fashion-vs-style


FASHION AND ANTI-FASHION ‘Although fashion and anti-fashion are both forms of adornment, they actually have little in common. We can appreciate the specialised functions of each simply by examining two gowns which were in the public eye during 1953: Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation gown and one from Dior’s 1953 collection. The Queen’s coronation gown is traditional, ‘fixed’ and anti-fashion; it was designed to function as a symbol of continuity, the continuity of the monarchy and the British Empire. Dior’s gown also created a stir in 1953, but then Dior had been creating a sensation since 1947, when he boldly launched the ‘New Look’, which defied cloth rationing in favour of longer, fuller, very feminine gowns. And each year Dior created a new New Look. In coronation year, he left behind his successful ‘princess line’ and captured headlines by shortening his skirts to 16 inches from the ground. Likewise, in 1954 Dior changed the ‘tulip line’ into the ‘A line’, and in 1955 replaced the ‘H line’ with the ‘A line’. In this way he captured the essence of fashionable attire: its function as a symbol of change, progress and movement through time. Like any fashionable (modish) garments, Dior’s 1953 ‘tulip line’ announced that a new season had arrived. Anti-fashion adornment, on the other hand, is concerned with time in the form of continuity and the maintenance of the status quo. Style and fashion are based upon and project alternative concept and models of time.’ pp.12-13 ‘Changing fashion styles reflect and express changing, fluid situations of social mobility, while anti-fashion styles reflect and express fixed, unchanging, rigid social environments.’ p. 14 ‘Fashion is not simply a change of styles of dress and adornment, but rather a systematic, structured and deliberate pattern of style change.’ p. 15 ‘Fashion change occurs not only with reference to social change, but more directly with reference to the internal, structural organisation of the system of fashion. The introduction of any fashion innovation must respect and relate to the fashion changes which have come before. In this sense neither designers nor the fashionable are in charge and in control of fashion change. Fashion is running its own show and one can only choose to get on or get off the fashion merry-go-round.’ p. 16 ‘With the exception of the unfashionable (those who can’t keep up with fashion change but would like to), anti-fashion [style] refers to all styles of adornment which fall outside the organised system of fashion change. The Royal Family wear anti-fashions, my mother wears anti-fashions, Hell’s Angels, hippies, punks and priests wear anti-fashions. [And, indeed, all those so-called ‘fashion designers’ who year after year crank out the same signature look are actually anti-fashion designers.] In no case is their dress and adornment caught up in the mechanism of fashion change, nor do they want it to be. Each wears a form of traditional costume - ‘our costume’ which should ideally remain unchanged and unchanging.’ p.16 ‘Anti-fashion is threatened not only by the spectre of change, but also by the phenomenon of ‘fashionalization’, whereby traditional costumes are converted into the latest styles. Fashion briefly shines its spot-light of damning praise on one fixed anti-fashion style and then another, and leather jackets, peasant blouses, denim blue jeans and plastic sandals from Woolworth’s become fashionable. Fashion has always appropriated anti-fashion ideas, promiscuously but not indiscriminately, whenever they suited its appetite for change.’ p. 17 ‘Anti-fashion images in the context of the fashion system acquire a new meaning and a new mode of communicating that meaning. Hippy, Hell’s Angel, peasant and worker styles, when worn by the fashionable, are no longer folk costumes; they are part of the fashion system. The style may remain much the same - indeed, it may even be the same garment - but its significance has been changed drastically. Fashionalization converts ‘natural’ anti-fashion style symbols into arbitrary ‘linguistic’ signs. That is, within the context of fashion, anti-fashion images lose their symbolic meaning and become - like phonemes in verbal language - arbitrary building blocks of the system of meaning that we have called fashion. In this way, anti-fashion images are incorporated into the vocabulary of the fashion language.’ p. 18 ‘Anti-fashion is composed of numerous and unrelated body and clothing symbols. Fashion, on the other hand, is a unified system of arbitrary body and clothing signs. A woman who looks like a prostitute and is a prostitute is a walking anti-fashion style symbol. With her body posture, gestures, movement, make-up and clothing she pictorially represents (symbolises) what it is that a prostitute is supposed to ‘mean’. This anti-fashion image could not be arbitrarily exchanged with, for example, the anti-fashion image of a nun without converting both of these natural style symbols into arbitrary signs. On the other hand if, as frequently happens, fashion turns its attentions to the ‘Tart Look’ then someone adopting this look for a season, instead of conveying the message ‘I am sexually available’ is telling us ‘I am fashionable’. If this is followed by the ‘Innocent School Girl Look’ or the ‘Peruvian Peasant Look’ the message remains exactly the same.’ pp.18-19 ‘In fashion, various looks are linked together as parts of a system in which meaning is gleaned from the structure: as with a join-the-dots puzzle, it is only when sufficient fashion images are joined together in sequence that a message becomes apparent.’ p.19 ‘Fashion is an advertisement for the ideology of social mobility, change and progress, a message which is symbolised by the fashion system’s own mechanism of constant change.’ p.19 ‘The conflict of fashion and anti-fashion is a battle of signs versus symbols. However, the systematic patterning of fashion signs over time spins out a thread of meaning with non-verbal sentences linked end to end to form paragraphs and whole volumes of fashion history. Thus, ironically, while particular fashion images are arbitrary signs, the structured pattern of fashion change is a natural symbol of social change.’ p. 19 ‘The conflict of fashion and anti-fashion is not between particular styles (e.g. Cavaliers versus Roundheads), nor between different designers’ collections within a fashion season (e.g. Dior versus Balenciaga). Within fashion and within anti-fashion, conflict is between image A and image B. Fashion versus anti-fashion, on the other hand, could be represented as the conflict of images A, B, C, etc. (specific anti-fashion styles) and images A1, B1, C1, etc. (that is, image A, etc. after fashionalization). The image itself does not change much: fashionable ‘boiler suits’ were, despite alterations in some cases, still boiler suits as worn by genuine British workmen everywhere. The content of the style remains essentially the same, but the sociological, temporal and semiological-linguistic context of the style - and therefore its meaning - has been radically changed by its fashionalization.’ p. 27


BODYSTYLES ‘The Queen’s coronation gown and Dior’s ‘New Look’ express two completely antithetical systems of time. The former is pre-set for traditional time while the latter is pre-set for modern time. Each outfit serves as a vehicle for time travel - the one into the past, the other into the future. But they have something in common: the subjugation of the personal, biological time of those who wore them. At her coronation, the Queen herself became a symbol of traditional, steady-state time; an advertisement for the continuity of the monarchy. On the other hand, a customer of Dior’s - simply by putting on the ‘New Look’- would have had her own, biological time rendered semiologically insignificant by the imposition of Modern Time. It is the same for the rest of us. Every day when we open the wardrobe door and select an outfit to wear, we are choosing between making ourselves advertisements of steady-state or linear-progressive-modern time. If we choose an outfit which is avant-garde then we will be advertising a concept of time which is progressive and which celebrates the future. And if, on the other hand, we choose a ‘timeless classic’ then we will be promoting a perception of time which is traditional and which celebrates the present as a manifestation of the past. Time is the most fundamental of all ideological systems and every human being in their choice of clothes or body decorations participates in this politics of reality.’ p.122 ‘Prior to the rise of modern nation states (and now the global village) our entire planet was differentiated into hundreds of thousands of costume regions and therein lies one of the principal purposes and functions of this form of dress: to mark the boundaries of small-scale communities and to provide a focus of group identity for those who resided in these communities. Thus what I have termed regional differences are actually social rather than geographic markers. The second characteristic and function of folk costume derives from the first. Each peasant group represented by a distinctive costume style (‘Our Costume’) was (or is) a community which sought to buttress itself against destabilising change by means of a steady-state perception of time and by means of an unchanging and ‘timeless costume which was an expression of this perception of time and history. Thus costume is a sort of time capsule which moves through history while denying its existence. By creating the illusion of the immutability of the status quo costume helps traditional societies to nip in the bud the threat of change by denying it its reality. . . Within a traditional community, costume does not change simply because it cannot be perceived to have changed.’ p.123 ‘While the defining characteristics of costume are regional variability and ‘timelessness’, fashion is characterised by perpetual, restless change and by regional uniformity. If a costume could be described as an advertisement for the status quo, fashion is an advertisement for change and progress. By perpetually substituting this year’s ‘new look’ for last year’s ‘new look’ (which has become tarnished by time), fashion defines ‘seasons’ and thereby creates the impression of change. While costume aims to be fixed or frozen in time (and thereby to reify a steady state system of time perception), fashion is a relentless march forward - of style and, by implication, of time itself. (Which is, of course, just as much a fiction as costume’s ‘timeless’ immutability.) Both costume and fashion are systems of signification but, at least on one level of analysis, they each express very different kinds of information. Whereas costume says where an individual is located sociologically (e.g. in village A, in the upper class, in the category of widows, etc.), fashion says what a person’s position is in linear-progressive time (behind the time/now/ahead of the times). However, because these meanings carry positive or negative social connotations for the would-be fashionable they also, by implication, define an individual’s place in social space.’ p.124 ‘This is how the fashion system functions semiologically: each signifier (the ‘new look’ of 1986, 87, 88, etc.) has no ‘natural’ symbolic meaning. Indeed, each such signifier on its own has no meaning at all. It is only when one ‘look’ is contrasted with others which have come before or after it in fashion time that its meaning (behind the time/now/ahead of the time) becomes apparent. For example, if in 1988 black garments are out and flower print garments are in this cannot be taken to mean anything other than that this difference of colour and pattern is a device to signal change at a time when other parameters of style such as cut or skirt length have been ‘used up’ in order to effect style change in previous years. Flower prints do not, in the context of the fashion system, signify anything other than the fact of fashion change itself (of which they are an arbitrary sign). Within the fashion system, differences of colour, pattern, cut, etc., have no more meaning than do the letters of a linguistic alphabet (e.g. the letter ‘a’ in ‘cape’ and the letter ‘o’ in ‘cope’ are only arbitrary devices of differentiation). In 1988 - within the fashion system - the only meaning which can be attached to a black blouse is old-fashioned and the only significance of a flower-print blouse is fashionable. p.124 ‘The different characteristics of costume and fashion as semiotic systems are important because they point to the different kind of relationship which each has to the society within which it operates. A costume system is always directly and symbolically linked to its socio-cultural environment such that social facts > culture > costume styles. Thus the social system expresses itself directly and ‘naturally’ in the style of its costume. In a sense, therefore, ‘Our Costume’ is the signifier of ‘Our Society’, In fashion, on the other hand, there is no immediate, intrinsic or ‘natural’ correlation between social history and fashion history. Flower prints to not signify that 1988 is socio-culturally a brighter, more colourful or flowery year than 1987. Their meaning is only that 1988 is a different year from 1987. The Chairman Mao jacket of the 1970s did not signify communistic trends in Western society. The only ‘natural’ symbol to be found in fashion is that of the fashion system itself taken as a whole. Its unending stylistic change - taken together - are a ’natural’ symbol of time as change. (And this conceptualisation of time is itself an expression of the phenomenon of social mobility.) It must be emphasised again, however, that this correspondence (social mobility > lineal-progressive time > fashion) refers only to fashion as a total system: the individual phonemes of the fashion system (‘this year’s look’) are meaningless pieces of a larger systemic jigsaw.’ p. 125 ‘Modernism - this new way of seeing history - opened the door onto a brave new world and brought radical innovations to the arts and, most of all, to the art of decorating and clothing the human body. I am not here referring simply to particular styles of dress, but rather to a system - a machine, if you will - for the perpetual production of new styles. Whereas in feudal and other traditional socio-cultural systems new styles of dress were suspect and devalued until they could be given a patina of ‘oldness’ and slowly incorporated into traditional costume, fashion rejoiced in novelty. The social mobility of the rising bourgeoisie was replicated, expressed and celebrated in fashion’s stylistic mobility and that which was new and different was afford greater value simply because it was new and different. p.127 ‘Although we are generally inclined to dismiss Punks, Skinheads, Teddy Boys, Rockers, Bikers, Hippies, Psychedelics, Rockabillies, Gothics and their distinctive styles of dress and adornment as ‘fads’, this is a misinterpretation of the phenomenon. Each such ‘cult’ is, in fact, a viable social and cultural entity and the attire of each such group is a traditional costume rather than a capricious fashion. . . Like those who belong to tribal and peasant societies, the members of Western style groups, by means of the time capsule which is costume, seek to preserve their socio-cultural status quo ‘forever’. (Whether they succeed in this project is, of course, another matter.) Although fashion has periodically copied and recontextualized the costume of these Western style groups (e.g., Zandra Rhodes’ ripped and safety-pinned design of 1977/8), those who are actually of these groups deplore such fashionialization and trivialization of their costumes. Within the boundaries of these style groups themselves there is no such thing as ‘this year’s Punk look’ or the latest thing in Biker gear.’ p.130 ‘As in the case of traditional tribal and peasant communities, style