashion, and Culture.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 369-92.

Ilabaca, Paula N. ‘Cuerpos de plástico/cuerpos de miel/cuerpos mediáticos: Presentación del

libro Virgencita de Guadalumpen de Oscar Hurtado Ramírez.’ Letras.s5.com: Página chilena al
servicio de la cultura. Accessed 12 January 2013. http://letras.s5.com/pi140809.html.

Kellogg, Susan. Review of The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega’s Huei
tlamahuiçoltica of 1649, by Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole and James Lockhart, eds. Ethnohistory
46, no. 4 (1999): 840-842.

LaFaye, Jacques. Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National

Consciousness, 1531-1813. Translated by Benjamin Keen. Foreword by Octavio Paz. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1976.
 Jessica C. Locke | 19

López, María Isabel. ‘¿Quién grabará las apariciones de Alex Lora en TV?’ El Sexenio, 26
September 2012. http://www.sexenio.com.mx/articulo.php?id=20011.

Miller, Daniel. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

Moles, Abraham. El kitsch. El arte de la felicidad. Translated by Josefina Ludmer. Barcelona:

Paidós, 1971.

Navarro, Adriana. ‘Kitsch, lo popular fuera de contexto.’ La Gaceta, 3 July 2006. Accessed 4
November 2012. http://www.gaceta.udg.mx/Hemeroteca/paginas/443/443_O2-7.pdf.

Ortiz, Lorena. ‘La Virgen de Guadalupe es un símbolo más para comercializar.’ Universidad
de Guadalajara. 8 December 2009.Accessed 6 November 2012.
http://www.udg.mx/node/3495.

Paz, Octavio. El laberinto de la soledad. Postdata. Vuelta a El laberinto de la soledad. Mexico

City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1981.

———. ‘The Flight of Quetzalcóatl and the Quest for Legitimacy.’ Foreword to Jacques
LaFaye. Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness,
1531-1813. Translated by Benjamin Keen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Peña Pérez, María Teresa. ‘Inician festejos de la guadalupana.’ Sexenio. 11 December 2011.
http://sexenio.com.mx/articulo.php?id=11557.

Sánchez Sandoval, Édgar. ‘Distroller, crecimiento guadalupano.’ El Economista. 15 September

2011. Accessed 5 November 2012. http://eleconomista.com.mx/industrias/2011/09/15/distroller-
crecimiento-guadalupano.

Santitos®. Accessed 11 April 2013. http://www.santitosweb.com/Edicion2012/.

Simmel, Georg. ‘Fashion.’ International Quarterly 10 (1904): 130-155.

Sontag, Susan. ‘Notes on Camp.’ Against Interpretation. New York: Dell, 1964.

Sousa, Lisa, Stafford Poole, and James Lockhart, eds. The Story of Luis Laso de la Vega’s Huei
tlamahuiçoltica of 1649. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

‘Tras escándalo, ventas de Pronósticos Deportivos caen 24%.’ Contraste: El arte de comunicar.
14 August 2012. Accessed 2 November 2012.
http://www.contrasteweb.com/tras-escandalo-ventas-de-pronosticos-deportivos-caen-24/.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institution. New
York: Macmillan, 1902 (1899).

‘Virgencita Termoformado.’ 3 December 2011.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5N7CzUt76E.
20 | Losing Her Religion?

‘Virgin of Guadalupe Market Bag.’ Buganvilla Fine Mexican Imports. Accessed 11 April 2013.
http://www.buganvillaimports.com/home/bug/page_217_63/virgin_of_guadalupe_market_
bag_01.html.

‘Virgin of Guadalupe Market Bag.’ Thrillomatic. Accessed 12 April 2013.

http://www.thrillomatic.com/clothing-accessories/bags-pursespouches/virgin-of-guadalupe-
market-bag/.

Wolf, Eric Robert. ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol.’ The Journal of
American Folklore 71, no. 279 (1958): 34-39.

Zarebska, Carla, ed. Guadalupe. Oaxaca, Mexico: J. Dalevuleta, 2002.

Jessica C. Locke, PhD, Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Mary Washington
in Fredericksburg, Virginia, USA, specialises in Colonial Mexican Studies and Contemporary
Mexican Literature, Culture, and Society.
Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style, volume 2, no. 2 , pp. 21-40 (2013) Inter-Disciplinary Press
ISSN: 2045-2349

Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion: A Clever and

Subversive Technique

Cassandra Gero

Abstract
Trompe l’oeil is an illusion, or a visual deception. Literally, the phrase means to fool the eye
and is most often associated with a hyper-realistic style of painting that has been around since
the fourth century BCE. This article examines the use of trompe l’oeil in fashion, with emphasis
on its potential for subversive critique. In fashion, trompe l’oeil often consists of the
replacement of three-dimensional garment or textiles elements with two-dimensional
representations of those elements. The illusion surprises viewers and can cause them to
acknowledge and question their preconceived notions about fashion. Focusing on this self-
reflexive quality, the examples used illustrate the thought-provoking nature of these irreverent
garments and textiles. Trompe l’oeil enables a designer to use fashion to criticize fashion, and
allows for the expression of ambivalence toward fashion. Among the subversive examples
discussed are maligned nineteenth-century printed textile ‘fakes,’ Elsa Schiaparelli’s irreverent
‘Bowknot Sweater,’ Roberta di Camerino’s signature ‘optical’ designs, Maison Martin
Margiela’s trompe l’oeil ‘jeans,’ and the brand Thursday Friday’s totes printed with pictures of
luxury ‘It Bags.’ The future of the technique in fashion is also addressed. Trompe l’oeil raises
critical questions about fashion and brings to light contradictory feelings surrounding it. It turns
a mirror back onto fashion, challenging people to rethink their assumptions, including those
they hold about how a garment should be constructed, what accessories are necessary, and what
makes a garment appropriate for certain occasions or people.

Key Words
Trompe l’oeil, fashion history, art, subversion, surrealism, design reform, fakes, Elsa
Schiaparelli, Roberta di Camerino, Franco Moschino, Martin Margiela, Thursday Friday, Jean-
Charles de Castelbajac, Henry Cole.

*****

1. Introduction
Trompe l’oeil is a style of painting used as early as the fourth century BCE, when the
artist Zeuxis painted a still life so realistic that birds allegedly swooped down to eat the grapes
depicted in his painting.1 However, trompe l’oeil is not just about creating a realistic image, it is
about tricking the audience, hence its name, which means to fool the eye. It is a game that the
artist plays with the viewer. Trompe l’oeil temporarily deceives the viewer before the moment
of surprise that comes when the illusion is realized. The style was popular in the Netherlands
during the seventeenth century and was revived by American painters in the nineteenth century.
It has been used sporadically since then. In her essay, ‘Trompe L’Oeil: The Underestimated
Trick,’ the art historian Sybille Ebert-Schifferer observes that:

trompe l’oeil was a dangerously subversive art form that – by compelling us

to contemplate its object-ness, the conditions of its making and the mechanics
22 | Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion

of human perception – profoundly shattered our faith in our ability to

recognize truths.2

This article explores how trompe l’oeil in fashion, by using that same self-reflexive quality, can
also be subversive.
Written from a fashion historical perspective, this study focuses on trompe l’oeil fashion
objects. The most iconic example – Schiaparelli’s Bowknot Sweater of 1927 – was the catalyst
for research and exploration of this topic. In Strange Glamour: Fashion and Surrealism in the
Years between the World Wars, the visual and cultural studies scholar Victoria Rose Pass
asserts that Schiaparelli’s Bowknot Sweater was subversive in that the sweater commented on
its lack of need of a three-dimensional bow.3 The article explores that assertion as applied to
other examples derived from fashion publications and museum collections.
Whereas trompe l’oeil in fashion has been primarily explored as it relates to surrealism,
my goal, here, focuses on the idea that the self-reflexive quality of trompe l’oeil provides an
opportunity for the critique of fashion through fashion. As in painting, trompe l’oeil in clothing
and textiles may try to pass as something it is not, literally fooling the eye of the viewer.
Alternatively, garments and fabrics may only attempt a momentary illusion, quickly letting the
viewer in on the trick. Both types of trompe l’oeil appear clever and can be effective tools of
subversion. I also address various ways in which trompe l’oeil has been used in the
manufacturing of textiles and garments, and how these examples challenge viewers to think
about their preconceived notions surrounding fashion. This questioning is achieved through
trompe l’oeil’s self-reflexive quality, which allows fashion to comment on itself. In exploring
the subversive qualities of the technique, the elements of fantasy and humour as well as
attitudes about the perception of fakes also will be discussed. In summary, my argument is that
the replacement of three-dimensional elements with two-dimensional representations not only
surprises viewers but may cause them to question their ideas about what they and others wear.
The examples I have chosen span four centuries, from the eighteenth century to the present, and
demonstrate how the use of trompe l’oeil has evolved and how what is considered subversive
changes over time.

2. Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion: Self-Reflexive Commentary

Although there are earlier instances, Elsa Schiaparelli’s Bowknot Sweater from 1927 is
one of the most iconic examples of trompe l’oeil in fashion. This sweater was imbued with a
sense of humour not widely seen in popular fashion up to this point. The collision of fashion
and avant-garde art possessed an irreverence that was refreshing, almost shocking. It also was
subversive in that it simultaneously rejected and embraced a decorative element of fashion. A
bow is an unnecessary element for sportswear such as a sweater, where it can get in the way of
activity. The sweater retained the illusion of a decorative bow without the encumbrance.4
Schiaparelli could have designed a sweater without a representation of a bow, but she was no
minimalist, rather a member of the Surrealist Movement in art, a movement not known for its
moderation. In calling attention to the fact that the bow was unnecessary, Schiaparelli created a
fashion that criticised itself. According to Ebert-Schifferer, ‘trompe l’oeil paintings represent a
highly self-reflexive genre, a sustained debate between the art and itself, the artist and himself.’5
Applied to fashion in this example, it is possible to see Schiaparelli debating the merits of bows
on sweaters. She did not want the encumbrance of a bow, yet she kept the visual form as
decoration.
The fashion historian Anne Hollander has noted that while many details of dress
originally had utilitarian purposes, the pleasing look of a style is often considered most
important. This is why a detail of dress like a bow may remain in the fashion vocabulary long
 Cassandra Gero | 23

after its usefulness. Often, an aspect is altered to become unusable and merely decorative.
Another example is the lapels on early military uniforms which were originally intended to
cross over the chest for warmth but were quickly turned into decorative flaps, worn open to
reveal the contrasting facing colour.6 So, it could follow that if lapels serve no function other
than to be visually pleasing, why not simply print a representation of them on the garment?

Image 1: Roberta di Camerino, ‘Afternoon Bag,’ 1955-60, The Metropolitan

Museum of Art. © Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art7

A designer who made this kind of trompe l’oeil her signature look was Roberta di
Camerino. Known professionally as Roberta (she named her company after the 1935 Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers film, Roberta), her given name was Giuliana.8 During World War II,
she was forced to flee Italy for Switzerland. There she designed and sold handbags, which
sustained Camerino and her husband financially until the end of the war when they could return
to Venice.9 These handbags became immensely popular, to the point where she is credited with
having invented the status bag.10 Camerino began using trompe l’oeil techniques on her
24 | Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion

handbags in the 1950s (Image 1), techniques she would later expand to her clothing designs in
the 1960s and 1970s. According to Camerino,

I like to do something new with simple things. It’s much easier to design
fantasies, showpieces that no one will wear. It’s much harder to design a new
sweater or something you can use.11

Camerino preferred simple silhouettes and high quality fabrics. The trompe l’oeil details, which
she called ‘optical,’ drew attention to the reductive quality of the garments, and her designs
incorporated printed line drawings of buckles, bows, and belts. She created dresses printed to
look like three-piece suits, and dresses that appeared to have flowing drapery, but did not.12
‘Something new,’ the style exemplified the Italian look – easy, comfortable, casual yet chic,
with a sense of playfulness. Her many designs, including umbrellas, suitcases, shoes, raincoats,
jewellery and more, sold in luxury boutiques. As such, Camerino redefined luxury by
simplifying it and by adding an element of whimsy. Trompe l’oeil straps and buckles made her
designs lightweight, easier to wear, and more comfortable. Her designs were amusing and
irreverent but became serious status symbols.
While trompe l’oeil paintings draw attention to the materiality of the painting itself (as
opposed to the image within the painting), trompe l’oeil garments emphasize the immateriality
of the details represented. Attention is drawn to what is not there in the construction of the
garment or accessory. This causes the viewer to realize that the elements missing are not
necessary. Like Schiaparelli’s sweater with the bow, Camerino’s optical styles were similarly
subversive, as they pointed out how unnecessary certain fashion elements are.
The influence of Schiaparelli’s sweater can be seen in the work of other designers. A
different type of trompe l’oeil sweater came from the American designer Rudi Gernreich, who
was known for his conceptual approach to fashion. In the late 1960s, he designed a dress that
appeared to have a coordinating sweater draped over the shoulders, but in reality the dress was
just one piece. Gernreich was poking fun at Halston, who had made it fashionable to tie a
sweater around one’s shoulders.13 The ‘Manly Sweater,’ designed by the English painter and
printmaker Patrick Caulfield for Ritva in 1972, had a trompe l’oeil design of a pipe in a pocket,
a comment on traditional 1950s masculinity that also recalls the surrealist painter René
Magritte’s work ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’14 These garments make accessories seem extraneous
and call into question our assumptions about our need for them and illustrate the use of trompe
l’oeil as a way to comment on fashion by exposing its clichés.
The subversive potential of trompe l’oeil has also been explored more recently by the
Belgian designer Martin Margiela, who is known for exposing and challenging conventions of
fashion and clothing in a way that is self-reflexive. Using his designs to critique and deconstruct
fashion, Margiela challenged the cyclical force of capitalism that drives fashion by mocking
fashion conventions. For example, he designed shopping bags as clothing and placed pieces
from prior collections in his new collections to highlight the artificiality and the built-in
obsolescence of fashion. Margiela’s designs are about the clothes themselves, and by exposing
the craft of making garments, he defies the conventions of the fashion industry, reducing
clothes to their visual and material elements.15
Not surprisingly, Margiela uses trompe l’oeil as a design technique. For example, for his
Spring/Summer 2012 collection, Maison Martin Margiela printed images of denim on heavy
cotton men’s trousers. Different tones and colours of denim washes were included in the prints,
quickly revealing the fact that the trousers were printed. In this case, jeans have been reduced to
pictures of denim washes, topstitching, rivets, and patch pockets. These trompe l’oeil printed
jeans draw attention to the mechanical and chemical processes used by manufacturers to make a
 Cassandra Gero | 25

pair of jeans look as if they have been worn for years, when they are actually brand new.
Printing photos of worn jeans on a pair of pants is a more obvious example of artifice, but is it
really that different than stonewashing or whiskering a pair of jeans? Distressing denim has
become the norm, and this garment causes the consumer to consider why this is. These trousers
challenge and subvert the fashion convention of artificial distressing as embellishment on jeans.

Image 2: Martin Margiela, ‘Ensemble,’ 1996, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

© Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art16
26 | Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion

Similarly, Margiela’s Spring/Summer 1996 ‘Photoprint Collection’ included an

ensemble in which the illusion of a sequined gown is printed on a plain jersey top and skirt
(Image 2).17 The garment toys with the viewers’ expectations and raises questions about the
function of fashion and of dressing up. What is more central to a fashion’s essence, its materials
or its appearance? Must a sequined dress be made with sequins or can the same effect be
achieved artificially? Trompe l’oeil makes it appropriate to wear what is essentially a T-shirt to
a fancy event. Or does it? Margiela’s garment raises questions about fashion conventions and
what is appropriate, and also allows for ambivalence. Arguably, Margiela’s ensemble can be
viewed as an extreme version of Camerino’s optical dresses. Once again, a severe simplification
redefines a luxury item. By paring down multiple elements to a printed jersey top and skirt, he
also adds a sense of surprise and fantasy.
A recent trend in trompe l’oeil is to challenge the status of luxury items such as the ‘It
Bag.’ The brand Thursday Friday used trompe l’oeil to comment on the fashion industry and
consumerism by manufacturing canvas tote bags printed with realistic images of status bags
(Image 3). On their website, Thursday Friday touted their line of ‘Together Bags’ as an ‘anti-
status symbol.’18 In contrast to a tuxedo T-shirt, which has a generic tuxedo image printed on
it,19 the Together Bags have images of iconic handbags by Chanel, Balenciaga, or Miu Miu
printed on their surface. While Thursday Friday gives their products names such as
‘Diamonds,’ ‘Moto,’ and ‘Braids,’ the buyer easily recognises which designer bags the images
depict. Those who carry these bags are making a statement that they have not spent well over a
thousand dollars on the much sought-after handbag pictured, presumably because they refuse to
buy into the idea of a handbag as a status symbol, or, perhaps, because they carry the tote
simply because they cannot afford the luxury bag. Of course, the canvas tote fulfils the practical
use of a handbag but not the fashionable one. Or does it? By broadcasting the fact that she is
aware of the vogue for a particular luxury bag, the carrier is anti-consumerist and consumerist
at the same time. Glamour magazine astutely described the totes as ‘straddling the line between
snobbery and democracy.’20 Indeed, it is ironic that some of these totes have waiting lists of
their own. Thursday Friday’s use of trompe l’oeil raises questions about what constitutes high
fashion, and brings to light the contradictions that exist within fashion. These totes purport to
critique luxury goods and consumerism, but when the ‘It Bag’ printed on the tote is no longer
desirable, will the owner then purchase a new tote? Is that considered participating in the luxury
fashion system?
Thursday Friday most likely devised its naming system to protect the company from
lawsuits. The strategy has not been entirely successful, as it was sued by Hermès in 2011. Even
though no logo had been used, Hermès had registered as a trademark the rectangular clasp on
the Birkin bag.21 While the Thursday Friday tote was intended to be a parody, a critique of
consumerism rather than a counterfeit, still the company was sued. On their website, Thursday
Friday has since softened its language regarding its mission. Instead of proclaiming its bags as
anti-status symbols, as was stated on the web site in January of 2012, a few months later the
company merely stated it is ‘inspired by consumerism, class, iconography.’22
From the above examples, we can see that fashion is a medium that can comment upon
itself, allowing for the expression of conflicting ideas and feelings about the fashion system to
be contested within that system. Trompe l’oeil allows for the acknowledgment and rejection of
fashionable ideals. However, that rejection can be ambivalent since the wearer has not
completely opted out of the fashion system and is still participating in it to some extent. It is
this simultaneous participating and critiquing that gives trompe l’oeil its power. The self-
reflexive nature of trompe l’oeil is at the heart of what makes the technique subversive. Fantasy
and playfulness, the attempts to deceive, and the technical skill involved in the trompe l’oeil
effect are all related to this core quality that draws attention to the fashion object itself.
 Cassandra Gero | 27

Image 3: Thursday Friday ‘Diamonds Together Bag,’ © 2011.

© Image courtesy of Thursday Friday

3. Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion: Humour

Franco Moschino also exploited trompe l’oeil’s potential for humour. Known as a witty,
whimsical, and irreverent designer, Moschino, like many Italian fashion designers, thought that
fashion should be fun. He also judged it superficial and unimportant.
28 | Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion

Image 4: Franco Moschino, ‘Maillot,’ ca. 1990, The Metropolitan

Museum of Art. © Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art23

Despite his profession, Moschino had disdain for those who followed fashion. He saw
them as fashion victims, members of a herd who blindly followed what is presented to them,
and considered himself a commentator rather than a fashion designer.24 He aimed to be
 Cassandra Gero | 29

subversive, launched a campaign that decreed ‘Stop the Fashion System,’ and encouraged
people to ‘be yourself, don’t let anyone else dictate your tastes, respect the individualism of
others.’25 In one interview, he advised, ‘wear your used clothes the way you want – make a
creation of yourself instead of buying my designs, which have become so expensive.’26
Moschino believed that clothing has a limited vocabulary and thought newness for the
sake of newness is absurd.27 He viewed trompe l’oeil detailing as one way to introduce novelty
as well as humour into a garment while showing how useless that new element is, since the faux
details have no function.
A variation on his trompe l’oeil designs came in the form of parodies of other designers’
work and of fashion fads. He ridiculed the excesses of the 1980s and the use of logos, for
example, by putting his own initials on a Louis Vuitton style bag and by designing a Chanel-
style suit on which he replaced the traditional gold chain belt with the embroidered words:
‘This is a Waist of Money.’28 Mocking fashion trends, Moschino designed a gold maillot with
trompe l’oeil sunglasses on a chain cascading down its front (Image 4). ‘Clothes are an aspect
of the way I play with stereotypes,’ he observed.29 To that end, he poked fun at his Italian
ethnicity by embroidering clothing with trompe l’oeil spaghetti stains, proclaiming ‘Sorry, I’m
Italian!’30 Satirizing traditional fashion conventions, he asked: ‘Without tradition, how could I
do anything? How could I joke, How could I critique? How could I fantasize?’31 With trompe
l’oeil, Moschino could reference a tradition and satirize it at the same time.

4. Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion: Fantasy

In fashion, trompe l’oeil often conveys a sense of fantasy and may even reflect a
designer’s personal biography. By pretending to be something it is not, the garment allows
wearers to ‘be’ someone they are not and to play with their identity.
In the collection of the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, there are
two linen dresses embroidered with naïve outlines of trompe l’oeil army and navy uniforms,
designed by the French designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac in 1994 (Image 5).32 These
dresses express Castelbajac’s sense of fun and his youthful sensibility. His inspiration for the
dresses most likely came from his childhood, when he had intended to become a soldier.33 From
an aristocratic family in which the men were mostly soldiers, from the age of six Castelbajac
attended military and religious boarding schools where he was required to wear a uniform.34
Known for his modern approach to fashion, Castelbajac has taken the constrictive uniform with
its rules about how precisely all of the elements must be worn (all components present, medals
in the correct spots, tie tied perfectly) and converted it into an easy linen dress.35 A uniform
consisting of numerous parts has been reduced to one simple form. As noted earlier, since
military lapels have often become decorative flaps only, why not, from Castelbajac’s
perspective, just embroider them on? The simplicity of these dresses, when compared to a real
military uniform, is striking. Made from linen in a loose, comfortable silhouette, the dresses are
reminiscent of the traditional clothing worn in Castelbajac’s birthplace of Morocco, giving the
garments an exotic feel. Using trompe l’oeil, Castelbajac is toying with clothing, fantasy, and
identity. With these fanciful dresses, the wearer can ‘play’ military. It is as if she is saying,
‘today, I will be a soldier.’ The dresses are easily put on and taken off, so this military identity
can be shed in a moment, allowing the wearer to harness the power of fashion to defy
conventions and subvert reality.
30 | Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion

Image 5: Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, ‘Dress,’ 1994, The Metropolitan

Museum of Art. © Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art36
 Cassandra Gero | 31

5. Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion: Fakes and Deceit, Past and Present

Whereas the examples discussed to this point have been easily recognized as playful
tricks, trompe l’oeil in fashion also has a history of being viewed as a deceit (Image 6). In the
mid-nineteenth century, new improved printing methods were used in an effort to create the
illusion of more luxurious textiles from humble ones. Printed versions of more expensive
woven fabrics were created, but they lacked the texture and dimensionality of the original
weave.
Some mid-nineteenth century British tastemakers denounced imitations such as trompe
l’oeil not only as bad taste but as immoral. Prime examples of this criticism can be found in The
Journal of Designs and Manufactures, which was published from 1849 to 1852 by Henry Cole,
a British civil servant, inventor, trade innovator, and design education reformer. The journal
published design theories anonymously, but they were written by Cole and his circle of artist
and designer friends. Like the English painter and art critic John Ruskin, who denounced
trompe l’oeil painting as deceptive,37 Cole disapproved of the technique and introduced a moral
element into his design theory, which appealed to the Victorian concern for morality and
respectability.38 In order to help consumers make the ‘right’ choices (i.e., Cole’s choices) and
impress upon them the importance of doing so, the journal offered reviews of ‘good’ and ‘bad’
textile patterns as well as examples of good and bad taste, and ‘true’ and false’ designs.
According to Cole, trompe l’oeil textiles fell firmly on the ‘bad,’ ‘false’ side of design. In an
1850 article entitled ‘Shams and Imitations, Especially in Woven Fabrics,’ the author,
presumably Cole, expressed concern about the effects on public morality of these ‘false’
fabrics, using the example of a printed imitation of a cashmere or Norwich shawl, a style
known commonly today as a paisley shawl.

The printers of shawls and of other garment fabrics, for the most part, have
long been striving to imitate the exact appearance of the threads inserted by
the loom. The struggle has been to produce a sham cachmere or Norwich
shawl for a few shillings, and thus placard the backs of the female population
with a sort of material falsehood. We have a belief that the indirect effect of
this, on the moral tone of all parties is much greater than is imagined… even
to good morals in the long run to the housemaid, who, parading in a Glasgow
printed shawl, affects to pass for her mistress in a cachmere one. Of this we
are sure, that there is a great and mischievous bar thereby placed against the
progress of good design.39

The author further argues that such imitations go against nature, an ongoing theme in Western
civilization going back to Plato’s Cave and his concerns about illusion and reality.

We contend that all such imitations are opposed to nature’s own principles,
which are always patent and without deceit, and that they violate the
conditions of the materials she abundantly supplies. Natural laws dictate
certain limits to weaving as well as to printing, and manufacturers and
designers would do well to bear this fact in remembrance.40

The unnamed author also expressed scorn for the manufacturers of these low-cost
imitations.

Printers do not imitate woven effects, because they are more difficult than
printing effects; but simply because woven effects, however inferior, are
32 | Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion

more costly to be obtained. And so long as this debasing motive has a power
of action, there seems to be no limit to the degraded imitations with which the
world must be afflicted, until a wiser public intelligence interposes a barrier.41

Image 6: ‘Faux Seersucker,’ circa 1890.

© Image courtesy of Sue Meller42

The text’s author clearly did not approve of a housemaid trying to pass for her mistress
or a textile manufacturer printing a humble fabric so that it may pass as a more expensive one,
and condemned both acts as dishonest and mischievous. In a follow-up article, he developed his
objection, arguing that printed textiles inspired by woven textile designs were a ‘false pretence’
and therefore inferior design; he used the example that printed cotton should not attempt to
imitate woven figured silk.43 In the April 1851 issue of Designs and Manufactures, imitation
 Cassandra Gero | 33

alpaca and chiné fabrics were judged negatively; the author of the article argued ‘however
successful these attempts may be, we should consider them reprehensible merely as
imitations.’44 Later, trompe l’oeil depictions of ribbon trim on fabric were also criticized as
false.45 These articles and other attempts to educate the public about good taste came to be
known as the design reform movement.
It is possible that the manufacturers of nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil ‘fakes’ may have
been merely making low-cost imitations or experimenting with new developments in textile
printing. But, it can also be argued that they were subverting the social order, democratizing
fashion in a way that let members of the middle class and the working class participate in the
clothing revolution, a critical result of the industrialization of fashion in that century, with
residues of old sumptuary law practices. The nineteenth century saw the middle class rise, the
prices of goods drop, department stores open, and the status quo challenged.
Although simulations were reviled by those like Cole, there was some leeway given to
textiles with prints that were not exact imitations. The Journal of Designs and Manufactures
reluctantly gave its approval to two stylized printed textile patterns that were inspired by woven
textiles. One had a checked background that was reminiscent of intersecting warp and weft, and
the other was a foliate print in which the design suggested the effect of light on a figured woven
silk. Still, concern was expressed that condoning this type of design may be a slippery slope. 46
While some prints tried to faithfully imitate a different weave of fabric, others were merely
inspired by the appearance of woven textiles. Whereas fakes were seen as deceitful and
dangerous at one point in the nineteenth century, they eventually evolved into benign standard
design motifs. As mentioned earlier, the motif commonly known today as paisley made its way
on to the backs of humble servants via trompe l’oeil printing. Houndstooth print was originally
a weave associated with Scottish shepherds and was made popular by the Duke of Windsor in
the 1930s. In 2008, Marc Jacobs converted the houndstooth pattern into an oversized version of
the weave.47 Similarly, Azzedine Alaïa created a suit from a large scale print of gingham in
1991.48 In addition to weaves, there are the ubiquitous animal prints of today’s fashion textiles.
Just as faux leopard skin may have at one time actually tried to pass as the real thing, eventually
it became a design motif in itself. Printed on silk, polyester, or cotton jersey, it becomes clear
that the wearer is not trying to pass it off as actual leopard skin.
Only the century before Cole was making his pronouncements, trompe l’oeil was widely
admired in painting as well as in fashion, with its practitioners aiming to elicit feelings of
astonishment, surprise, and admiration from their viewers.49 This was the case with the makers
of eighteenth-century trompe l’oeil figured silk textiles who surely hoped to achieve the same
reaction while also creating objects of beauty. Luxurious silk fabrics were made with complex
themes woven or embroidered on to them to look as if they were trimmed in lace or fur. One
example is a 1760s French textile in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London, which features depictions of both fur and lace trim in brocade.50 While some viewers
might initially be fooled when viewing this fanciful fabric, upon further inspection, the illusion
becomes obvious. Today, the process of deciphering the illusion is pleasurable. The surprise of
subverted expectations is also used in jokes, which is why people may chuckle upon seeing a
trompe l’oeil textile or garment.51 In addition to amusing the viewer, it gives them the
opportunity to think about their own perceptions as they relate to textiles and fashion. This is a
product of the self-reflexive quality of trompe l’oeil.
The celebration of the technical triumph of trompe l’oeil in fashion, like that for
paintings and eighteenth-century silks, can still be seen today. One example is a pair of ‘jeans’
made from Tencel, digitally printed to look like real denim.52 As opposed to being seen as
immoral like the printed ‘fakes’ of the nineteenth century, they are considered innovative,
34 | Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion

clever. In fact, the innovation is seen by some as a good deed, since the process of making these
faux jeans is more eco-friendly than the traditional method of producing jeans.

