Fashion Theory

The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

ISSN: 1362-704X (Print) 1751-7419 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfft20

El octavo arte: la moda en la sociedad

contemporánea

Noemí Pereira-Ares

To cite this article: Noemí Pereira-Ares (2018): El octavo arte: la moda en la sociedad
contemporánea, Fashion Theory, DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2018.1427890

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2018.1427890

Published online: 31 Jan 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 8

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfft20
Fashion Theory
DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2018.1427890
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Reviewed by
Noemí Pereira-Ares
Noemí Pereira-Ares is a re-
search fellow in the Department
of English and German Studies
at the University of Santiago
de Compostela, Spain. Her
research interests include
South Asian diaspora literature,
migrant literature(s) in English,
postcolonial, diaspora and
transcultural studies, fashion
theory and the sociological
study of dress in literature. She
is the author of Fashion, Dress
and Identity in South Asian
El octavo arte:
la moda en
la sociedad
contemporánea
El octavo arte: la moda en la sociedad contemporánea
José María Paz Gago (Hércules Ediciones, 2016)
In El octavo arte: la moda en la sociedad contemporánea [The Eighth Art:
Fashion in Contemporary Society], originally published in Spanish in 2016,
José María Paz Gago discusses fashion in its duality as both “art and in-
dustry” (26), forcefully stressing its “historical value and its consubstantial
aesthetic dimension” (31).1 As Paz Gago writes in the introduction, “fads
are fleeting, but fashion remains” (31). Fashion, he adds, has contributed
significantly to “the history of art and human culture,” as well as to “the
economic and social development of modern, democratic societies” (26).
2 Noemí Pereira-Ares
Diaspora Narratives: From the
Eighteenth Century to Monica
Ali, published by Palgrave
Macmillan in 2018. Email:
noemi.pereira@usc.es
This emphasis on the dual nature of fashion, as art and business, provides
the backbone for the analysis carried out in subsequent chapters, and it
is also foregrounded in the prologue, written by the prestigious fashion
designer Modesto Lomba. As Lomba states when paraphrasing the author,
El octavo arte considers fashion as a means of artistic expression, even
as a window on what Charles Pierre Baudelaire referred to as “the moral
attitude and aesthetic value of the time” (Baudelaire 1981, 391), without
however losing sight of the fact that fashion is also an industry and, as
such, it is ineludibly shaped by the rhythms of capitalism. By analyzing
fashion within the above-mentioned parameters and over more than two
centuries—from 1780 to the present—Paz Gago produces a book which
constitutes a pioneering work within fashion studies in Spanish, and one
which also adds far-reaching insights to fashion theory in general.
Conceptually well informed and coherently argued, El octavo arte
­situates itself at the intersection between studies on the fashion industry
(Ewing 2014; Steele 2000; White and Griffiths 2000) and the scattered lit-
erature on the crossovers between fashion and art (Mackrell 2005; Geczy
and Karaminas 2012). The author should be congratulated for manag-
ing to integrate these two narratives into a seamless whole, aptly demon-
strating the imbrications between both lines of inquiry. To this effect, Paz
Gago shies away from sticking to one particular methodological frame-
work and, displaying admirable erudition, he creates a book that operates
at the crossroads of epistemological domains, informed by the work of
many fashion practitioners, from the so-called “fashion classics” (Carter
2006) to contemporary scholars, and from semioticians, sociologists and
psychologists—i.e., Herbert Spencer, Georg Simmel, John Carl Flügel,
Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Lipovetsky, Umberto Eco—to writers such as
­Oscar Wilde, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Benito Pérez Galdós,
and Emilia Pardo Bazán, amongst others. What is more, El octavo arte
­examines fashion alongside a wide range of materials—from early fashion
periodicals to present-day blogs, and from literature to film, painting and
photography—additionally featuring original contributions by important
figures connected to the national and international sphere of fashion such
as Modesto Lomba, María Barros and Pascal Soury, amongst others. Par-
ticularly for those interested in the intersections of fashion and literature or
fashion and cinema, it is a pleasure to discover the plethora of literary and
film references that Paz Gago has woven into the fabric of this text. As a
result, the book under review here can also rightfully be said to contribute
to existing studies discussing fashion through and/or in relation to other
written and visual texts (Hollander 1993; McNeil, Karaminas, and Cole
2009; Hancock, Johnson-Woods, and Karaminas, 2013).
El octavo arte is divided into three chapters, ordered in chronologi-
cal progression, plus an introduction and afterword. The introduction
­pertinently unpacks key concepts and, whilst acknowledging the book’s
indebtedness to other thinkers, Paz Gago succeeds in laying bare its new
interventions in the field. The author devotes a substantial part of the in-
El octavo arte: la moda en la sociedad contemporánea 3

