Fashion as Cultural Translation: Signs, Images, Narratives

By Patrizia Calefato

The book highlights how the signs of fashion showcase stories, hybridations, forms of feeling, from the classics of fashion in cinema, to fashion as cultural tradition in the global world, to digital media. Based on a strong socio-semiotic method (Barthes, The Language of Fashion is the main reference), the book crosses some of the main aspects of the contemporary culture of the clothed body: from time and space, to gender, to fashion as cultural translation, to the narratives included in the media convergence of our age. According to Jurji Lotman, fashion introduces the dynamic principle into seemingly inert spheres of the everyday. Fashion’s unexpected function of overturning received meaning is conveyed through its collocation within the dynamic storehouse of what Lotman calls the “sphere of the unpredictable.” In this horizon, the concept of fashion as a worldly system of sense (Benjamin) generates different “worlds” through its signs. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785272448

Book preview

Fashion as Cultural Translation

Signs, Images, Narratives

Fashion as Cultural Translation

Signs, Images, Narratives

Patrizia Calefato

English translation from the original Italian manuscript by Alessandro Bucci

Alessandro Bucci

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Patrizia Calefato 2021

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952921

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-242-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-242-X (Hbk)

Fashion as art in Culture, by Jacques Weyers. Fashion Editor: Chris Viljoen.

Shot in Durban, South Africa.

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Fashion as Cultural Translation in the Hyperconnected World

Supplement to the Introduction: Fashion, the Hyperconnected World and Coronavirus

1.Time

History and Memory

Reuse, Recycle

Timeless Classics

Patchwork and Waste

2.Spaces

Fashion and the City

The Street

Fashionscapes

Fashion Cities: Fashion in Cities

Fashion and Architecture

Fluid Cities

3.Fashion as Cultural Tradition: Italian Style

Signs and Atmospheres of the Italian Style

Mass Fashion

Italian Classics

Media and Globalisation

The New Wave

Luxury and Ethics

4.Fashion as Cultural Translation

Visual Culture and Cultural Translation

Orientalisms

South

Hijab

5.Clothed Bodies

Clothed in Signs

Body, Fashion, Gender

Queer

From Stereotype to Art

The Skin and Cosmetic Surgery

Models, Anorexia and the Limits of the Body

6.The Body as Text

Language and Fashion: From the Name of God to the Power of Brands

The T-Shirt

The Stolen Letter

Forms of Writing on the Clothed Body: The Tattoo

Rites, Fashions, Imagery

Permanent Modifications of the body

7.Humans and Beyond

Porn Fashion

Animalier Spirits

Zoo Fashion

Food

8.Fashion and the ‘Second Nature’

Nature and Myth

Organic and Inorganic

Prosthetics

The Hand and the Machine

Technology and Well-being

9.Fashion, Communication and Converging Media

The Origins of Fashion Journalism

Fashion Magazine, Women’s Writing and Photography

Twentieth-Century Magazines: Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Beyond

Beyond Printed Paper: Fashion on the Radio, TV and in Cinema

Fashion Magazines and Fashion Articles

Web Journalism and Converging Television

10.Fashion Narratives in Visual Culture

Between History and Stories

Hats

Sunglasses

Colours and Politics

White/Black

Conclusions: Fashion as an Idea about the Future

References

Index

INTRODUCTION: FASHION AS CULTURAL TRANSLATION IN THE HYPERCONNECTED WORLD

In his book Modernity at Large (1996), Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai introduces an interesting conceptualisation of fashion wherein he describes it as an essential notion to understand forms of consumption, duration and history from an anthropological and sociological perspective. Appadurai observes:

In general, all socially organized forms of consumption seem to revolve around some combination of the following three patterns: interdiction, sumptuary law, and fashion. (Appadurai 1996, 71)

