Fashion in Popular Culture

Description

When we open our closet doors each morning, we seldom consider what our sartorial choices say, whether we tend toward jeans and a well-worn concert t-shirt or wingtips and a three-piece suit. Yet, how we dress divulges more than whether we crave comfort or couture; our clothing communicates who we are and how we relate to our culture. But how does a Balenciaga bag or a tough leather jacket topped by liberty spikes signify these things?



Fashion in Popular Culture considers this question. Combining fashion theory with approaches from literature, art, advertising, music, media studies, material studies, and sociology, contributors from across Europe, Australia, and the United States consider the function of fashion within popular culture. Fashion, they show, has the capacity to both influence and be influenced by popular culture, and its meaning is also contingent upon context. Chapters in the book cover both historical and contemporary concerns, addressing a variety of other questions, including the role fashion plays in subcultures.



For students and scholars of fashion and popular culture—or anyone fascinated by what clothing can convey—Fashion in Popular Culture offers an engaging, interdisciplinary analysis.

Introduction – Joseph H. Hancock, II, Toni Johnson-Woods and Vicki Karaminas List of Figures Fashion in Contemporary Culture Chapter 1: Brand This Way: Lady Gaga’s Fashion as Storytelling Context to the GLBT Community – Joseph H. Hancock, II Chapter 2: Navigating Cultural Anxiety: Strategic Ambiguity in Lisbeth Salander’s Style-Fashion-Dress – Susan B. Kaiser Chapter 3: Australian Gothic: Black Light Angels, Appearance, and Subcultural Style – Vicki Karaminas Chapter 4: Fashionable Addiction: The Path to Heroin Chic – Alphonso D. McClendon Fashion in Media and Literature Chapter 5: Dames and Design: Fashion and Appearance on Pulp Fiction Covers, 1950–1960 – Toni Johnson-Woods Chapter 6: Territories of Knowledge and Nostalgia in Modern Fashion Designer Life Writing – Ilya Parkins Chapter 7: Looking for Mr. Benson: The Black Leather Motorcycle Jacket and Narratives of Masculinities – Marvin J. Taylor Chapter 8: Fashion Photography, Phallocentrism, and Feminist Critique – Louise Wallenberg Chapter 9: ‘He Can’t Love Me if I’m Ugly’: The Recurring Theme of Popular Beauty in the Television Soap Opera Days of Our Lives – Andrew Reilly and Nancy A. Rudd Chapter 10: Redressing the Devil’s Wardrobe: Representing and Re-Reading the Darker Side of Fashion in Chick Lit Novels – Anne Peirson-Smith Fashion in Historical Context Chapter 11: Redeeming the Voices of Reform – Patricia A. Cunningham Chapter 12: The Language of Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France – Paula von Wachenfeldt Chapter 13: The Devil of Fashion: Women, Fashion, and the Nation inEarly-Twentieth-Century German and Swedish Cultural Magazines – Andrea Kollnitz Chapter 14: Rome: Eternal City of Fashion and Film – Eugenia Paulicelli

Sujets

• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• General officer
• Fashion
• Anthropology
• Design
• General
• Mode (habillement)