troduction to defining “fashion,” sagely moving from its utilitarian and

communicative functions to its artistic and aesthetic value. On top of this,
a further point is eloquently added: “fashion implies at the same time an
irresistible power of seduction” (11). Paz Gago thus takes in an argument
he first put forward in Moda e sedução [Fashion and Seduction] (2016),
another recent publication that builds productively on existing studies dis-
cussing the layers of meaning and mystery that dress adds to the body
(Entwistle 2005). The author’s expertise in semiotics also resounds strong-
ly in this excellent introduction, particularly when he theorizes fashion
branding. According to Paz Gago, we are currently witnessing a semiotic
twist whereby fashion has metamorphosed into brand names. Drawing on
Naomi Klein’s work (2002), he further contends that, more than products,
contemporary ­fashion brands produce signs. The brand name becomes
what he calls a “supericonema” (19), an integrative sign that has visual,
­sonorous, tactile and sensual properties, representing at once an identi-
ty and a product endowed with significations and values the consumer
identifies with. Always executed with a light touch, semiotic echoes also
­permeate Paz Gago’s discussion of the mutual interdependence between
fashion and communication. Like other scholars before him (Barnard
2002), Paz Gago acknowledges fashion as a communicative phenomenon
per se. However, he goes a step further and lights a torch for how essen-
tial the mass media are to any definition of fashion. For, as he argues,
fashion requires the mass media in order to circulate swiftly and effec-
tively, so much so that the birth of modern fashion coincided with the
appearance of the first illustrated fashion periodicals in pre-revolutionary
France, Le Cabinet des modes (1785–1786) being a prominent example
in this respect. What is more, throughout the book Paz Gago carries out
a comprehensive and wide-ranging analysis of the different media histori-
cally used for the dissemination of fashion—from early fashion periodicals
to cinema, television, and the Internet—and, in so doing, he convincingly
demonstrates how fashion has impacted on certain means of communica-
tion, and how audiovisual technologies—particularly in our current digital
era—have effected changes in the presentation as well as in the production
and consumption of fashion.
In the remainder of the book, Paz Gago goes to great lengths to craft
a narrative in which the historical development of the fashion business
is skillfully intertwined with a critical—at times even literary—explo-
ration of the artistic and aesthetic value of fashion over different peri-
ods. El octavo arte is not fashion history in conventional terms, and yet
the book does ­historicize the evolution of fashion in Western societies.
Over the three main chapters in the book, Paz Gago traces the growth
of the modern fashion industry from its infancy (1780–1880) to the
art-à-porter (1880–1930) and prêt-à-porter (1930–1980) phases and, fi-
nally, to the current trend-à-porter and net-à-porter era (1980–present).
With exquisite precision, the author captures changes in taste and style,
reviews sartorial disquisitions and contextualizes the creative output of
4 Noemí Pereira-Ares

leading figures on the fashion scene, from Charles Frederick Worth—the

founding father of haute couture—to contemporary bloggers and influ-
encers, via Paul Poiret, Coco Chanel, Cristóbel Balenciaga, Madame Grès,
Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Gianni Versace, Ágata Ruiz de la Prada,
John Galliano, Oscar de la Renta, and Carolina Herrera, amongst many
others. References to Japanese designers such as Kenzō Takada, Issey Mi-
yake, and Kansai Yamamoto also help to dispel the Western-centrism that
dominates most of the book—a Western-centrism already diagnosed as be-
ing endemic to many fashion accounts (Niessen 2007). In its exploration
of the fashion industry, the book dwells on a few worn-out arguments,
a downside which could be justified by the author’s need to introduce a
Spanish-speaking readership to subject matters still underdiscussed within
the scarce literature on fashion written in Spanish. However, the last chap-
ter in the book, which covers 1980 to the present, proves all the more topi-
cal, fresh and insightful in this respect. In it, Paz Gago examines, inter alia,
the phenomenon of fast fashion, providing a detailed exploration of the
Inditex Emporium, its integrated corporate structure, and the marketing
synergies which turn its products into viral trends every season. Similarly
enlightening is the subsequent, and properly updated, discussion on the
ubiquitous presence of fashion in the blogosphere, which is accompanied
by a survey of the most prominent bloggers, from pioneers Scott Schuman
and Yvan Rodic to Tavi Gevinson, Bryan Boy, Chiara Ferragni, Anna dello
Russo, Rumi Neely, Blanca Suárez, and Paula Echevarría, to name but a
few. As Paz Gago shows, the web has substantially altered our relationship
to fashion. Amongst other effects, it has accelerated the already vertig-
inous rhythms of fashion, with fashion companies constantly launching
“mini-collections” and “capsule collections”; and it has allowed fashion
amateurs to become fashion icons who now occupy the front row of inter-
national ­fashion shows, write for well-established fashion magazines and
collaborate with haute couture firms.
Although it provides a comprehensive analysis of the fashion industry,
the book certainly stands out for its genuine commitment to claiming and
reclaiming the aesthetic and artistic value of fashion, simultaneously vin-
dicating the need to approach fashion as a hybrid art which integrates and
enters into dialogue with other forms of art. Fashion, Paz Gago contends,
is “art,” both in the sense of being the “art of seduction” par excellence (31)
and a system of individual, chronotopically located, “artistic creations sensu
stricto” (21). As he further asserts in this last respect, “[t]he creation of
haute couture, exhibited at fashion shows with architectural design values
or displayed in the glass-cabinets of great museums, is a unique and un-
repeatable piece,” at times “without any potential sartorial functionality,”
for probably “nobody is expected to buy or wear it. This singular piece
deserves to be considered a work of art in its own right” (33). In effect, as
Paz Gago points out, fashion has already moved into galleries and art halls,
spaces conventionally reserved for the contemplation of art—and here he
reviews various examples, including the exhibition of Yves Saint Laurent
El octavo arte: la moda en la sociedad contemporánea 5