By using terms such as ‘interdiction’ and ‘sumptuary law’,¹ Appadurai refers to forms of restriction of consumption, including taboos, duties and bans which many societies have coded in their written laws. Fashion is instead perceived as the model of forms of consumption – extended from the perspective of both quality and quantity – which pertain primarily (albeit not exclusively) to the field of clothing and which activate – as Appadurai observes through Mauss’s words – ‘techniques of the body’ (Ibid., 67). Thus, the ‘generalized shift from the reign of sumptuary law to the reign of fashion’(72) represents that ‘cluster of events’ which Appadurai defines a ‘consumer revolution’. This revolution has taken place in many different societies at different times and under different historical circumstances. These conjunctures are not tied exclusively to the model which prevails in Europe; instead, they are engendered within a ‘multiplication of scenarios’, where ‘the rest of the world will not simply be seen as repeating, or imitating, the conjunctural precedents of England or France’ (73).

Why do I believe that Appadurai’s vision is relevant to understand fashion as a form of cultural translation? Of course, it is rather limiting to look at fashion only within the sphere of consumption, especially today, as Appadurai himself seems to imply when he writes that ‘the idea of consumer revolution is itself in some ways inadequate to the electronic present’ (72) and we will find out in the following chapters. However, while I keep this limitation in mind, and while I look at this issue 25 years after Modernity at Large was published, what I consider essential in Appadurai’s understanding is the global vision of fashion as a phenomenon which cannot be merely ‘analysed’ within different social scenarios and culture, but as one which instils the very notion of culture with pluralism and complexity. In other words, the object – or the system – of fashion mobilises an articulate and mobile disciplinary gaze.

Since its origins in the last decades of the twentieth century, fashion theory – upon whose interdisciplinary methodology this book is founded – has questioned the genealogy of the forms taken by the clothed body in different eras and different places of the world, as well as the cultural, social and economic processes by which those forms fully affirm themselves as ‘fashion’. I am here using the term ‘genealogy’ in the sense that Michel Foucault developed in his 1961 essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, where he gives genealogy the task to ‘record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality’ and to ‘seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history’ (Foucault 1977, 139).

This definition can be juxtaposed to Appadurai’s definition, which establishes a relation between genealogy and history:

History leads you outward, to link patterns of changes to increasingly larger universes of interaction, genealogy leads you inward, toward cultural dispositions and styles that might be stubbornly embedded both in local institutions and in the history of the local habitus. (1996, 74)

Fashion is a system wherein social roles, models of the imagination, figures of the body, narratives and sentient forms originate from objects, materials and signs which are usually considered ephemeral or frivolous: clothes, accessories, body decorations and make-up. These elements might seem far from the ‘great discourses’ of history, but they involve narratives which interweave and interpret the small and the large, external and internal, local and global.

Fashion theory goes beyond the history of clothing by looking at fashion from different perspectives: as popular culture, as an essential component of daily life, as a cultural industry, as a creative process, as a system for the representation of taste and as common sense. Furthermore, the theoretical pledge of fashion theory is to deconstruct the universalistic and Eurocentric canons in the light of both cultural and gender studies as well as in the light of poststructural and postcolonial critique (Calefato 2003). This pledge emerges in the critique to the dominating narrative which considers fashion a typical phenomenon only within Western societies, which are metaphorically represented by the traditional European fashion capitals between the end of the nineteenth century and mid-twentieth-century London and Paris. The deconstruction of Appadurai’s tautological question ‘Why did the history of Europe (or England) happen only in Europe (or England)?’ (1996, 72) is still very relevant today, and the field of fashion provides an emblematic cross-section.

While the interconnected world increasingly highlights the necessity to take a global perspective in every field of knowledge, we are still experiencing the effects of a dominating narrative based on the idea of an alleged hierarchical difference between ‘societies that have fashion’ and societies that might only have ‘traditional costumes’. For example, in keeping with stereotypes which are rooted deep within social discourses, the miniskirt is automatically seen as a sign of fashion: it was invented in London in the 1960s, so there is no doubt about it. Instead, by virtue of an idea of ‘culture’ understood as an unchangeable identitarian category, a chador is usually defined as a sign of ‘traditional costume’, regardless of how the functions of this garment change in relation to fashion, of the potential semiotic contaminations within which it is used, or the different motivations of its wearers.