groups’ costumes are symbolic and their meaning is the culture, values and beliefs of those who wear them. By means of such a semiotics of attire and adornment the members of style groups can advertise the most fundamental beliefs and values of their culture to each other and to the rest of us. While the clothing and decorations of the would-be fashionable are arbitrary signs which generate meaning (ahead of the times/now/behind the times) only in relationship to fashion history, the costumes of Western style groups (like those of most tribal and peasant peoples) are meaningful in and of themselves and they signify symbolically and ‘naturally’. Because they are not arbitrary signs, these costume symbols are not interchangeable - thus it would be semiologically and ideologically inappropriate for Hippies to dress as Punks or vice versa. And because such costumes are ‘natural’ symbols, they constitute a direct, visible expression of the cultural system of those who wear them. In a sense, therefore, Punk costume is Punk culture and Hippy costume is Hippy culture etc. p.132 ‘The 60s were a period when virtually everyone perceived themselves to be members of some enormous, ever expanding and ever rising bourgeoisie. Everyone, in other words, had great expectations. The vast majority believed that they had prospects and they welcomed change as the doorway which lead to a sunny, sci-fi future. Standing still, looking back, putting up with the status quo was frowned upon. Ever more rapid fashion changes symbolically celebrated the desirability of social change and progress. A particular style of garment was, therefore, either old-fashioned, in fashion or avant garde and there was no room in this system for alternatives. Because style was completely defined by its temporal dimension, it was uniform and easily recognisable (by the public as well as by fashion journalists) as the fashion. In the 1980s things appear to be very different. Instead of embracing the futuristic we embrace post-modern styles which look back with affection rather than anger or superiority and which unashamedly salutes that which used to be seen as passé. This may not (in so far as dated styles are deliberately re-contextualized) be a straightforward traditionalism but its certainly a world away from the approach on the 60s which labelled as suspect anything whatsoever which was tainted by time and therefore not ‘modern’. Clearly the 1980s are a whole new ball game. I cannot claim to know the true cause of the post-modern world view, but it is easy to see that it has had a profound effect upon fashion’s previous dictatorship of style. Today, just as in the 60s, fashion designers launch their new collections and each season fashion journalists dutifully report that this year’s colour are such and such, this year’s hem length is such and such, and so forth. On the surface it all seems like business as usual, but closer inspection suggests that something very different is going on. Namely, the stylistic differences from one designer to the next are more pronounced than are the generic differences from one year to the next. Indeed, it is very difficult to find any common denominator which effectively summarises this yearly fluctuation. My point is simply that in the 1980s yearly fluctuations are not as distinctive as are the ‘timeless’ signature styles of particular designers. And although fashion journalists may each year make valiant (if misguided) attempts to neatly summarise the themes, colours, hemlengths, etc., of that season, this has clearly become a meaningless exercise. Whereas in the 60s, ‘this year’s colours’ might have been limited to two or three per season, we are now given a list as long as your arm which takes in practically every conceivable shade and hue (and then, as we read on, we discover that ‘of course’ X, Y, and Z are continuing to buck the trends by using some other colour which managed to slip through the long list which the journalist provided at the start). In the 1980s it is the differences from one designer to the next which are important, while yearly fluctuations are no longer as marked or significant as they were in, for example, the 60s when one really could pinpoint the common denominator of a given season’s direction. In glossing over the difference between different designers, journalists are obscuring the fact that large segments of the so-called ‘Fashion Industry’ are no longer engaged in the business of producing fashion in a strict sense of the word.’ pp.136-137


STYLE SURFING ‘The 1980s witnessed a dramatic change in our attitude towards change - and therefore towards fashion. Suddenly, to describe someone as ‘trendy’ was a put-down rather than a complement. Suddenly, anyone who reflexively jumped on the latest bandwagon - throwing out anything in navy blue because Vogue said that hot pink was in - was branded a ‘fashion victim’. Suddenly, someone who only a few years before would scramble to keep up with/ahead of the trends would boast, ‘I’ve had this for ages’. Suddenly, everyone in the know wanted ‘timeless classics’ - be they an undatable Jean Muir black cocktail dress or a pair of ‘original’ Levi’s 501s to be worn with ‘original’ Doc Martins boots and an ‘original’ Perfecto black leather jacket as worn by Marlon Brando in The Wild One. In other words, fashion