ONLINE DOSSIER: ANDREA ECKERSLEY, CAMERON DUFF »BODIES OF FASHION AND THE FASHIONING OF SUBJECTIVITY«
Abicare, Fiona. 2013. “Look”. httpss://www.sarahscoutpresents.com/exhibitions/62/works/image1203/
»Even though fashion has always been concerned with the body (see Hanson, 2007: 93–97), the formal study of clothing and the ‘fashion system’ has only rarely availed itself of the conceptual resources available in contemporary ‘body studies’ (Blackman and Featherstone, 2010: 1–3). Likewise, body studies have only rarely considered the specific role of clothing and fashion in the modulations of embodiment and subjectivity (see Paradis, 2012; Scott, 2010; Springgay and Truman, 2017).« (p.37)
»The point, we would argue, is that fashion is a collective achievement of encounters between bodies, human and nonhuman (Parkins, 2008: 502–505), such that analysis should move from what fashion is, to what fashion does in its encounters with bodies (see Ruggerone, 2017: 580–584).« (p.38)
»Across fashion studies, fashion and clothing are commonly read as manifestations of important social, cultural and political changes, for example, in gender relations and sexuality, in class, ethnic, national and/or religious identifications and subcultural involvement (Entwistle, 2015: 79– 85). Karen Hansen (2004: 369–370) argues that historically, clothing and dress have been analysed as representations of structural processes and phenomena, rendering clothing as ‘an accessory in symbolic, structural or semiotic explanations’. Far and away the most common aspect of this analysis has been interest in fashion as a semiotic index of changes in gendered and sexual identity, with scholars debating the extent to which changes in fashion lead such developments or merely reflect trends originating elsewhere (see also Hanson, 2007). This is the view that sees fashion either as an instrument of the identification and enforcement of gendered norms or as a measure of their disruption. Invoking the latter view, Francesca Granata (2017: 2) argues that the ‘bodies and subjects circulating within fashion at the turn of the millennium are undisciplined ones that upset gender and bodily norms and rules of propriety and beauty’. Susan Kaiser (2012: 21) notes how fashioned bodies are structured by ‘age, ethnicity, class, and sexuality in addition to perceptions of gender’, while Entwistle (2015: 172) argues that traditional gender tropes remain ‘perhaps the single most important factor in practices of dress in almost all social situations where dressed bodies meet’.« (p.39–40)
»Emphasising the significance of the former, Julie Hanson (2007: 99) notes how dress ‘operates as much through the body as the body operates through the manipulations of dress’, such that dress can be ‘personally and collectively invested with the power to evoke and invoke individual desires, fantasies and identifications’. Indeed, this is where greater dialogue between contemporary discussions of fashion and embodiment ought to yield the more promising insights, promoting unique understandings of the ways bodies are affected by fashion’s immediately felt materialities, along with the wider social, semiotic and discursive forces that inevitably accompany these encounters.« (p.41)
»The fashioned object has no logic without a body (Apter, 1995).« (p.42)
»Fashion garments are constantly acquiring and losing qualities, properties and associations in these encounters. Like Abicare’s play on the fashioned body encountering its own image, alongside the same outfit cast in acrylic resin, fashion is caught in an iterative relay between flat twodimensional representations, common to all media, and the threedimensional spaces of the living, moving, fashioned body (see also Blackman, 2019: xii–xvi). Fashion constantly moves back and forth across these dimensions, from the mirror and the smart phone screen to the movements of the fashioned body experiencing its own fashioning. This relay may be observed in everyday encounters with fashion, as one gets dressed, in the varied responses this dressed body invokes in others, and in the digital materialities that shape how fashion circulates in mediated forms. In these temporal encounters, fashion places the body in direct contact with affects and materials outside itself – fabric, matter, design, culture, signs, desires and contexts of all kinds – conveyed in the varying images by which fashion circulates in mediated forms (see Featherstone, 2010).« (p.44–46)