I believe this conception to be very similar to one loved by twentieth-century anthropologists, which created a hierarchic distinction between societies that already had writing and those that did not. To briefly expand on this comparison I am going to consider Of Grammatology, which includes the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s critique of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s study of some of the populations that he analysed, including Brazil’s Nambikwara, whom the French anthropologist defined as ‘societies with no writing’. According to Derrida, this definition corresponds to ‘no reality or concept’ (2016, 118). Instead, it embeds an ethnocentric prejudice which classifies as ‘writing’ solely what ‘we’ understand as such, namely, the transcription and linear annotation of orality. Derrida observes that:

If one stops understanding writing in its narrow sense of linear and phonetic notation, one should be able to say that all societies capable of producing, that is to say of obliterating, their proper names, and of playing classificatory differences, practice writing in general. (Derrida 2016, 118)

By following Derrida, I here understand the erasure of the name as the a priori act through which a society translates into signs its vision of the world. As a matter of fact, since signs substitute one another, they are always placed ‘under erasure’, as Gayatri Spivak suggests in her introduction of Derrida’s translation:

Signs will always lead to signs, one substituting the other (playfully, since ‘sign’ is under erasure) as signifier and signified in turn. (2016, xxxviii)

On the grounds of this interpretation, I understand writing as the inscription of the human body in space and time in the form of signs which are articulated through ‘classificatory differences’ established within an open semiotic network. The traces of this inscription can be very different, and they can emerge in various forms of expression, for example, through singing, dancing, cooking and, more relevantly here, through clothes. The clothed body is always a ‘written’ body – marked and carved. In turn, it ‘writes’ (that is to say, it produces) society’s imagery and the visual culture. The signs of the clothed body give life to the socio-semiotic system which we call fashion at the moment when the imitation–innovation mechanism, described famously by Simmel (1904), manifests itself in a social formation and takes increasingly larger dimensions. As we have seen, this mechanism forms the basis of what Appadurai identifies as the passage of society from sumptuary law to the society of fashion. This passage actualises itself not merely in relation to consumption, but rather, and more importantly, depending on the possibility of the signs of the clothed body to be mechanically (and technologically) reproduced for an increasingly large number of social subjects.

As the language of the signs of the body, fashion is in constant translation. In using the notion of ‘translation’, I am transferring on the plane of the language of the body (which is not only a verbal language) Walter Benjamin’s idea of translation as a practice which turns ‘the foreignness of languages’ into an opportunity to stretch ‘into a higher and purer linguistic air’. In Benjamin’s vision, this area is never fully reached. However, it represents a ‘nucleus’ which ‘is best defined as the element that does not lend itself to translation’, namely, ‘which goes beyond transmittal of subject matter’ (1996, 257).

In using this specific essay by Benjamin, I don’t agree with its interpretation as a text in which the German philosopher theorised the impossibility to translate, precisely because, on the contrary, he valorised translation, perceiving it as the constant movement towards something which pertains to language, while also not being primarily ascribable to mere communication. Language itself, by definition, does not primarily aim to ‘communicate’. It is instead a ‘modelling device of the world’ (Petrilli and Ponzio 2011, 311) through signs, both verbal and non-verbal. Similarly, the not (only) verbal language of fashion translates, interprets and hybridises the body and bodies. At the origin of the most mass-based and ‘prêt-à-porter’ modalities of regulating our ways of dressing in keeping with the seriality of the fashion image, there is an archetypical and carnivalesque gesture which enables us to disguise, ‘write’ and ‘translate’ the body. Our body becomes a body ‘for others’, as well as for ourselves as if we were others. It is a deeply cheerful and tasteful gesture, which comprises – besides the pleasure of disguising – the sensual enjoyment and the kinaesthetic play of the body and among bodies.

