I’ve been adrift, hoping to remember that I care deeply about clothes if only to distract me from my glooms. But the memory has eluded me. The day of the Met Gala, which never fails to stir at least something in me, I continued forgetting. The day after, the Daily News front page explained a bit of it. “Fashion and Friction: While glitterati party at annual Met Gala, pro-Palestinian protesters march on the museum.”
This happens sometimes, enthusiasms failing to rustle up their usual endorphin releases. Sometimes the problems on your mind are too big to dismiss with fantasy. It’s helpful in moments like these to find a book. To root around in your head and kick things over until you find that missing spark.
I’m still on Joann Entwistle’s The Fashioned Body. In it, she does thing academics do sometimes where they turn a word over and over and over. Her introduction considers the word fashion. She starts with how she thinks Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter define it in Fashion and Anti-Fashion: “A special system of dress, one that is historically and geographically specific to western modernity.” But, she interjects, “fashion must be considered as a distinctive system for the provision of clothes.”
So then she brings in a combination of Georg Simmel’s Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms and Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class: “One of the means adopted by the new capitalist class to challenge aristocratic power and status, first by openly flouting the sumptuary laws imposed by royalty and aristocracy, and second, by adopting and aggressively keeping pace with fashion in an attempt to maintain status and distinction.” Though she’s focusing on the definition of one word, every other word invoked to decipher its meaning comes with its own lineage and controversy and set of connotations. Capitalistic. Class. Status. Distinction.
Drilling down further with Fred Davis’s Fashion, Culture, and Identity: “Any definition of fashion seeking to grasp what distinguishes it from style, custom, conventional or acceptable dress, or prevalent modes must place its emphasis on the element of change we often associate with the term.” Essentially, via Elizabeth Wilson’s Adorned in Dreams: “Fashion is dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles: fashion in a sense is change.”
I ran into a neighbor holding a clutch of Playbills on the elevator the other day. I asked him if anything was good. Cheerily and without hesitating he gave a bunch of recommendations. I said thanks and sulked off to my apartment. I remember thinking: How come I can’t muster such an enthusiastic embrace of the new?
I had been looking toward the Met Gala, toward high fashion shows, as possible streams of fresh passion. But often these were adding up to mere spectacle, in the way that Guy Debord defines it in Society of the Spectacle: “a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system” and “the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the modern production process.”
Throwing myself into the enormity and fascination of a spectacle can be fun, but sometimes I also feel myself slipping away from the real. I went into Dover Street Market and a salesperson quoted a Comme des Garçons runway piece at $41,000. I thought it was a joke, a fake number, but they said it was real, that people come into the store and buy pieces like that. Some interesting pattern-cutting, sculptural, artistic really. A thrilling use of polyester. But sitting with the reality of all the big money out there coursing through high fashion is destabilizing. It’s a bit like the stock market earnings reports: a vast trove of ideas and information regularly offered for the public, though seldom for the exclusive benefit of the public.
Pulling from Entwistle’s read of Jennifer Craik’s The Face of Fashion: “In short, the western fashion system goes hand in hand with the exercise of power; the exercise of power cannot simply be associated with the unfolding development of modern consumer capitalism; fashion systems should not be confined to particular economic or cultural sets of arrangements.”
It was funny reading through her summaries of these ideas, so much labor attempting to fix and understanding of such a wildly slippery thing. She sets them against each other, disagrees with some of them, all in an effort over just a few pages to prepare the reader for her own attempt to fix an understanding of how clothing and its production functions. (There’s a separate but similar exercise for the word and concept of “dress.”) But rather than drown in the infinity, Entwistle’s definition-staking is a reminder that there’s always more out there to take in, to think about, to enthuse over, as well as more ways to take it in, to think about it, to enthuse over it. To remember that is to find anchor, to find kindling.