went out of fashion. Not that the ‘Fashion Industry’ readily acknowledged this shift in its objectives and function. The fashion journalists flocking to Paris, Milan, London and New York still, by and large, sought to discern the latest single ‘direction’. But as the difference between designers became more and more pronounced - most evolving a distinctive and little-changing ‘signature style’ - the idea became increasingly more difficult to sustain. What had happened was that the defining feature of dress had shifted from fashion, with its emphasis on constant change and singular ‘direction’, to style, with its emphasis on constancy and pluralistic diversity. (None of which, of course, made the clothing industry or designers any less important. Far from it. All that had changed was the function of their product: now increasingly defining where you were - your lifestyle, what tribe you belonged to - rather than when you were - that is, whether you were ahead of or behind the times.) pp. 25,27, 28 ‘To jumpcut directly from the determined march of fashion to the polymorphous perversity of post-modern style is to miss out an important direction in the contemporary history of appearance - a direction that might best be characterised as Pre-Modern. To put it in cinematic terms, before Blade Runner came The Wild One, with its vision of a world that is not fragmented into personalised parody but instead splintered into stylistically distinctive tribe-like gangs. The film is misnamed: these are wild ones, riding and dressing in unison, a collective that is more than the sum of its parts. It isn’t just the classic timelessness of the style (the fact that one can still find Bikers dressing almost identically to those of the late 1940s who are depicted in the film), but also the social functions of such dress (the way in which it signal ‘We’ rather than ‘I’) that identifies it as style rather than fashion. Much more ancient that fashion, this tribal approach to appearance undoubtedly dates back to the earliest days of human existence.’ p. 37 ‘By nature a tribal species, we increasingly find ourselves either individualised, or homogenised, undifferentiated and without a clear sense of community. To fill the vacuum we have increasingly used style differences (of furniture, cars, interior decor, kitchens and cuisine, as well as appearance) as a marker of ‘people like us’ (PLU have/don’t have strip-pine kitchens, PLU eat/don’t eat sushi, PLU wear/don’t wear Levi’s 501s.) Picking up on an increasingly subtle and sophisticated semiotics of style - an encoding of deep, rich meaning within surface appearances, a dialectics of design - we have found a new way of cross-cutting the undifferentiated social mass to create a sense of community. Thus, while my grandparents would have been wary of inviting a non-WASP to dinner (but I would not), I would feel wary of inviting someone who wears a shell suit, drives a Suzuki jeep, eats chips with curry or has a home furnished throughout in Laura Ashley. (And if I just offended some of you, then this proves my point.)’ pp. 43, 44, 45 ‘The present has become a remake of the past. (And thus, needless to say, ‘youthful rebellion’ becomes a most unlikely event - if not a complete contradiction in terms.) This process of the snake eating its own tail - this recycling of our culture in general and of youth culture in particular - has begot endless ‘revivals’ and ‘retro’ cults. The former are especially prevalent within the world of (sic) ‘fashion’, where ‘The Mods Are Back’ or ‘The Return of Punk’ alternates with nostalgic revivals of entire decades in quick succession. It is in the nature of fashion (arguably it is its ‘job’) to undermine original meaning - transubstantiating ethnic styles, military uniforms, fetishistic perversity or the visual identity of youthful styletribes into ‘just fashion’. . . . Fashion has reduced whole decades - the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s - to a visual shorthand that possesses no historical roots: aesthetic codes bereft of (or, to think positively, set free from) actual, substantive events, decoupled from both time and place. In fashion’s version of history, only fashion existed previously. Perhaps this was always so. But what really is remarkable is the extraordinary extent to which fashion today exists and moves ‘forward’ by recycling itself. Remarkable because, in doing so, it defines itself as anti-fashion - blatantly undermining its intrinsic message of perpetual novelty and progress. By its own rules, yesterday’s fashions should be a worthless as yesterday’s newspapers. Yet by its own practice, ‘The Future’ is an edifice built of old, long-discarded bricks.’ pp.75-6




In the beginning there was style. Invented by our earliest ancestors some 100,000 years ago, this approach to transforming appearance served to mark out the boundaries of each tribe, to indicate differences of role and status within the group and to emphasise the unchanging continuity of traditional ways of life. Then, in the Renaissance with the birth of modernism, fashion was born - demonstrating and celebrating constant change and progress. In the last few decades, however, fashion has gone out of fashion and style has re-emerged as the dominant force but, now, with the emphasis upon individual, personal expression.