Thus, the understanding of fashion as cultural translation represents in our epoch a moment when different languages align, from the language of technology to the language of cinema, from literary to musical language, from the language of urban roads to that of uniforms and professions. Since the 1990s, fashion theory has emphasised its interest for the dialectic between the global and the local dimension of fashion as a cultural, productive and symbolic system. Thus, we have witnessed a multiplication of research outputs inspired by the critique of Orientalism in fashion, which, by following Said (1978) is understood as the projection of cultural stereotypes by Eurocentric thought on ‘non-Western’ societies. Symbolically, this theoretical awareness came in 1997, the year when the journal Fashion Theory was first published. This event identified the origin of an autonomous international field of research, with regard to both the history of costume and the vast area of cultural studies, of which fashion theory is an essential part (Calefato and Breward 2018; Kaiser 2012).² More recently, fashion theory has enriched further the complexity of its field of research by considering the constant dialogue between global and micro-local dimensions, cultural heritage and innovation (Ling, Segre Reinach 2018). Adam Geczy, for example, has introduced the notion of ‘transorientalism’ in order to ‘get out of the more binary logic of Orient and Occident, as well as the opprobrium and guilt that subtends from the word Orient’ (Geczy 2019, 5).

Recently, this author (Calefato 2019) has used Vicki Karaminas’s notion of fashionscapes (Geczy and Karaminas 2012, p. 1984), drawing inspiration from the idea of the global cultural flows presented in Appadurai’s ‘scapes’ (see Chapter 2). This term sketches a vision of fashion in a process of continuous translation, which today has gone beyond itself, creating new landscapes, perspectives and territories, both real and imagined, made of physical and sign matter. Within these landscapes, perspectives and territories, clothed bodies reproduce themselves on a planetary scale. Talking about the ‘planet’ and the ‘globe’ is not a meaningless pursuit. As Spivak suggests in Death of a Discipline, globalisation ‘is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere’. Spivak continues by explaining that the planet, instead, ‘overwrites the globe’: ‘the planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan’ (2003, 72).

The media enables us to experience this planetary alterity in our daily lives fully. Our constant connection through social networks, the preponderant role of visual culture, the reduction of physical distances, and speed as the image of time are only some of the aspects which confirm that we are part of an era and an inhabited space that does not correspond to the ‘globe’ as a uniform model of social exchange, as Spivak reminds us. Fashion is not unfamiliar with this transformation of the planet. On the contrary, it influences this process in many ways.

The TV series The Expanse (2015–) is a suggestive metaphor to think about fashion as an aesthetic system and as a system of signs capable of sketching multiple hypothetical ‘future bodies’ even beyond our planet. Based on a literary series of the same name, which, as per latest updates, will comprise nine books by 2021 (Corey 2011–21), The Expanse depicts events which take place in the twenty-fourth century on an extraterrestrial expanse. In sci-fi literature, space is traditionally portrayed as a place where technology conjugates itself with alterity, the unexpected and difference. The series marks the interplanetary and ultra-human space and its own narrative with an essential component: the strong aesthetic connotation of the clothed body. All characters are strongly characterised by clothes, tattoos, hairstyles which define their class, social belonging and individual character: from the luxurious futuristic saris of the ONU Secretary-General Chrisjen Avasarala to the cyberpunk inspiration of belters to Martian uniforms.³ Cultural translation, subcultural styles, the contamination of languages and fashion: sci-fi visual culture thus engendered an ultra-planetary translation of the signs of the clothed body. The movements of people and languages, the mixture of different sign systems, the transcultural encounters constitute current planetary fashionscapes, and will maybe form – as is the case for the visionary imagery of The Expanse – future ultra- and alter-planetary landscapes.

Fashion is thus a form of visual culture which lives through signs. From classic and ‘evergreen’ objects – made famous by the cinema – to the images of digital media, fashion signs stage narratives, hybridisations and sentient forms. In this book, I show how the model of cultural translation, which fashion interprets, is based on a semiotic network which connects places, social practices and forms of imagination.

The first two chapters are devoted to the notions of time and space, from the perspective inspired by Walter Benjamin’s view of fashion as the ‘tiger’s leap’, from present to past and as a system whose narratives are shaped in a given space and construct spaces in turn, such as the nineteenth-century city of fluid landscapes of the contemporary world. Time and space are the categories within which the essential features of cultural identity are formed, along with the opportunity to understand fashion