viz.

Image: author's own, photo of December 2013 cover of Vogue

To round out the fall 2013 season of viz, I follow up on Suss’s latest post re: the Hunger Games and the rhetoric of fashion. As Suss makes clear, the new film Catching Fire portrays style in the districts as Depression-drab-chic (to put it generously). Which is all kinds of problematic. In the continuing buzz surrounding the movie's release, however, I've noticed that it's the outrageous outfits of the Capitol dwellers that capture the most media and corporate attention.

This post was originally published, in slightly different form, on the Harry Ransom Center's blog, Cultural Compass. 

Photo of Carson McCullers by Cecil Beaton, via Cultural Compass

It might seem funny that an author’s fashion sense would even be a topic of discussion. What does it matter what a writer wears, so long as she writes? And yet, clothes, accessories, and everyday objects give us tangible, direct links to the past and to the people who wore them, used them, and kept them in their homes.

Compiled from www.madewell.com

Fall clothing lines are out, which means the online window-shopper in me is happy as a clam. I’ve been scrolling around, looking for new sweaters or jeans or blazers that would be appropriate for the drastic change in seasons we collectively imagine here in central Texas.

And here’s what I’ve noticed: all the things I like right now have names with the word “boy” in them. Tomboy jackets, boyjeans, boyfriend shirts. Perhaps this is just indicative of a (never-ending) androgynous trend at the places I shop; as the image above shows, just one store—in this case, Madewell— capitalizes on the boyish qualities of their women’s clothes four times in their fall lookbook. Menswear-inspired women’s clothes are nothing new, but they’re definitely on trend in the retail world this fall, in a very self-aware way. Dressing across gender lines can be cool and even a means of subverting traditional gender roles or images. But labeling these styles “boy ____” has, I think, the opposite function.

It got me thinking about some of the strange, patriarchal, normative, and bizarrely long-lasting differences between men’s and women’s clothing design. In particular, one of the most basic differences: how they’re cut.

Image Credit: Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation

The Divine Comedy, scene rendering: In a path of blue-white light Beatrice steps down from her chariot to meet Dante, 1921-1930

Norman Bel Geddes lived a sixty-five years that connect two worlds, the Victorian past of 1893, the Atomic Age of 1958. His work reflects and resists that trajectory. The current exhibit on Bel Geddes at the Harry Ransom Center (UT Austin) divides his career into phases or stages of development. A highly creative childhood segued into a successful career as a stage and costume designer for New York Theater. Of all his work—in industrial design, in architecture, in “futurism”--his set and costume design remains my favorite. But in an important sense, Bel Geddes never left the theater.

J O’Shea at SuperTouch has posted a review of an art show by Mr. Brainwash (AKA Theirry Guetta). According to O’Shea, Brainwash is a hack, ripping off the style of pop artists like Warhol and street artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey.

After following pioneering street art legends like Banksy and Shepard Fairey around, camera in hand, shooting hundreds of hours of footage, however, the lure of cheap & easy fame began to eat away at [Guetta]. The desire to mint an original style proved more elusive. It all began several years ago with a series of uninspiring wheatpaste posters in the style of nearly every stencil artist that came before him depicting Guetta, with trademark facial hair and fedora, holding a camera, fused to the walls of Hollywood’s most heavily trafficked corridors. Further inspired by the success of Banksy’s self-produced “Barely Legal” solo show in 2006 (and with the encouragement of Sir Banks himself—possibly his biggest art prank on us all to date?), and having established sufficient ”street cred,“ Guetta began to plot his own ascent. The result is the exhibition in question, titled “Life is Beautiful” that currently occupies the formerly vacant CBS Studios on Sunset Blvd. . . . In the words of one of LA’s most pioneering street art provocateurs, Skullphone, “if Disneyland wanted to open a street art ride, this is what they’d have done.”

The antics of Mr. Brainwash, and the reaction of O’Shea to them, made me think of Richard Lanham’s at times scathing review of pop art in The Economics of Attention. It is interesting to note that artists like Duchamp and Warhol, who Lanham calls “attention artists” or “attention economists,” were pranksters who may have really liked the joke that O’Shea so deplores: somebody sees how much money and prestige comes from making pop art, declares himself a pop artist, and starts to receive money and prestige through the wholesale copying of other artists’ methods and works. Mr. Brainwash is merely manipulating what Lanham calls the “Interpretive Bureaucracy of Attention Economists,” the establishment of art critics and promoters who can be trusted to find importance and meaning where there is none.

I would be interested in hearing from other readers of Lanham’s book to see how they think Mr. Brainwash’s work fits into the author’s description of the Attention Economy.

via Right Some Good