6. The Future of Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion

At the core of the trompe l’oeil technique in fashion is the depiction of three-
dimensional elements carried out in two-dimensional decoration. As seen in the examples of
Margiela’s trousers and the Tencel ‘jeans,’ the ubiquity of jeans makes them ripe for critique
and experimentation. Trompe l’oeil versions of jeans have been very common recently, steadily
infiltrating the mainstream. ‘Jeggings,’ leggings printed to look like skinny jeans, were the
logical next step for jeans when the style for women’s pants became skin-tight. Most jeggings
have trompe l’oeil stitching and pockets, and some are printed to imitate distressed denim. A
further example is ‘Pajama Jeans®’ which can be bought from infomercials and which focus on
their comfort. ‘Looks like designer denim/Feels like PJs,’ proclaim the ads.53 Pajama Jeans
have an elastic waist with a trompe l’oeil fly and button. However, in keeping with the illusion,
they do have five functioning pockets and brass rivets, which are unnecessary for the lighter
weight cotton and spandex blend fabric. These ‘jeans’ can still be considered subversive in that
they reject traditional jeans, which can be uncomfortable and cost hundreds of dollars.
Additionally, the concept of printing design elements is now so commonplace that trompe l’oeil
‘It Bags’ have become common, with designers making their own versions.54 The American
design, craft, and homemaking magnate Martha Stewart has offered a tutorial on how to make
your own.55 These examples still offer some element of surprise, and Stewart’s ‘do-it-yourself’
bag in some sense can be considered subversive. But what is the future of trompe l’oeil in
fashion? As it becomes more commonplace to use 2D/3D illusion, will it eventually lose much
of its impact? Will trompe l’oeil continue into twenty-first century fashion? Will it continue to
destabilize traditional clothing and accessories?
It is possible that the future of subversive trompe l’oeil in fashion will be in a type of
urban camouflage. Camouflage as a textile design plays an important role in the history of
countercultural fashion,56 but urban camouflage requires more than a surface design motif. We
live in the age of surveillance, and the artist Adam Harvey has created a project called ‘Stealth
Wear: New Designs for Countersurveillance,’ which includes ‘Anti-Drone’ garments. These
garments reflect heat and hide the wearer from the overhead thermal surveillance of drones.57
Harvey’s other projects include ‘CV Dazzle,’ a catalog of hair and makeup styles meant to
camouflage a person from face detection, and ‘Camoflash,’ a paparazzi-thwarting clutch.
According to Harvey, ‘Collectively, Stealth Wear is a vision for fashion that addresses the rise
of surveillance, the power of those who surveil, and the growing need to exert control over what
we are slowly losing, our privacy.’58 Mark Shepard, another artist, designed the ‘CCD-Me-Not
Umbrella,’ meant to confuse surveillance cameras and create beautiful images in the process.59
These garments, accessories, techniques, and ideas may be incorporated into fashion on a
greater scale in the future. Instead of fooling the human eye, these objects aim to fool the
camera’s eye. These protective wearables critique an element of contemporary society – our
diminishing privacy. The merging of art, technology, and fashion could potentially have the
power to thwart this development. Much like a nineteenth-century woman could pass
undetected as a housemaid with the help of a printed shawl, a person with these cloaking
devices could pass by surveillance cameras, undetected as themselves or as a person at all.

7. Conclusion
Whether the illusion is meant to fool completely or just momentarily, trompe l’oeil
fashions are imbued with fantasy, irreverence, and subversion. The self-reflexive quality of
 Cassandra Gero | 35

trompe l’oeil facilitates the unique opportunity for fashion to comment upon itself. With the use
of two-dimensional details in place of three-dimensional elements, viewers are challenged to
confront their assumptions about garment construction and fashion conventions. Schiaparelli’s
Bowknot Sweater expressed the pointlessness of having a bow on sportswear more effectively
than merely creating a sweater that lacked a bow. The technique is destabilizing and also allows
for ambivalence and conflicted feelings to be expressed by the designer and by the wearer.
People can both participate in and critique fashion at once. Since there is an element of surprise
and humour, the technique is appealing and accessible.
The power of trompe l’oeil in fashion can be seen in the diverse examples discussed in
this article. Realistic trompe l’oeil ‘fakes’ of the mid-nineteenth century can be interpreted as
threatening the social order, allowing people of a lower economic classes to afford what appears
to be expensive clothing previously out of reach for them. Through fashion, larger issues of
consumerism, status, and class are addressed. The sense of fantasy created through the use of
trompe l’oeil results in playful, whimsical, and irreverent fashions that defy conventions. By
allowing individuals to appear to be dressed in something they are not wearing or cannot wear,
such as a military uniform or an expensive designer handbag, trompe l’oeil harnesses the power
of fashion to subvert reality and the established social order.
As seen through the examples presented in this analysis, what is considered subversive
changes over time. Textiles printed to look like woven fabric are not likely to upset design
critics today and may even garner praise, as with the example of the eco-friendly printed Tencel
‘jeans.’ What remains constant is the fact that trompe l’oeil in fashion engages viewers in a
thought-provoking and interactive process, challenging them to acknowledge and rethink their
assumptions regarding fashion. These assumptions include how a garment should be
constructed, what accessories are necessary, what makes a garment appropriate for certain
occasions, and what garments are suitable for certain people to wear. Finally, trompe l’oeil does
what it has always done – show us that things may not be what they appear to be. Trompe l’oeil
turns a mirror back onto fashion, causing viewers to think about fashion in a new way. Does a
three-piece suit really need to be three pieces? Is buying a luxury bag the only way to
communicate your fashion knowledge and social status? Must a sequined gown be made of
sequins? These questions are raised in clever ways that makes the viewer do a double take, and
look again with fresh eyes.

Notes
1
Charles Jencks, ‘Trompe L’Oeil Counterfeit,’ STUDIO International 189-190 (1975): 109.
2
Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, ‘Trompe L’Oeil: The Underestimated Trick,’ in Deceptions and
Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe L’Oeil Painting, ed. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer (Washington,
DC: National Gallery of Art, 2002), 18.
3
Victoria Rose Pass, Strange Glamour: Fashion and Surrealism in the Years between the
World Wars (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2011).
4
Ibid., 121.
5
Ebert-Schifferer, ‘Trompe L’Oeil,’ 24.
6
Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 312.
7
Roberta di Camerino handbag. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of the Brooklyn
Museum, 2009, gift of Mrs. Eduardo Andrade, 1964 (2009.300.5352a-c).
8
Josh Patner, ‘From Bags to Riches: Meet the Mother of All Pocketbooks,’ The New York
Times, February 26, 2006, F166.
9
John Phillips, The Italians: Face of a Nation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 50.
10
Patner, ‘From Bags to Riches,’ F166.
36 | Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion

11
Ibid.
12
Valerie Steele, Fashion, Italian Style (New York: Fashion Institute of Technology, 2003), 45-
50.
13
1999.57.1 in the collection of the Costume Institute. Also see: Richard Martin, Our New
Clothes: Acquisitions of the 1990s (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), 54.
14
T.18-2000 in the collection of the V&A Museum, accessed 8 March 2012,
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O25358/manly-sweater-artists-collection-sweater-caulfield-
patrick/.
15
Rebecca Mead, ‘The Crazy Professor,’ The New Yorker, March 30, 1998, 107-108.
16
Martin Margiela ensemble. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Gould Family
Foundation Gift, in memory of Jo Copeland, 2010 (2010.133a, b).
17
2010.133a, b in the collection of the Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
18
Together Bags, accessed 27 January 2012, http://www.thufri.com/collections/together-bags.
19
For an example of a tuxedo t-shirt, see 1996.335.21 in the collection of the Costume Institute
of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
20
‘The Next Best Thing to Birkin? Meet the $35 Handbag with a Three Month Waiting List!’ 8
December 2010, accessed 21 June 2012,
http://www.glamour.com/fashion/blogs/slaves-to-fashion/2010/12/the-next-best-thing-to-a-
birki.html.
21
‘This Week in Fashion Law: How Thursday Friday is Using Chanel as a Pawn in its Quest to
Dominate the World of Meta-Fashion,’ 3 September 2011, accessed 21 June 2012,
http://lawoffashion.com/blog/story/09/03/2011/97.
22
Together Bags, accessed 21 June 2012, http://www.thufri.com/collections/together-bags.
23
1998. 163_F. jpg, in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase Irene,
Lewisohn Charitable Trust, 1998 (1998. 163).
24
Kathleen Madden, ‘Moschino Cheery,’ Vogue, June 1986, 186.
25
Brantley, ‘Designing Anarchist,’ 80.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., 78.
28
Anne-Marie Schiro, ‘Franco Moschino, 44, Is Dead; Designer Known for Irreverence,’ The
New York Times, September 20, 1994, D23.
29
Mariuccia Casadio, ‘Ready to Where?,’ Interview, September 1991,130.
30
Samantha Conti, ‘Viva Moschino,’ W., August 2003, 64.
31
Casadio, ‘Ready to Where?,’130.
32
1996.489.1 and 1996.489.2 in the collection of the Costume Institute of The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
33
Suzy Menkes, ‘The Child is Father of his Art,’ International Herald Tribune, June 7, 1994, 8.
34
Grace Mirabella, ed. ‘Living: The Thrill of Discovery,’ Vogue, June 1984, 274.
35
Jennifer Craik, ‘The Cultural Politics of the Uniform,’ Fashion Theory 7 (2003): 144.
36
Jean-Charles de Castelbajac dress. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Jean-Charles de
Castelbajac, 1996 (1996.489.2).
37
Ebert-Schifferer, ‘Trompe L’Oeil: The Underestimated Trick, 18.
38
Suga Yasuko, ‘Designing the Morality of Consumption: ‘Chamber of Horrors’ at the
Museum of Ornamental Art, 1852-53,’ Design Issues 20 (Autumn 2004): 46-47.
39
‘Shams and Imitations, Especially in Woven Fabrics,’ The Journal of Designs and
Manufactures 4 (September, 1850): 8, accessed 13 January 2013,
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/DLDecArts.JournDesv04.
40
Ibid., 9.
 Cassandra Gero | 37

41
Ibid., 10.
42
Image from Susan Meller and Joost Elffers, Textile Designs: Two Hundred Years of
European and American Patterns for Printed Fabrics (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002).
Velvet fabric printed to look like seersucker.
43
‘More upon Shams in Woven Fabrics,’ The Journal of Designs and Manufactures 4 (October
1850), 40.
44
‘Novelties in Printed Fabrics,’ The Journal of Designs and Manufactures 5, 43.
45
Suga Yasuko, ‘Designing the Morality of Consumption,’50.
46
‘More upon Shams in Woven Fabrics,’ 40-41.
47
Priscilla Chung, ‘Houndstooth,’ accessed 4 February 2013,
http://www.imprintnyc.org/houndstooth.html.
48
1995.205.18a, b in the collection of the Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of
Art.
49
Ebert-Schifferer, ‘Trompe L’Oeil,’ 24.
50
V&A Search the Collections, CIRC.502-1962, accessed 19 January 2013,
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O112662/fabric-unknown/.
51
Wolf Singer, ‘The Misperception of Reality,’ in Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of
Trompe L’Oeil Painting, ed. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer (Washington, DC: National Gallery of
Art, 2002), 51.
52
Walker, Daniela, ‘Eco-Friendly Jeans Made from Wood Pulp,’ 21 February 2013, accessed
22 February 2013, http://www.psfk.com/2013/02/wood-pulp-jeans.html.
53
Pajama Jeans, accessed 3 March 2013, https://www.pajamajeans.com/.
54
An example by Michael Kors, accessed 3 March 2013,
http://www.net-a-porter.com/product/175200.
55
‘Trompe L'oeil Tote Bags and Pouch,’ accessed 17 February 2013, http://www.marthastew-
art.com/921926/trompe-loeil-tote-bags-and-pouch.
56
Tim Newark, Camouflage, London: Thames and Hudson/Imperial War Museum, 2007, 164-
170 and Melissa Huber, ‘Camouflage,’ Imprint (NYC) exhibition web site, accessed 17
February 2013, http://imprintnyc.org/camouflage.html.
57
For more information about drones and privacy, see Matthew L. Wald, ‘Current Laws May
Offer Little Shield Against Drones, Senators Are Told,’ The New York Times, March 20, 2013,
accessed 7 May 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/us/politics/senate-panel-weighs-
privacy-concerns-over-use-of-drones.html; Richard M. Thompson II, ‘Drones in Domestic
Surveillance Operations: Fourth Amendment Implications and Legislative Responses,’
Congressional Research Service, 3 April 2013, accessed 7 May 2013,
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42701.pdf.
58
‘Stealth Wear: New Designs for Countersurveillance,’ accessed 23 January 2013,
http://ahprojects.com/projects/stealth-wear.
59
‘Sentient City Survival Kit,’ accessed 23 January 2013,
http://survival.sentientcity.net/umbrella.html; http://survival.sentientcity.net/blog/?page_id=17.

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Pajama Jeans. Accessed 3 March 2013. https://www.pajamajeans.com/.

Pass, Victoria Rose. Strange Glamour: Fashion and Surrealism in the Years between the World
Wars. PhD diss., University of Rochester, New York, 2011.

Patner, Josh. ‘From Bags to Riches: Meet the Mother of All Pocketbooks.’ The New York
Times, February 26, 2006, F166.

Petit, Florence. America’s Printed and Painted Fabrics 1600-1900. New York: Hastings
House, 1970.

Pevsner, Nikolaus. Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. Bath:
Palazzo Editions, 2011.

Phillips, John. The Italians: Face of a Nation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965.

Schiro, Anne-Marie. ‘Franco Moschino, 44, Is Dead; Designer Known for Irreverence.’ The
New York Times, September 20, 1994, D23.

‘Sentient City Survival Kit.’ Accessed 23 January 2013.

http://survival.sentientcity.net/umbrella.html; http://survival.sentientcity.net/blog/page_id=17.

‘Shams and Imitations, Especially in Woven Fabrics.’ The Journal of Designs and
Manufactures 4 (September, 1850): 8-10. Accessed 13 January 2013.
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/DLDecArts.JournDesv04.

‘Stealth Wear: New Designs for Countersurveillance.’ Accessed 23 January 2013.

http://ahprojects.com/projects/stealth-wear.

Steele, Valerie. Fashion, Italian Style. New York: Fashion Institute of Technology, 2003.

‘This Week in Fashion Law: How Thursday Friday is Using Chanel as a Pawn in its Quest to
Dominate the World of Meta-Fashion.’ 3 September 2011. Accessed 21 June 2012.
http://lawoffashion.com/blog/story/09/03/2011/97.

Together Bags. Accessed 27 January 2012. http://www.thufri.com/collections/together-bags.

Walker, Daniela. ‘Eco-Friendly Jeans Made from Wood Pulp.’ February 21, 2013. Accessed 22
February 2013. http://www.psfk.com/2013/02/wood-pulp-jeans.html.

Yasuko, Suga. ‘Designing the Morality of Consumption: “Chamber of Horrors” at the Museum
of Ornamental Art, 1852-53.’ Design Issues 20 (2004): 43-56.
40 | Trompe L’Oeil in Fashion

Cassandra Gero, MA, is a Conservation Assistant at the Costume Institute of The

Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She holds a MA in Fashion and Textiles
Studies: History, Theory, Museum Practice from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New
York City.
Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style, volume 2, no. 2, pp. 41-62 (2013) Inter-Disciplinary Press
ISSN: 2045-2349

Coming Out from Under the Crinolines: Raising the Hem on

Literary Representations of Shoes in Alcott, Dickens, Dreiser,
Zola and Wharton

Sarah Heaton

Abstract
This article analyses the literary representation of the emergence of footwear from beneath the
late nineteenth-century woman’s skirts as a complex site of the simultaneously hidden and on
display. It begins with a consideration of contemporary cultural engagement with women’s
shoes in the television series Sex and the City (1998-2004) to explore the aura and fetishism of
footwear, and to re-read artistic and literary representations in a past culture of footwear
concealment. I will return to Carrie Bradshaw, the lead character of the series, from time to time
in the article. Shoes on display towards the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth
century in department stores, in the paintings of Giovanni Boldini, and created by the first
celebrity shoe designer Pietro Yantorny represent a society oscillating between keeping the
shoe under the crinolines and the desire to uncover the hidden. The revealing of literary
representations of footwear of the era normally left concealed will be explored from the flash
of blue silk French heels in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-69); the ‘lost shoe’ in
Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1853) and faded wedding shoe in Great Expectations (1861);
the ‘talking’ shoes in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900); the displayed shoes in Émile
Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise (1883); and the borrowed shoes in Edith Wharton’s Summer
(1917), patent boots in The Custom of the Country (1913), the kissed tip of the shoe in The Age
of Innocence (1920), and the boots of power in The Buccaneers (1938). Because footwear was
kept beneath the crinolines, when it finally did emerge in cultural representations it is a moment
of crisis, revelation, and importantly, a symbol of female empowerment. I argue that the
revealing and concealing of footwear through the gendered gaze and ownership reveals a level
of determinacy in the wearing of shoes and boots not fully accounted for if the gaze and
ownership remains male.

Key Words
Shoes, boots, department stores, Émile Zola, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, Theodore
Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Victorian literature, shoe designers, Pietro Yantorny, Sex and the City.

*****

Her Old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her
gloves.
-Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)1

1. Introduction: The Aura of Shoes

Whilst Carrie Bradshaw may miss the ferry because she has lost one of her Jimmy
Choos, Cinderella always manages to catch her carriage, and whether it is made of fur, gold or
glass the slipper always fits. Both Carrie and Cinderella know the importance of a good fit,
whether you need to run across New York City or dance all night at the ball. A woman’s shoes
42 | Coming Out from Under Her Crinolines

are part of who she is and can, because they have an impact on her stance and gait, affect not
just the way she moves through life but also how she lives her life. Perhaps even more
importantly shoes have, in contemporary cultural consciousness, become fetishised less in
terms of a Freudian sexual substitution, e.g., the ‘shine on the nose’2 becomes the patent leather
of a shoe, but more in the question posed by Professor of Design Lorraine Gamman and the
literary critic Merja Makinen in their feminist re-working of Freudian passivity.
‘Representations of women in corsets or high-heeled shoes may look fetishistic to some
feminists, but whose is the fetishism under scrutiny, and what degree of fetishism are we
talking about?’3 Certainly, for many women shoes and boots have taken on an aura which ties
into not only the object itself, the designer name, and celebrity culture but something
unspecifiable. It is the aura which Karl Marx, writing at the same time as some of the novelists I
am considering, attempts to elide in his theorising of the fetishism of commodities but breaks
through in his description of the table, made of wood, ‘an ordinary sensuous thing’ that ‘stands
on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it
were to begin to dance of its own free will,’4 and commodities as ‘sensuous things which are at
the same time suprasensible.’5 For the philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, ‘that
which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.’6 The
philosopher George Santayana perhaps expressed it best in 1896 when he wrote, ‘Beauty is the
pleasure that is regarded as the quality of the thing.’7
Arguably women’s shoes and boots have taken on a life of their own and emanate an
auratic appeal which for women combines a sense of self, sensuousness and status. In the 2003
Sex and the City episode ‘A Woman’s Right to Shoes,’8 Carrie Bradshaw’s Manolo Blahniks
are stolen at a baby shower after the hostess had the audacity to ask her guests to remove their
shoes and then ‘shoe-shames’ Carrie about the money she spends on her footwear. Carrie
demands reimbursement. It takes the entire episode for the friend, distracted by motherhood, to
understand or to be reminded of the importance of a woman’s shoes. Here the designer shoes
contain in them not only Marx’s critique of use-value versus exchange-value, and Carrie’s and
arguably her female audience’s fetishisation, but also the validation of Carrie’s sense of self
aligned to the aesthetics of the object. Shoes for women are a complex moment of exchange not
only of the object but the self.
To understand nineteenth-century cultural attitudes toward women’s footwear it is useful
to consider the current cultural fixation on shoes and shopping for shoes which reached a kind
of apotheosis with Sex in the City. Previously name dropped in the British series Absolutely
Fabulous (1992-1995) Manolo Blahnik’s often impractical fashionista shoes became a popular
culture icon after the 2000 episode when Carrie pleaded with her mugger, ‘You can take my
Fendi baguette, you can take my ring and my watch, but don’t take my Manolo Blahniks.’9
Blahnik himself has said that ‘Shoes help transform a woman.’10 Certainly this is so for Carrie
when she puts on a pair to the extent that it affects not merely her outfit but ‘who’ she is for the
day. Blahnik is an artist who studied architecture and his designs interlace cultural
representations, fashion and art; indeed, his sketches are as exclusive, sought after and
expensive as the shoes themselves. That he took influence from Luchino Visconti’s film
adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (1963) in his design of the shoe
‘Tortura’ or in designing the shoes for Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette (2006) only
underscores the symbiotic relationships in the art of shoes with film, fashion and thought. This
explicit link between what is at one level a commodity and consumer object and on another
level an artistic form returns us to the dichotomy being debated in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries by Marx, Benjamin and Santayana about an object’s function, and the
social, aesthetic and sensual life of objects. This philosophical debate about the function,
 Sarah Heaton| 43

fashion and the aura of shoes is aired prior to hems being shortened in both European and
American literary texts in the oscillating revealing and concealing of footwear.
Sex in the City and Blahnik set a cultural marker in terms of our contemporary
consciousness of shoes just as novels in or about the second half of the nineteenth century did.
Although the novels I have chosen to analyse focus on the preoccupations of the bourgeoisie,
they do suggest the nineteenth-century woman’s experience of wearing shoes, including her
emotional attachment to and personal associations with them.11 As the dress historian Lou
Taylor observes, ‘Literary sources too can often movingly explain our personal reactions to
clothes’ and ‘can breathe body movement’ back into footwear.12 Taylor suggests the importance
literature can have for dress historians in terms of bringing the clothes alive both in terms of the
cultural associations of the time as well as more personally in the experience of wearing.
Literature allows us to see not just the shoes or boots themselves but the movements and
gestures which emanate from the wearing of them. Authors of the period I am discussing rarely
reveal a female character’s footwear, preferring to keep it hidden under layers of skirts, even
though the characters in novels do tend, as some scholars have noted, to ‘carry their stories on
their backs, each outfit mapping their social and sexual conquests and their declines.’13 When
authors like Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, Theodore Dreiser, Émile Zola and Edith
Wharton do reveal women’s footwear it is during a moment of crisis and revelation. In the late
nineteenth century the toe began to peep out from under the crinolines, making it an object of
fetishism at the same time theorists like Marx and Santayana were debating the nature, worth,
and aesthetics of objects. This article will first discuss the development of the nineteenth-
century footwear industry, the shoes painted by Giovanni Boldini, and the first celebrity shoe
designer Pietro Yantorny to explore how the aura of shoes was secured, before moving on to
consider the emergence of shoes as spectacle in the department store as a form of commodified
aura. The literary representations analysed have been chosen because they show female
footwear normally hidden from view in literature. The article will explore the gendered
exchange of footwear and argue that there is a securing of silent aura and power in the way a
woman wears her shoes.

2. Revealing Footwear: Designing and Painting Shoes

The art historian Aileen Ribeiro argues that ‘Literature conveys emotions and feelings
about clothes that can highlight character and further the plot of a play or a novel’ and notes
that ‘fashion can be said to produce fiction.’14 The literary critic John Harvey comments that it
is novelists such as Dickens ‘who are at once most sentient and most exact in tracing people’s
dress, as in their words, their pushes for assertion and bids for control.’15Although Nancy
Rexford, a scholar of shoes of the nineteenth century, has identified different cultural attitudes
to footwear among France, America and Great Britain, she suggests it is the influence of
American mass manufacturing that drove footwear fashion and choice. The American woman,
Rexford observes, could ‘find elegant slippers, shoes and boots made of leather, silk and wool,
having high and low heels and fastened with ribbons, ties, buttons, straps and elastics.’16 The
laissez-faire economics of late nineteenth-century America allowed all sectors of the economy
to grow. The manufacturing and retail side of the footwear industry, and the growth of the
department store, were part of America’s emergence as the preeminent industrial power. The
visibility of footwear was not just in terms of the industry but also fashion with closer fitting
skirts emerging on both sides of the Atlantic from 1870 onward; this development allowed the
toe to show so that there was the ‘reintroduction of buckles and bows on the toes of shoes and
boots…to be seen while walking.’17 Still, the fashion historian Jonathan Walford reminds us
that even by 1910 ‘most footwear, still unseen under the hem, was black, brown or white.’18
44 | Coming Out from Under Her Crinolines

There is a cautionary note here regarding these ‘safe’ colours, which still predominated and
were indicative of conservatism in both fashion choices and cultural consciousness. Whilst it
may appear that shoes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century are privileged for their
form and function and at a level of display and consumption unseen before, there is more to be
seen in the previous period than the pervasive tightly laced black Balmoral boot hidden under
layers of crinolines would indicate.19
Certainly for most of those living during the nineteenth century having multiple pairs of
shoes was a luxury when one pair sufficed, and footwear divided the well-heeled from those
who wore something functional, if anything at all. There has always been a tension between the
function and fashion of footwear. Linda O’Keefe writing on shoes suggests:

Once mass production took hold in the 1850s, boots became affordable to
maids as well as the ladies they served. No longer a reliable sign of status, the
boot became a symbol of emerging equality not only between the sexes, but
among social groups as well.20

Rosy Aindow, writing on fashion in literature, confirms that the increasing democratisation
through the developments in manufacturing and department stores meant that fashion was not
only more readily available but also thought about differently, and that the bourgeoisie ‘carved
out its social position in relation to such commodities.’21 In his 1899 Theory of the Leisure
Class, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen suggests that fashionable footwear is the preserve of the
leisure class because it has no function other than to conspicuously display leisure and
consumption, especially for wealthy women.

The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of
demonstrating the wearer’s abstinence from productive employment….The
woman’s shoe adds the so-called French heel to the evidence of enforced
leisure afforded by its polish; because this high heel obviously makes any,
even the simplest and most necessary manual work extremely difficult.22

Whilst Veblen argued that there is a trickledown effect of fashion, with women of the
lower classes copying their social betters, any widening democratisation of a fashion
undermines the demarcation of social hierarchy through the silent signifiers of adornment.
Returning to Sex and the City, certainly Carrie Bradshaw was not a member of the upper class
and didn’t have the capital behind her to have a life of leisure, and yet she had a closet full of
designer shoes. Carrie’s purchasing of designer shoes suggests a new type of fashion hierarchy.
Her wardrobe of shoes implies her dominance in terms of certain social freedoms and her
freedom as a single, independent woman in the city, which the mother-friend who shoe-shames
her is unable to secure. The mother’s absence of significant footwear suggests adherence to a
different social hierarchy that Carrie equally cannot access. The nuances of such social
signification and hierarchies are embedded in the designer shoe codes and the aura which was
secured by the first ‘celebrity’ shoe designer, the Italian Pietro Yantorny.
It is perhaps unsurprising that it was towards the end of the nineteenth century that the
first shoe designer, in the modern sense, Pietro Yantorny, who was based in Paris, emerged to
‘secure’ the aura of shoes. Not only did the emergence of Yantorny and his shoes-as-art ensure
that women’s footwear was increasingly on show, but shoes bought from Yantorny served to
demarcate the differences in social class which the bourgeoisie desired.23 Yantorny advertised
himself as ‘the most expensive shoe designer in the world,’ was regularly interviewed for
newspapers and magazines, and collected a wealthy clientele which led to his celebrity and his
 Sarah Heaton| 45

nearly mythical status. Uncontestably, his shoes were and still are objects of desire. According
to the curators of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto:

Yantorny saw shoemaking as an art. In fact the last entry in his journal
…describes a pair of exquisite feathered shoes that took him six months to
make.… “I didn’t make it with the intention of selling it, only as an art object
and to show just how far I could push the envelope of shoemaking .… My
only aim is to leave something to a museum of the shoe that future
generations could admire.”24

Yantorny was prescient, for today collections of his shoes are exhibited or housed in
museums like the Bata Shoe Museum and The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York City. His shoes-as-art approach is apparent in an early twentieth-century
‘Boot,’ which is the apotheosis of unwearable as it has no function. This boot is pure object and
is the fetishism of commodities of which Marx and Freud were at the time writing.25 One of his
most famous customers, the socialite Rita de Acosta Lydig, whose trunk of treasured Yantorny
shoes is housed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, was well-aware of the sensuousness in the
art and aura of shoes. For Lydig, a ‘shoe without sex appeal is as barren as a tree without
leaves.’26 Below, she glances downward, with her Yantorny pumps on full display (Image 1).

Image 1: Portrait photograph of Mrs Rita [de Acosta] Lydig, © 1925.

Courtesy of the Arnold Genthe Collection, Library of Congress

Lydig’s comment hints to the coming fetishisation of female footwear. She was a devoted client
of Yantorny’s, commissioned hundreds of pairs of shoes from him, and was famously painted
by Giovanni Boldini in 1911, with her skirt slightly raised, revealing her beautiful silver shoes,
which Boldini painted in detail (Image 2).
46 | Coming Out from Under Her Crinolines

Image 2: Portrait of Rita de Acosta Lydig, 1911, by Giovanni Boldini27

Boldini also painted the shoes of Princess Marthe Bibesco, a writer of the Belle Époque,
who similarly publicly commented on the sensuousness of dress and its relationship to a sense
of oneself. ‘The moment a woman has replaced a white frock and fragile, dainty shoes by heavy
clothes and thick boots, it would be absurd to imagine her the same person.’28 Both women
were painted after the turn of the century, and by 1920, shoes were fully on show.29
But a look back to Boldini’s earlier artwork reveals he was always a painter of shoes,
from the Victorian black boots of the 1875 Crossing the Street (Image 3) to the red shoes in the
1875 A Friend of the Marquis and the 1875 Lady in Rose (Image 4) Boldini’s paintings are
unique for the time in terms of the display, detail, array of designs and colour in which he
depicts shoes.
 Sarah Heaton| 47

Image 3: Crossing the Street, © 1875, by Giovanni Boldini30

Image 4: Lady in Rose, © 1875, by Giovanni Boldini31

48 | Coming Out from Under Her Crinolines

The boot associated with nineteenth-century footwear was practical and modest, and even when
hemlines began to rise, as Walford notes, ‘walking boots became taller to keep up with the
shrinking hem.’32 Certainly this sense of modesty is reflected in both the art and literature of the
time when rarely was a woman’s skirt raised to display her footwear.

