Fashion Journalism by Sanda Miller & Peter McNeil

Author:Sanda Miller & Peter McNeil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Fashion theory: Do we need it?

The anthology edited by Malcolm Barnard (ed.), Fashion Theory: A Reader provides a valuable collection of texts by past and present authors whose writings were deemed to qualify as theoretical tools for the fashion researcher, starting with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Both of them provided two seminal methodologies (tools) of research for the fashion theorist that were related to the concept of “fetishism”; the former predicated of commodities and the latter analyzed as a pathological symptom defined by Freud as a fear of castration. By studying these two texts students not only gain unexpected insights into the hidden mechanisms that control fashion but they enable them to understand how to choose and apply a theoretical framework to their own case studies. As it happens, students are familiar with how commodities are fetishized at the expense of their bank accounts when a Prada bag is priced at thousands of pounds. They might not know that the mechanisms which contribute to this situation can be explained through what Marx calls the “quasi-mystical” character of the “product of labour as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity,” which you might understand as “branding,” but Marx calls it “fetishism”: “I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” (Marx, in Barnard, 2007: 348). “Fetishism” and fashion return in the context of eroticism and Barnard lists Sigmund Freud’s “Fetishism”; David Kunzle’s “The Special Historic and Psychological Role of Tight-Lacing” (MS dated 1977 and subsequent writings); and Valerie Steele’s Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power (Oxford University Press 1996), a subject to which she made a significant contribution over the years.

Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun also provide an anthology, but as its title indicates, their remit is wider, including topics as “Brief History of Modern fashion” (starting with the Enlightenment), “Fashion and Identity,” “The Geography of Dress,” “Politics of Fashion,” “Fashion and the Body,” “Fashion and Art,” “Fashion in the Media,” “From Haute couture to the Street,” “The Fashion Business,” and finally the “Future of Fashion.” Their imaginative and wide-ranging subject areas indicate the multiple ways in which fashion can be encountered and studied.

Only one of its eleven parts—Part II—is dedicated to “Fashion Theory” (pp. 77–120), consisting of an introduction contributed by Abby Lillethun, followed by six chapters—Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang: “The Power of Fashion,” Roland Barthes: “Written Clothing,” Grant McCracken: “The Fashion System,” “Joanne Entwistle”: “The Dressed Body,” Sandra Niessen: “Re-Orienting Fashion Theory” and Caroline Evans: “Fashion at the Edge,” some of which are extracts from books, as in the case of Roland Barthes’s chapter taken from his book, “The Fashion System” first published in 1967.

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