at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1983), as well as the retrospective

dedicated to Madame Grès at the Musée Bourdelle, Paris (2011). What is
more, throughout the book, Paz Gago traces the historical value of fashion
as an artistic expression, quoting from writers, philosophers and essayists,
and rescuing publications such as L’Art et la mode (1883–1965), a French
periodical whose title is emblematic of the intimate relationship between
fashion and art. Particularly instructive in this respect is the author’s ex-
ploration of the historical construction of the “fashion artist.” According
to Paz Gago, whereas Charles Frederick Worth was the first tailor to feel
he was an artist—hence he stamped his name on his creations—Paul Poiret
was the first couturier to be, in effect, an artist, not only because he viewed
haute couture “as an artistic expression” per se, but also because he drew
inspiration from other artistic veins such as “theatre, painting or sculpture”
(97). Special emphasis is here placed on Spanish designer Cristóbal Balen-
ciaga, who is said to have considered himself “a practitioner of an art that
integrates all the other arts … architect for drawings, sculptor for shapes,
painter for color, musician in harmony, and philosopher for measure and
style” (37). It is precisely this vision of fashion as “a synthesis of all the
other arts” (37) that leads Paz Gago to anoint fashion “the Eight Art”—a
vindication informed by Ricciotto Canudo’s own vision of cinema (1911),
“the Seventh Art.” The author ably supports this thought-provoking
argument throughout, recurrently exemplifying it through the work of
well-known fashion designers: in her designs, Madame Grès is said to
have given expression to her vocation as sculptor; Yves Saint Laurent’s
“Mondrian dress” paid tribute to the Dutch painter; and Christian
­
­Lacroix’s collections have captured the essence of modern painting. More-
over, as Paz Gago argues and succeeds in showing, nowadays fashion
moves incessantly towards “hybrid forms of artistic expression” (165),
and contemporary fashion shows have become “scenic spaces” (34), with
“painting and ­poetry, theatre and film, sculpture and literature, music and
dance” merging elegantly into present-day fashion collections (35). José
María Paz Gago thus proves that, for all its marketing thrust, the title of
this remarkable and timely book does have a strong raison d’être.

Note
  1. All quotations are translated from the original Spanish by the reviewer.

References
Barnard, Malcolm. 2002. Fashion as Communication. London: Routledge.
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre. 1981. Baudelaire. Selected Writings on Art and
Artists. Translated by P. E. Charvet. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Carter, Michael. 2006. Fashion Classics: From Carlyle to Barthes. Oxford:
Berg.
6 Noemí Pereira-Ares

Entwistle, Joanne. 2005. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern
Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ewing, Elizabeth. 2014. History of 20th Century Fashion, 4th Edition.
London: Bastsford.
Geczy, Adam, and Vicki Karaminas, eds. 2012. Fashion and Art. Oxford:
Berg.
Hancock, Joseph, Toni Johnson-Woods, and Vicki Karaminas, eds. 2013.
Fashion in Popular Culture: Literature, Media and Contemporary Stud-
ies. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Hollander, Anne. 1993. Seeing through Clothes. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Klein, Naomi. 2002. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.
New York: Picador.
Mackrell, Alice. 2005. Art and Fashion: The Impact of Art on Fashion and
Fashion on Art. London: Batsford.
McNeil, Peter, Vicki Karaminas, and Cathy Cole, eds. 2009. Fashion in
Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film, and Television. Oxford:
Berg.
Niessen, Sandra. 2007. “Re-Orienting Fashion Theory.” In The Fashion
Reader, edited by Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun, 105–110. Oxford:
Berg.
Paz Gago, José María. 2016. Moda e sedução [Fashion and Seduction]. Sâo
Paulo: Estaçâo das L ­ etras e Cores.
Steele, Valerie. 2000. Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look to Now. New
­Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
White, Nicola, and Ian Griffiths, eds. 2000. The Fashion Business: Theory,
Practice, Image. Oxford: Berg.