3. Department Stores and Displays

Whilst photographs from the period provide evidence that one must keep one’s skirts
lowered, shoes had been emerging as something to be displayed in shop windows for some
time. But as with the tension between function and fashion, whilst shoes are very much on
display in the shop window there remains, culturally, a sense of the hidden embedded in both
their design and display. Indeed, fashion design from across the centuries often plays with what
is seen and what is hidden and this is nowhere more apparent than in the selling of shoes. Shoe
selling outside the cosmopolitan city mostly remained the preserve of the small shop and the
craftsman. Shoes were usually confined to the window space; once one entered a shoe shop the
walls were lined with shoe boxes, in the style of the co-operative shoe shops which opened
from 1873 onwards, selling mass produced cheap shoes.33 The window display was developed
by architects to incorporate island displays, a glass cabinet placed in corridor-like entrance
spaces which customers could walk around and view the shoes from all directions, but not
touch, prior to fully entering the shop. Because they were incorporated into the entrance of the
shop they were still at the margins of the shops in arcade like liminal entrance spaces rather
than displays in the interiors. It was the cosmopolitan department stores towards the end of the
nineteenth century which started to display shoes free-standing in the interior of the shop where
they could be touched as they were viewed.
Shoes were getting their own space as they did in both Émile Zola’s The Ladies’
Paradise (1883), which charts the rise of the department store through the perspectives of the
shop girl Denise Baudu, newly arrived in Paris from Valognes, and of the store’s owner, Octave
Mouret, and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), which follows the fortunes of Carrie
Meeber, newly arrived in Chicago from rural Wisconsin and initially working in a shoe factory.
Both novels celebrate the spectacle, scale and range of goods for sale in department stores,
which as Zola writes, create, ‘departments for flowers, millinery, perfume, shoes, and I don’t
know what else.’34 Significantly, shoes had become part of the spectacle of display, on show in
the department store and its literary representation. The department store, observes Zola:

had brought out all its white things, and there, as everywhere else, there was
an orgy of white….Although it was not yet the season, in the centre, as a
decoration, was a display of first communion dresses and veils in white
muslin, white satin shoes, a spectacular florescence, as if an enormous
bouquet of innocence and guileless ecstasy had been planted there.35

While shoes have been objectified, part of the art of the spectacle, they are close enough for
customers to reach and touch, infusing the art of display with a sense connection and interiority.
In Sister Carrie, the shoes go further and seductively ‘speak’ to Carrie, the consumer who
cannot afford all she desires. ‘“Ah, such little feet,” said the leather of the soft new shoes, “how
effectively I cover them; what a pity they should ever want my aid.”’36 In their seductive
appeal, the shoes simultaneously reveal and conceal Carrie’s identity construction and what it is
in the city that drives her. For Zola’s shop girl Denise, it is the crowd of the city; for Dreiser’s
Carrie it is the object, itself. Problematically, Carrie cannot afford the shoes, even though she
makes shoes, and her character is split between the drudgery of her existence and the influence
of her desire. As the literary scholar Rachel Bowlby suggests in Just Looking, ‘Carrie’s self is
 Sarah Heaton| 49

formed by concrete things in a subjective image…which she does not have the means to make
her own.’37 In The Ladies’ Paradise, the revealing of female desire is uncovered as Madame
Marty, the bourgeois housewife who buys anything and everything, passes further and further
into the depths of the store to reach the shoe department and arguably herself and her ‘morbid
desire.’

Then she had gone downstairs again to the shoe department at the far end of
one of the galleries, beyond the ties, a department which had been opened that
very day; she had ransacked the show-cases, seized with morbid desire at the
sight of white silk mules trimmed with swansdown and shoes and boots of
white satin with high Louis XV heels.38

The literary critic Hannah Thompson has likened the buying of clothes in Zola’s novel as
akin to undressing, and argues that women are erotically aroused particularly through touch and
also ‘spent’ when they leave a store.39 Madame Marty’s ‘morbid desire’ can here be linked to
the ‘shaming of the sexual act.’40 But because Madame Marty’s is a journey into the interior of
the department store there is a revealing of the interior self, encapsulated by the aura-like appeal
of the shoes she desires, that is on the margins of revealing and concealing. For Walford, the
specific shoes, the mules which reveal the foot and are associated with indoor wear, and the
fashionable heel which ‘helped women to perfect the Grecian bend,’41 suggest hidden desires.
Bowlby argues that it is the ‘peculiarly modern gaze of desire and fascination’ which is a
passive exchange in which the women experience a ‘loss of self or self-possession’ (s’y
perdre).42 Arguably, Zola’s housewives and Dreiser’s social climber Carrie lose themselves
precisely because the desire for the aura of the object is so much a part of the self. This is not
the well-worn fetishisation of shoes or fabric from the male gaze, seen elsewhere in the novel.
Despite shoes emerging on show in the spectacle of the department store interior, to such
flamboyant effect in Zola’s rendition, there is still the sense of the marginal and the subversive,
or even perverse, in the looking at shoes which are worn.

4. Men and Women: Gazing at and Giving Shoes

In Zola’s novel, the gazing at footwear takes on a voyeuristic positioning when it is from
a male perspective. During the second meal service in the basement of the department store,
Deloche, one of the salesmen in the lace department who is taken on at the same time as Denise
and who can never satisfy his hunger at mealtimes, looks up through the ventilator to the
passers-by at street level.

Standing against the wall, Deloche, stuffed full of bread, was digesting in
silence, looking up at the ventilator; his daily recreation, after lunch, was to
watch the feet of the passers-by as they hurried along the pavement – feet cut
off at the ankle, heavy shoes, elegant high boots, dainty women’s ankle-boots,
a continual procession of live feet.43

The male gaze steers the consumption of shoes here from a female interiorised
fetishisation to an exterior fetishisation which objectifies the female. The voyeurism appeals to
the hidden interior desires of the male. Shoes, here, appear to have a close relationship to
display and spectacle in cultures of exchange that speaks to both display and interiority; under
the male gaze, it is all about the commodification of women. But it is more than footwear on
show making the hidden visible, which sits comfortably with Victorian moralising that keeps
50 | Coming Out from Under Her Crinolines

footwear hidden beneath a woman’s skirts. When in Sister Carrie, Charles Drouet, the
travelling salesman who pays for Carrie’s new shoes, asks her to ‘stick 'em out,’ the shoes show
he has ‘bought’ her.44 Even when Carrie is walking to meet the sartorially elegant married bar
manager George Hurstwood, whom she believes is more upmarket than Drouet, her shoes are
on show, marking her availability. ‘On her feet were yellow shoes and in her hands her
gloves.’45 Whilst ‘in a material way she was considerably improved,’ because ‘her little shoes
now fitted her smartly and had high heels,’46 she has also been bought and has ‘felt ashamed.’47
Her footsteps falter under the gaze of a girl who worked at the shoe factory with her48 and the
knowledge that Drouet has bought clothes for her. But rather than merely taking the
commodities and the hidden shame in being a woman who can be bought, Carrie’s hidden
desires emerge through the seductive voice of the shoe and are arguably the same ‘morbid
desire’ referred to by Zola and figure in both the women who shop and the gentleman who
voyeuristically consumes the passers-by’s shoes. Whether it is Drouet who has bought them or
Deloche digesting his lunch, while covertly viewing footwear on the move, or the women
reaching out to touch the shoes on display in the depths of the department store, it is about
subconscious desires of the self and the voyeuristic pleasure in peeping at footwear emerging
from skirts. Women’s footwear in cultures of display and exchange is a powerful medium of
agency but also an object which one can be powerfully subject to.
Because a woman’s boots or shoes, however modest, rarely peep out from under her
skirts in late nineteenth-century literature, when there is a mention of women’s shoes and boots
in a novel it is a significant moment of object placement and a moment of revelation or crisis
for the woman. In contrast, while men’s shoes are often on show, they simply demarcate the
type of man with which we are dealing. When women’s footwear is on show, it tends to be
typical working-class shoes and is specifically described to reinforce the poverty and hardship
of the woman’s life. In The Ladies’ Paradise, Denise’s ‘shoes caused her even more suffering,
for they were heavy shoes she had brought from Valognes, lack of money preventing her from
replacing them with light boots.’49 Later, she examines ‘them wondering how she could make
them last until the end of the month.’50 In Sister Carrie, Carrie ‘felt the worn state of her
shoes.’51 When Drouet insists on buying her new shoes and her showing them off, along with
gloves and a jacket, it is a clear moment of the patronage of a woman, a scene that we are still
familiar with in contemporary culture when a man buys a woman a dress for a date, a gift Carrie
Bradshaw, a single woman, was no stranger to in Sex in the City.
Whilst the gendered male gifting of clothes suggests the buying of a woman, when
women pass-on clothes to other women, it is a different type of ownership. That women
frequently passed on their once worn dresses, even shoes, to poorer relatives and servants,
reminds us of the transient relationship women had to clothing. But as with the nuance of
difference in the fetishisation of shoes in terms of the male and female gaze, so there is a
nuance of difference in the sense of ownership in the gifting of clothes from men to women and
between women. In Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917), set in a poor New England mountain
community, Charity is seduced and left pregnant by Harney and eventually marries the older
Mr Royall. Earlier, when preparing for the town’s Old Home Week and seeking to attract
Harney, Charity realises the perfect white satin shoes she desires to wear have already been
worn by her rival Annabel Blach, who in the end, Harney marries.

Charity took up the satin shoes and looked at them curiously. By day, no
doubt, they would appear a little worn, but in the moonlight they seemed
carved of ivory. She sat down on the floor to try them on, and they fitted her
perfectly, though when she stood up she lurched a little on the high heels. She
looked down at her feet, which the graceful mould of the slippers had
 Sarah Heaton| 51

marvelously arched and narrowed. She had never seen such shoes before,
even in the shop-windows at Nettleton...never, except...yes, once, she had
noticed a pair of the same shape on Annabel Balch.52

But her hesitation is a momentary consideration, and when later Charity is dancing with Harney
she only gives a cursory dismissive thought to whose feet had once worn these shoes.
The borrowing of shoes has a more salutary effect in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
(1868-69). The domestic novel charts the growth of the March girls under the guidance of their
mother Marmee whilst their father is away during the Civil War. Meg, the eldest, is a well-
mannered beauty who runs the household when their mother is away. Jo, the intellectual, is an
independent tomboy. Beth is shy, gentle and sickly. And Amy is the vivacious, artistic youngest
sister. The novel is full of functional boots and shoes suitable to the March family’s socio-
economic position, and perhaps, even more importantly, to their moral standing. When Meg
goes with Jo to the New Year’s Eve dance, her new ‘high-heeled slippers were dreadfully tight,
and hurt her, though she would not own it.’53 Hiding her pain and believing that a ‘real lady’ is
known by her ‘neat boots’ the ‘tight slippers tripped about so briskly that none would have
guessed the pain their wearer was suffering smilingly.’54 Precisely because the slippers have
come out from under her skirts, Meg wrenches her ankle and the tomboy Jo moralizes: ‘I knew
you’d hurt your foot with those silly things.’55

Image 5: Little Women, illustration, 1880, © by Frank T. Merrill.

Courtesy of Project Guttenberg56
52 | Coming Out from Under Her Crinolines

In a macabre parallel to the scene in which Marmee and Meg’s sisters gather together to
furnish a wardrobe for her stay (Image 5, note the sensible boots in the foreground), the
fashionable Moffat sister Belle shuts herself away with Meg to transform her. ‘I shan’t let
anyone see you till you are done, and then we’ll burst upon them like Cinderella and her
godmother, going to the ball.’57 But we, the readers, already know that Meg is no Cinderella
when it comes to wearing shoes because she had wrenched her ankle at the earlier New Year’s
Eve dance, even if the ‘high-heeled blue silk boots satisfied the last wish of her heart.’58 Whilst
for the fashionable crowd Meg does make the impression that Belle and, arguably, Meg want to
make, and is ‘Cinderella,’ as Major Lincoln points out, Meg also realizes she has been ‘spoilt
entirely; she’s nothing but a doll.’59

Image 6: Little Women, illustration, 1880, © by Frank T. Merrill.

Courtesy of Project Guttenberg60

Meg’s boots, peeping out from under her skirts, reveal her usually hidden desire for a
feminine performance, as depicted in the illustration above (Image 6), which conflicts with her
ascribed socio-economic gender role. The night at the ball, Meg behaves as fashion and her
boots dictate. The boots, just as Cinderella’s slippers and dress, work for her in a moment of
carnivalesque democracy where the socio-economic lines have momentarily collapsed, and
Meg literally dances in someone else’s shoes. She does, of course, regret her vanity. Fashion,
particularly fashionable footwear in Little Women, is aligned to pain, the manipulation of the
 Sarah Heaton| 53

body, and narcissism, and does not rest easily with the moral values at the core of the text. The
reader notes the satirical tone when the narrator’s voice breaks through, proclaiming, ‘but, dear
me, let us be elegant or die.’61 It is unsurprising then that most readers align themselves with Jo
and her functional boots. As well, most viewers of Sex and the City align themselves with
Carrie rather than with the new mother who shoe-shames her, perhaps because Carrie’s
engagement with fashionable footwear is a female interiorised fetishism of self-identification
rather than a display to attract the fetishising gaze of the male.
Amy, the youngest March sister, is in some ways the more interesting sister, as she
combines aspects of her two older sisters; she has the beauty and femininity of Meg but is a
more successful housekeeper, and is aligned to the independence of Jo. Amy is perhaps closer
to our contemporary Carrie Bradshaw than the other three. Fashion sits comfortably on her
shoulders and it opens doors for her not only to Europe but also to Laurie, their wealthy
neighbour’s grandson. However, we never find out what Amy is wearing on her feet, as she
keeps her footwear firmly under her skirts. The only time we know what shoes Amy is wearing
is when she sits crying ‘with one boot on,’ left behind from a theatre trip, and destroys Jo’s
diary in retaliation as it was Jo who did not want her younger sister dragging along.62 In an
attempt to be forgiven Amy dons her ice-skates and chases after Jo and Laurie only to fall
through the ice whilst Jo watches. The revelation of Amy’s footwear is a moment of crisis as
both Jo’s and Amy’s inner desires are made visible: Jo’s anger at her sister as she silently
watches Amy struggle and does nothing to help, and Amy’s desire to be recognised both by her
sister but also by Laurie. She no longer is content to be the little sister left at home.

5. The Silent Power of Shoes

The novels of the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, who wrote earlier than the other
authors discussed in this article, are littered with working-class shoes but the gilded shoe and
boot are mostly absent. Shoes, for Dickens, repeatedly tell of a hard life and poverty. But a
peculiar scene which focuses on a servant’s shoes in Bleak House (1853) draws our attention
beyond the expected role of the shoe that underscores poverty and hardship. Lady Dedlock
leaves her French maid Hortense behind when it appears she is linked to the murder of Mr
Tulkinghorn, Lady Dedlock’s solicitor.

I suppose there is nothing pride can so little bear with as pride itself, and that
she was punished for her imperious manner. Her retaliation was the most
singular I could have imagined. She remained perfectly still until the carriage
had turned into the drive, and then, without the least discomposure of
countenance, slipped off her shoes, left them on the ground, and walked
deliberately in the same direction through the wettest of the wet grass.63

Walking away from the house Hortense is watched by Mr Jarndyce, Ada and Esther, our
narrator at this point. Whilst there is revelation here in terms of character, the striking simplicity
of Hortense, the servant, removing her shoes, reveals a moment of inner crisis but also strangely
a moment of empowerment. Again, the revealing of the shoe reveals the inner machinations of
desire. Mr Jarndyce questions whether Hortense is mad, and the keeper points out that, no she is
not, while his wife suggests Hortense fancies herself walking through blood. In a novel which
has been hailed as one which endorses female community, we take the wife’s word. For
women, in particular, whether it is shoes, clothes or an object, the function on expected terms is
not always the most important trait of a thing, and the woman here understands that the removal
of the shoes ties Hortense to the blood of Tulkinghorn, who refused to write a letter of reference
54 | Coming Out from Under Her Crinolines

for her, and in itself is a powerful gesture of self-identification. The removing of the shoes is a
moment of crisis and revelation of whom Hortense really is, a murderess, but it is the taking off
of the shoes which is dwelt upon rather than her actions. The revealing of the shoe exposes her
difference, her separation from the Dedlock house, and her parting from the ‘civilised.’ ‘Still,
very steadfastly and quietly walking towards [the house], a peaceful figure too in the landscape,
went Mademoiselle Hortense, shoeless, through the wet grass.’64
The stillness and silence help us to understand why Dickens’ other shoe is not worn by
Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1861). Arguably, it is precisely whether we perceive the
shoe as never put on or taken off which guides our reading of it as a fetishised object, part of
the paraphernalia of adornment representing the institution of marriage, or a self-fetishised
object. Writes Dickens of Miss Havisham:

She was dressed in rich materials – satins, and lace, and silks – all of white.
Her shoes were white …. She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but
one shoe on – the other was on the table near her hand – her veil was but half
arranged, her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom
lay with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and some
flowers, and a Prayer-Book all confusedly heaped about the looking-glass.65

Miss Havisham had been jilted at the altar and has never moved on. The house remains
exactly as it did on that fateful day, with only her ward Estella and Pip, our narrator, the young
man with great expectations, as two occupants who will bring about change. Her unworn shoe,
rather than being concealed under her wedding dress, remains on show and reveals a level of
agency not usually recognised in analysis of the scene. Miss Havisham is one of the best known
of Dickens’ characters, and there is a sense of stasis and even entrapment in the image of this
woman fading away in the wedding dress, which was meant to bind her to her husband and has
ended up binding her to him in his absence. While Dickens’ description of Miss Havisham
contains all the expected elements of the wedding apparel,66 it is the shoe on her dressing table
which hints at the discord in the scene of a long ago jilted bride arranging herself. In critical
work on the novel the shoe is usually ignored, just another motif of the lack of care and self-
awareness which adds to her withered and wax like appearance. Miss Havisham in her wedding
dress is one of the most striking images in Dickens’ writings and certainly does not wither in
the reader’s mind. When Hortense’s shoes are removed in Bleak House the impact is in the
silence that we also find in Miss Havisham’s room in Great Expectations.

I glanced at the dressing-table again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once
white, now yellow, had never been worn. I glanced down at the foot from
which the shoe was absent, and saw that the silk stocking on it, once white,
now yellow, had been trodden ragged.67

The shoe on the table, here viewed from the perspective of Pip, is unworn, in the wrong
place, and distils the importance of all the decaying objects in the room. It would be too simple
at this point merely to align Miss Havisham to these objects by casting her as another. This is
particularly so if we take into consideration her self-belief in her role as vindicator of women’s
rights and her taking ownership of Estella, her ward, as an object. Time and again, the reader is
directed to Estella’s inhuman almost doll-like being. Certainly Miss Havisham treats her more
as a doll than a daughter, in the dressing her up and storing her in the house, reminding us of the
patronage in the male gifting of clothes and shoes to a woman rather than the female passing of
clothes on to other women. But when Miss Havisham treats Estella as a doll to be costumed in
 Sarah Heaton| 55

the clothes, shoes and jewellery she has bought her, Estella wears them elegantly, successfully,
unlike the doll-like Meg March of Little Women. At one point in the novel, Pip meets Estella
but does not recognise the ‘elegant lady’ who is associated with ‘the shoes with red heels and
the blue solitaire.’68 There is the suggestion of a vibrancy and colour to the shoes which, as I
have already suggested, is mainly absent from Victorian literature. Certainly Estella’s red shoes
stand out when contrasted to Pip’s thick boots.
But perhaps they do not stand out against Miss Havisham’s unworn wedding shoe. In
fact, read together the women’s shoes of Great Expectations take on a significance of their own.
Both Estella’s and Miss Havisham’s are high fashion shoes, intricately adorned. Further, the
wedding shoe is displayed on the table next to Miss Havisham where it was when she read the
letter from her fiancé, jilting her. When read together, the shoe as object and the shoe that is
worn by her dressed ‘doll’ stand in for one another. The wedding shoe on the table has lost its
original function, use value and exchange value. But precisely because Miss Havisham brings
Estella into her room and places shoes on her feet, and precisely because she brings Pip in his
heavy boots into her room to ‘view’ Estella, Miss Havisham exerts moments of control which
suggests that the wedding shoe on the table is not an object forgotten, and neither is she. That
the shoe is on display throughout the story restores an exchange value in terms of the gaze over
which Dickens has caused Miss Havisham to have control. Her seeming passiveness, her stasis,
her silence, all attributes of a disempowered womanhood, become her agency and power. Shoes
are her weapons with which she equips Estella. Importantly, as Pip observes, when he re-visits
Satis House after some years, only Estella is allowed to touch the bridal shoe, ‘the white shoe,
that had never been worn, in her hand, and her head bent as she looked at it, was an elegant lady
whom I had never seen.’69 By the end of the novel, Miss Havisham repents, but by then she is
delirious, and Estella does put the shoe down literally and figuratively. Pip and Estella have
been disempowered by the shoe on the table and the expectations of a woman of money during
the period. Miss Havisham’s footwear of power has been taken from underneath her crinolines
because the social institution of marriage has rejected her. Whether she would have kept her
shoes under her skirts had she married will never be known. Miss Havisham’s static shoe
disempowers all but the person who put it there.
By the time Edith Wharton is writing, it is easier to read footwear as oppositional and a
site of agency and empowerment. Wharton’s women are well-versed in using clothes as part of
their repartee of commodity exchange and her novels include references to the latest couture
designers from Doucet and Maison Paquin and to sensitive explication of women’s work as
milliners.70 The Wharton scholar Maureen Montgomery suggests that Wharton’s ‘fiction
constitutes a counter discourse that challenges the meanings given to femininity and gender
relations by the news media and consumer capitalism in general.’71 Wharton’s fiction elucidates
the power women can exert once they mobilise themselves, notwithstanding their constricting
clothes and society. Wharton is an astute writer of clothing and fashion, and there is little
mention of shoes in her novels despite the fact that she is writing just as skirts are rising. When
footwear does emerge from beneath the skirts they are weapons which are used as a form of
resistance to the hegemonic norms.
The sociologist Diana Crane’s argument for oppositional dress helps us to understand
Wharton’s use of footwear in The Custom of the Country (1913), The Age of Innocence (1920),
and The Buccaneers (1938). ‘Oppositional styles of clothing such as those that emerged in the
nineteenth century disrupt existing boundaries and create new boundaries,’ Crane suggests.72
Crane’s concept is useful precisely because footwear during the period is operating at the
boundary, at the margin, as fashion went through a huge period of change. Yet for novels that
are so fashion and clothes conscious it is the men’s feet which are the best dressed and the
women’s which largely remain hidden beneath their skirts. When a woman’s boots do emerge
56 | Coming Out from Under Her Crinolines

they emerge to express the interior desires of the woman but there is a level of agency and even
weaponry in their wielding, whether it is as an expression of the social climber Undine’s anger
in The Custom of the Country when her ‘long patent-leather boot … was off with a wrench, and
she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet,’73 to a moment of intimate crisis in The Age of
Innocence.

She spoke in a low even voice, without tears or visible agitation; and each
word, as it dropped from her, fell into his breast like burning lead. He sat
bowed over, his head between his hands, staring at the hearthrug, and at the
tip of the satin shoe that showed under her dress. Suddenly he knelt down and
kissed the shoe.74

Of course, Newland Archer, the Old New York gentleman lawyer who is engaged to the
moneyed May Welland, would kiss the shoe of Madame Olenska, the bohemian divorcee who
has returned from Europe, as they confess their love for each other but also the impossibility of
being together. Ellen Olenska’s clothes are all about naturalness and confidence with her body.
She is in control; her clothes act as a challenge and elevate her above New York society not
only in terms of their fashionableness but because she is a ‘modern’ woman who will wear an
empire style dress if she wants to. It is precisely this final point which makes Newland kiss
Ellen Olenska’s shoe, when he is unable to ‘leave’ his fiancée May and all that she stands for.
The shoes of Wharton’s women are among her heroines’ most powerful accessories,
perhaps precisely because they so often remain hidden until a critical moment in the narrative.
In The Age of Innocence, Madame Olenska’s shoe derives some of its power in ways which are
akin to that seen in Miss Havisham’s shoe in Great Expectations, while in Wharton’s The
Buccaneers, which follows several young American heiresses over to Britain in their quest for
aristocratic husbands, the boot emerges as a site of power exchange among a mother and her
two daughters.

The young Virginia only has to glance at her mother’s boots to unnerve her
mother: Virginia’s sapphire eyes rested with a remote indifferent gaze on the
speaker’s tightly buttoned bronze kid boots, and Mrs. St. George suddenly
wondered if she had burst a buttonhole.75

There is a vulnerability to the exposure of the fashionable boot, and the mother’s anxiety about
getting fashion right. Furthermore, Virginia, the older daughter, uses her own footwear to
challenge her mother’s authority. Nan, the younger daughter, grinds her heels into the crack
between the veranda boards while defiantly stating, ‘I think she is lovely.’76 Here the boot is
used as a weapon to show the young girl’s growing dominance.

6. Conclusion
There is a moment in literature written in or about the nineteenth century when the
peeping of a shoe-shod toe from beneath women’s skirts had an impact that extends far beyond
mere characterisation. Unlike the abundance of dresses and silks which adorn the novels of the
period, women’s shoes remain relatively ‘silent’ but when they do ‘speak’ it is at a moment of
crisis, revelation and, importantly, power. Whilst Wharton kept her hemlines long, once
hemlines start to rise in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s the Beautiful and the Damned (1922) ‘there were
shoes of gold and bronze and red and shining black,’77 and they join the list of items of dress to
suggest the conspicuous consumption and spectacle of the crowd, from the character in The
Great Gatsby (1925), who telephones to have his golf shoes returned after Gatsby’s death, to
 Sarah Heaton| 57

Nicole, in Tender is the Night (1934), who buys four pairs of shoes on a shopping trip. Shoes
are thrown into the novels just as Gatsby throws reams of hand-made shirts on to his bed to
seduce Daisy. Shoes are part of a narrative of plenty, seducing us just as they do in Sex in the
City. The series restored the silent power of shoes by taking the over-commodification of
designer shoes and the fetishisation of the male gaze; on female terms, it gave back an aura to
the art of shoes and their fetishisation.

Notes
1
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2000), 9.
2
Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism,’ Collected Papers, V (London: Hogarth, 1924), 198.
3
Lorraine Gamman, and Merja Makinen, Female Fetishism (New York: New York University
Press, 1994), 62.
4
Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 163-4.
5
Marx, Capital, 165.
6
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Literary
Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 283.
7
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory (New York:
Scribner’s Sons, 1896), Project Gutenberg, accessed 26 July 2013.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26842/26842-h/26842-h.htm.
8
‘A Woman’s Right to Shoes,’ Sex in the City, Season 6, Episode 9, directed by Timothy Van
Patten (2003; New York: HBO).
9
‘What Goes around Comes Around,’ Sex in the City, Season 3, Episode 17, directed by Allen
Coulter (2000; New York: HBO).
10
‘Biography,’ Manolo Blahnik, accessed 14 March 2013, http://www.manoloblahnik.com.
11
Lou Taylor, The Study of Dress History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002),
102. See also Deborah Wynne, Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel (London
and Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2010).
12
Taylor, The Study of Dress History, 103, 105.
13
Peter McNeil, Vicki Karaminas, and Catherine Cole, Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing
in Literature, Film and Television (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 5.
14
Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 1, quoted in Peter McNeil, Vicki Karaminas
and Catherine Cole, Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television
(Oxford: Berg, 2009), 5.
15
John Harvey, Men in Black (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), 19.
16
Nancy Rexford, ‘The Perils of Choice: Women’s Footwear in Nineteenth-Century America,’
in Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, ed. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (London:
Berg, 2011), 139. See also John Peacock, Shoes: The Complete Sourcebook (London: Thames
and Hudson, 2005), 69-83.
17
Jonathan Walford, The Seductive Shoe: Four Centuries of Fashion Footwear (London:
Thames and Hudson, 2007), 52.
18
Ibid., 124. See also 52.
19
Linda O’Keefe, Shoes: A Celebration of Pumps, Sandals, Slippers and More (New York:
Workman, 1996), 296.
20
O’Keefe, Shoes, 303.
58 | Coming Out from Under Her Crinolines

21
Rosy Aindow, ‘Clothing, Class Deception, and Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century Fiction,’
in Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television, ed. Peter McNeil,
Vicki Karaminas and Catherine Cole (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 35.
22
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (London: Unwin Books, 1970), 121.
23
Fabulous images of Pietro Yantorny’s shoes can be viewed at the website of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, including the famous trunk of shoes owned by Rita de Acosta Lydig, a subject
of this article. ‘Trunk of Shoes, 1917-19,’ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed 21 July
2103, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/C.I.53.76.1a,b-12a,b.
24
‘Pietro Yantorny,’ podcast audio, Bata Shoe Museum, accessed 14 March 2013,
http://www.batashoemuseum.ca/podcasts/200905/index.shtml.
25
Marx, Capital; Sigmund Freud, Fetishism.
26
Stephanie Pedersen, Shoes: What Every Woman Should Know (Newton Abbot, UK: David
and Charles, 2005), 32.
27
No Known Copyright.
28
Marthe Bibesco, ‘My Roumania,’ Vogue, June 1925, accessed 21 March 2013,
http://www.tkinter.smig.net/romania/Bibesco/index.htm.
29
Walford, The Seductive Shoe, 124.
30
No Known Copyright.
31
No Known Copyright.
32
Ibid.
33
Kathryn A. Morrison, English Shops and Shopping (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2003), 78-80.
34
Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. Brian Nelson (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics,
2008), 371, Kindle Edition.
35
Ibid., 404.
36
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1986), 98.
37
Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London:
Routledge, 1985), 54.
38
Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 416.
39
Hannah Thompson, Naturalism Redressed: Identity and Clothing in the Novels of Émile Zola
(Oxford: Legenda, 2004), 83.
40
Ibid., 84.
41
Walford, The Seductive Shoe, 96.
42
Bowlby, Just Looking, 72-73.
43
Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 169.
44
Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 75.
45
Ibid., 47.
46
Ibid., 46.
47
Ibid., 63.
48
Ibid., 76.
49
Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 122.
50
Ibid., 127.
51
Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 7.
52
Edith Wharton, Summer (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 121.
53
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (London: Penguin Classics, 1989), 25.
54
Ibid., 26-27.
55
Ibid., 30.
56
No Known Copyright.
 Sarah Heaton| 59

57
Ibid., 90.
58
Ibid., 90.
59
Ibid., 93.
60
No Known Copyright.
61
Ibid., 26.
62
Ibid., 73.
63
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Free Access Book, n.d.), Kindle Edition, 166-7.
64
Ibid., 167.
65
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1992), 46-47.
66
See Clair Hughes, Dressed in Fiction (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 175; Katherine Joslin, Edith
Wharton and the Making of Fashion (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 158.
67
Dickens, Great Expectations, 49.
68
Ibid., 219.
69
Ibid., 1992.
70
See Joslin, Edith Wharton.
71
Maureen E. Montgomery, Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New
York (London: Routledge, 1998), 15.
72
Diana Crane, ‘Clothing Behaviour a Non-Verbal Resistance: Marginal Women and
Alternative Dress in the Nineteenth Century,’ in The Fashion History Reader: Global
Perspectives, ed. by Georgio Riello, and Peter McNeil (London: Routledge, 2010), 348.
73
Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), 31.
74
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (London: Virago, 1988), 156.
75
Edith Wharton, The Buccaneers (London: Fourth Estate, 1993), 8.
76
Ibid., 11.
77
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned (London: Penguin Modern Classics,
2001), 26.

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Hughes, Clair. Dressed in Fiction. Oxford: Berg, 2006.

Joslin, Katherine. Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion. Durham: University of New
Hampshire Press, 2009.

Manolo Blahnik. ‘Biography.’ Accessed 14 March 2013. http://www.manoloblahnik.com.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1990.

McNeil, Peter, Vicki Karaminas, and Catherine Cole. Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in
Literature, Film and Television. Oxford: Berg, 2009.

Metropolitan Museum of Art. ‘Trunk of Shoes, 1914-19.’ [Pietro Yantorny Shoes.] Accessed
21 July 2103. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/C.I.53.76.1a,b-12a,b.