»Fashion is always located in this dual register of social and personal resonances, of the past encountering the present. How did this garment feel the last time it was worn? What happened on that occasion, in that encounter? What kind of person might wear this garment? Is it right for ‘me’? Rosie Findlay (2016: 81) writes movingly of the crowded subjectivities that attend individual garments, observing how the ‘material and the immaterial intertwine and co-create our being in the world in the everyday act of getting dressed’. This co-creation expresses a moment of subjectification, a realisation of identity, fraught with imagination, ‘affecting one’s sense of who one is as clothed …reshaping our embodied self by influencing and reconfiguring our experience of ourselves’ (Findlay, 2016: 81).« (p.47)
»Deleuze’s treatment of the encounter calls attention to fashion’s affective power, its propensity to transform bodies in their capacities to affect and be affected by the bodies (human and nonhuman) that they encounter (see also Massumi, 2002). This emphasis suggests that all encounters with fashion are felt and lived as an affective transition, however modest or intensive. For example, as a body encounters the materiality of a garment, its feel, silhouette, cut and fit, the desires and aversions it activates or responds to, the tastes it engenders, are all felt in a range of affective tones as the body is affected, however profoundly or subtly.« (p.49)
»In each case, encountering fashion involves a transmission between bodies, such as the body of the fabric, the body of the dress, the body of the wearer and the body of the space the body inhabits, its digital interfaces and supports (Smelik, 2015). These transmissions give social and material form to the co-constitution of subjectivity.« (p.49)
»Fashion, in its embodied coordination, anchors memory in the specificity of habit; I remember the last time I wore this jacket, and we bumped into our neighbour on the tram. I got blisters wearing these shoes for the first time. These are ‘my’ memories of my own ‘subjective’ experience, my own fashioned identity. Findlay (2016) endorses these aspects of memory and clothing, but also fashion’s capacity to project a body into an imagined future. This, for Findlay (2016: 85), is fashion’s affective power, its ‘capacity to transform who we are’ according to the affects and materialities that we associate with a particular garment. By ‘imagining ourselves being attired in the garment, we expect to experience ourselves differently when we wear it’ (Findlay, 2016: 85). Hanson (2007: 98) concurs, adding how dress “makes room” for the adoption of alternative capabilities and capacities’ as individual garments come to ‘literally appropriate the body of its wearer’ in practice, affect, desire and memory. Memory, indeed, ties the subject to its past, just as it prompts the subject to imagine a coherent future. In memory, the time of the past is transformed from the ‘immediate past of retention’, into the ‘reflexive past of representation, of reflected and reproduced particularity’ (Deleuze, 1994: 71). In and through this transformation, memory moves from simply retaining the past to reflexively representing it to and for a subject. Memory grounds the subject’s reflexivity and the forms of representation and recollection by which the ‘illusion’ of a relatively stable and temporally coherent subject/self is made to endure (see Widder, 2012: 43–46). We would argue with Findlay (2016) that the very materiality of clothing weaves its way into this process, participating in the constitution and reconstitution of subjectivity according to the habits, affects and memories it activates.« (p.51–52)
»What we have found at the heart of this dialogue is an emphasis on how these divergent material and social aspects are transformed into affective experience via a line of becoming (Deleuze, 1994). This is how the T-shirt can be transformed from rag to treasured favourite, depending on the contexts, affects and relations attending the encounters it participates in (see also Hanson, 2007).« (p.53–54)
»This is what we mean when we speak of the practices of subjectification that occur in encounters with fashion. These encounters evoke the affective assemblages by which the body is fashioned, as it becomes clothed and represented, signified and practiced. All of this happens in habit, memory and practice as bodies encounter fashion.« (p.56)
Eckersley, Andrea and Cameron Duff. 2020. “Bodies of Fashion and the Fashioning of Subjectivity” Body and Society. httpss://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/10.1177/1357034X20942805