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Visual Rhetoric - Visual Culture - Pedagogy
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What are you gonna wear?
Submitted by timturner on Thu, 2007-09-13 08:42
Yesterday marked the end of Fashion Week in NYC, the time when designers show off their spring collections in chichi, outlandish (and expensive) runway shows. Fashion has gotten a lot of attention in popular culture in recent years, thanks in part to the success of Project Runway and The Devil Wears Prada. But it is not universally acclaimed, as a recent article in the New York Times points out: "Depending on who is doing the talking, fashion is bourgeois, girly, unfeminist, conformist, elitist, frivolous, anti-intellectual and a cultural stepchild barely worth the attention paid to even the most minor arts." Yet fashion is a form of self-(re)presentation in which everyone engages--even when they think they are rejecting it, or at least "not thinking about it." (Nudist colonists are maybe an exception, but even they have to get dressed sometimes.) The best expression of this point I know of is Meryl Streep's monologue about the blue sweater in The Devil Wears Prada. Fashion implicates everyone in its complex social, cultural, even political networks: of capital, class, gender, race, sexuality, globalization...the list could go on. Yet no one seems more reluctant to acknowledge this point than academics. The author (Guy Trebay) of the NYT article mentioned above quotes noted feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter on this point: "The academic uniform has some variations," she said, "but basically is intended to make you look like you're not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it, God forbid." To me, this seems like an interesting blind spot. So, why am I making this fuss about fashion? I want to submit it as a category of visual rhetoric (an important one) that hasn't been discussed on the blog thus far. We can talk about a visual rhetoric of the public sphere (architecture, public art), and we can discuss rhetoric in terms of its focus on ethos as self-presentation. And fashion marks the intersection of public and private versions of the self. (As such, it also seems like a great way to open up conversations about post-structuralist concepts of identity/subjectivity.) All of which is to reiterate (probably unnecessarily) that everything really is an argument...even the clothes on your back. Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty Images (via NYT) |
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I think there's probably a
I think there's probably a pretty strong connection between fashion and Richard Lanham's articulation of the economics of attention as well--in the new information economy fluff begin to replace stuff and style becomes everything, how we notice and what we notice. I agree, Tim, there are a lot of way in which fashion is not only visual rhetoric, but performative visual rhetoric. And as for nudists, well, the absence of clothes is a comment on the rhetoric of fashion in many ways, I would imagine . . .
It's an interesting point,
It's an interesting point, and a vital one since the very visibility of the body as a communicative surface would seem to become increasingly important in a world where people speak less and less to each other in public spaces. If you buy into Malcolm Gladwell's arguments in Blink, fashion would seem to become one of the most important and primary resources for communicating one's identity in a world where an icnreasing amount of communication encounters its audience in a fleeting visual transaction.