Montgomery, Maureen E. Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New

York. London: Routledge, 1998.

Morrison, Kathryn A. English Shops and Shopping. New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2003.
 Sarah Heaton| 61

O’Keefe, Linda. Shoes: A Celebration of Pumps, Sandals, Slippers and More. New York:
Workman Publishing, 1996.

Peacock, John. Shoes: The Complete Sourcebook. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005.

Pedersen, Stephanie. Shoes: What Every Woman Should Know. Newton Abbot, UK: David and
Charles, 2005.

Rexford, Nancy. ‘The Perils of Choice: Women’s Footwear in Nineteenth-Century America.’ In

Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, edited by Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil, 138-
159. London: Berg, 2011.

Riello, Giorgio, and Peter McNeil. Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers. London: Berg,
2011.

Santayana, George. The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. Project
Gutenberg. Accessed 26 July 2013.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26842/26842-h/26842-h.htm.

Sex and the City. Produced by Darren Starr. 1998-2004. New York: HBO.

Taylor, Lou. The Study of Dress History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Thompson, Hannah. Naturalism Redressed: Identity and Clothing in the Novels of Émile Zola.
Oxford: Legenda, 2004.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. London: Unwin Books, 1970.

Walford, Jonathan. The Seductive Shoe: Four Centuries of Fashion Footwear. London: Thames
and Hudson, 2007.

Wharton, Edith. Summer. London: Penguin, 1993.

———. The Custom of the Country. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.

———. The Age of Innocence. London: Virago, 1988.

———. The Buccaneers. London: Fourth Estate, 1993.

‘What Goes Around Comes Around.’ Sex in the City. Season 3, Episode 17. Directed by Allen
Coulter. 2000. New York: HBO.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2000.

Wynne, Deborah. Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel. London and Farnham:
Ashgate Publishing, 2010.
62 | Coming Out from Under Her Crinolines

Zola, Émile. The Ladies’ Paradise. Translated by Brian Nelson. Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, n.d., Kindle edition.

Sarah Heaton, PhD, is Senior Lecturer and Deputy Head of English at the University of
Chester, Chester, UK. Her research and publications are in fashion in literature.
Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style, volume 2, no. 2, pp. 63-84 (2013) Inter-Disciplinary Press
ISSN: 2045-2349

Britain’s Brand Story in the Fashion Films of the

Central Office of Information (COI)

Jo Stephenson

Abstract
This article discusses British films of the Central Office of Information (COI) made in the post-
World War II period to promote the British fashion industry to overseas markets. The films
were part of a national branding campaign to sell British exports and to create a brand for
Britain as a successful nation of trade. Constructed ideas of Britishness and the brand image of
London, sold through these films, are still frequently replicated and reproduced in popular
culture and are promoted through British media to sell contemporary Britain abroad. The films
of the COI therefore provide a valuable archive of visual representations of Britishness, an
origin largely forgotten, but which can help us to understand why certain images of Britain are
held so clearly in the public imagination today. By comparing a sample of four COI films,
namely Sixty Years of Fashion (1960), Miniskirts Make Money (1968), This Week in Britain
791: The Mary Quant Show (1974), and Insight: Zandra Rhodes (1981), this article will
navigate a way through the narratives being told, evaluating what images are being sold. In
mapping this history of fashion promotion in international state sponsored media, I will be
analysing the connections among public information films, fashion, the cultural geography of
the urban landscape, and perspectives on the commodity value of time. My theoretical
frameworks reflect these goals and offer an analysis of the methodological difficulties inherent
in a study of archival films and of the multiple levels of their curation. This research forms part
of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project that traces the
relationships among non-fiction film and media, the British fashion industry, and British
branding campaigns from World War II to the present day. The COI films highlight the gap in
current fashion film criticism regarding non-fiction fashion films, which this article seeks to
remedy.

Key Words
Fashion, film, branding, London, Britain, Britishness, British Monarchy, Central Office of
Information (COI), historiography, cultural geography, cinematic time, fashion export film.

*****

1. Introduction
The Central Office of Information (COI) was an organisation set up by the British
Government in 1946 to replace the wartime Ministry of Information. According to Linda Kaye,
Research Executive at the British Universities Film and Video Council, the COI was sponsored
to produce and disseminate through all media publicity material for government departments,
including the Foreign Office, the Commonwealth Relations Office and the Colonial Office.
Along with the British Council and the External Services of the BBC, the COI worked with the
Board of Trade to make up the Overseas Information Service (OIS).1 In 1970, twenty-four years
after the initial setting up of the COI, Sir Fife Clark, then Director General of the Central Office
of Information, laid out the full scope of the COI’s mission:
64 | Britain’s Brand Story

In the United Kingdom the COI arranges press, television, cinema, and poster
advertising, produces booklets, leaflets, films, television material, exhibitions,
photographs and other visual material, and distributes departmental press
notices. To British embassies and high commissions overseas it supplies
press, radio and television material, films, booklets, magazines, reference
services, exhibitions, photographs, display and reading-room material; it also
manages schemes for promoting the sale in other countries of British books,
periodicals and newspapers, and organizes tours for visitors invited to Britain
by HM Government. On behalf of the Board of Trade, the COI is responsible
for the design and construction of pavilions and stands at overseas trade fairs
and for displays at trade promotion events abroad.2

The dissemination of information regarding British identity across such a complete range of
platforms by one organisation was designed to provide a consistent and coherent image of
Britain to be presented to overseas markets, advertise the British nation, help improve its
international status, and hence improve the British economy through its export trade. As Sir
Clark made clear, ‘care is needed to ensure that the material produced will serve HM
Government’s policy interests.’3
The COI films are part of a largely forgotten heritage of public information films that are
being brought back into public consciousness and used by television documentaries and news
programmes to visualise the British past. Their inclusion in contemporary British history telling
is increasing the need to evaluate their existence as primarily promotional film materials. The
COI fashion orientated films also highlight the gap in current fashion film criticism regarding
non-fiction fashion films, a gap that I hope to begin to bridge in this article.
One of the key requirements for the COI national branding campaign was to increase
consumer desire abroad for British-made products, including its fashion, for design was one of
the key British industries promoted in the COI’s work. In this article, I will look at the ways this
collection of films worked to create a consumer brand for Britain with real economic value, a
brand that worked by tying images of the British fashion industry at specific moments of British
history with images of London, Britain’s most internationally recognisable consumption site.
I will be using archival films to map a history of British fashion branding, bringing
together public information films, the urban landscape, time, and fashion to construct my own
narrative of the COI’s storytelling. The article draws on social theory about archives and
selective memory, brand storytelling, cultural geography, and cinematic time (Section 2);
discusses the historical context of the films, specifically contemporaneous UK politics, social
movements, and export economy (Section 3); and analyses, in terms of the above, four COI
fashion export films, representative of the decades in which they were produced: Sixty Years of
Fashion, from 1960;4 Miniskirts Make Money, from 1968;5 This Week in Britain 791: The Mary
Quant Show, from 1974;6 and Insight: Zandra Rhodes, from 19817 (Sections 4, 5, 6, and 7,
respectively). These are followed by my concluding thoughts (Section 8).

2. Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks

A. The Archive(s): Choice and Memory
As historical artefacts, the COI collection of promotional fashion films forms part of the
COI archive, now held by the British Film Institute (BFI). Historiographers speak of archives as
power structures, created by those with political, social and economic authority to construct an
official version of the past. As the French philosopher Jacques Derrida has observed:
 Jo Stephenson| 65

every archive…is at once institutive and conservative….An eco-nomic

archive in this double sense: it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an
unnatural fashion, that is to say in making the law…or in making people
respect the law….It has the force of law, of a law which is the law of the
house…of the house as place, domicile, family, lineage, or institution.8

Derrida is here speaking of the ‘powers of economy…archival economy.’9 Arguably, the

promotional fashion films of the COI are part of this practice. At the time of their production,
the films were official representations of British society and industry, carefully thought out and
crafted by official bodies.
In 2010, a collection of these films was digitised and published in a DVD collection by
the BFI for contemporary consumption.10 Decisions were made about which films to include in
the DVD collection, just as in the past decisions were made about what to film, as well as which
films to keep and preserve. When we look at the DVD COI films, we are thus already seeing a
collection that has been chosen or curated for us. Discussing the relation of archives and power
structures, the French social theorist Michel Foucault claims that when one studies history, one
must question ‘the document.’11 In The Archaeology of Knowledge, he argues that:

ever since a discipline such as history has existed, documents have been used,
questioned, and have given rise to questions; scholars have asked not only
what these documents meant, but also whether they were telling the truth, and
by what right they could claim to be doing so, whether they were sincere or
deliberately mis-leading, well informed or ignorant, authentic or tampered
with.12

Similarly, Derrida writes about ‘archive fever,’ the compulsion to find origins in
archives. ‘The trouble de l’archive stems from a mal d’archive. We are en mal d’archive: in
need of archives.’13 For Derrida, this search for origins is by its nature impossible.14 History
cannot exist in archives because archives, and the myriad of documents they hold, are nothing
more than representations. Foucault took Derrida’s argument further, suggesting that because
archives have the potential to be easily misinterpreted, they can provide a distorted presentation
of history. For Foucault, the archive writes history and ‘transforms documents into
monuments.’15 In referring to both Derrida and Foucault in her book Dust, the historian Carolyn
Steedman argues that archival documents have put constraints on historical writing because
today’s archival historian is as preoccupied with what is not present in the archive as much as
what is.16 Foucault rejects the concept of a ‘total history’ that ‘seeks to reconstitute the overall
form of a civilization,’ and instead speaks of the establishment of a ‘general history,’ a ‘new
history,’ that ‘speaks of series, divisions, limits, differences of level, shifts, chronological
specificities, particular forms of rehandling, [and] possible types of relation.’17
The official body behind the films of the COI makes the questions about their use raised
by Derrida and by Foucault extremely important. However, there is also the argument that
reproaches their historiography by asking how else we are to know history if not through
representation and selection? If one accepts that official archives are constructed narratives,
subjectively created by institutions in power, any analysis of archival films becomes
problematic but does that mean they should not be studied? I have considered the problem of
the archive in my analysis of the COI fashion films and acknowledge that they are biased
constructions. In order to make more informed judgements about the content choices that were
made, I have tried to identify fragments of social history that have been left out of the films.
However, the only access I had to the verification of this information was through the further
66 | Britain’s Brand Story

accounts of social history, of which I am bound to ask the same questions as I ask of the
archive.
In this article, I look at how the fashion films of the COI are complicit in shaping a
memory of the past, a memory or nostalgia for Britain at a specific time in history that quite
possibly never existed. It is possible that I am here suffering from Derrida’s mal d’archive as I
look for an origin of the films, a primary instigation or purpose, and a totalised meaning. In line
with the problems raised by historiography, perhaps this means that I will inevitably fail. Yet
the very fact that these films are representations and therefore the result of specific choices and
careful decision making processes by those in power is a reason why I find them so interesting.
The choices made in the past can be analysed to answer questions about why we view certain
moments of history in certain ways today.
For this article, I have chosen to focus on films included in the BFI’s curated, digitised
DVD collection. All originated in the COI archive, were selected for redistribution by the
current archive holders, and have undergone the same process of selection, curation and
representation. There is justification, therefore, for examining them in relation to one another, to
form part of a newer narrative. As I made selections from the DVD collection, I, too, have
become a curator of the films, further complicating their analysis. I made my choices from the
BFI DVD collection based on what I thought were the clearest examples of national fashion
branding.

B. Cultural Geography
Besides the problems associated with writing a history that relies on archives, national
branding issues are also important to discuss. As a narrative-driven medium, the COI fashion
films were used to tell the story of the British fashion industry, which, in turn, was used to
promote Britain and Britishness on the world market. Great Britain and London are places, and
places can be branded through the use of stories in national promotion campaigns. Place brand
marketers and tourism scholars have noted that when we visit a locale, we construct meanings,
stories and memories about the locale that connect the present with the past.18 Consciously and
unconsciously, these place brand narratives influence consumer decision making about
consumption and create ‘place brand equity’ for a locality.19 It is this relationship between
narrative and ‘place brand equity’ that I suggest is behind the storytelling of these films. The
British brand informed, but was also partially created by, the storytelling of the COI fashion
films, which relied on entertainment ‘to plead their case before the public.’20 The story is not
self-contained in each film but rather is told accumulatively, as a collective, with each film
telling a part of the overall narrative. In their telling, the individual films are bound together
through the use of symbols and image associations that refer back to one another.
A useful theoretical framework to turn to here is the work of the cultural geographer
David Gilbert, who theorises links between fashion, consumption and place in ‘Urban
Outfitting: The City and the Spaces of Fashion Culture.’21 For Gilbert, the city provides
symbolic meaning to clothing and influences consumption behaviour; i.e., consumers will buy
trophy products they may not have bought in a different location.22 With cities like London,
Paris, and New York, images of which are disseminated continually in the mass media, the
result is a powerful global exchange of both visual and mental symbols. Gilbert explores the
globalisation of fashion and city images, looks at the parallel effects of globalisation on the
deconstruction of cities and the abstraction of retail space, and argues that despite relatively
recent developments in our experience of fashion consumption, long established global brands
like ‘Paris’ and ‘London’ remain an integral factor in the success of the fashion industry.23
Looked at in this way, the promoted image of a city and its relationship with fashion has the
potential to have a huge impact on a national economy.
 Jo Stephenson| 67

C. Cinematic Time
Besides the question of ‘where’ to film, another crucial element in the promotion
campaign of the COI fashion films was the question of ‘when’ to film. According to the
philosopher-economist-sociologist Karl Marx, there is a strong connection between commerce,
history, and a commodity’s ‘exchange-value.’24 When looked at in correspondence with
Gilbert’s writing on geographical commodification, time, as well as location, becomes a critical
consideration in the analysis of these films. London of a particular period, say the 1960s, adds
exchange-value to British fashion commodities.
Time, itself, can be linked with fashion and with film. In The Emergence of Cinematic
Time, the film and media scholar Mary Ann Doane links Marx’s discussion of labour-time with
a consideration of film. Doane notes that ‘in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…
emerging cinema participated in a more general cultural imperative’ that structured time – the
actual hours and days – of capitalist modernity.25 Doane writes of a new ability to ‘wear time,’26
with the advent of the watch; indeed, as fashion is visually located in filmic representations that
document its cyclical patterns and trends, the COI films can be seen as wearing time in an
alternate sense – of displaying fashions symbolically to represent and delineate certain markers
of British history. This idea is taken further when Doane asserts that time is not lived but
‘externalized.’27 The ability to attribute a commodity value to time and to relate this value to the
filmic display of clothing is valuable to our understanding of the cinematic representation of
fashion in the COI films.
I would like to argue here that certain markers of time in British fashion history hold
more commodity value than others. This explains the constant return to imagery of the
Swinging Sixties in contemporary British media coverage. Arguably, a reason for this
heightened commodity value of clothing from a particular period is in part because of the
amount of time spent, to use an aspect of Marx’s labour theory of value, by the official and
commercial bodies that built the media imagery and cumulative brand images of a particular
moment in a particular place. It is not the intrinsic value of the clothing that is being promoted,
but rather a constructed value of time, place, and commodity. The COI fashion films, therefore,
are incredibly valuable for understanding why we view certain moments in British fashion
history with higher regard and with a more vivid, pronounced and popular cultural memory
than we do others.
Before moving on to the films themselves, it is necessary to provide a historical context
for the COI films and to look at the reasons why the British fashion industry became an object
of state interest in post-war Britain.

3. Historical Context: UK Politics and Export Economy

In the post-World War II period, the British economy was floundering. The war itself
‘together with war-related damage, had cost Britain around one quarter of its national wealth.’28
Earnings from overseas markets had also been ‘eroded,’ and by 1943 British exports were ‘less
than one-third of their pre-war value.’29 Moreover, Britain’s foreign debts were of significant
size.
Britain needed a strategy to rebuild and regenerate its economy. In the election
manifesto which won them the vote in 1945, the Labour Party outlined a plan titled Let Us Face
the Future.30 One of the main focuses of this plan was the nationalisation of industry.31 The
acknowledgement that British industry had an important part to play in the rebuilding of the
British economy, along with the decision to nationalise some industries at a time of post-war
reconstruction, meant that private industry, too, became an object of state interest. The social
historian David Kynaston describes 1945 as having, ‘A pride in Britain’ and a pride in the label
Made in Britain.32 To increase British exports and glamourise its industries, these aspects of the
68 | Britain’s Brand Story

British economy were pushed in national promotion campaigns abroad. The Labour Party was
intent on promoting British design, and in 1944 the Council of Industrial Design was set up as
part of a series of initiatives to promote British design culture.33 For example, in 1946, the
Victoria and Albert Museum held the Britain Can Make It exhibition, and in 1951 the Festival
of Britain was held on London’s South Bank. The COI films of this period showcase British
design to export markets and include films such as Designed in Britain34 and Design for
Today.35
At this time, government involvement in consumer advertising was influenced by
Keynesian economics, a main principle of which is that markets need government intervention
to ensure high consumer demand.36 In line with Keynesian ideas of government responsibility
towards British consumption, the promotional fashion films of the COI of this time ‘were
produced with one eye firmly fixed on Britain’s image abroad and one eye firmly fixed on the
export balance sheet.’37
The post-war government interest in British fashion had had a precedent during World
War II with the creation of the Utility Clothing Scheme of 1941. To compensate for a shortage
in British textiles needed for the war effort, the Board of Trade set out rules to prescribe how
materials could be used and how clothing for the mass market could be designed. These clothes
were branded with the ‘CC41’ label, which stood for ‘Controlled Commodity 1941.’38 Well-
established fashion designers were often employed in the design of these garments in order to
increase their aesthetic appeal, but these designers worked anonymously and were not named
on the label. By the end of the war, 85 per cent of clothing made in Britain held the CC41 mark,
which had become the symbol of the ‘British’ clothing brand.39 While The Board of Trade had
managed to avoid the nationalisation of fashion in 1942,40 British clothes rationing continued
until 1949, and the Utility Clothing Scheme did not end until 1952.41 By this time, the
Conservative Government had been re-elected into power and was working towards the re-
establishment of an economy not run by the state.
During the 1950s, the fashion films of the COI built on the post-war promotion of
British design as well as on the government’s wartime interest in British fashion. These films
took off at a time of release for the British fashion industry from the constraints of the Utility
Clothing Scheme and the move into a new era of freedom in British design. The 1950s was a
decade of increasing economic stability after the austerity of the 1940s,42 although some forms
of rationing still continued. Teenagers, in plentiful supply by the end of the 1950s thanks to the
post-war baby boom, also became a critical part of the post-war economy. They had far more
discretionary income than teenagers of their parents’ generation, and created an unprecedented
shift in the habits of mass consumption. It just so happened that young people on both sides of
the Atlantic were becoming increasingly interested in fashion.
So far, this article has acknowledged the problems of representation and selection
inherent in a study of archival films. It has also outlined key theoretical issues involved in a
discussion of officially produced promotional fashion media. These issues include the
commodification of national and urban identity (in this case, specifically London), and the
presented connection between branded consumption sites and specific markers of time, for the
benefit of tourism and export economies. The result was nation branding through city branding,
which linked the British fashion industry to state interests and national reconstruction. Britain
was moving forward into an era of renewed prosperity in the West that coincided with the
development of a new consumer market of teenagers, who were keen to project their identity
through fashion. I will now move in to an analysis of the films themselves, to consider how this
background is characterised in the films of the COI.
 Jo Stephenson| 69

4. Sixty Years of Fashion

A clear example of a COI promotional fashion export film is Sixty Years of Fashion
(1960) which chronicles British style changes since the beginning of the twentieth century.43
While analysing the elements of British national identity chosen for promotion in this film, it
becomes apparent that one of the most striking themes is the British Royal Family. The first
image following the opening credits is a painting of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee which
took place in 1897. It is a colourful image of a Royal event, presenting Guards in red uniforms
with gold edging, decorated horses and crowds of waving subjects. The COI is making an
explicit connection between the desirability of British fashion and the prestige of the British
Royal Family, one of Britain’s biggest tourist attractions and a significant part of traditional
British national identity. Fashion is also linked with sovereignty in the film’s commentary.

The country decked itself to meet a new century, and a new sovereign….The
orgy of Edwardian fashions had begun. Red became the colour of the hour.
Geranium, old rose, vermillion and scarlet. Appropriate colours for the year
of Coronation.44

On the screen is the painted image of a woman posing in a garden in a red dress. She is wearing
a matching red hat with a large gold brooch on the side and pearls around the edge. She has a
white ruffle at her throat and huge, floating sleeves. Her posture reveals a puffed out chest. Her
head is held high, and she is looking directly at the camera, exuding confidence. As the camera
gradually closes in on this image, the screen becomes red before the camera moves out again
from the red of the woman’s dress to reveal an image of King Edward VII in a red suit. The
gold edging and medals adorning his coat connect with the gold brooch seen on the woman’s
hat in the previous image. The King’s chest is also puffed out, and his head is held high,
although instead of looking directly at the camera he looks diagonally off to the distance. The
prominence given these two images links the fashions of 1902 with Royal dress. These images
are followed by a painted image of King Edward VII’s Coronation in August of 1902. In
another scene, the film highlights the influence of British Royalty on the fashions of the day in
the description of British mourning dress after King Edward VII’s death. ‘Black Ascot, 1910.
Edward was dead, and George reigned.’45 With this reference to King George V, the Royal
Family’s situation is introduced alongside changes in British fashion, presenting the two as
going hand in hand. Rather than prompting the audience to buy a particular item of clothing, the
first half of the film moves chronologically through historical style changes, telling the story of
British fashion and connecting it with a story of British identity, specifically its long-standing
monarchy, in order to introduce the idea of a British fashion brand.
Throughout Sixty Years of Fashion, changes in British fashions are shown to change
simultaneously alongside other socio-political changes in Britain, associating further the British
fashion industry with a story of British national identity. A propaganda poster showing an
image of Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State at the beginning of World War I, calling the
country to arms is set against paintings of women in uniform doing war work, and the fashions
are seen to have a ‘military air.’46 There is also acknowledgment of the shifts to British fashion
brought about by the suffragettes. As British women won the right to vote in the 1920s, their
clothing became looser and less restrictive, with fashion acting as the physical manifestation of
women’s changing social identity and status.47 As the film’s history of Britain, and
simultaneously British fashion, reaches 1939, its mise-en-scene includes painted images of war
and of people waiting out air raids in tube stations. The fashions portrayed here are the
aforementioned utility clothes.
70 | Britain’s Brand Story

Image 1: Women in Red Dresses, from Sixty Years of Fashion,

COI, 1960, BFI Design for Today DVD.
© 2010, courtesy of the BFI

The commentary of Sixty Years of Fashion proclaims that wartime utility clothing had a
long-term impact on the future of the British fashion industry. ‘Their mass production laid the
foundation for a revolution in the making of clothes in the post-war years.’48 When upbeat
victory music is played on the soundtrack, the accompanying image is of a woman in a navy
blue coat with red buttons, holding a white neck scarf almost like a peace flag. Her attire
obviously references the colours of the Union Jack. Three women are seen marching in a studio
(again highlighting the constructed storytelling of this presented historical account) in red
dresses, making a ‘V’ for Victory sign with their right hands (Image 1). This combination of the
colour red with the symbol of victory could symbolise a number of other themes, including
London, royalty, and a modern British sensibility about women, all of which are relevant as
elements of a newly formed post-war British identity. It is also relevant here to note that the ‘V’
for Victory sign was a gesture famously adopted by Prime Minister Winston Churchill during
World War II. Thus, the image of female fashion consumers copying this gesture further ties
together notions of government interest in British fashion as well as alludes to their role in the
promotion of the Made in Britain brand label. British fashion is highlighted in this scene as
having a historical, national, and political resonance.
In telling a story of British history and linking this story with the development of British
fashion, Sixty Years of Fashion presents a highly considered strategy of brand storytelling. The
commodification of twentieth-century British history to promote the fashion industry in 1960
also corresponds with ideas surrounding the constructed relationship between commerce and
time. It is an ironic strategy if viewed against the title of the Labour Government’s post-war Let
Us Face the Future campaign, as the COI was here facing the future by turning to a reliance on
the past to secure national brand equity. By building the Royal Family and the two World Wars
into the story of the British fashion brand, the COI was promoting pride in British victory,
national character, and in a ‘total’ national history where each element was perfectly integrated
as a part of the same successful narrative. This branding strategy highlights further the
 Jo Stephenson| 71

subjectively constructed nature of the past presented in these films, when looked at in terms of
Foucault’s rejection of the possibility of historical totalisation.

Image 2: Commonwealth Institute, from Sixty Years of Fashion,

COI, 1960, BFI Design for Today DVD.
© 2010 courtesy of the BFI

The second half of Sixty Years of Fashion builds on this branding story and turns the
history of the British fashion industry into a commodity. An advertisement for British export,
the film displays montaged images of models in front of symbols of British export, including
the Commonwealth Institute in London (Image 2) and an airport departures building (Image 3).
Here, images are used to make unequivocal links between British cultural geography, British
export and British fashion. The film ends with a fashion model boarding an airplane set for
‘New York, ‘Beirut,’ ‘Paris,’ and ‘Adelaide,’ to showcase British fashions abroad (Image 4).
The commentary declares:

Now, with ever growing efficiency, exports are soaring. British clothes are on
the move. All over the world, whatever their age, their income or their way of
life, women look to London for ready to wear fashions at prices they can
afford.49

The plane being boarded, with the BEA logo for British European Airways, is possibly
one of an improved series of De Havilland Comets, the first commercial jetliner, significantly
made in Britain. If this is the case, we can see in this image a further layer of British promotion
that is tied up with the theme of export, technology, and a new modern Britain. The plane takes
off and the film ends, having made its point clear, in line with post-war British export targets
for expansion.
72 | Britain’s Brand Story

Image 3: Airport Departures, from Sixty Years of Fashion,

COI, 1960, BFI Design for Today, DVD.
© 2010, courtesy of the BFI

Image 4: New York, Beirut, Paris, from Sixty Years of Fashion,

COI, 1960, BFI Design for Today DVD.
©2010, courtesy of the BFI

5. Miniskirts Make Money

Throughout the 1960s, the COI fashion films often focused on teenage consumers and
were aligned with desirable images of London that were being promoted in other forms of
 Jo Stephenson| 73

popular culture. The fashion historians Valerie Mendes and Amy De La Haye describe the
exported image of 1960s London in the American magazine Time:

On 15 April 1966 Time magazine splashed “London, the Swinging City” on

its cover and, accurate or not, the description stuck. The article revealed an
enthusiasm for London’s youth-orientated attractions. In the mid-1960s
British teenagers had money to spend on entertainment (chiefly pop music),
clothes and cosmetics. In London, the place for the young to meet, hang out
and exchange their weekly wages for reasonably priced ready-to-wear
clothing was Carnaby Street in Soho.50

This idea of Swinging London forms one of the strongest images of recent British history in
cultural memory and is still frequently referred to in contemporary media as a time of success
for the British fashion industry and the British economy. Associated with Swinging London and
the Swinging Sixties, the cultural geography of London and the commodity value of time are
once again inextricably linked elements of the British fashion brand. Here Gilbert’s ideas about
branded consumption sites, Doane’s analysis of cinematic time, and Marx’s theory about the
relationship between commerce and history create a memorable image of London as a fashion
capital and brand.

Image 5: Mock Street Sign, from Miniskirts Make Money,

COI, 1968, BFI Design for Today DVD.
© 2010, courtesy of the BFI

As a celebrated fashion figure of Swinging London, the designer Mary Quant was often
a subject of COI films. Her starring role is not surprising, given her global fame and
international mass-market success as a British fashion designer and trendsetter. The art and
fashion historian Caroline Evans, details the Quant phenomenon:
74 | Britain’s Brand Story

Quant rapidly moved to the fashion mainstream through astute

merchandising. She started wholesaling in 1961 and launched the Ginger
Group in 1963 to franchise her slightly cheaper designs for mass-
manufacture. American deals followed, as did Quant cosmetics and
underwear that sported the famous Quant daisy…. In 1966 she was awarded
an OBE for her services to fashion exports as part of prime minister Harold
Wilson’s aggressive capitalisation on the pop and fashion cultures of the
city.51

The fact that Quant named one of her chalk striped tunics ‘The Bank of England’52 may have
been an ironic statement about the British Establishment. However, considering that her
clothing line was a hugely successful British export, it also seems to be an appropriate name. In
addition, the name acts as a wider reference to the fashion and tailoring industry of London and
its role in British economy.
Mary Quant made the mini-skirt famous and a highly desired fashion item, and it is
prominently featured in Miniskirts Make Money, a one minute film from 1968, filmed inside a
London fashion boutique called Lady Jane on London’s Carnaby Street.53 The location is
confirmed by geographical indicator markers such as street signs and shopping bags that are
visible inside the boutique (Image 5). The film draws on the consumer value of cultural
geography, specifically on the ideas of London as a trendsetting global brand and Carnaby
Street as the street for young people everywhere. Once the geography of the film is established,
London as a branded consumption site is connected with iconic tourist images of London. The
montage of images includes a red post box, a traditional British symbol, and a sign advertising
Sadler’s Wells Theatre, a (still) famous London dance venue. Later on in the film, we see brief
glimpses of Union Jack flags. The camera’s focus on the bare legs of women, sitting in offices
or trying on clothes in the boutique, ties together Mary Quant, the miniskirt, youth, and
Swinging London. The film showcases the Britishness of British design, another example of
Kynaston’s claims about the post-war pride symbolised by the Made in Britain label. As in
Sixty Years of Fashion, this promotion of Britishness also links to national promotion design
events such as the Festival of Britain and overseas trade fairs arranged by the COI.
As part of its focus on London, the film makes visual reference to the above noted Time
article that coined the term Swinging London. Piles of watches in Lady Jane’s boutique not
only reference Big Ben, an iconic London landmark, but promote ideas of London fashions
being ahead of the times (Image 6). This image of externalised time also connects with the
magazine’s title Time, as well as with Doane’s concept about the wearing of time and the
relationships among fashion, time, and commerce. Posters of the British pop group The Beatles,
of Jean Shrimpton, ‘the world’s first supermodel,’54 and of David Bailey, the notable 1960s
fashion photographer, are also included and are visible on the walls of the boutique. Again, the
London being presented here is young, fashionable, and creative, and visualised in ways to
appeal to the teenage consumer market. Lest we forget the marketing purpose of the film, one
of its key images is that of dollar bills, being placed inside a till (Image 7). The United States
export market is likely to have been one of the main target audiences of this film, as America
was among the British fashion industry’s largest international consumer markets at this time.
 Jo Stephenson| 75

Image 6: Watches, from Miniskirts Make Money,

COI, 1968, BFI Design for Today DVD.
© 2010, courtesy of the BFI

Image 7: Dollars Being Exchanged, from Miniskirts Make Money,

COI, 1968, BFI Design for Today DVD,
© 2010, courtesy of the BFI

The second half of Sixty Years of Fashion portrays fashion as a medium of the future,
technology and change, well-suited to the fast-moving creativity and innovation of the British
urban landscape. Miniskirts Make Money uses fashion to promote British goods by connecting
it through mise-en-scene with London, Britain’s capital city and the centre of both British state
76 | Britain’s Brand Story

control and Keynesian ideas about the centrality of the state to a national economy. The film
explicitly identifies British nationality with the new and the urban rather than with the
traditional and rural. The branded city space of London is used to create a designed view of a
unique and memorable fashion identity in a specific time.

