"I turned myself
into the fiction of myself to such an extent that any
natural feeling that I
have, of course, from the moment I'm born,
becomes a feeling of
imagination... I stripped off my own being to
such an extent that existing
means dressing up . Only
when I'm
disguised am I really myself."
-
Fernando Pessoa. (emphasis added)
Fashion is the ultimate
medium, the medium without content that is read to contain multitudes of
identities. This medium is always the message, and does not pretend to
be otherwise. When fashion talks, it always talks about itself: vintage,
retro, trompe l'oile, couture. The way that fashion is read, however, inscribes
style onto the body in a creation of identity.
Fashion is an aesthetic technology of the body. It is an extension
of the skin, and also an autoamputation of numerous identities. The
look of the body, its ability to function and its own basic functions
are altered by what the body is wearing and how the body wears it/extends
itself. Fashion photography defamiliarizes the body and has the ability
to amputate limbs (often to show the limbs fulfilling their true purpose:
to carry a shoe, to show a glove). High fashion and couture (when it, as
it so often does, represents androgyny, camp, unusual gender performances,
etc) is not drag but an amputation of gender in which identity radically
shifts with what one decides to wear each morning. Fashion is both a revision
of the body and a performance (the film Paris is Burning to shows
how fashion performs not only gender, but race and class), and I will use
its liminal nature to show how performance revises the body. By always-already
performing, we are always-already cyborgs.
But what is the difference between
clothing and fashion? It could said that clothing encompasses fashion
(there exists unfashionable clothing, or ‘mere clothes'), or the opposite: fashion (or to be fashionable) can
also include ways of walking, talking, eating, smoking a cigarette, and
most importantly the choice of clothing and manner in which clothing is
assembled. Fashion carries the mark of both personal style/identity and
the unraveling (or explosion?) of those identities. Fashion (in the sense
of what is ‘fashionable,' or Good Fashion) carries the mark of coolness.
Coolness and personal style define the body, making the inner (mind)
outer. It emphasizes surface, makes the private into the public and
back again. It is one of the manners in which the public/private
citizen becomes a cyborg citizen: we often can tell politics or musical
taste from style, and we can be politically surprised by a relevant
disjunct in this expectation. When clothing extends the body, what
is the implication to this extension being/looking cool? I'll examine
McLuhan's Narcissus story (gadget fetishism), the science fictionalized
discourse in Haraway, and Baudrillard's ideas about seduction.
Other topics
that could be covered, though I cannot cover them all... The “internal” implications
of coolness (taste, theory), appropriation (fashion colonialism;
pertains esp. to race performance), nativism, the fashion icon, and sexuality/sexual
attraction.
The scope of this project is obviously large, larger than
I have even expressed in this proposal. I will need to discuss the limits
and shape of the paper in office hours, and then the sequence of thoughts/events
will become more logical.
Sources I will cite: Haraway, Vogue , Marshall McLuhan, the film
Paris is Burning, Nylon , Baudrillard, Japanese street fashion
magazines, Butler, the film A Notebook on Clothes and Cities (Wim
Wenders's documentary on Yohji Yamamoto - which I will hopefully
find). &more.
A few books that I have found on the library website look good; I
will have to check them out and see what I can use.
I am also planning,
if it is okay, to turn in a small scrapbook of images that I will cite
in the paper. In keeping with the theme, the book will most definitely
look fashionable.