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 25 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781783200474
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Lady Gaga and Kermit The Frog, 2009 MTV Video Music Awards - Red Carpet. (Collection: WireImage, Photographer: Kevin Mazur).
Cover designer: Ellen Thomas
Copy-editor: Macmillan
Typesetting: Planman
ISBN 978-1-84150-716-3
eISBN 978-1-78320-060-3
Printed and bound by Latimer Trend, Plymouth, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Joseph H. Hancock, II, Toni Johnson-Woods, and Vicki Karaminas
List of Figures
Fashion in Contemporary Culture
Chapter 1: Brand This Way: Lady Gaga’s Fashion as Storytelling Context to the GLBT Community
Joseph H. Hancock, II
Chapter 2: Navigating Cultural Anxiety: Strategic Ambiguity in Lisbeth Salander’s Style-Fashion-Dress
Susan B. Kaiser
Chapter 3: Australian Gothic: Black Light Angels, Appearance, and Subcultural Style
Vicki Karaminas
Chapter 4: Fashionable Addiction: The Path to Heroin Chic
Alphonso D. McClendon
Fashion in Media and Literature
Chapter 5: Dames and Design: Fashion and Appearance on Pulp Fiction Covers, 1950–1960
Toni Johnson-Woods
Chapter 6: Territories of Knowledge and Nostalgia in Modern Fashion Designer Life Writing
Ilya Parkins
Chapter 7: Looking for Mr. Benson: The Black Leather Motorcycle Jacket and Narratives of Masculinities
Marvin J. Taylor
Chapter 8: Fashion Photography, Phallocentrism, and Feminist Critique
Louise Wallenberg
Chapter 9: ‘He Can’t Love Me if I’m Ugly’: The Recurring Theme of Popular Beauty in the Television Soap Opera Days of Our Lives
Andrew Reilly and Nancy A. Rudd
Chapter 10: Redressing the Devil’s Wardrobe: Representing and Re-Reading the Darker Side of Fashion in Chick Lit Novels
Anne Peirson-Smith
Fashion in Historical Context
Chapter 11: Redeeming the Voices of Reform
Patricia A. Cunningham
Chapter 12: The Language of Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France
Paula von Wachenfeldt
Chapter 13: The Devil of Fashion: Women, Fashion, and the Nation in Early-Twentieth-Century German and Swedish Cultural Magazines
Andrea Kollnitz
Chapter 14: Rome: Eternal City of Fashion and Film
Eugenia Paulicelli
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Masoud Yazdani, James Campbell and Bethan Ball from Intellect for their support. We would like to acknowledge Anne C. Cecil and Roberta H. Gruber of the Fashion, Product, Design & Merchandising Department, Allen Sabinson, Dean of the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, Drexel University Philadelphia, as well as, Dr Joseph H. Hancock, II, President of the Popular Culture and American Culture Association (2013–2015) and the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand for their financial contributions. Thank you to Professor Lawrence Wallen, Head of the School of Design and Professor Desley Luscombe, Dean of the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, and the University of Queensland for their unwavering support. Thanks to Bill Burmester for his editing assistance. A special appreciation to Margaret A. Miller and Edward A. Augustyn for their patience and dedication to the project.
Most importantly we are indebted to the contributors themselves who saw the worth of this project. We hope that this volume will be the beginning of many such discussions and collaborations of this caliber.
Introduction
Joseph H. Hancock, II, Toni Johnson-Woods, and Vicki Karaminas
In the opening scene of Albert Nobbs (2011), the American actress Glenn Close is cross-dressed as a hotel waiter who is employed at the Morrissey’s Hotel in Dublin. She wears a black bowler hat, popular with working-class and civil servants, a white shirt with high upstanding collar and bowtie, and a tailored mid-calf black suit typical of the type of clothes worn by butlers and male servants in the late nineteenth century. Based on the novella by George Moore, Albert Nobbs is the story of a woman who dresses and poses as a man to escape economic restrictions suffered by women in Victorian Ireland. The film follows the same vein as cross-dressing film classics Victor/Victoria (1982) starring Julie Andrews as a struggling female soprano playing a male female impersonator to gain employment and Yentl (1983) in which Barbra Streisand portrays a Jewish girl who disguises herself as a boy to enter religious training that bars women. And then of course there is Orlando (1992), the film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s influential novel whose four-hundred-year-old hero crosses time and gender. The novel uses gender and dress to imagine what it would be like if social identities were less bound to bodies and appearance.
The cast of characters in Albert Nobbs, Victor/Victoria, Yentl and Orlando wear their stories on their backs, each garment mapping their gender and social position on their bodies. As dress historian Aileen Ribeiro writes, ‘Literature conveys emotions and feelings about clothes that can highlight character and further the plot of a play or a novel…. Fashion itself can be said to produce fiction’ (2005: 1). Fashion is codified and endowed with social meanings about gender, sexuality and identity. Dress frames the body. It expresses who we are and who we are not as a means of expressing identity and a way of interacting and belonging to a particular culture. Dress also plays an important part in proclaiming a person’s sexual and gender identity. The adoption of what is considered masculine or feminine dress is a means of communicating membership of a particular group, the affirmation or rejection of an ‘assigned’ rather than ‘chosen’ gender or the declaration of a sexuality, be it queer or otherwise. In this way, clothes are given value as a means of making a statement about individuality and a person’s place in society. If clothing is a form of the non-verbal and visual codes that communicate certain characteristics or facts about the wearer, then the dress choices of alternative genders within a culture demonstrate a desire to be seen as someone else. What makes the study of fashion so important in popular culture is the role of clothing in constructing material identity and its shaping of personal and social space. Patrizia Calefato is eloquent when she notes that
 
Fashion has turned the body into a discourse, a sign, a thing . A body permeated by discourse, of which clothes and objects are an intrinsic part, is a body exposed to transformations, to grotesque openings toward the world; a body that will feel and taste all that the world feels and tastes, if it simply lets itself open up. (1997: 72)
Fashion is a phenomenon that exemplifies diversity across cultures. It is dependent on time and place and commonly defined as the prevailing style at a given moment or place. While the media likes to suggest that fashion is only for the wealthy it is really a commodity that is accessible to everyone at various levels of quality and distinguishable styles. Contemporary clothing items such as T-shirts, denim, khaki pants, polo shirts, sweaters and baseball caps, have become transnational garments. These mass fashion items signify most of what is bought and sold every day as ‘fashion’, suggesting that to define fashion only as elitist would simply be wrong (Miler and Hancock 2009: 1).
Once relegated to the field of art, anthropology and costume (dress studies), fashion now encompasses such diverse disciplines as film, theater history, and business studies. Until very recently, fashion was considered to be frivolous and was relegated to the domain of the feminine (and the ‘foppish’ male) and the body, as opposed to architecture, philosophy or the fine arts, which were deemed masculine and considered the domain of the mind.
Interdisciplinarity across academia has meant that scholars have approached the study of fashion and dress from a number of perspectives that challenge fashion’s marginal place in traditional academic scholarship. Whilst scholars George Simmel, Thorstein Veblen and Walter Benjamin all wrote about fashion and how it was one of the principal means by which modernity manifests itself, its own identity and the zeitgeist, it has only been of late that fashion has gained critical ground in transforming our understanding of dress in popular culture as a barometer by which taste, consumption, class, and identity are measured.
Fashion scholars are not limited to the study of haute couture or high fashion, but also areas that relate to the dress, style, appearance, consumption, and adornment of people across cultures and in everyday society. Issues such as sexuality, gender, religion, race, ethnicity, and the various ways we construct identity have become increasingly important. Art, performing arts, history, literature, design, manufacturing, marketing and branding, merchandising, retailing, and psychological/sociological aspects of dress and body image are key disciplines in the study of fashion in the twenty-first century. Different types of methodologies are used to research and write about fashion. Art historians examine fashion from the wearer’s point of view and look specifically at the actual garments depicted in painting as a source of analysis. Cultural anthropologists use qualitative methods such as ethnography to study cultures by examining elements of dress, such as the sari or the kimono. Whilst sociologists use ethnography to study subcultural styles, cultural theo