6. This Week in Britain 791: The Mary Quant Show

In 1974, the COI made another film that highlighted Quant’s influence on global
fashion. As part of the This Week in Britain series,55 The Mary Quant Show celebrated the
exhibition Mary Quant’s London, held at the London Museum, Kensington Palace, between
November 29, 1973 and June 30, 1974. The holding of an exhibition about British fashion in
one of the royal palaces is a return to a previously mentioned trope of associating the British
fashion industry with the British Royal Family. By the 1960s, members of the monarchy were
themselves making this association. In 1960, Queen Elizabeth II’s sister Princess Margaret, a
fashion icon of the day, married Anthony Armstrong-Jones, a trendy high society photographer
whose subjects included members of the fashion elite. It is therefore possible that the location
of the exhibition was as much planned to promote the fashionability of the British Royal
Family, in an increasingly anarchist decade, as it was to promote the British fashion industry.
Again, the promotion of the two, are intertwined. The location of the exhibition immediately
heightens the prestige of its contents, presenting the implication of a Royal endorsement, and
the show was presumably placed there to attract more visitors and attention. The opening shots
show a model posing for the camera in Quant’s unmistakeable striped tights with the Quant
daisy emblem on the waistband.56 References to 1960s Swinging London are made here
through the inclusion of clips from filmed interviews with David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton.
These clips are placed among images of models posing in front of London city office blocks in
scenes reminiscent and directly referencing the iconic Bailey/Shrimpton British Vogue shoot in
New York, which took place in the Spring of 1963; the shoot was famous for changing the
classic style of fashion photography to a much more youthful, playful, and, significantly, urban
aesthetic. In referencing this shoot, the COI is clearly attempting to connect ideas of London
with the glamour of New York, whilst simultaneously staking claim over the new style of
fashion photography in reference to British Vogue. The film emphasises the angular lines of the
city of London and connects them with the angular lines of British designed clothes (such as
Quant’s tunic mini-dresses and dungarees), as well as the angular lines of the short British
hairstyle or bob synonymous with London hair-dresser Vidal Sassoon, often associated with
Quant’s fashions. One of the models shown is Twiggy, another iconic symbol of Swinging
London, who was regularly photographed by Bailey. By filming and promoting an exhibition
about Mary Quant at Kensington Palace in the 1970s, and associating a royal palace with
symbols of the Swinging Sixties, the COI is once again promoting contemporary London and
its fashions through its past. The film is in a continuum of COI films that use British history
references to promote British fashion.
The strategy also suggests that London is struggling to find a strong, modern, publically
marketable identity in a new decade. The reality of Mary Quant's Swinging London, apart from
the hype created by the media’s coordinated and edited view of London, is, in fact, debatable.
Caroline Evans argues that Swinging London was a ‘myth,’ created for foreign export and had
‘already become a little ossified.’57 After Carnaby Street was turned into a tourist site, it was
passé, and the ‘fashion cognoscenti’ moved ‘west towards the Portobello Road.’58 Moreover,
with the rise of the Teddy Boys in the 1950s, of Mods and Rockers in the 1960s, and the Punks
of the mid-1970s, Quant clearly could not claim ownership of the city’s fashion reputation. The
narrator of The Mary Quant Show says, ‘Mary Quant’s London was a London in the throes of a
bloodless revolution. It all started in the mid-50s, and its leaders were the young.’59 The film
 Jo Stephenson| 77

here notes that the shift to teenage consumption began in the 1950s, before the advent of the
miniskirt.
What The Mary Quant Show does do is squarely distance social revolution from the
violent, anti-social behaviour of the Teddy Boys and the later anti-fashion attitudes of the Punks
and place it firmly on short skirted pin-up girls, wearing polka-dots and stripes (patterns
associated with Quant’s designs), who posed for photographers and helped sell British clothes.
It was a cultivated image, a representation of London that ignored the ever-rising rejection by
youth of state control during this period and the political unrest, partly provoked by rumours of
an imminent nuclear war and by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) which many
young people joined simply as ‘a means to… subversion.’60 This rebellious attitude carried over
into wider anti-Establishment perceptions, including awareness of the politics of consumption
and opposition to the state-promoted culture of fashion. Anti-consumer fashions, such as those
created in the Hippie and the Punk Movements, and associated politics were taken up by a
group of British teenagers who offered ‘a parallel and quite contrary nirvana to the “white heat”
of Prime Minister Wilson’s technological revolution.’61 If acknowledged in the COI films, this
underground, which ‘had its own media – newspapers, magazines, film, theatre and even
fledgling video,’62 would not, perhaps, have done the British fashion industry’s export finances
quite so well. Not surprisingly, the COI ignored it.

7. Insight: Zandra Rhodes

In the 1980s, the COI began to recognise the marketable potential of rebellious British
youth and their fashions as export commodities; of particular focus was the work coming out of
London art schools such as Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths, and the Royal College of Art.
Insight: Zandra Rhodes (1981) is a COI film about the Punk-influenced British fashion
designer who sports pink, green or red hair, and was directed by Peter Greenaway.63 The film
marks a shift in the COI’s projection of Britain because it acknowledges the anti-Establishment
political subculture of the Punk Movement. It depicts images of youths with shaved heads,
facial piercings and tattoos who are wearing Dr. Martens boots, studded leather jackets, chains,
and coats with slogans like ‘West End Punx’ sprawled across the back (Image 8). The art
historian Bonnie English has discussed the work of Rhodes in the historical context of the
1970s and 1980s and writes of clothing of the period ‘as a counter-cultural device.’64 Street
style presented a ‘dissatisfaction’ of youth with social values, with clothes serving as ‘a form of
protest.’65
Yet, what is most important about this film for the purposes of this article is that while it
documents how fashion had changed dramatically, the brand motifs of Britain remain the same.
This illustrates a continued attempt by the COI to present a ‘total’ history of Britain, as well as
implies that perhaps the filmmakers of the COI had become a little too used to their own story.
Is it possible that the COI was becoming unable to see beyond the image of Britain that it had
already spent so long creating and presenting to the world? British fashion export is still a
recurring theme, although subtler. As Rhodes talks about the fashion industry, we see her
walking through an airport with a following shot of a plane taking off, making a connection
between British fashion and British export, just as in the 1960 Sixty Years of Fashion. Shots of
a fashion show in the urban, industrial environment of a train station also connect fashion with
travel, transport, and export as well as with the urban landscape. Specific geographical
indicators of London are present in the image of a London Liverpool Street Station sign,
another brand equity city symbol, just visible behind a moving train.
78 | Britain’s Brand Story

Image 8: West End Punx, from Insight: Zandra Rhodes,

COI, 1981, BFI Design for Today DVD.
© 2010, courtesy of the BFI

The motif of royalty is also ever present through the film’s narration. Rhodes, who
designed gowns for Princess Diana, says, ‘I dress the Duchess of Kent.’66 As she makes this
remark, she is walking through an airport, a nod to the exportable potential of British Royal
Family dress. Rhodes continues, telling her audience, ‘When Princess Anne got engaged that
was my latest dress and I designed all the lace and everything.’67 The point I am making is that
despite the anarchic attitude of the Punk Movement, epitomised by the appropriation of an
image of the Queen’s head on the Sex Pistol’s ‘God Save the Queen’ record cover, the
monarchy is still being celebrated, albeit ironically, by the designer interviewed for the COI
promotion of Punk fashion. Rhodes’ association with royalty is cemented when she tells the
audience that she was made ‘Royal Designer for Industry,’68 an honour for which she received a
scroll from Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II.69 By carrying on the motif of
British Royalty throughout their canon of films, the COI continues to present a ‘total’ history
and attempts to retain a consistent brand image for Britain.
Towards the end of the film, Rhodes highlights the centrality of Britishness to her
designs, thereby cementing the exportable British appeal of her clothes.

I don’t think I could have designed like I do if I wasn’t British. When people
buy a Zandra Rhodes they are buying a Zandra Rhodes that is my own
character, and my character is formed by the fact that I am English and have
an English way of looking at it.70

Rhodes also admits that she sees herself as a ‘figurehead.’71 Here we can see the great
contradiction in Rhodes’ work. As English observes, rather than embrace anti-capitalist, anti-
consumer, and anti-Establishment political values associated with the Punk style, Rhodes took
the Punks’ aesthetic and re-appropriated it to make money. Along with other British fashion
designers and musicians of the time who capitalised on the Punk Movement, Rhodes
 Jo Stephenson| 79

commodified and undermined the Punk ethos. By choosing to promote the Punk style as seen
through Rhodes, the COI diminished the movement’s social value, currency, and arguably its
aesthetic by claiming it as their own, in order to increase its economic value to non-Punk
fashion industrialists. Once again, government interest in the British fashion industry had
influenced fashion.

8. Discussion and Conclusion

COI fashion brand narratives are still at work. Connections and parallels can be made
between the representation of London and Britain in the archival films I have discussed and in
contemporary media, films, magazine editorials, and design where the Swinging Sixties and
Punk imagery have had numerous revivals. Today’s fashion collections continue to draw upon
past representations of London and the 1960s and serve to forge a collective cultural memory,
which, in part, was created by the films of the COI. What we have today are representations that
reference representations and add to an enduring narrative. While new symbols are gradually
added to the already established British fashion brand story, the continuity with the past
narrative remains strong. The London Olympics 2012 Opening Ceremony, for example,
included a section promoting the music and fashion of London’s Swinging Sixties in its
promotion of contemporary Britain.
By analysing how the British fashion industry worked with government to construct an
image of itself as producing worthwhile exports, we can look at contemporary industry-
government campaigns that promote national events, for example, tourism and fashion weeks,
and begin to understand why connections are made among national identity, fashion, location,
time, brand storytelling, commerce, and export. We can also better appreciate the role of
national media in the shaping of these representations.

Notes
1
Linda Kaye, ‘Reconciling Policy and Propaganda: The British Overseas Television Service
1954-1964,’ in Projecting Britain: The Guide to British Cinemagazines, ed. Emily Crosby and
Linda Kaye (London: BUFVC, 2008), 69-96, 71.
2
Sir Fife Clark, The Central Office of Information (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970), 12.
3
Ibid., 13.
4
Sixty Years of Fashion, dir. Sam Napier-Bell (The Central Office of Information, 1960), The
COI Collection Volume Two: Design for Today (British Film Institute, 2010), DVD.
5
Miniskirts Make Money, dir. Unknown (The Central Office of Information, 1968), The COI
Collection Volume Two: Design for Today (British Film Institute, 2010), DVD.
6
This Week in Britain 791: The Mary Quant Show, dir. Unknown (The Central Office of
Information, 1974), The COI Collection Volume Two: Design for Today (British Film Institute,
2010), DVD.
7
Insight: Zandra Rhodes, dir. Peter Greenaway (The Central Office of Information, 1981), The
COI Collection Volume Two: Design for Today (British Film Institute, 2010), DVD.
8
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 7.
9
Ibid., 7-8.
10
The COI Collection Volume Two: Design for Today.
11
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan M. Sheridan Smith (London
and New York: Routledge, 1989), 6.
12
Ibid., 6-7.
80 | Britain’s Brand Story

13
Derrida, Archive Fever, 91.
14
Ibid.
15
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 8.
16
Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
17
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 10-11.
18
Robert Govers and Frank Go, Place Branding: Glocal, Virtual and Physical Identities,
Constructed, Imagined and Experienced (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 15.
19
Ibid.
20
Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker, What’s Your Story? (New Jersey: FT Press, 2008), 133.
21
David Gilbert, ‘Urban Outfitting: The City and the Spaces of Fashion Culture,’ in Fashion
Cultures: Theories, Explorations, and Analysis, ed. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson
(London: Routledge, 2000), 7-24.
22
Ibid., 11.
23
Ibid., 7-24.
24
Karl Marx, Capital: An Abridged Edition, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 14.
25
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive
(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 3-4.
26
Ibid., 4.
27
Ibid., 7.
28
Lawrence J. Butler, Britain and Empire: Adjusting to a Post-Imperial World (London and
New York: I. B. Taurus, 2002), 60.
29
Ibid.
30
David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945-51 (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 21.
31
Ibid., 24.
32
Ibid., 58.
33
Christopher Breward and Ghislaine Wood, ‘Tradition and Modernity 1945-79,’ in British
Design from 1948: Innovation in the Modern Age, ed. Christopher Breward, and Ghislaine
Wood (London: V&A Publishing, 2012), 30-39, 31.
34
Designed in Britain, dir. J. B. Napier-Bell (The Central Office of Information, 1959), The
COI Collection Volume Two: Design for Today (British Film Institute, 2010), DVD.
35
Design for Today, dir. Hugh Hudson (The Central Office of Information, 1965), The COI
Collection Volume Two: Design for Today (British Film Institute, 2010), DVD.
36
Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles
(London: Abacus, 2006), 60.
37
BFI, ‘Disc 2: Fashion’ in The COI Collection Volume Two: Design for Today, ed. BFI
(London: BFI, 2010), DVD Booklet, 3.
38
Jonathan Walford, Forties Fashion: From Siren Suits to the New Look (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2008), 43.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., 8.
41
Valerie Mendes and Amy De La Haye, Fashion since 1900, New ed. (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2010), 140.
42
Jonathon Green, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture (London: Pimlico,
1999), 2.
43
Sixty Years of Fashion, dir. Sam Napier-Bell.
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid.
 Jo Stephenson| 81

46
Ibid.
47
Certain women over the age of thirty won the right to vote in 1918, with all women over the
age of twenty-one gaining this right in 1928. UK Parliament, ‘Women and the Vote: Key
Dates,’ www.parliament.uk, accessed 17 July 2013,
http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/women
vote/keydates/.
48
Sixty Years of Fashion, dir. Sam Napier-Bell.
49
Ibid.
50
Mendes and De La Haye, Fashion since 1900, 179-80.
51
Caroline Evans, ‘Post-War Poses: 1955-75,’ in The London Look: Fashion from Street to
Catwalk, ed. Christopher Breward, Edwina Ehrman and Caroline Evans (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press in association with the Museum of London, 2004), 117-37, 125.
52
Mendes and De La Haye, Fashion since 1900, 179.
53
Miniskirts Make Money, Dir. Unknown.
54
Alex Wade, ‘The Saturday Interview: Jean Shrimpton,’ The Guardian, 30 April 2011,
accessed 14 May 2013,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/apr/30/saturday-interview-jean-shrimpton.
55
This Week in Britain 791: The Mary Quant Show, dir. Unknown.
56
A design usually associated with 1960s fashion.
57
Evans, ‘Post-War Poses: 1955-75,’ 126.
58
Ibid.
59
This Week in Britain 791: The Mary Quant Show.
60
Green, All Dressed Up, 24.
61
Ibid., xi.
62
Ibid.
63
Insight: Zandra Rhodes, dir. Peter Greenaway.
64
Bonnie English, A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th Century: From the Catwalk to the
Sidewalk (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007), 77.
65
Ibid., 96.
66
Insight: Zandra Rhodes, dir. Peter Greenaway.
67
Ibid.
68
Ibid.
69
The British designer Jean Muir, dressmaker to celebrities and aristocrats, had apparently
recommended her for the award.
70
Insight: Zandra Rhodes, dir. Peter Greenaway.
71
Ibid.

Bibliography
BFI. ‘Disc 2: Fashion.’ In The COI Collection Volume Two: Design for Today, edited by BFI.
London: BFI, 2010, DVD Booklet.

Breward, Christopher, and Ghislaine Wood. ‘Tradition and Modernity 1945-79.’ In British
Design from 1948: Innovation in the Modern Age, edited by Christopher Breward and Ghislaine
Wood, 30-39. London: V&A Publishing, 2012.

Butler, Lawrence J. Britain and Empire: Adjusting to a Post-Imperial World. London and New
York: I.B. Taurus, 2002.
82 | Britain’s Brand Story

Clark, Sir Fife. The Central Office of Information. London: Allen & Unwin, 1970.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz.

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive.
Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002.

English, Bonnie. A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th Century: From the Catwalk to the
Sidewalk. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007.

Evans, Caroline. ‘Post-War Poses: 1955-75.’ In The London Look: Fashion from Street to
Catwalk, edited by Christopher Breward, Edwina Ehrman, and Caroline Evans, 117-37. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with the Museum of London, 2004.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by Alan M. Sheridan Smith.

London and New York: Routledge, 1989.

Gilbert, David. ‘Urban Outfitting: The City and the Spaces of Fashion Culture.’ In Fashion
Cultures: Theories, Explorations, and Analysis, edited by Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church
Gibson, 7-24. London: Routledge, 2000.

Govers, Robert, and Frank Go. Place Branding: Glocal, Virtual and Physical Identities,
Constructed, Imagined and Experienced. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Green, Jonathon. All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture. London: Pimlico, 1999.

Kaye, Linda. ‘Reconciling Policy and Propaganda: The British Overseas Television Service
1954-1964.’ In Projecting Britain: The Guide to British Cinemagazines, edited by Emily
Crosby and Linda Kaye, 69-96. London: BUFVC, 2008.

Kynaston, David. Austerity Britain 1945-51. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2008.

Marx, Karl. Capital: An Abridged Edition, edited by David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995.

Mathews, Ryan, and Watts Wacker. What’s Your Story? New Jersey: FT Press, 2008.

Mendes, Valerie, and Amy De La Haye. Fashion since 1900. New ed. London: Thames &
Hudson, 2010.

Sandbrook, Dominic. Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles.
London: Abacus, 2006.

Steedman, Carolyn. Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.

 Jo Stephenson| 83

Stephenson, Jo, ‘“Miniskirts Make Money:” Post-War British Fashion Promotion in Films by
the COI.’ Paper presented at 4th Global Conference Fashion: Exploring Critical Issues,
Mansfield College, Oxford University, UK, 16-19 September 2012.

UK Parliament, ‘Women and the Vote: Key Dates.’ www.parliament.uk. Accessed 17 July
2013.
http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/women
vote/keydates/.

Wade, Alex. ‘The Saturday Interview: Jean Shrimpton.’ The Guardian, 30 April 2011.
Accessed 14 May 2013.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/apr/30/saturday-interview-jean-shrimpton.

Walford, Jonathan. Forties Fashion: From Siren Suits to the New Look. London: Thames &
Hudson, 2008.

Filmography
Design for Today. Directed by Hugh Hudson. 1965. The Central Office of Information. The
COI Collection Volume Two: Design for Today. British Film Institute, 2010, DVD.

Designed in Britain. Directed by J. B. Napier-Bell. 1959. The Central Office of Information.

The COI Collection Volume Two: Design for Today. British Film Institute, 2010, DVD.

Insight: Zandra Rhodes. Directed by Peter Greenaway, 1981. The Central Office of
Information. The COI Collection Volume Two: Design for Today. British Film Institute, 2010,
DVD.

Miniskirts Make Money. Directed by Unknown. 1968. The Central Office of Information. The
COI Collection Volume Two: Design for Today. British Film Institute, 2010, DVD.

Sixty Years of Fashion. Directed by Sam Napier-Bell. 1960. The Central Office of Information.
The COI Collection Volume Two: Design for Today. British Film Institute, 2010, DVD.

The COI Collection Volume Two: Design For Today. Released by the British Film Institute,
2010, DVD.

This Week in Britain 791: The Mary Quant Show. Directed by Unknown. 1974. The Central
Office of Information. The COI Collection Volume Two: Design for Today. British Film
Institute, 2010, DVD.

SOURCE CREDIT – ‘BFI’ NB. Permission granted solely for reproduction in publicity in
connection with The COI Collection Volume Two, Design for Today, released by the BFI on
DVD. Use in any other product or service is prohibited.

Jo Stephenson is in the final year of an AHRC funded PhD project in the Film Studies
Department, Queen Mary, University of London. Her thesis traces the relationships among non-
84 | Britain’s Brand Story

fiction film and media, the British fashion industry, and British branding campaigns from
World War II to the present day.
Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style, volume 2, no.2, pp. 85-100 (2013) Inter-Disciplinary Press
ISSN: 2045-2349

Branding Sustainability: An Interview with

Designer-Entrepreneur Sarah Van Aken

Natalie W. Nixon

Abstract
Sustainability in a fashion context is often discussed in terms of regenerative materials and the
supply chain. What is missing is how a fashion business with environmental ecology goals can
be an inspiring business model for other sectors. In fact, the ways in which a sustainable-
oriented fashion business can be a model for fiscal and environmental sustainability and
economic viability for a range of industries is an underexplored area. Sara Van Aken is a
clothing designer and retailer based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with a unique business
approach. She seeks to scale the social and environmental sustainability values embedded in her
apparel business beyond fashion apparel; she is interested in how those values may provide a
prototype for economic development for a variety of industries.1 Van Aken brands her fashion
products in two ways: as a model for sustainability and as a model for economic development.
Her business, SA VA, is comprised of a flagship store and design studio in downtown
Philadelphia, an adjacent garment production centre, a wholesale brand, and an on-line fashion
community and online store. SA VA’s brand diffusion includes: 1) the SA VA private label, 2)
manufacturing for other designers, 3) custom shirts, 4) restaurant/chef uniforms, 5) a retail line,
and 6) a wholesale line. In this interview, Van Aken discusses the origins of her business, her
decision in 2008 to move production from Bangladesh to Philadelphia, her interpretation of
sustainability, and her expansive goals for a fashion business in a major urban American city as
a model for economic development for other industries.

Key Words
Sustainability, sustainable fashion, slow fashion, fair trade, reshoring, disruptive innovation,
diffusion of innovations, business model, Sarah Van Aken, SA VA.

*****

1. Introduction
Fashion is a platform for innovation and action. It marks identity, creates well-being,
embraces creativity and connects communities around the world. In 2011, US apparel
consumption was valued at $283 billion. Depending on your perspective, this number can either
seem staggering for what it indicates about a lack of mindfulness for sustainable living,2 or it
can be viewed as a huge opportunity for fashion to have a positive impact on a global society.3
Researchers who engage in scenario planning point out that external factors such as emerging
economies, the transformative nature of technology, and attitudes towards shortages in
resources will compel more apparel businesses to adopt sustainable practices.4
Sara Van Aken is a sustainable clothing designer and retailer based in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, and has a unique business model which embraces environmental ecology. Her
goal is to scale the social and environmental sustainability values she has embedded in her
apparel business beyond fashion apparel; she is interested in how those values may be a model
for economic development for a range of industries. Van Aken brands fashion in two ways: as
a model for sustainability and as a model for economic development. SA VA is comprised of a
86 | Branding Sustainability

flagship store and design studio in downtown Philadelphia, an adjacent garment production
centre, a wholesale brand, and an on-line fashion community and online store. The adjacent
production centre makes SA VA a more vertically integrated operation, one where design,
production and retail operations are managed under a single proprietorship. SA VA’s brand
diffusion includes: 1) the SA VA private label, 2) manufacturing for other designers (i.e.,
consulting for product launches, product development, sourcing and manufacturing), 3) custom
shirts, 4) restaurant/chef uniforms, 5) a retail line, and 6) a wholesale line.
As a small business, SA VA employs fourteen people and is able to offer a living wage
that pays higher than a McDonald’s or a Starbucks and also offers health insurance. Van Aken’s
goal is to be an ethical clothing and accessories brand, built on the platform of effortless,
individual style and social consciousness. The SA VA brand is locally made, community
focused, and globally inspired, which is underscored by its mission statement:

SA VA is striving to be the most socially sustainable apparel company in the

country, developing a lifestyle brand that is a mindful choice for women that
care about social and environmental responsibility. We work towards this end
by creating local living wage job creation and reducing our carbon footprint
by manufacturing locally, use responsibly sourced and often eco-friendly
textiles and create community partnerships that help women and children.
When our customer buys SA VA she is able to find the image she wants
without compromising the values she holds.5

Sarah Van Aken graduated from the University of Delaware in 1998, where she studied
fine arts and majored in ceramics. She has been a speaker at the BALLE (Business Alliance for
Local Living Economies) conferences in 2011 and 2012 and is on the board of the Sustainable
Business Network (which is a member of BALLE). In the recent past, Van Aken received the
Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce Young Entrepreneur of the Year award (2012),
The Merchants Fund Business Grant (2011), the Women’s Opportunity Resource Center
Community Impact Award (2011), and Apparel Magazine’s Top Innovator Award (2011).
In this interview, Van Aken discusses the origins of her business, her decision in 2008 to
move production from Bangladesh to Philadelphia, her interpretation of sustainability, and her
expansive goals for a fashion business in a major American city as a model for economic
development. While reshoring – the bringing of good, well-paying manufacturing jobs back to
the domestic market, is an emerging trend in American cities such as Philadelphia,6 there has
been a lack of systematic research about the motivations, processes, and effects of reshoring.
My interview with Sarah Van Aken provides an opportunity to better assess its merits.

2. Methodology
I am a qualitative researcher, trained in design management, and find value in the case
study method because of the depth of insight it brings to a broad topic; a benefit of the approach
is that it can reveal motivations for why actors make certain choices.7 While it is important to
be cautious about making generalizations from one case, the case study method is valuable for
the deep perspective it brings to a topic such as sustainability in fashion, which is multi-layered
and complex. For example, researchers are interested in the ways that fashion and sustainability
intersect in terms of design process, supply chain, logistics and even branding and promotion.8
In compiling this interview, I visited the SA VA retail shop on three different occasions,
toured the ‘workshop’ (i.e., the small adjacent factory), and observed customers’ interactions
with staff. I interviewed Sarah Van Aken twice and asked her semi-structured questions about
 Natalie W. Nixon | 87

her perspective on sustainability as it relates to fashion, as well as her goals for SA VA as a

business model for economic development. Both interviews were recorded and then
transcribed. 9 I sorted and sifted through the two interviews to assess key themes. I discuss those
themes in the conclusion of this paper.

3. Origins
When asked how her background in ceramics and fine arts influenced her decision to go
into mass-produced clothing, Van Aken said that her choice was a matter of lifestyle. ‘I didn’t
want to be a starving artist and found it difficult to be in a space of complete existentialism that
I believe you need in order to be a very successful fine artist.’ According to Sarah, fashion
allowed her to integrate design, art and marketing. She also cites her practicality and simplicity
as reasons why the ready-to-wear garment industry was a great career choice for her.

Image 1: Sarah Van Aken checking on production. © Jeff Fusco,

image courtesy of Jeff Fusco

NWN: How did you come up with the SA VA retail concept?

SVA: It’s a little bit of a long story. I think quite honestly that it was based on ego more
than anything else! I went to school for fine arts and had this dream of being a clothing
designer. I had been making clothes. I worked in the garment business in New York after
school and came back to Philadelphia, and about eight years ago realized that I knew no one
who in their right mind would give me half a million dollars to start a women’s apparel line. So
I created a business plan where I got into the business for $10,000 [by] sewing men’s custom
shirts and grew my business from there. I had some success with that and then through sort of a
stroke of luck, knew someone who used to work for me, who was from Bangladesh and his
brother-in-law used to make denim for us and I sent him over there with some money and told
him to open a garment factory for us and it worked. I started designing and manufacturing
uniforms for specialty shops and high end hotels and manufacturing them in Bangladesh; that
was the bulk of my business for several years. I always knew that I wanted it [the SA VA
brand] vertically integrated, because I learned quickly that when the market was moving very
quickly, it was incredibly difficult to get a small round of production done. I’ve always liked
the idea of not just controlling the manufacturing, but also of creating the working environment
of selling.
88 | Branding Sustainability

NWN: What did doing business in Bangladesh teach you?

SVA: That was actually a really great experience. I’m glad it’s over; it was sometimes a
headache, but overall, a great experience!
NWN: What was the headache about, and what are you glad about?
SVA: Well, I mean, I’m happy about having the experience…at a young age, owning a
business in a Third World country and traveling there, and employing people, and the social
issues. You know, just the logistics of getting things done in a country where you have to pay
off customs workers so your fabric doesn’t get stolen in customs, which is absurd!
NWN: One of the costs of doing business.
SVA: At one point, their government collapsed because they failed to have an election,
and you know I was on the last plane out of there before the military took control of the
government. Luckily, it wasn’t at all volatile.
NWN: What years were you in Bangladesh?
SVA: The summer of 2006 to the beginning of 2009. And the headaches were, for
instance, I would be on the phone at 3:00 in the morning, asking whether goods had shipped.
‘Oh, they shipped. They shipped.’ ‘What’s the tracking number?’ ‘I don’t have it yet from the
shipper,’ which is ridiculous, and then come to find out that the fabric hadn’t even cleared
customs, so not only had it not….The fabric hadn’t even arrived, let alone been cut and sewn.
So….‘Oh, it shipped, it shipped.’ I’m like, ‘But why did you lie to me?’ ‘I’m sorry.’ You know,
they want to please, and they don’t like telling the truth.
At the same time, it was a really great experience because we ended up hiring all very
skilled tailors who could make tons of different garments, who have their own tailoring shops,
who we paid five times what a normal wage would be for a tailor.
And so culturally, it was a pretty amazing experience, but it became incredibly taxing.
I’m really glad I had that experience, but I’m glad it’s over!
NWN: So why did you move production out of Bangladesh?
SVA: By 2008, gas prices had quadrupled so air shipping was ridiculous. The larger my
orders got and more high-profile my clients, the more problems I seemed to have with getting
the quality of goods I needed out of Bangladesh. I turned thirty and I just really wanted to do
something good with my life and I knew I either had to scratch this business entirely or convert
it into something that had meaning for me…. I knew there was something missing in the market
for women in their 30s, 40s and 50s. I think the 2008 election just took me back to a different
set of values and I knew that I wanted a comprehensive approach to socially-conscious
clothing. So not just using organic fabric, even though it might be made in China with whatever
labour, I wanted to start with local living wage job creation.
But beyond that, I just couldn’t wrap my arms around shipping textiles and garments all
around the world, and creating jobs in other places. And it was just something that I really
wanted to imagine a way to make things here, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll just make things
in Chinatown….’ I wanted to be more sustainable, and I knew that I needed to find a way to do
that; it just didn’t resonate for me anymore, and I knew I had to either scratch the fashion
business, or to turn it into something…good.

