A Remark
I have inevitably realized, throughout my research, that most writers who think about art in relation to fashion tend to be men, while the artists who make work about this relationship tend to be women. I am not particularly interested in thinking in a gendered manner, but this fact is hard to ignore. Throughout time, men have possessed language, and women have been the figuration of that lexicon. What exists within women has been verbalized by men.
When it comes to culture, this division tends to be created from above. Many writers I refer to in this text seem to look at mass culture and fashion in a hyper-analytical manner. There is a certain masculine fear that thinking extensively about a topic like fashion might come close to an indulgent act. This fear manifests in a mode of thinking that is solely an intellectual activity, a thought process that will never actualize itself. I think that the indulgence in culture associated with queerness and femininity is still far from being seen as the intellectual exercise that it is. It is not a form of thought that derives from theorizing and flattening culture to make it more understandable and logical. It is a form of thought that comes from taking and receiving culture in an imaginative manner.
This is not to say that there are no female opponents to fashion. Many feminist scholars have been against fashion and the fashionable. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote: “An air of fashion, which is but a badge of slavery (…) which many young people are so eager to attain, always strikes me like the studied attitudes of some modern prints, copied with tasteless servility after the antique.”[1] Feminist readings of fashion have long been a form of resistance against fashion as a device that distracts women from their true intellectual potential, confining them to social inferiority. “Fashion works to intensify self-absorption and thereby reduces the social, cultural and intellectual horizons of women.”[2]
Wollstonecraft first defended the rights of men in response to Burke’s pamphlet on the French Revolution, then, in 1792, turned to the rights of women. It is one of the key texts of modern feminist thought. However, in the post-modern interpretation, fashion can be seen as a tool for breaking down identity and gender. Fashion can be used to tickle stereotypes and gender boundaries. The contemporary artificiality of fashion makes this possible. The preoccupation with culture, instead of nature, liberates women from the antiquated ideas of beauty and self-presentation. In fact, fashion has always been the most obvious expression of social change. If you were shown a fashion magazine from one hundred years ago, it would probably offer a much more insightful representation of that time than a novel written in the same year.
Writer Susan Sontag is a great example of a thinker who surpasses the purely theoretical framework in subversive ways, ways that seem to reflect the time and culture she is writing about. In her famous essay “Notes on Camp”, Sontag creates a very complete definition of camp by structuring the work as a list, filled with numbered bullet points.[3] Each number helps to create the idea of camp, which is neither strict nor obedient. For instance, number 4 states “Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp:”. Sontag mentions “Swan Lake”, or “Bellini’s operas”, or “stag movies seen without lust”. This list is, in fact, random. There is no structured development of an argument. However, it proves to be one of the most elaborate formal and textual attempts at “theorizing” the cultural phenomenon that is camp. It is a brilliant example of a linguistic piece that aims to define culture in some way.
Camp as a sensibility, distinct from an idea, as Sontag puts it, exists precisely in the realm of visual attunement that a mood board requires. Camp, in its essence, is the love for the unnatural, the artificial and the exaggerated. The visual transformation of an image is essentially an exaggeration of its parts. In many ways, Sontag´s way of thinking about camp is the way I think about fashion (with lowercase f). I am engulfed by a fascination that simultaneously offends me. Sontag herself is strongly drawn to and conflicted by campiness, she claims that this is why she can talk about it, as “it requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion”.[4]
Georg Simmel was a man who was interested and invested in women’s rights, having written essays on suffrage, but who also complained that women should not be allowed in his classes, as their bright, colourful dresses distracted him from his intense and didactic teaching. He said, “I prefer when the auditorium is as colourless and as indifferent as possible. The dual form of appearance and bright clothes disturbs me.”[5]
Here, Simmel fits into the long lineage of male writers and creatives who reflected on the fact that clothes, and therefore fashion, distract from the greater concentration on other, more important, intellectual activities. The masculine indifference to fashion and the aestheticization of the self is a cliché that remains true today. In 1947, Bernard Rudofsky wrote, “The artist who felt that his urge for expression should not be limited by tradition, and freely depicted human hair as blue and white skin as yellow, has a counterpart in the fashionable woman who with equal creative freedom uses the newly available cosmetics to dye her hair blue and to paint her face yellow.”[6]
Steve Jobs’ famous uniform was composed of blue 501 Levi’s jeans, a black Issey Miyake turtleneck, and a pair of New Balance 992 sneakers (image 57). The male genius cannot think about clothes because he must think of the most important things in the world, such as the iPhone. This cliché presents itself as complete indifference to fashion, yet it clearly operates under its powerful signals. Not caring about fashion is still a way of partaking in it.
Job’s uniform signals practicality, consistency and normality. His banal and bland choice of dress aims to dissociate his persona from the typical billionaire. He clearly did not want to come off as a Wall Street billionaire. Instead, his clothes make him look like a normal guy who just, almost by coincidence, made a lot of money. This look paved the way for the tech-billionaire look we know today, the basic, casual, UNIQLO, evil kind of look. This is an example that demonstrates how clothes acquire social and political meaning. Communicating intellectual seriousness, while refusing fashion itself, becomes one of its most effective styles. Meaning is manufactured by representation.
[1] A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, London: J. Johnson, 1792, 220
[2] After a Fashion, Joanne Finkelstein, Melbourne University Press, Australia, 1996, 56
[3] Notes on “Camp”, Susan Sontag, 1964, 2-3
[4] Ibid., 1
[5] Frisby, George Simmel, 1981 (sourced Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorist (second edition), Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (Anthology Editors), Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025)
[6] Are Clothes Modern? Bernard Rudofsky, Publisher. P. Theobold, 1947, 54