*****

Van Aken’s motivations for bringing manufacturing of her SA VA business to the

United States are part of the larger trend of reshoring, also referred to as ‘inshoring.’ Reshoring
is a phenomenon that is characterized by manufacturing in the USA despite the apparent cost-
advantages of outsourcing abroad. While reshoring has not been studied extensively, it has
become an alternative for many manufacturing businesses, including those in the apparel/textile
 Natalie W. Nixon | 89

sector. The opposite of offshoring, reshoring has been clearly defined as the procurement of
goods and services domestically,10 and production facilities which serve the domestic market.11
Reshoring represents a reverse trend, that of bringing portions of manufacturing nearer to the
destination market or completely moving manufacturing back to the destination market. The
apparel manufacturing industry is a labour intensive industry, and production chases low labour
cost environments. This is the principle reason why production has shifted out of the United
States and into developing nations where the cost of labour is significantly lower. Cities like
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, whose local economy was once driven primarily by the textile and
manufacturing industry, saw a complete exodus by the early 1980’s and are looking for ways to
revive and reinterpret manufacturing capabilities.
In actuality, the cost advantages to offshoring are diminishing as the intangible costs of
extensive supply chains rise to the surface. The hidden costs of offshoring include quality
assurance, training, and travel costs of company personnel. The following seven factors are
examples of considerations typical in a business’s decision to embrace reshoring or not: 1) a
shorter product development cycle,12 2) easily internalized tacit knowledge, 3) rising labour
costs at offshore locations,13 4) fear of knowledge transfer and intellectual capital leaking to
competitors and data privacy, 5) inefficiencies (transport related) resulting from distance,14 6)
quality inconsistency, and 7) better training and development.
Notably, Van Aken’s motivations for moving her Bangladeshi operation to Philadelphia
include the majority of these seven points; namely points one, two, five and seven. Simply put,
with manufacturing closer to the destination market, SA VA product development cycles could
be cut by almost 50 percent and supplier relationships better managed. But these were not her
only motivations. Integrating social ethics and the triple bottom line of sustainability (social,
environmental and fiscal) were huge drivers.

Image 2: The SA VA window display in Philadelphia.

© Sarah Van Aken, image courtesy of Sarah Van Aken

4. Financing the Business

NWN: How did you finance your business?
SVA: Because we have diversified revenue streams, such as uniforms and custom
services, and we were launching SA VA, our retail women’s apparel brand, it was feasible for
us to have a sewing factory. It required a lot [of] different classes of labour and arrangements
than those typical [of] garment factories, because we needed a wide variety of products. We
90 | Branding Sustainability

needed a different model, but if we could do it on a vertically integrated model, we could still
make the margins to make it work.
NWN: Right.
SVA: I went to the city of Philadelphia in 2008 and asked them for a whole lot of
money, and nobody, no banks were lending in November of 2008. However, you know, based
on manufacturing job creation, the city could partner with a local commercial lender. It’s the
way all industrial development corporations lend. They lend based on manufacturing job
creation. I knew that the rules with the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation [are]
usually for every $35,000.00 you borrow you have to create one full-time job.
The way that those loans are structured is you get a commercial lender to come in and
partner with the city, and they gave us 45 percent of the total project cost, and took a first lien
position. Then the city came in and gave us another 45 percent and took the second lien
position, all low-interest financing. And we had to put 10 percent down of the entire project
cost, so that included the purchase of the real estate, the equipment, and any of the hard costs of
the project; so, everything but the marketing and the inventory.
NWN: Describe that process as an entrepreneur, of figuring that out.
SVA: Yeah, you know, financing is a tricky thing, and it’s funny because there’s this big
scale in financing that you know, bankers know, big-time Wall Street bankers know. But I was
fortunate enough to have a lot of experience in real estate, and we were financing this based
upon the purchase of a piece of real estate. And we were doing it in Center City [downtown
Philadelphia] instead of an empowerment zone, and…we had four corporations. We were
buying the building under another LLC, and then there were guarantors….It was not an easy
deal, but they worked with me, and we kind of took what structure they had initially given us
that they thought would work. And it took a while. We met with them in November of 2008;
we closed on the building in the beginning of June of 2009, so it took time to do that.

5. Interpretation of Sustainability
One way to posit SA VA’s business model is in terms of an industrial ecology
perspective. This perspective attempts to use analogies of natural ecological systems and looks
for the potential of environmental improvement of nature.15 To the extent that industrial
ecology looks at an industry’s environmental improvement by a reduction of energy costs and
waste management costs, SA VA can be viewed through such a lens. Two economic and social
advantages of the industrial ecology approach that are seen at SA VA are: 1) a more diverse
economic base, and 2) greater potential for job creation by forming niche firms.

*****

NWN: How, in your opinion, can sustainability be branded?

SVA: It isn't a characteristic that is slapped on top of any X product. It is really a core
platform of how a business works, the ‘Why.’ It also can't be in lieu of a good, stylish and
quality product, at the appropriate price point. There are also challenges to branding it in that
the word sustainability itself has been overused and abused and most folk’s eyes glaze over
when they hear [it.]
NWN: In what ways does SA VA brand sustainability? What is your particular take on
branding sustainability through SA VA?
SVA: Sustainability – social and environmental – is the core of how and why we do
business and it is branded in everything, every choice we make – from how we relate and build
relationships with our customers to choices we make in materials selection, community
partnerships, messaging on our website, and business certifications. Even the globe shopping
 Natalie W. Nixon | 91

tags on each garment are a physical checklist of what elements of sustainability the garment
contains.
NWN: Do you think there is any inherent conflict in trying to brand sustainability
through fashion?
SVA: I think there are challenges but I believe that the conflict or difficulty rather exists
in the lack of awareness and education of consumers on their impact on the environment and
[on] people around the world, as a result of the choices that they make in their clothing.

Image 3: Dress, Fair Trade silk, digitally printed, Spring 2013 Collection,
manufactured in Philadelphia.16 © Sarah Van Aken,
image courtesy of Sarah Van Aken

NWN: Your vision for your business seems to encompass a broader vision of
sustainability – that the clothing portion is just a start, and that you are also very interested in
developing a model of sustainable economic development for a region. Would you explain that?
SVA: What we do differently is take a more comprehensive approach to sustainability.
It’s not just impact on the environment but also on people and the economy. It is the
convergence of three core principles:
First, think local first: three times the amount of money you spend in a local sustainable
business stays in the community that it is spent in. The ability to create local living wage jobs
through apparel [manufacturing] in our region.
Second, be environmentally sustainable: reduce the carbon footprint created by local
manufacturing. Use sustainable, recycled and organic textiles when possible; we try to source
these local first, as well.
Third, be ethically sustainable: fair trade fabrics, living wages, recreating the industry as
a noble profession. We believe it is possible to create new models within the apparel industry
for it to become economically, environmentally and ethically sustainable, using Philadelphia as
the incubator.
NWN: And your notion of sustainability, as you said, started out with trying to make
sure you employ people with a fair, liveable wage.
SVA: We also did a lot of little calculators online that show the reduction of our
company footprint by manufacturing here versus Bangladesh and also buying more domestic
things like cotton. And then we also use recycled paper hangers in the store [and] compostable
92 | Branding Sustainability

shopping bags. All the fixtures in the store, with the exception of where the cash register sits,
were reclaimed from other stores and refurbished.

6. SA VA’s Business Model

When I asked how she thought her version of a sustainable business model was distinct
from others, Sarah responded that SA VA’s B Corporation certification, granted in 2011, means
that its approach to sustainability is comprehensive. A ‘B Corp certification’ does for a
sustainability-oriented business, what a LEED certification does for ‘green’ architecture; such
corporations are ‘certified by the nonprofit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and
environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.’17 Her considerations go beyond
how much water organic cotton consumes or poor labour conditions. Multiple factors are
analysed for each SA VA garment produced, including if it meets fair trade standards, is locally
made, is organic, is recycled, is renewable, etc. ‘We try to get as many as we can and do the
right thing.’

Image 4: Flutter Dress, Fair Trade silk, Spring 2013 Collection,

manufactured in Philadelphia. © Sarah Van Aken,
image courtesy of Sarah Van Aken

Sarah Van Aken’s motivation to embrace reshoring goes beyond tangible and intangible
costs arguments. A great motivator has been the opportunity to offer a business model that
stems from an industrial ecology perspective which incorporates principles of the circular
economy, where regenerative, closed loop systems are key principles. 18 SA VA is an example
of a new type of business model that considers the economic business opportunities and ethical
payoffs that come with transitioning to a restorative, circular economy.

*****

NWN: So how would you describe your business model? What would you say is your
value proposition?
SVA: It’s a little bit hard to quantify. I mean, we say that it’s a vertically integrated
ethical apparel company; that’s the easy way to say that. First and foremost, in terms of SA VA,
it’s a fashion brand, but we take a comprehensive approach to social sustainability, so I don’t
look at sustainability, this word of sustainability, as being eco-friendly. I look at it
 Natalie W. Nixon | 93

comprehensively as [involving] ethical and social issues, transportation, and also the
environmental impact of the textile and the garment. It’s impossible to have a 100 percent
sustainable garment.
NWN: What would a 100 percent sustainable business look like?
SVA: If I was going to have this sustainable garment from my business in Philadelphia,
I would have to grow organic cotton and organic berries on the roof of my building. And I
would have to use recycled water, and no heat to dye, and use a hand loom, and pedal sewing
machines, and sell those clothes to people who walked in the store. That would be a sustainable
garment, right? And you know, they would look incredibly granola and folky, and it would be
really ridiculous, and it would take me probably eight months to make one garment. So
knowing that that was impossible, I guess what resonated for me, and I think resonates for our
customers, is that we decided to start with people.
If we could create local living wage jobs in Philadelphia, where people had health
insurance that would be a great place to start, and take the premise of the Slow Food Movement
and think local first. And of course, the component of that, too, is that we reduce our carbon
footprint in half by manufacturing locally. So I’m not shipping textiles and garments all around
the world. I produce about half, and we try to source as much domestically as we can, so all of
our knits are domestic.
So we wanted to create a dialogue with our customers and have a different kind of
relationship with them, and have it be interactive, and community based. And then also create
community partnerships with organizations that have women transition back into the workforce
or help women’s issues, such as supporting the Career Wardrobe.

Image 5: Pants, hemp-linen blend; top, USA milled viscose,

Spring 2013 Collection, manufactured in Philadelphia.
© Sarah Van Aken, image courtesy of Sarah Van Aken
94 | Branding Sustainability

NWN: Tell me about your Honest Denim Program.

SVA: Sure. All of our denim comes from a company in the United States called Safe
Denim. So it’s U.S. grown cotton, milled in the United States. We are using low-impact dyes,
manufacture it here in Philadelphia, and wash it with low-impact enzymes.
NWN: So you’ve said before that sustainable fashion isn’t a language that makes sense
to fashion consumers. Why do you think sustainable apparel is more realistic and more
relevant?
SVA: Well, I think that the majority of people in the United States do not consider
themselves part of the fashion world. There might be people, a lot of people who like fashion,
buy clothes, who you know, want to be stylish or whatever. I think the vast majority of people
want to look good and have style but they don’t consider themselves part of fashion. I think that
fashion is too limiting. The word sustainable doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s one of the
reasons why we got our B Corp certification, because it differentiates companies who have
good marketing from companies who really have strong social missions. You’re not just saying
that you’re socially driven, but through B Corp, people come in and qualify and quantify what
you’re saying you do.
NWN: What are ways that you’re trying to educate people about sustainability in a
fashionable context?
SVA: You know, you gauge customers. If they don’t care, you’re like, ‘Okay, let me
show you this dress.’ And if their response is, ‘Oh,’ then it enters a new conversation, and we
can say ‘Well, this is the impact. This is this garment, and what’s so great about this is we can
trace this cotton back to the southern part of the United States where it was grown.’ Those little
quick facts that you can give people, such as: ‘The apparel industry is the biggest polluter of the
environment in the world.’ People are like, ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, really; and this is why.’
NWN:And your hang tags are also pretty cool.
SVA: They’re compostable. Without having to say anything, [our tags] tell people that
we considered all of these elements when making the garment, and you know, people walk by
our store and don’t realize that it’s local-made or sustainable, because it looks like a fashion
brand, which was the other key thing, because it has to sell. If I put a garment on the rack that
didn’t fit well, that didn’t look good on a hanger, or was overpriced, it wouldn’t sell, so it has to
be fashion first and foremost. And the end, also, is the added value of sustainability and local-
made.
But I’ll tell you that more people are interested and excited about the fact that it was
made in Philadelphia or the United States than they care whether something’s organic.
NWN: Why do you think that resonates more with people, to learn that the product is
locally made?
SVA: I think it’s a human connection. I think that they’ve already been educated in the
Slow Food Movement, and thinking local first and local produce, and building, and energy. So
they’re already a little bit accustomed to this idea of local, and what it means in those areas.
And fundamentally they know that jobs are created through independent manufacturing and
retail.
NWN: You recently took part in the BALLE conference. Would you explain what the
BALLE conference is, and how that conference has been shaping the way you think about your
business model?
SVA: BALLE is the umbrella organization [of] all of the regional and international
sustainable business networks. I was incredibly inspired by what people were doing out of
nothing, all around the world.
So think local first about everything you do. If you’re giving Walmart a tax credit to
come into your community to create jobs, which is ridiculous, you’re actually paying them to
 Natalie W. Nixon | 95

create [a] cash vacuum, and create only $8.00 an hour jobs. If you think of it, none of their
[Walmart’s] legal services are handled locally. Their payroll’s not handled locally. Their IP is
not handled locally. None of their products are sourced locally. So the only thing that happens
locally is their trash removal….Even their executives are often times brought in. So they’re not
creating local jobs; they’re brought in to open a store. BALLE did an entire, all-day intensive
workshop on community finance, and I found that very profound. I grew up on a dairy farm
when I was a kid. And there was this woman, Mabel Fisher, who, whenever my parents, if we
needed a car, or we needed a tractor for the farm, we would go see Mabel Fisher, and I would
love playing in her yard! And she would give us the money to buy things, and we’d pay her
back. And I didn’t even really know that you got money from banks, because banks [were] a
place you’d put your money when you had it, and you’d go to Mabel Fisher if you needed
money. She was lending to people in the community, and that’s how things were financed.
If we could think local, first, and then have a global network of local, sustainable apparel
businesses that created jobs in communities, and people did what they were good at because,
you know, we’re never going to grow silk here. It’s not indigenous. We shouldn’t try, but there
are things that grow well in the United States and those are the things we should do. If we could
shift back the cash flow to people who make it, and have that be a noble profession, where
people took pride in what they did and about making it a noble profession again, that’s the
opportunity.

Image 6: Juniper skirt, organic cotton jersey; jacket, USA domestic linen,
Spring 2013 Collection, manufactured in the USA, © Sarah Van Aken,
image courtesy of Sarah Van Aken
96 | Branding Sustainability

7. Future Options
NWN: What are your thoughts about how you want to see your business grow?
SVA: Well, I don’t want to be the only person making things here. I want everybody to
do this, because I think it’s a really good idea. But how do you create a viable model for them
to transition to make things better? And [come] up with something that’s a sensible solution to
give people answers where they can actually make sensible choices? So it’s getting to people
who have the right value set and can help change the industry from within.
So we have a plan, but you know, I always think it’s funny to talk about it because it
doesn’t happen that way. The plan shifts. So I’m just going to work hard, and we’re going to
see what happens, and we’re going to let things come, and we’re going to push in certain
directions, and if things feel right, we’ll do that, and if it kind of happens that way, we’ll do
that.
NWN: Thank you Sarah, I appreciated your time!
SVA: Thank you!

Image 7: Sarah Van Aken in her retail store, Philadelphia,

© Sarah Van Aken, image courtesy of Sarah Van Aken

8. Concluding Thoughts
Interestingly, Sarah’s final words in this interview – ‘we’re going to let things happen…
if things feel right, we’ll do that’ – are a clear reflection of SA VA’s circular economy
principles. While we would like to believe that challenges such as ‘sustainable fashion,’ could
have neat, three bullet point resolutions, the truth is that a much more iterative, intuitive and
prototype-approach that embraces ambiguity is more viable and realistic. The SA VA business
model gives other firms that are mindful about sustainability the impetus to be trailblazers,
prepare for a radically different future, and develop skills for a rapidly changing landscape.
This interview offers two major contributions.
First, it positions a fashion retailer as a model for economic development in a major
American city. This is a new and broader perspective about the ways that sustainable business
practices can be leveraged from the fashion industry and for the broader good. Innovative
business models from fashion that spawn economic development in municipalities are rare and
should be closely watched. Unfortunately, public policy in the USA is not making it attractive
enough for more companies to consider reshoring, even as a Boston Consulting Group survey
showed that in 2012, approximately 25 percent of US manufacturing firms were considering
 Natalie W. Nixon | 97

shifting production back from China to the USA. This is noteworthy when we consider that by
2015 it will cost almost the same to manufacture goods in regions of America as in China.19
Why? Certain costs in America are decreasing. The cost of energy for running plants is
decreasing. Wages are dropping. (Because of the economic recession of 2008, more people are
willing to work for lower wages because of high unemployment in the USA.) The dollar is
weak. The workforce is becoming more flexible and productive. Add to these, the facts that
supply chain costs for transport are increasing and advanced manufacturing techniques such as
3D printing are more widely available for small manufacturing quantities. All of the above can
advance reshoring’s business case. SA VA’s timing may be perfect for spawning more micro-
fashion apparel businesses which are inspiring not only for the fashion sector, but for micro-
enterprises across sectors.
Second, this SA VA interview presents a case which connects the dots among fashion
apparel firms, the industrial ecology, and the circular economy perspective. SA VA’s
motivation for moving production from Bangladesh to the USA was an internal one. Sara
would love to see more public policy incentives in place in local, state and federal governments,
but unfortunately, they are far and few between. As was noted in a special report published in
the January 19, 2013 issue of The Economist, innovation and quality suffers as distance grows
between manufacturing and design.20 SA VA’s business model can help more fashion firms to
identify the fiscal viability of socially responsible businesses that integrate regenerative, closed
loop processes in their production, marketing and organizational design. The result would be a
fashion industry, better prepared for a future that will have very different environmental, fiscal,
labour, and social constraints than those present today.
In conclusion, SA VA shows us that fashion can advance the business case for
embracing a comprehensive sustainability approach.

Notes
1
Elizabeth Wellington, ‘Sarah Van Aken,’ The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 13, 2012, accessed
17 April 2013,
http://www.philly.com/philly/style/20120613_Sarah_Van_Aken_a_leader_in_Made_in_Americ
a_movement.html.
2
‘Apparel Stats 2012,’ American Apparel & Footwear Association, October 12, 2012, accessed
13 April 2013, http://www.wewear.org.
3
‘Consumer Goods: Global Industry Guide,’ Research and Markets, accessed 13 April 2013,
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/838232/consumer_goods_global_industry_guide.
4
‘Fashion Futures 2025: Global Scenarios for a Sustainable Fashion Industry,’ Forum for the
Future, accessed 4 April 2013,
http://www.forumforthefuture.org/project/fashion-futures-2025/overview.
5
‘About SA VA,’ SA VA, last modified April 2013, accessed 13 April 2013,
http://www.savafashion.com/blog/about.
6
Jane Von Bergen, ‘Knitting Together Textile Manufacturing,’ The Philadelphia Inquirer,
November 1, 2011, accessed 3 April 2013,
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/jobs/Inq_JobbingBlog_Knitting-together-textile-
manufacturing.html.
7
Robert E. Stake, ‘Qualitative Case Studies,’ in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research,
3rd ed., ed. Norman Kent Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications,
2005), 443-446.
98 | Branding Sustainability

8
Kate Fletcher and Lynda Grose, Fashion & Sustainability: Design for Change (London:
Laurence King Publishing, 2012), 56.
9
Sarah Van Aken, interview by author, 3 April 2012 and 14 September 2012. Follow up phone
calls for clarification made on 8 November 2012 and 21 April 2013.
10
Wen-Chi Liao, ‘Inshoring: The Geographic Fragmentation of Production and Inequality,’
Journal of Urban Economics 72, no. 1 (2012): 2-4; William Skipper, ‘Services Offshoring: An
Overview,’ Anthropology of Work Review 27, no. 2 (2006): 9-17.
11
Rama Kompella, Nikhilesh Dholakia, and Douglas Hales, ‘The Dynamics of Inshoring,’
Knowledge Globalization Institute 6, no. 1 (2012): 92.
12
Dave Johnson, ‘Re-Shoring, On-Shoring and Insourcing,’ Huffington Post, April 2, 2010,
accessed 17 April 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-johnson/re-shoring-on-shoring-
and_b_523740.html.
13
John Ferreira and Len Prokopets, ‘Does Offshoring still Make Sense?’ Supply Chain
Management Review 13, no. 1 (2009): 24.
14
Kompella, Dholakia, and Hales, ‘The Dynamics of Inshoring,’ 90.
15
David Gibbs, Pauline Deutz, and Amy Proctor, ‘Industrial Ecology and Eco-Industrial
Development: A Potential Paradigm for Local and Regional Development?’ Regional Studies
39, no. 2 (April 2005): 173.
16
Utilizes less dye and therefore less effluent is emitted into the environment. Original graphic
is a hand batik made from potato resin and was digitized.
17
Certified B Corporation, Accessed 4 April 2013,
http://www.bcorporation.net/what-are-b-corps. LEED : Leadership in Energy & Environmental
Design is an internationally recognized green building certification system.
18
‘Towards a Circular Economy,’ Ellen MacArthur Foundation, accessed 4 April 2013,
http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/business/reports/ce2012.
19
Tamzin Booth, ‘Coming Home,’ The Economist, January 19, 2013, accessed 3 April 2013,
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21569570-growing-number-american-
companies-are-moving-their-manufacturing-back-united.
20
Ibid.

Bibliography
American Apparel & Footwear Association. ‘Apparel Stats 2012.’ October 2012. Accessed 13
April 2013. http://www.wewear.org.

Booth, Tamzin. ‘Coming Home: A Growing Number of American Companies are Moving
Their Manufacturing Back to the United States.’ The Economist, January 19, 2013. Accessed 3
April 2013.
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21569570-growing-number-american-
companies-are-moving-their-manufacturing-back-united.

Certified B Corporation. Accessed 4 April 2013. http://www.bcorporation.net/what-are-b-corps.

Ellen MacArthur Foundation. ‘Towards a Circular Economy: Economic and Business Rationale
for an Accelerated Transition.’ Accessed 4 April 2013.
http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/business/reports/ce2012.
 Natalie W. Nixon | 99

Ferreira, John, and Len Prokopets, ‘Does Offshoring still Make Sense?’ Supply Chain
Management Review 13, no. 1 (2009): 20-27.

Fletcher, Kate, and Lynda Grose. Fashion & Sustainability: Design for Change. London:
Laurence King Publishing, 2012.

Forum for the Future. ‘Fashion Futures 2025: Global Scenarios for a Sustainable Fashion
Industry.’ Accessed 4 April 2013. http://www.forumforthefuture.org/project/fashion-futures-
2025/overview.

Gibbs, David, Pauline Deutz, and Amy Proctor. ‘Industrial Ecology and Eco-Industrial
Development: A Potential Paradigm for Local and Regional Development?’ Regional Studies
39, no. 2 (April 2005):171-183.

Johnson, Dave. ‘Re-Shoring, On-Shoring and Insourcing: The Coming New Era of American
Manufacturing.’ Huffington Post. April 2, 2010. Accessed 17 April 2013.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-johnson/re-shoring-on-shoring-and_b_523740.html.

Kompella, Rama, Nikhilesh Dholakia, and Douglas Hales. ‘The Dynamics of Inshoring.’
Knowledge Globalization Institute 6, no. 1 (2012): 88-95.

Liao, Wen-Chi. ‘Inshoring: The Geographic Fragmentation of Production and Inequality.’

Journal of Urban Economics 72, no. 1 (2012):1-16.

Research and Markets. ‘Consumer Goods: Global Industry Guide.’ Accessed 13 April 2013.
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/838232/consumer_goods_global_industry_guide.

SA VA. ‘About SA VA.’ Last modified April 2013. Accessed 13 April 2013.
http://www.savafashion.com.

Skipper, William. ‘Services Offshoring: An Overview.’ Anthropology of Work Review 27, no. 2
(2006): 9-17.

Stake, Robert E. ‘Qualitative Case Studies.’ In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research,
3rd ed., edited by Norman Kent Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, 443-446. Thousand Oaks: Sage
Publications, 2005.

Von Bergen, Jane. ‘Knitting Together Textile Manufacturing.’ The Philadelphia Inquirer,
November 1, 2011. Accessed 3 April 2013.
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/jobs/Inq_JobbingBlog_Knitting-together-textile-
manufacturing.html.

Wellington, Elizabeth. ‘Sarah Van Aken a Leader in Made in America Movement.’ The
Philadelphia Inquirer, June 13, 2012. Accessed 17 April 2013.
http://www.philly.com/philly/style/20120613_Sarah_Van_Aken_a_leader_in_Made_in_Americ
a_movement.html.
100 | Branding Sustainability

Acknowledgment: The author wishes to acknowledge Sarah Van Aken, who generously gave
of her time to answer multiple stages of questions for this interview and provided access to the
SA VA retail operation and adjacent workshop.

Natalie W. Nixon, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Fashion Merchandising &

Management program at Philadelphia University and Director of the Strategic Design MBA.
She earned her PhD in Design Management from the University of Westminster. She is a
design thinking researcher focused on fashion diffusion (applying strategies from the fashion
industry to other realms), and on business design.
Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style, volume 2, no. 2, pp. 101-120 (2013) Inter-Disciplinary Press
ISSN: 2045-2349

Exhibition Reviews
Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity
The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
26 February – 27 May 2013
Organized by The Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
and the Musée d´Orsay
Catalogue: Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity
Gloria Groom, ed.
Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago
2012, 336 pages, $65
Illustrated, with selected bibliography and index
ISBN: 978-0-300-18451-8

The woman in the painting is standing in the midst of stark darkness, her back facing the
spectator, her body in a detained gesture, her hand gently striking the bow holding her chin. Her
lowered glance is a mixture of apathetic solemnity and the ‘the twinkling satisfaction’ that the

Image 1: Camille, 1866, by Claude Monet.

© Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

fashion writer Kennedy Fraser has described as the most common accessory to fashionable
clothes. The woman is a mild presence within the striking apparition she wears, an all-crinoline,
form-fitting bodice dress, made of stripes of grey and emerald green, irradiating the texture of
silky gauze, and finished off by a black, short coat with caramel-hued fur trimmings. Camille
(1866), by Claude Monet, is a sartorial instant in captivity, a distilled moment of a time when
102 | Exhibition Reviews

clothes mattered enough to be infused into the brush strokes of art (Image 1). Camille is one of
eighty figure paintings, paired with period clothing, accessories, and fashion photographs,
plates, and prints, presented in Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity. I saw the exhibition at
the Met’s Costume Institute but it has also made stops at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (25
September 2012 – 20 January 2013) and the Art Institute of Chicago (26 June – 22 September
2013). Impressionism provides an enlightening look at the role fashion played in the works of
the Impressionists and their contemporaries from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s, when there
was one world style capital, Paris.

Image 2: Evening Dress, French, House of Worth, 1882, silk, satin,

and net with pink artificial rose and green leaves.
© Image courtesy of Jacque Lynn Foltyn

Among other things, fashion’s modernity is sustained by paradox. Adherence to its

capricious rhythms can imply a coinciding impulse towards fitting in as much as a need to stand
out; the height of a trend is usually marked as the beginning of its demise. Both tendencies, as
well as female vanity, are behind the traditional charges that fashion and fashion studies are
secondary and frivolous subjects. However, the intensity of fashion’s presence in contemporary
consumer culture and academic discourse across many disciplines reveals otherwise, as does its
presence within the realm of modernist painting – and life, when the fashion industry was
taking off. Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity brings us not only close to the delicacies of
the kind of beauty and style that augment our sense of aliveness, it also proves that fashion is a
mirror, a testament to a given time in history. The ways individuals breathed, posed, thought,
felt and lived can be glimpsed through the fashions of their times, the fads they ascribed to and
the clothes they wore. Perhaps visual renderings of these passing sartorial inklings are the ones
that offer these hints with sharpest precision. But Impressionism also vivifies the clothes one is
able to see on the surviving canvases, mixed in the thick traces of paint, as some of the dresses
(including actual ones worn by the subjects in the paintings), marvelous in spite of the marks
left by time, are displayed in glass cases, scattered throughout the continuous galleries (Image
2). Monet’s Camille is an effective example of the powers provided by the visual representation
of fashion (Image 1). The painting contains some of the aesthetic and philosophical premises
that propelled the nouvelle peinture of the nineteenth century: a fixation on fashionable
 Exhibition Reviews | 103

women’s compositional sense, the implicit intimacy between painter and poseuse, the attempt
to seize timelessness through the ephemerality of shifting trends, as well as the ‘moral ethos’ of
the time – all revealed through the nuances of dress. It also unveils with wondrous precision
how women in modern Paris ‘performed’ and presented themselves through clothes.

Image 3: In the Conservatory (Madame Bartholomé), 1881, by Albert Bartholomé.

Summer Day Dress worn by Madame Bartholomé, French, 1880, white cotton
printed with purple dots and stripes. © Image courtesy of Jacque Lynn Foltyn

Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity is broken down into eight thematically-oriented

galleries. The first gallery, conceptualized under the category of ‘Refashioning Figure
Painting,’ is a semi-circular range of striking, large formatted paintings that materialize one of
the exhibition´s driving premises, as formulated by the painter Édouard Manet, and is inscribed
on a gallery wall: ‘The latest fashion is absolutely necessary for painting. It is what matters
most.’ In the painting and clothing selections seen here, the vibrancy of new painting
methodologies is made tangible through the clothes and the detailed settings of the women who
wear them. The fashions also reflect the period spanning from the 1860s to the 1880s, when the
invention of the haute couture fashion house, most conspicuously that of Charles Frederick
Worth, the rise of the department store, the newly acquired roles of ready-to-wear clothes, and
the growing influence of the fashion magazine were all sculpting a new vital experience,
awakening in turn, the need for new modes of representation. Painters like Monet and Manet
and writers like Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Émile Zola were among the artists
who yearned to capture the ‘nuanced richness’ of the new tempo of modern life.
In the second gallery, ‘En Plein Air,’ fashion´s fleetingness is more directly in focus.
The look of the moment and, as the gallery´s wall text explains, ‘the ephemeral qualities of light
and shade’ and ‘the passing whims of the latest trends,’ are paired with the realism of
photography and the precision of the fashion plate. Painters, embracing the bidding of the poet
Charles Baudelaire, had seized upon realism, previously the domain of the journalistic vignette.
This realism is seen in Young Ladies on the Bank of the Seine (1857) by Gustave Courbet, The
Couple (1868) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Marquis and Marquise de Miramon and their
Children and Family Reunion (1865) by James Tissot, and Women in the Garden (1866) by
Monet. Each painter anticipated the objective nature of photography whilst conserving the
virtuosity of traditional painting; it is their ode to realism and denotes their proximity to the
104 | Exhibition Reviews

vignettes of the fashion press. Technicalities set aside, what set this nouvelle peinture apart
from the renderings of the fashion plate?
Ultimately, modernist painting was an effort to capture and conceptualize everyday life.
This conceptualization, as the anthropologist Michael Taussig has argued, calls for an
understanding of a representation that is contiguous with what is being represented, as opposed
to a view that is distant or suspended. The cultural studies scholar Ben Highmore addresses this
issue within the realm of Impressionist painting, referring to it as ‘Art´s truck with the
everyday,’ not a mere abstract problem of form. Paris was speeding up. As a vital experience
and form of thought, modernity disrupted old schemes of certainty. As described by Baudelaire
in one of the texts on the walls, everyday street life began to be ‘ephemeral, fugitive,
contingent.’ Social relations began to fall under the intoxicating allure of commodity exchange,
and Highmore notes that traditional paintings’ use of ‘deep illusionistic space’ no longer fit the
new life of modern Paris. A sense of fleetingness is thus woven into the new painting itself,
with its brashness, abbreviations, roughness, and flowing paintwork.
Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity is also, of course, about clothes, and some of
the dresses eternalized through oil painting come alive in that mesmerizing yet eerie way that
can occur when they are displayed on mannequins. The actual dress worn by Renoir´s own
Camille salutes the spectator with its evanescing but enduring emerald green stripes, as one
enters the exhibition´s precinct. Albert Bartholome´s large-formatted In the Conservatory
(Madame Bartholomé) (1881) renders his lovely wife in striking whips of colour, standing
gracefully in front of a garden in full bloom, displaying an unforgettable ensemble in white and
violet-stained polka dot print. A short distance from the canvas, the same dress stands, ‘alive
and well,’ worn by no one, ‘standing’ within the frozen air of a glass capsule. The day when
Madame Bartholomé wore the dress – perhaps to greet her guests, to hold a thought, or to feel
the fresh air of the garden – is somehow preserved. Though the colour of the dress has faded
and is no longer as vibrant as in the painting, the ensemble is no less striking and captivating,
with its feminine contours and fashionable combinations (Image 3).
The third gallery, ‘The White Dress,’ is devoted to a recurring theme in both sartorial
options and painting motifs. The robe d'intérieur, or day dress, is captured with its informal
freshness in paintings that combine portraits and genre scenes. These intimate domestic scenes
include the Eva Gonzales at the Piano (1879) by Alfred Stevens, and Woman at the Piano
(1875/76) by Renoir. Both depict the femmes bourgeoise in the pleasantness of their homes,
clad in what the exhibition´s wall text beautifully describes as ‘whipped confections of white.’
The scenes not only seize the popularity of the piano in the middle-class home but lend the
spectator a brief understanding of the ways femininity was conceived and experienced. Lovely
ladies wear complex attire in private settings; how they look is the main source for the
definition of the self. Lise, Woman with Umbrella (1867), another painting by Renoir, comes
alive to the far right, and is offered to the spectator not through the dress the woman wears, but
through a subtle delicacy, the umbrella, an ‘accessory’ of sorts that provides the finishing touch
to her Parisienne sartorial temperament. Black silk lace, ivory silk faille, taffeta and ivory-
handle parasols, kept carefully at bay in a glass display case, take us into that other feminine
realm – the fashionable repertoire of accessories. Fans, made of feathers, tortoise shell, mother-
of-pearl, paint and silver foil are other noteworthy complements, subtle testimonies of what
made a modern woman fashionable.
Gallery Four, ‘The Black Dress,’ is devoted to a garment that was already a symbol of
worldly elegance and a staple in the wardrobe of the fashionable woman of the era. This ode to
black as the ‘queen of colors’ is matched with a spectacular apparition: an 1877 Maison Roger
reception dress, in black silk gauze, trimmed with pleated flounces, jet fringe and Chantilly-
 Exhibition Reviews | 105

lace. Black is also featured in Renoir´s Madame Charpentier with Her Children (1878) and in
Manet’s Lady with Fans (1873) and The Parisienne (ca. 1875) (Image 4).

Image 4: The Parisienne, ca. 1875, Édouard Manet.

© Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifth gallery, ‘The Dictates of Style,’ makes a shift into the 1870s and 1880s,
captivating fundamental sartorial transformations when, for example, the bustle yielded to a
more streamlined princess style and to the new painterly representations those stylistic turns
implied. By then, more artists had embraced the ways of the ‘new painting,’ and the results are
clearly seen in paintings that render stylishly dressed figures amidst beams of diffused light and
shade. Trembling brush strokes exemplify the stylistic hesitancy of representation described by
Highmore. Renoir´s Woman with Parrot (1871) and Manet´s Study of Figure Outside (1886)
both capture the hallmarks of Impressionist painting.
‘The Parisian Man of the World,’ the sixth gallery, is devoted to the modern gentleman
and reflects the contrast between the feminine and masculine sartorial realms. While women´s
dress codes were dictated by change, multiple occasions and varying possibilities, the men´s
aesthetic regime was placed under the norm of simplicity and limitation. This called for men´s
fixation on fit and detail, championed by British tailors, and for different painting
methodologies, with artists focusing on men´s character and individuality. Canes and hats of the
late nineteenth century, displayed within the gallery, attest to male sobriety and uniformity in
dress. Tissot´s striking The Circle of the Rue Royale (1868) displays what the painting´s placard
accurately describes as the ‘arrogantly relaxed gentry.’
The seventh gallery, ‘Consumer Culture,’ brings the spectator into fashionability in far
more modern terms, when the department store had made fashion widely accessible. Painting,
106 | Exhibition Reviews

in this context, is removed from the combination of portrait and sartorial captivation, posing its
representative prism on small-scaled detailed depictions.

Image 5: Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877, by Gustave Caillebotte.

© Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The eighth and final gallery, ‘Spaces of Modern Life,’ reveals the ways urban modernity
ultimately developed into the multitudes of anonymous individuals a flaneur might have
encountered in a graceful, ogling promenade. Tissot´s marveling realism is displayed in
paintings that unveil the theatre and the ballroom as new places for fashionable creatures to
show their sartorial expressiveness. A highlight of this gallery is Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris
Street, Rainy Day (1877), a large grey and mauve coloured tribute to the formality of well-
dressed urbanites walking under their umbrellas, as well as to the tempo of modern life (Image
5).
Further emphasis on fashion, through the eyes of fashion scholars, would have added to
my enjoyment of the exhibition, but Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity lingers in the
spectator´s sensorial domain as a reminder that fashion can aid us in better capturing the spirit
of the times, its moods, truths and oscillations.

Vanessa Rosales is a Colombian fashion writer for Latin American Vogue and for The Daily
Beast, and is an MA student in fashion studies at Parsons The New School for Design, New
York City.

Bibliography
Fraser, Kennedy. The Fashionable Mind. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.

Highmore, Ben, ed. The Everyday Life Reader. New York: Routledge, 2002.
 Exhibition Reviews | 107

Taussig, Michael. ‘Animism and the Philosophy of Everyday Life: Le Tour de Tiergarten.’
Lead essay for catalog for Animism show in Antwerp, Berne, and Berlin, 2009.

►▼◄

Hartnell to Amies: Couture by Royal Appointment

Fashion and Textile Museum, 83 Bermondsey Street, London
16 November 2012 – 23 February 2013
Curated by Dennis Northdruft and Michael Pick

I have a weakness for the elegant black and white fashion photos of 1950s Vogue
magazines, so a Hartnell to Amies: Couture by Royal Appointment poster caught my attention
during a recent visit to London. What appealed to me were its images of a long-lost classic
feminine beauty ideal: slender silhouettes in tailored evening gowns, long gloves, and sculptural
hats, complemented by elegantly moulded hair. The models seemed majestic, like Hollywood
stars lifted up beyond their daily cares (Image 1). I decided to follow this poster to the heart of
Bermondsey Village, South London, where the Fashion and Textile Museum leads a fairly
anonymous existence, below the radar so to speak, except for those already in the know as to its
location. When passing from the London Bridge Underground Station in the shadow of the
Shard Tower, close to where the exhibit was taking place, one sensed a new bustle in the
streets. No doubt the towering attraction of ‘the Shard’ was drawing a few more tourists into the
little backstreets of Bermondsey.
The Hartnell to Amies exhibition is homage to three notable British fashion designers:
Norman Hartnell (Sir Norman Bishop Hartnell, 1901-1979), Hardy Amies (Sir Edwin Hardy
Amies, 1909-2003) and Frederick Fox (b.1931), each of whom outfitted the British Royal
Household for nearly a century. The exhibition started in an antechamber separate from the
main exhibition room. Three objects occupied that antechamber. First, there was a large black
and white fashion photograph resembling the exhibition poster – not the same picture, actually,
but certainly from the same period – by the celebrated English portrait and fashion
photographer Norman Parkinson (1913-1990); second, an introduction to the exhibition with a
fashion history of London; and third, a wedding dress, designed by Norman Hartnell in 1929
for an heiress to the Guinness fortune, Oonagh Guinness (1910-1995). I could sense that the
curators had put both heart and knowledge into their tale of Hartnell, who had challenged long
established Parisian fashion traditions and called the world’s attention to haute couture ‘Made
in London.’ Thus we embarked on a chronological journey, recounted via fashion cuts and
materials, of the changing world of the twentieth century.
A mere twenty-two years of age back in 1923 when he opened for business in Mayfair,
specializing in the art of embroidery, Hartnell provided the Bright Young Things and Flappers
of the 1920s with garments with pearl and tassel details then considered indispensable. He
added even more lavish dimensions of luxury and romantic glamour to the evening dresses and
afternoon clothes that were his chosen genre. Hartnell’s characteristic flamboyant flair,
combined with the dignity and the assurance of traditional British style, soon caught the eye of
Buckingham Palace, and his first royal commission was in 1935. He designed the future Queen
Elizabeth II’s wedding dress in 1947, and by 1952 Hartnell’s reputation was such that he was
108 | Exhibition Reviews

invited to design her Coronation Gown in 1953. (The gown itself was not present at Hartnell to
Amies other than in words and sketches.) In gratitude for his subsequent services to the Royal
Household, Hartnell was knighted in 1977. Sir Norman Bishop Hartnell became the first British
designer to receive this distinction, which earned him the popular sobriquet ‘first fashion
knight.’

Image 1: Hyde Park Corner, ensemble by Hardy Amies, British Vogue, 1951.
© Norman Parkinson Limited/Courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive

As I moved on to the main exhibition hall, Hartnell’s knighthood was not all that came
to mind. With its grey plastic flooring, white concrete walls, and pipes, wires, and installations
visible in the ceiling, I understood that it must have been something of a curator’s challenge to
outfit these institutionally prosaic surroundings for presentation with embroidered beauty and
elegance. As it turned out, only a very few changes were required. A royal blue colour, in
keeping with the exhibition’s title, covered the platforms and background of the little islands of
display, while large photographs conjured forth the life and the elegance of the changing eras.
This ‘less is more’ concept succeeded in its mission. When entering the main hall, one was met
with a four-room showcase on the left, which contained a selection of Hartnell’s private
belongings. A handwritten note on colourful paper, accompanied by some small illustrations
and doodles, made one realize that Hartnell’s predilection for luxury and detail was not mere
‘elitism’ or ‘extravagance’ but was founded on his wonderfully intuitive sense of beauty and
 Exhibition Reviews | 109

imagination. On a bottom shelf lay a small leather-bound notebook, the cover of which read
‘Dear Hardy,’ thereby connecting us to the next of the three designers exhibited.
While still a young, aspiring designer, Hardy Amies’ close study of Hartnell’s work
encouraged him during his own successful rise (Image 2). By 1935, Amies was a designer at the
Lachasse couture house in Mayfair, having initially gained notice for his re-design and
construction of suit jackets for women, providing them with day clothes that looked just as
good at Salisbury Station as they did in the Ritz bar. During the war years, Amies, like Hartnell,
was challenged by wartime shortages of materials and resorted to re-modelling and utilizing
existing clothes, while at the same time re-inventing women’s fashion. In 1945, Amies boldly
founded his own couture house, and by 1951 Princess Elizabeth was seeking out his designs,
which led in 1952 to his becoming the second designer (aligned with Hartnell) to purvey to the
Royal Household.
My first impression of the royal blue-covered platforms used to display the costumes
was that they were overcrowded, with an ‘overeager’ mix of Hartnell’s evening gowns and
Amies’ suits. However, each display was furnished with texts that managed to provide a great
deal of information in a small place, for example, an idea of the glamour of the 1930s, the
utility design restrictions of World War II, the post-war ‘New Look,’ and the ‘new Elizabethan’
age of the 1950s. The curators’ goal was apparently to provide as many examples as possible of
gorgeous details and innovative design ideas, which, in turn, enabled one to fully take in and
appreciate the texture of the textiles, the beautiful embroidery, the pearly patterns and the soft
silk draping on the mannequins.

Image 2: Hardy Amies with models, British Vogue, 1953.

© Norman Parkinson Limited/Courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive
110 | Exhibition Reviews

On my right, sandwiched in between a golden silk dress with a large bow on the hip and
a black crepe evening dress with a matching beaded bolero jacket (Hartnell creations from the
1930s), was a singularly magnificent piece, the Jewel Coat, designed by Hartnell in 1945. In
black velvet, the coat has three-quarter sleeves and colourful embroidery of flowers and little
suns in red, yellow, orange and golden pearls. To my left, the utility years were represented by
a checked fine woollen suit, designed by Amies in 1940 and worn by Mildred Shay, an
American actress of the 1930s. The edges of the jacket had an unusual detail: a woven ribbon
stating ‘Made in England,’ which struck one as a quite interesting early example of ‘bearing the
brand,’ here, the country of origin. Behind the checked suit was a Hartnell-designed black and
white printed silk three-piece suit with a blouse top from 1957, a foretaste of the lighter touch
of the 1960s. The display was completed by a cocktail dress made by Amies in 1960, of dark
red satin with black printing, with a boat shaped neck, a fitted bodice, three-quarter sleeves and
a full skirt – it shined.

Image 3: Hartnell in studio with models, British Vogue, 1953.

© Norman Parkinson Limited/Courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive
 Exhibition Reviews | 111

By the last podium, I found myself dreaming away in front of a wedding dress made in
1956 by Hartnell for Lady Anne Coke, one of Queen Elizabeth II’s Maids of Honour at that
1953 Coronation. The silver-corded lace bodice was a perfect detail on top of the enormous
satin organza train, which covered a third of the large corner podium. On the left, another
wedding dress, this one made by Amies, caught my eye. The Duchess of Buccleuch, a former
fashion model of Hartnell’s, wore it when she wed John Scott, the Earl of Dalkeith in 1981. It
was made of cream silk taffeta and has long sleeves and a draped bustle effect, held by bunches
of white roses.
On the second floor, crowded display platforms visualizing Swinging London and Street
Fashion were accompanied by lengthy historical texts. A platform on my right displayed the
Amies look of the 1960s: satin or silk dresses in bright colours, sleeveless and with a relative
few details, fringes, pleating and saucer buttons. Outshining them all was a cape, inside of
which a black and white checked fabric could be glimpsed, although it was the scarlet napped
wool on the outside that made it really stand out.
The left half of the second floor was dedicated to Frederick Fox, the exhibition’s third
designer. The Australian milliner, who moved to London in 1964 and took over Langée on
Brook Street, began in 1968 to make hats to compliment the clothes designed for the Queen by
Hardy Amies. This employment put Fox at the forefront of millinery, where he remains to this
day. When exploring the Frederick Fox showcases, one could not help but think that the Queen
must have been in possession of a quite well-developed sense of humour to wear some of his
marvellous creations. The pink waterfall of bellflowers hat that she wore at her Silver Jubilee
looks even more colourful here, within the grey rather solemn atmosphere of the museum, than
it would have when atop her tidy brown curls back in 1977. Fox’s creations consist of flowers,
birds and pill box hats in all shapes and sizes, and it seems fairly obvious what his design
philosophy is: You can wear anything just so long as you can balance it on your head. A special
delight was a bridesmaid’s bonnet resembling a bathing cap, made out of paper rings of the sort
usually made into a festive paper chain. Made of stiffened white silk, the cap resembles a
handsome curl paper helmet. Also present was an example of Fox’s signature ‘flying saucer’
hats, of the type made iconic by Princess Diana in the 1980s.
The large pictures, taken by the aforementioned Norman Parkinson for British Vogue
during the 1950s and 1960s were happily situated in the exhibition, covering the areas from
floor to ceiling between the displays, while providing the final touch to the simple mannequins
(Image 3). The Fashion and Textile Museum is part of an academy, which perhaps explains its
institutional appearance. Even though some of the smaller pictures were found in a somewhat
uninspiring conference room, their presence provided social and historical contexts for how the
designs were worn in the past.
I had to keep reminding myself that this collection was in many respects ‘larger’ than its
venue, that it was a tremendous scoop for the Fashion and Textile Museum to be able to present
Hartnell to Amies. Why Fox was left out in the exhibition title was at first a mystery; after all,
his hats served to complete the exhibition in much the same way as they completed the Royal
House’s look, but then one realized that the exhibition’s real story was that of the creation of
British couture, as endorsed by the Royal Family, and in particular, of the contributory role of
the courage, the skills and the success of these two first British ‘fashion knights.’
When I left the exhibition, I glanced briefly at some dresses and embroideries that I had
passed over unnoticed on my arrival and understood that I could subscribe to the words of
Norman Hartnell: ‘I despise simplicity. It is a negation of all that is beautiful.’
112 | Exhibition Reviews

Cassandra Schrøder Holm has a degree in history and is affiliated with the Danish National
Research Foundation’s Centre for Textile Research/CTR, where she works with women’s and
textile history.

►▼◄

Shoe Obsession
The Museum at FIT, New York
8 February – 13 April 2013
Co-curated by Valerie Steele, Colleen Hill, and Fred Dennis
Catalogue: Shoe Obsession
Valerie Steele and Colleen Hill
New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
in association with The Fashion Institute of Technology, New York
2013, 284 pages, $45
Illustrated, annotated, with bibliographical references
ISBN: 978-0-30019-079-3

‘That one is so hot!’ exclaimed a ten-year-old girl, her sticky hands and warm breath
fogging up the tempered glass housing seven pairs of heels and platforms from Givenchy and
Alexander McQueen. She was lost in a well-ordered labyrinth of tall display cases, spotlights
above, shoe specimens all around. There were plenty of comments to be heard in the vast black
space – whispers, exclamations, deadpan exaltations, and a whole dictionary’s worth of
interjections, memories and opinions. Apparently people have lots to say about shoes, women’s
shoes in particular. And why shouldn’t they? Lately their heights, shapes and manner of
ornament have reached far into the realms of cult status. So far, that in the title of the exhibition
on hand, the word ‘obsession’ followed by the word ‘shoe’ seemed commonplace, a
catchphrase.
The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology’s grand scale show Shoe Obsession
displayed examples of this feverish love for elevated toe tappers, and the variety here was quite
impressive. Covered in exotic leathers, dyed suede, beaded and studded, buckled and buttoned,
a dizzying array of objects put forth the aim of examining our cultural interest in ostentatious
footwear. Co-curated by Valerie Steele, Colleen Hill and Fred Dennis, the exhibition credited
significant cultural influences such as the television series Sex and the City (1998-2004, HBO)
for eliciting a broader awareness of fashionable shoe designers. Shoe Obsession also showcased
the private collections of a select group of female collectors, among them Baroness Monica von
Neumann, the jewellery designer Lynn Ban and the fashion icon and brewery heiress Daphne
Guinness.
The museum’s main lobby provided a preliminary taste of the exhibition with a jumble
of excerpts from Julie Benasra’s 2011 documentary God Save My Shoes. The film clips, which
feature interviews with designers such as Walter Steiger, Bruno Frisoni of Roger Vivier, and
Vivienne Westwood, whet the appetite for accessories, with footage of the filmmaker venturing
onto the hallowed grounds of the Vogue shoe closet and the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.
 Exhibition Reviews | 113

Image 1: The Main Gallery. © Image courtesy of The Museum at

The Fashion Institute of Technology, New York

Down the stairs and through the doors, a large, dark space with three illuminated vitrines
and carefully arranged floodlights set the stage for a grand spectacle (Image 1). In the first
gallery, ambivalent dads parked on heavy wood benches fiddled endlessly with their
smartphones as interested parties floated through the space, passing across spotlit paths to glass
cases filled with footwear. ‘The average woman owns twenty pairs of shoes?!’ questioned one
woman. ‘I think it’s a little more than that,’ she answered herself, her clearly articulated words
turned into mumbles as she and her companion stared, mouths agape, at the most colourful case
in the room. Perhaps it was the centrepiece of Louboutin platform booties in multicolour dyed
snakeskin from the designer’s 2013 Cruise Collection that silenced her. Or it may have been the
eye-popping display of colour in general, infused with both texture and pattern, on outlandish
but wearable samples from some of footwear’s most recognized contemporary designers, none
with heels under 11.5 centimetres. White leather studded platform Pradas and pieces from
Azzedine Alaïa, Giuseppe Zanotti, Yves Saint Laurent, Tabitha Simmons, and Nicholas
Kirkwood displayed established and emerging talents in shoe design.
Several emerging designers whose works leaned on the side of unwearable were given a
platform in Shoe Obsession, underscoring the concept of fashion piece as art object. On a back
wall, a sinewy silhouette of a single shoe displayed a curvy, anthropomorphic shadow from the
French poet and fashion designer Aoi Kotsuhiroi’s ‘Orchidacea Hermaphroditus,’ 2012.
Alongside were similarly dark pieces. Shoes with layered materials such as brass, wood, nuts
and bolts, hoof-like shapes with tails and antlers by Masaya Kushino and Kei Kagami, were
described by both a horrified and smitten viewer as ‘freakish and orthopaedic.’
In another glass ‘temple,’ a separate grouping of white, eggshell, and translucent heels
further displayed shoes whose function is ultimately secondary to their form. Biomorphic
stilettos, 3-D printed exoskeleton platforms, and architectural shoe prototypes composed of
glass, plastics and paper from the student collections of Janina Alleyne and Tea Petrovic, of De
Montfort University, Leicester, UK, and the Academy of Fine Arts, Sarajevo, Bosnia and
114 | Exhibition Reviews

Herzegovina, respectively, and the BioMimicry shoe from the fashion designer Marieka Ratsma
and the architect Kostika Spaho combined natural forms with architectural elements and
modern technology. A glass slipper from Maison Martin Margiela, 2009, added a fairy tale air
to the grouping.
‘This is so exciting. Just looking in there….Oh!’ exclaimed a woman in a pair of low-
key brown mules. Alighting each and every shoe were outstretched steel posts, narrow totems
of worship fitted with a singular shelf to house each object. I must admit my heart went aflutter
too when I entered the main gallery. One glimpse and the oversized space felt unbelievably
rich, akin to the dark intimacy of the jewellery galleries at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in
Paris. There, the glossy black envelopes you, floor to ceiling, allowing the room full of gems to
constitute a galaxy all its own. The shoe specimens here were similarly entrancing; indeed, the
physiological effect was much like what one feels when opening a box of precious stones.
Within the second room’s twenty-four glass cases, irrationally beautiful and hideous
objects effortlessly attracted the gaze of the crowd. Further in, one was immediately surrounded
by the orderly grid of glass and high heels, above which a wall-sized A-Z index of shoe
designers gave the viewer some footing in an almost overwhelming accessory ‘situation.’ At the
forefront were styles from a now household name Manolo Blahnik, immediately recognizable
for their pop cultural association with the HBO series Sex and the City. The high-heeled Mary
Jane ‘Campari’ style, from 1994, that Sex’s Carrie Bradshaw swooned over as the stuff of
legend was there in the gallery, its shiny black patent leather providing proof of its existence
outside of television and urban myth. Alongside this fabled pair of shoes, was an ethereal silver
pair of Blahnik’s ‘Sedaraby’ d’Orsay pumps, featured in another shoe-themed episode of the
programme, ‘A Woman’s Right to Shoes.’ This instance found Ms. Bradshaw attending a party
where she was required to remove her heels before entering. They are stolen, and she is
inconsolable, but when the stiletto universe nods in her favour and the party’s hostess agrees to
replace them, spending $485 in the process, Carrie’s triumphant redemption signals a win for
both feminism and the shoe-obsessed single woman. (Catwalk readers: In this issue, Sarah
Heaton discusses this Sex and the City episode in her fascinating article about representations of
nineteenth century shoes.)
Aside from shoe objects as icons of pop culture, among the most compelling vitrines are
those grouped according to private collector. In these coveted shoe collections distinctive
personalities are made evident. Lynn Ban’s edgy, graphic styles include Camilla Skovgaard’s
black strappy platform sandal with her signature jagged sole, flame-addled Prada wedges, and
Nicholas Kirkwood pumps decorated with Keith Haring motifs. For Princess Deena Al-Juhani
Abdulaziz, owner of the Riyadh fashion boutique D’NA, the items were decidedly more
ladylike. A variety of feminine styles were featured, including a delicate pump of beige eyelet-
punched leather from Nina Ricci and seafoam green bejewelled heels from Miu Miu fit for a
princess.
Similarly striking are the sets grouped by designer and those styled for their visual
impact. Many of the same heelless Noritaka Tatehana styles exhibited in MFIT’s recent Daphne
Guinness (16 September 2011 – 7 January 2012) exhibition are shown here, with names
referencing fantastical unicorns, roses and crystal thorns. Pieces from Chanel’s Métiers d’Art
Collections from 2005 and 2009 are ominous and sexy, grouped next to Alberto Guardiani’s
lipstick shoe, a simple black leather piece supported by a heel modelled after a tube of red
lipstick. Andreia Chaves’ ‘Invisible Shoe,’ a towering wedge with faceted, mirrored surface,
was a simple, complex and certainly futuristic addition (Image 2). Showstopper after
showstopper, the sense of fun, fancy and fetish imbued in each design follows the viewer’s
excitement from one object to the next.
 Exhibition Reviews | 115

Image 2: Andreia Chaves, ‘Invisible’ shoes, 2011. Leather, printed nylon,

laser-cut mirrored façade. © Image courtesy of the Museum at the Fashion
Institute of Technology, New York

Image 3: ‘Pigalle’ red, studded heels Christian Louboutin, Fall 2012.

© Image courtesy of the Museum at the Fashion
Institute of Technology, New York
116 | Exhibition Reviews

The subject of shoe fetishization and its connection to female sexuality was only very
subtly alluded to throughout the exhibition. However, flanking the eighteen central glass cases
are six wall-mounted ones filled with surreal heels and high-shafted boots, complete with
elaborate surface textures and finishes from Christian Louboutin, Rick Owens and Helmut
Lang. Black leather Alexander McQueen thigh high lace-ups, and Tatehana’s pink pointe ballet
shoes, custom made for Lady Gaga, reached elaborate heights with their extremely lengthy
shafts and eighteen inch platforms (Image 3).
While going to extremes, increasing the exhibition’s ‘wow factor,’ the lack of historical
or academic context in a museum setting made this showstopper feel commercial. The vastness
of the main gallery shared a similarity to the recently expanded shoe salons of the retail giants
Barneys and Saks Fifth Avenue, the latter of which actually boasts its own zip code and acted
as Shoe Obsession’s main corporate sponsor.
If the curatorial intent here was to delve into our psychic attraction to outrageous shoes,
the exhibition itself only skimmed the surface, giving the viewer more eye candy in the form of
stilettos and clodhoppers than any substantive accompanying texts. The show’s matching tome,
published by Yale University Press, nicely fills in these cracks with essays by Steele and Hill,
profiles of private collectors, and over 200 colour photographs. Still, as a living, breathing
exposition of artefacts, the galleries were simple and breathtaking. With so many styles on
display, the enraptured audience felt time stop, at least for the moment it took to say ‘ooh!,’ as
they glided from case to case, wide-eyed and curious, noses up against the glass and pulses
accelerating, imagining something different on their feet.

Ericka Basile is a visual artist and fashion scholar living and working in Brooklyn, New York.
She holds an MA in Visual Culture: Costume Studies from New York University’s Department
of Art & Art Professions.

Bibliography
‘A Woman’s Right to Shoes.’ Sex and the City. Season 6, Episode 9. Directed by Timothy Van
Patten. 2003. New York: HBO.

God Save My Shoes. Directed by Julie Benasra. 2011. New York: Caid Productions. DVD,
Documentary.

Sex and the City. Produced by Darren Starr. 1998-2004. 2003. New York: HBO.

►▼◄
 Exhibition Reviews | 117

Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions

Couriers of Taste
(Danson House, Kent, UK, 1 April 2013
– 31 October 2013)
Through maps, drawings, photographs,
masks and sculptures, Couriers of Taste
explores how cultural contact through
eighteenth-century exploration and trade
influenced developments in art. The
setting for the show, the historic Danson
House, has a chinoiserie style that serves
as an appropriate backdrop for the artists’
work, which the visitor can tour through
different rooms, each of which reflects a
distinct culture. The exhibit is part of the
SINOPTICON Project, partly funded by
the Arts Council England and is
Face the Elements, 2013, WESSIELING
supported by the National Trust’s New © 2013, photograph by Chiara Liberti
Art Programme. Featured artists include
Susan Stockwell, Suki Chan, Gayle Chong Kwan, Stephanie Douet, Christian Jankowski, Isaac
Julien, Grayson Perry, Ed Pien, Meekyoung Shin, Karen Tam, Erika Tan, Tsang KinWah,
WESSIELING, and Laura White.

Oscar de la Renta: American Icon

(Clinton Presidential Library, 18 May 2013 – 1 December 2013)
The five-decade career and life of the Dominican-born American designer Oscar de la Renta is
celebrated in this exhibition. De la Renta, who was trained by Cristóbal Balenciaga and Antonio
Castillo, has created gowns worn by First Ladies and by Hollywood stars, and has been
designing collections for his own label since 1965. More than thirty of his gowns and other
designs are displayed.

Ron Arad: In Reverse

(Design Museum Holon, Holon, Israel, 19 June 2013 – 19 October 2013)
This exhibit highlights the architect Ron Arad's work in metal – ranging from chairs to
sculptural pieces – from the past three decades. Arad, a Tel Aviv-born, London-based architect,
artist, and designer, welds and hammers steel and has mined the properties of metal for more
than three decades.
118 | Exhibition Reviews

Fashion Rules: Dress from the Collections of HM The Queen, Princess

Margaret and Diana, Princess of Wales
(Kensington Palace, London, 4 July 2013 – Summer 2015)
The exhibit features dresses from the closets of HM Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Margaret and
Diana, Princess of Wales, each of whom the exhibit links to the spirit of particular decades,
from the 1950s with the young Queen Elizabeth II to the 1980s, with the glamour associated
with Princess Diana. The exquisite clothing is accompanied by photographs and film footage,
and the exhibition analyses the influence of each Royal’s distinctive style.

La mécanique des dessous, une histoire indiscrète de la silhouette

(Mechanical Undergarments, an Indiscreet History of the Silhouette, Les Arts Décoratifs,
Louvre, Paris, 5 July 2013 – 24 November 2013)
The ‘underworld’ of female and male undergarments is the focus of this remarkable exhibit,
which revels in the ‘fly,’ the corset, the crinoline, the bustle, the pouf, the stomach belt, the bra
and other undergarments that we humans have devised to mould our bodies according to the
dictates of fashion and beauty. The curators of the exhibition explain that these ‘concealed
architectures’ have been a constant in fashion, at least since the fourteenth century.

Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s

(The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 10 July 2013 – 16 February 2014)
The blossoming of creativity in the 1980s London fashion scene is the focus of this major
exhibition. More than eight-five ensembles showcase the daring designs of Betty Jackson,
Katharine Hamnett, Wendy Dagworthy, John Galliano, among others.

Small Delights: Chinese Snuff Bottles

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 19 July 2013 – 17 February 2014)
Snuff, pulverised tobacco, was introduced to China by European missionaries, emissaries, and
merchants in the second half of the seventeenth century, and soon became a fashionable
substance, valued for its stimulating effects. The exhibit displays a collection of the miniature
corked bottles that were used to preserve the flavour and freshness of snuff. Bottles were
produced in stone, glass, metal, porcelain, ivory, and lacquer, were often painted, and reflect
artistic developments over five millennia of Chinese civilization.

A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk

(The Museum at FIT, New York, 13 September 2013 – 4 January 2014)
From Cristobal Balenciaga and Christian Dior to Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen,
many of the greatest fashion designers of the past century have been gay. Do gay men have a
special relationship with fashion? To what extent have lesbians, bisexuals and transgender
people also made significant contributions to fashion? The exhibition seeks to answer these
questions. Curated by Fred Dennis and Valerie Steele, it features ensembles that span more than
a century of fashion, and addresses subjects such as androgyny, dandyism, idealizing and
transgressive aesthetic styles, and the influence of subcultural and street styles, including drag,
leather, and uniforms.
 Exhibition Reviews | 119

Alaïa
(Musée Galliera - Musée de la mode de la ville de Paris, 28 September 2013 – 26 January 2014)
Curated by Olivier Saillard, Director of the Musée Galliera, the exhibition is the first
retrospective devoted to the body conscious designer Azzedine Alaïa, the Tunisian-born
Parisian couturier who clothed the famous in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, dressing everyone
from Greta Garbo and Arletty to Grace Jones, Tina Turner, Raquel Welch, Madonna, Naomi
Campbell, and Stephanie Seymour.

Yousuf Karsh: Icons of the Twentieth Century

(Mona Bismarck American Center for Art and Culture, Paris, 16 October 2013 – 26 January
2014)
Organized by Jerry Fielder, Curator and Director of the Estate of Yousuf Karsh, the exhibit
commemorates Karsh’s contributions to the shaping of personal and historical memory
throughout the twentieth century. It will feature Karsh’s photographs of American and French
luminaries that helped transform them into icons. Archival material from his magazine covers
from Life and Paris-Match will also figure in the exhibit.

Gods and Heroes: European Drawings of Classical Mythology

(The Getty Center, Los Angeles, 19 November 2013 – 9 February 2014)
The mythology of ancient Greece and Rome has been the subject of artists whose approaches
differed depending upon the time and location in which they lived. Forty drawings from the
Getty Museum's collection, dating from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, have been
selected to explore how pictorial representations of ancient gods, heroes, and ordinary humans
have been instrumental in the formation of Western culture.

Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore!

(Somerset House, London, 20 November 2013 – 2 March 2014)
In partnership with the Isabella Blow Foundation and Central Saint Martins, Somerset House
celebrates the ‘life lived through clothes’ of the late Isabella Blow. Blow, who was Fashion
Director for Tatler and the Sunday Times Style, and worked for US and British Vogue, was
considered a patron of fashion. Her generosity was legendary, and she is credited with
‘discovering’ and launching the careers of the designers Alexander McQueen, Philip Treacy,
and Hussein Chalayan, and the models Sophie Dahl and Stella Tennant. Her collaborations with
major fashion photographers such as Steven Meisel and David LaChapelle will also be
highlighted in the exhibition, which was curated by Alistair O’Neill with Shonagh Marshall.

Patterns of Magnificence: Tradition and Reinvention in Greek Women's

Costume
(The Hellenic Centre, London, 3 February 2014 – 2 March 2014)
The exhibition showcases thirty-two stunning ensembles, rarely exhibited in London, that
emerge from a rich cultural tradition and have inspired designers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier and
John Galliano.
120 | Exhibition Reviews

Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 16, 2013 – January 5, 2014)
The so-called Golden Age of European exploration brought about the flowering of the textile
trade (along with the slave and spice trades). Textiles, the exhibit reveals, acted as a kind of
currency that travelled about the globe. The exhibition displays beautiful and historically
important works from across the Museum's collection and from a few international loans to
highlight what the curators claim is an important design story that has never been told from a
truly global perspective.

►▼◄
Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style, volume 2 no. 2, pp. 121-129 (2013) Inter-Disciplinary Press
ISSN: 2045-2349

Book Reviews

On the Button: The Significance of an Ordinary Item

Nina Edwards
London & New York: I. B. Taurus
2012, 260 pages, £16
Illustrated, with glossary and index
ISBN: 978-1-84885-584-7

Nina Edwards is a writer and cultural critic

interested in the cultural history of ordinary items and
in the history of fashion. Although Edwards holds an
MA in European Languages and Literature, she does
not consider herself an academic, a piece of
information I managed to solicit from her publisher,
I.B. Taurus (she includes only a three sentence bio in
her book and her web page www.ninaedwards.com
lacks a bio section). Edwards writes fiction, television
scripts, and non-fiction, and she is also an actress. In
On the Button: The Significance of an Ordinary Item,
she tosses out button references in her descriptive
style, and her sentences spill out upon every page like
my grandmother’s buttons spilling out of a tin. It is
immediately clear that this book is neither a
straightforward button catalogue nor an historical
report of how buttons have been used in fashion.
Edwards takes a wider view so as to include how the
button has evolved beyond an ordinary functional
fashion item into a weighty and ubiquitous concept. © 2012, courtesy of I.B. Tauris
Her knowledge about the button spans several
disciplines, including philosophy, politics, arts, cinema, and comparative literature.
To whom does Edwards address this study of a mundane, ubiquitous object? Surely it
must be the broader thinker, she or he (yes!) who is well read, sophisticated, and perhaps a bit
nerdy, ready to explore realms beyond the obvious. It is as if Edwards has created a buttonhole
through time and space where her references map a non-linear journey into unexplored territory.
Her approach is fitting, designed to prove her main point: that associating the button only with
fashion and its obvious functions cannot do justice to its significance across disciplinary space
and throughout cultural time. Some readers of this book will already have significant button
knowledge and possibly even collections of their own, but I can hardly imagine that many will
have pondered the button’s meanings as extensively as Edwards has.
To have an author deal with the organization of button facts with such broad storytelling,
first-person insights, and studious references to the button’s many meanings, garnered from
literary and cinematic works, as Edwards has done, did startle me initially. In the ‘Introduction’
she describes a conversation with a male friend who at first seemed uninterested in her affinity
for buttons, but as the talk unfolded, it becomes clear that he did care very much about a
particular nondescript metal button that he tenderly had saved from his father’s old overcoat,
122 | Book Reviews

which then leads to his admission that he also collected men’s shirt buttons. For Edwards, this
revelation affirmed her own interest in the ordinary button and stimulated her deeper, broader
questions about the button’s implications. In the text immediately following this insight,
Edwards quotes Chaucer’s poem The Romaunt of the Rose, in which he describes ‘knoppis fyne
of gold enameled,’ where ‘knoppis’ are parenthetically noted by Edwards as having been
‘ornamental buttons.’ The Chaucer quote is evidently included to show the reader that great
classic male writers as well as ordinary men have been intrigued with buttons, albeit of different
materials and for significantly different reasons. This observation underscores what Edwards
has meant this book to be, namely about fashion comprehended through the vehicle of the
button, in its narrowest and widest senses; punning, she describes the book as a volume ‘on the
button.’ The introduction preps us for Edwards’ claim that the button cannot accurately be
defined as merely an item that fastens two pieces of cloth but rather that it is deserving of a new
definition which gives due credit to the wider button concept in idioms, slang, political
campaigns, character descriptions in literature and cinema, modern art, and technology (e.g.,
computer buttons), to name just a few. This also leads us to at least one more notable button
concept ‘hiding in plain sight’ and to which I shall return in concluding this review.
The book’s ten chapters: ‘As a Notion,’ ‘Why We Collect,’ ‘The Enlightenment Button,’
‘Gentlemen Prefer Buttons,’ ‘Commerce and Cuteness,’ ‘War and Grief,’ ‘Culture and Creed,’
‘Sex, Love and Buttons,’ ‘Arts and Crafts,’ and last but not least, ‘Dash My Buttons!’ have
engaging titles but were slow reads. Edwards’ button facts are offered in meandering sequence
and are characterized by much use of symbolic interpretation with respect to a specific aspect of
the button’s significance in a particular chapter. In Chapter One, ‘As a Notion,’ in a single
lengthy paragraph Edwards roams from the notion of the button as a proper noun (as in Button
Valley City in Montana, USA) and then on to Dick Buttons, the British Formula One racing
driver, then on to buttons as denoting individual band members of the group F*ck Button,
followed by inclusion of the Button Moon ITV children’s television programme wherein
kitchen utensils come to life and travel to the button moon. She concludes the chapter by
remarking how the button is also the centre of the target in the Scottish game known as curling.
In Chapter Two, ‘Why We Collect,’ she relates the marvels of man-made button details to
scientific details, noting that the button is a graspable entity, offering something of infinity that
can be held in the palm of your hand and caught by the eye. In Chapter Seven, ‘Culture and
Creed,’ Edwards talks about the button as an art medium, specifically as used by the artist Ran
Hwang in her large scale installations and 3-D button collages. Edwards explains that Hwang’s
use of the ordinary button to create large wall art installations, that often include hovering
images of the Buddha, brings new meaning to the actual button as well as to the button’s ability
to stimulate new thought. The website for Hwang’s fantastic button installations is a must-see
and worthy of Edwards’ inclusion, for Hwang’s artwork definitely places the button in a new
context.
I was somewhat disappointed in the quality of some of the fifty images (eleven colour
plates and thirty-nine black and white ones) used to support, or in a few cases only partially
support, Edwards’ text. Several of the black and white images in the book were hard to view
simply because of the cream coloured paper and the paper’s rough quality, and the small size of
the images. A case in point is when Edwards draws the reader’s attention to a specific set of
Wedgewood Jasperware buttons with fine details that show elegant Roman deity motifs inspired
by archaeological artefacts, yet the 1/2 inch and 7/8 inch size images are just too small to make
out the deities well. Edwards makes a strong point about how the Wedgewood buttons started
out as medallions but became buttons when they were mounted in steel or elaborate settings. I
felt at a disadvantage by having no side or back view of the buttons to reinforce this point. To
support her text and imagery at this juncture, I visited the V&A website and found the exact
 Book Reviews | 123

buttons mentioned, including colourful views of the medallions with the mountings. The-colour
plates were more successful than the black and white ones Edwards selected for the book (I
missed the point of using four of the book’s eleven colour plates to illustrate the British fashion
designer Zandra Rhodes’ buttons when they were all so alike). To balance these image choices,
I advise the reader to visit the links listed in the book’s bibliography and to search the web for
good images of the buttons mentioned. (The British Button Society website’s historic button
images under ‘Buttons in the News’ is very useful). I found several button collection and
fashion detail books with beautiful button images at my public and university libraries for quick
reference to Edwards’ button descriptions.
In support of the book’s broad exploration of the significance of the button, the
bibliography reveals Edwards as a serious researcher. Edwards’ interviews with members of the
British Button Society and curators at button museum exhibits as well as with individuals
holding private collections lend value to her study as a primary resource.
Overall, Edwards did broaden my perspective on the cultural significance of buttons and
the materials from which they are made. Most interesting for me are the connections she makes
between buttons and the human body. Edwards included a section on buttons made from human
bones and then stretches the reader’s mind by detailing the symbolism of belly buttons, as
button ‘ideas.’ In the final chapter, ‘Dash My Buttons!’ Edwards explains that in a photo image
of a foetus in utero, the baby’s navel looks like an actual button with the umbilical cord as a
shank connecting foetus to the mother. Edwards goes on to explain the use of the belly button
concept across several cultures, as for instance Japanese Hesokuri, or ‘belly button money,’ yet
another example within her expansive universe of button significances.
At the close of On the Button, Edwards admits that the book’s train of thought provides a
‘maze’ rather than a linear history. All the same, she manages to ‘button up’ everything neatly
with a suitable quote from the English novelist Beryl Bainbridge in According to Queeney
(2001), a fictional account of the last years of Dr Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century author
and lexicographer: ‘Without buttons, we are all undone.’ For me, this quote left my own button
journey primed for more exploration – not your ordinary button idea, and also, not your
ordinary book.

Elizabeth Kaino Hopper is an instructor in Design at the University of California at Davis,

where she teaches classes in surface design, patternmaking and construction, and fashion and
textile history. She is also a freelance workshop teacher, fashion designer and maker of fashion
solutions for the less mobile woman.

Bibliography

Bainbridge, Beryl. According to Queeney. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2001.

Edwards, Nina. Nina Edwards. Accessed 28 April 2013. http://www.ninaedwards.com.

Foxley, Eric. The British Button Society: In the News. Accessed 8 May 2013.
http://www.britishbuttonsociety.org.

Hackstein, Stephanie. Knopfe/Buttons: Geschichte Und Herstellung/History and Production.

Filderstadt: Markstein Verlag für Kultur- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 2007.

Hwang, Ran. Ran Hwang. Accessed 27 April 2013. http://www.ranhwang.com.

124 | Book Reviews

McKenzie, Althea. Buttons and Trimmings. London: The National Trust Enterprises Limited,
2004.

Victoria and Albert Museum. Buttons (Josiah Wedgwood and Sons). Accessed 25 May 2013.
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O77508/buttons-josiah-wedgwood-and/.

Wisniewski, Debra J. Antique & Collectible Buttons: Identification & Values. Paducah,
Kentucky: Collector Books, 1997.

►▼◄

Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being 2

Cristina Giorcelli and Paula Rabinowitz, eds.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press
2012, 266 pages, $25, paperback,
Illustrated
ISBN: 978-0-8166-7807-5

Habits of Being is the comprehensive title of a

four-volume series focused on the social, cultural, and
political expressions of clothing across a wide range of
venues, from those seen on the street and in museums to
those imaged in films, literature, advertisements and
magazines. The volume is edited by Cristina Giorcelli of
Roma Tre University and Paula Rabinowitz of the
University of Minnesota, and when the series is
completed it will include contributions by scholars from
Algeria, France, Hungary, Italy, and the United States,
most of which were originally published in Abito e
identità: Ricerche di storia letteraria e culturale
(Clothing and Identity: Studies in Literary and Cultural
History), a twelve-volume series edited by Giorcelli and
published in Italy between 1995 and 2012. Since
publication, the Italian series has made its mark as an
original treatment of the intricacies of textile, texture, and
text in real-life experience, as well as in literary/artistic
representation; particularly noteworthy are its exploration © 2012, courtesy of the Regents of
the University of Minnesota
of the qualities of accessories, which more often than not
are the most significant feature of dress. The first two volumes of Habits of Being contain the
gist of this line of research. A few new essays by American contributors have been added to
those originally selected from the Abito e identità series but the structure remains fundamentally
that of the Italian volumes, with a tightening of the thematic organization.
As a structural principle, the first two volumes of Habits of Being open with an
introduction written by one of the two editors, followed by a chapter written by a
 Book Reviews | 125

psychoanalyst, which explores how items of dress come to incorporate processes of self-
recognition, projection, and desire, and then a chapter by a fashion designer, which considers
the social, economic, and aesthetic aspects of dress and accessories. A sequence of contributory
essays follows these opening works.
The name of the second volume is Habits of Being 2. Here the circulation and exchange
of clothes are addressed through the veil of allegory in thirteen chapters and a coda, following a
preface and an introduction. The preface of the book ‘Clothing, Dress, Fashion: An Arcade,’
introduces the idea that fashion is an allegorical system of representation. In the Arcades
Project, Walter Benjamin wondered whether the arbitrariness of allegory might not be a twin to
that of fashion. An allegory is an arbitrarily chosen figurative language or extended metaphor,
used for the purpose of making a complex or abstract concept more readily accessible to a wide
audience ‘on the agora;’ the classic example is Plato’s famous ‘Allegory of the Cave.’ For our
immediate purpose, a perhaps better choice to exemplify the arbitrary character of allegory is L.
Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, in which ‘cowardice’ is embodied – allegorized – in the lion
and ‘thoughtless panic’ in the scarecrow. However, perhaps the time has come to reverse
Benjamin’s query and look at fashion as ‘archetypal allegory.’ By this is meant that the
arbitrariness of fashion, its ‘allegory’ or ‘character of an allegory,’ is to be sought in fashion’s
capacity for circulating its meaning through art, design, life styles, events, tales, and literature.
The requisite allegory in Exchanging Clothing is furnished in Rabinowitz’s introduction,
‘Walking the Walk: Circulation and Exchange,’ a reference to Kate Gilmore’s Public Art
Funding-sponsored installation Walk the Walk. This event took place 10 May – 14 May 2010
in Bryant Park, Manhattan, New York, and featured seven young women dressed in identical
canary yellow shifts, pink cardigan sweaters, and ivory pumps, continuously promenading in
five-hour shifts between 8:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m., on an eight-foot high and ten-foot square
pedestal erected for the occasion. As a living monument to urban energy and city employees
who work on shifts, it dramatized allegorically the conjunction of clothing and identity as an
exchange of positions in time/space. Implicit in this very notion of ‘exchange’ is instability,
namely, that of a formation of identity that goes along with that of clothing as signifying an
established identity. The most straightforward opportunity to check on this incompleteness of
self is afforded by travel. This is exemplified by the American journalist Nelly Bly’s prosthetic
holdall, as described by Cristina Scatamacchia of the University of Perugia, Italy, in her chapter
‘Traveling Light: Nelly Bly’s All-Inclusive Bag.’ Carried around the world in 1889 for seventy-
nine days by Bly, a young female reporter, this small, solitary piece of hand luggage is as
revealing an accessory as was Audrey Hepburn’s gorgeous Givenchy ball gown in Sabrina
(1954), described in ‘Like Their First Pair of High-Heeled Shoes: Continental Accessories and
Audrey Hepburn’s Cinematic Coming of Age,’ the chapter authored by Alicia Grace Chase of
State University of New York (SUNY). Both chapters focus on the transition from female
‘incapacity’ to being a self-assured ‘woman of the world.’
Allegory is about narrating a tale in other and in other’s words, and can also be applied
to words that until recently some women had some difficulty in ‘exchanging,’ so to speak,
outside of the closet. In ‘Slips of the Tongue: Lesbian Pulp Fiction as How-To-Dress Manuals,’
Paul Rabinowitz’s analysis on lesbian pulp fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, Rabinowitz labels
such words ‘slips of the tongue’ and adroitly links that Freudian expression to images of women
in their slips on covers of lesbian paperbacks; such front cover images let ‘slip’ what could be
expected inside.
Interest in the role of dress in literature is relatively new but rapidly expanding. In the
next contributions, we are plunged into the rich domain of literature and its proprietary
exploitation of fashion. In the chapter, ‘Sheer Luxury: Kate Chopin’s “A Pair of Silk
Stockings,”’ Cristina Giorcelli follows up this with great subtlety when describing the
126 | Book Reviews

emotional ordeal Mrs Sommers, the impecunious protagonist of the short story (originally
published in the early 1890s) faces, before surrendering to the lure of an ‘accessory,’ the silk
stockings of the title, which at the time were the epitome of luxury. We are given to understand
that Mrs Sommers’ ‘self-indulgence,’ with its attendant psychic turmoil, prefigures the effects
of the impending sartorial ‘liberation’ of women’s bodies subsequently achieved by Poiret and
Chanel. Wearing silk stockings represents an awakening or erotic liberation of the woman’s
sensibilities and an awareness of herself and her body, while at the same time encouraging a
sense of elegance and taste. A similarly subtle level of analysis is to be found in ‘Orbits of
Power: Rings in James Merrill’s Poetry’ by Andrea Mariani of the University of Pescara, Italy,
an impassioned reading of some of Merrill’s poems where rings are present symbolically, as
signals of deeply felt truths, and naturalistically, as gemstones in their precious settings.
Exchanging Clothes makes clear that literary bodies are no less influenced by fashion
than by living bodies. Just as fashion has silently colonized literature, literature has silently
colonized fashion. To access literature through the medium of dress is an operation at high risk
of tautology, as well as self-contradiction. Involving oneself in self-contradiction, the
provocative ‘Accessory Questions’ posed in the first chapter of the book by the Rome-based
psychoanalyst Laura Montani provides us with a warning: the nexus of habits and being might
result in a silencing of women’s desire. The fashion designer Mariuccia Mandelli, whose nom-
de-guerre is Krizia, suggests in ‘Krizia and Accessories’ that accessories help unleash this
desire. By their simultaneous empowering and clamping down of the body, accessories become
objects of love as well as revulsion. A young girl may look more attractive in an embroidered
frock, but as remarked in ‘Word-Processed for You by a Professional Seamstress,’ by Karen
Reimer, a maker of craft-based conceptual art, the activity of embroidering was long used as a
kind of moral hygiene for women. Within Algerian culture the code of jewellery can be
permissive and prescriptive at the same time, as we read in one of the book’s last chapters,
‘Ornaments and Feminine Clothing Tradition in Algeria; or the Identity Quest,’ by Chafika Dib-
Marouf of Jules Verne University, France. Similarly, a tie can be a fetish, or, more simply, a
knot that unties, as wittily expounded in ‘A Knot to Untie: Social Power, Fetishism, and
Communication in the Social History of the Tie,’ by Nello Barile of IULM University, Milan.
Clothing as an anthropological construct is the other powerful strand of analysis
explored in Exchanging Clothes. ‘The Dress of Thought: Clothing and Nudity in Homer, Virgil,
Dante, and Ariosto,’ the chapter written by the art and fashion historian Anne Hollander, is a
study of the clothing/nudity system in Homer and in some of the other major epic poets of the
Western canon. Down-to-earth immortality is also the privilege of the innumerable items of
clothing daily processed at the Savers Thrift Department Store in Minneapolis. In ‘It is a Garage
Sale at Savers Every Day: An Ethnography of the Savers Thrift Department Store in
Minneapolis,’ Katalin Medvedev of the University of Georgia, has cast herself as the
‘ethnographer’ of this truly Dantesque place of expiation, where articles of clothing are recycled
in preparation for future stages of existence. Seen under the light of possible re-use, no article of
clothing or accessory, however worn out, is too poor to stir memories, desires, or expectations.
The bubble-up/trickle-down pendulum inherited from Simmel and Veblen that the West
has been using as a clock by which to measure fashion is a wound-down instrument by now. On
the occasion of the première of Four Weddings and a Funeral in London, May 1994, Versace’s
gesture of moving safety pins from the cheeks of London punks to the seams of Elizabeth
Hurley’s evening gown simply occurred outside the pendulum’s line of oscillation. ‘A Safety
Pin For Elizabeth: Hard-Edge Accessorizing from Punk Subculture to High Fashion,’ by
Vittoria C. Caratozzolo of Sapienza University, Rome, is a brilliant reflection on the meaning of
this revisionary gesture. Versace’s feat of the imagination liberated an energy no bubbling-up or
trickling-down paradigm can contain: a quantum of it remains suspended and directionless,
 Book Reviews | 127

though available for future use. Consumption itself is no longer that final resting place for use-
values that Marx had imagined it to be. The ‘joker’ here is that of an imaginative pleasure or
‘mental hedonism,’ originally noted by the sociologist Colin Campbell, which attaches to the
image of the product in a discursive synergy with the media or mediascape, as Versace well
understood. Caratozzolo’s ear is also fine enough to catch the note of pain and fear in the
transmuting of Elizabeth Hurley’s safety pin, with its multiple connotations as a status item that
can function as a sort of refuge or ‘temporary home’ which allows for a momentary coming to
terms with our own incompleteness, positioned in an ‘intermission’ between two acts, while
waiting for fashion to consume any presumption of a unique or singular ‘otherness’ we might
have. There is no way out: even The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s
Spring 2013 exhibition Punk: Chaos to Couture may be seen as the consumption of otherness,
through the force of the spectacle.
In conclusion, there is every reason to expect that by the diversity of its topics and in-
depth treatments of them, Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being 2 will be of interest both for
fashion scholars and the informed layman, not only because of its capacity to entertain but
because of its provocative questions which have multiple answers.

Paola Colaiacomo is Professor of English Literature, Iuav University of Venice, Italy (IUAV).
Her main line of research is the crossings between fashion and literature.

Bibliography
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1987.

Chopin, Kate. ‘A Pair of Silk Stockings.’ Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1996
[published as a 64 page, ‘book.’]

►▼◄

Briefly Noted Books

Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion

Kate Irvin and Laurie Anne Brewer, eds. New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
published in association with the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, RI, 2013,
illustrated, with an index, 208 pages, $50, ISBN: 978-0-3001-9081-6.
The book celebrates the emergence and continuity of the dandy, from the nineteenth-century
elegance of George Bryan ‘Beau’ Brummell to the ‘peacocks’ of today. While the authors note
that word ‘dandy’ has been associated with men thought superficial, flamboyant, and self-
indulgent, they use the word to describe the man who gives much thought to his self-
presentation not only to call attention to himself but to defy the status quo. A series of essays
traces the contradictory definitions, images, and history of the dandy, the fabrics and tailoring
128 | Book Reviews

that play an important role in their self-styling, and the relationship between black dandyism
and hip-hop. Fifteen notable dandies are written about by individuals who share an affinity for
their subjects, including Charles Baudelaire by Patti Smith, Oscar Wilde by his grandson Merlin
Holland, Andy Warhol by ‘Factory’ member Daniela Morera, and John Waters by the writer
Philip Hoare.

Kate: The Kate Moss Book

Kate Moss. Fabien Baron, Jess Hallett, and Jefferson Hack, eds. New York: Rizzoli, 2012,
illustrated, 448 pages, $85, ISBN: 978-0-8478-3790-8.
Created by Kate Moss, herself, in collaboration with three editors, the book is a curated
personal retrospective of Kate Moss’s career, tracing her evolution from a teenager
photographed by Corrine Day to one of fashion’s all-time most iconic models. Kate was
released with eight unique covers and features photographs of Moss by Arthur Elgort, Corinne
Day, Juergen Teller, Mario Sorrenti, Mario Testino, Mert & Marcus, Nick Knight, Patrick
Demarchelier, Peter Lindbergh, Steven Klein, Terry Richardson and others, and also includes
previously unpublished images of Moss from her own archives.

From Production to Consumption: The Cultural

Industry of Fashion
Marco Pedroni, ed. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013,
illustrated, 251 pages, £24.99, ISBN: 978-1-84888-165-5.
Fashion is a cultural industry where production and consumption
meet. The book analyses this theme and also explores the
processes and people whose work connects the two dimensions.
Asks Pedroni: What do Marlies Dekkers’ lingerie and
contemporary flagship stores have in common? What links
American Apparel’s campaign to reform the USA immigration
law and an ancient doll called Pandora? Fashion! Through ten
chapters and an introduction, the book explores meeting points
between producers and consumers as well as processes and people
whose work connects production and consumption.
© 2013, courtesy of
Inter-Disciplinary Press

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion

Elizabeth L. Cline. New York: Portfolio Hardcover, 2013, with an index, 244 pages, $25.95,
ISBN: 978-1-59184-461-7.
Cline sets herself the task of uncovering the true price of cheap fashion, tracing the rise of
budget clothing chains, the demise of the middle-market and of independent retailers, our
obsession with sales, and the trend of acquiring a wardrobe of largely unworn, cheaply made,
throwaway clothes, shoes, and accessories. She travels to factories in China and Bangladesh,
and looks at the impact, both in the USA and abroad, of America’s obsession with what she
calls ‘steals and deals.’ For me, a woman with a sewing machine in her closet, Cline’s
discussion of the demise of sewing as a once taught home economics skill and route from
poverty for workers was sobering. Other topics include the pressures forced on retailers to
 Book Reviews | 129

drastically reduce detail and craftsmanship, how consumers can break the ‘buy-and-toss cycle,’
sustainable fashion, and how women can refashion, mend, and even make their own clothes.

Fashions: Exploring Fashion through Cultures

Jacque Lynn Foltyn, ed. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press,
2012, illustrated with an index, 303 pages, £24.99, ISBN: 978-
1-84888-015-3.
From the style statements of Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, Jimi
Hendrix, Gothic Lolitas and Hussein Chalayan; to those
created by internet gamers, ‘foodies,’ supermodel ‘corpses,’
Jamaican designers, and spandex-wearing disco divas; to those
worn by Congo immigrants in Italy, Russians nostalgic for the
Soviet empire, Chinese women of the Republican era, and
Dutch women reconciling the dictates of Paris with life in the
Netherlands, fashion is a critical aspect of the zeitgeist of
modern society. Reflecting contemporary preoccupations,
fashion transmits cultural identities, mentalities, anxieties, and
uncertainties as individuals seek to define, challenge, or © 2012, courtesy of
reinvent cultural selves and dictums. The study of fashion is Inter-Disciplinary Press
actually the study of fashions, hence the title Fashions:
Exploring Fashion through Cultures. Culture threads its way through the fourteen chapters of
this interdisciplinary book, which is divided into three sections: Transformations,
Transnationalism and Transgressions. Representing a broad range of disciplines, the book’s
fourteen contributors dialogue with each other about the variety and complexity of fashion as a
shared, patterned, and stylized form of cultural expression that provides meaning, order,
identity, livelihood, aesthetic enjoyment – and frustration and challenges – to human lives.

The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France
and America, 1900-1929
Caroline Evans. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013, illustrated with an
index, 338 pages, $50, ISBN: 978-0-3001-8953-7.
Evans’ latest contribution to the history of fashion provides an account of the earliest fashion
shows in France and the United States in the 1880s to 1929, and analyses them in the context of
modernism, the rationalization of the body, and the emergence of film. Using new archival
evidence, the book shows how ‘mannequin parades’ used the visual language of modernism to
transform business and management methods into ‘visual seduction.’