Consumption and identity

construction
209 comments

French philosopher J.P. Sartre published Being and

Nothingness in 1943. Often referred to as
“phenomenological ontology”, this essay invites us to
question ourselves on the being of Man and to describe
its fundamental structures. Composed of four parts, it is
chapter II “Doing and Having” of the fourth part “Having,
Doing and Being” that will interest us here. After having
outlined his project of existential psychoanalysis, based,
unlike Freudian psychoanalysis, on consciousness and
aiming to grasp the totality of the human being through a
decoding of the empirical behaviors, Sartre focuses on
the important question of possession, the link between
doing, having and being.

After studying the “doing”, the philosopher comes to the

question of “having”. “What is meant by “to appropriate”? Or if
you prefer, what do we understand by possessing an
object?”, in other words, how to define possession? He
proposes several key characteristics.

Possession as use?

If using an object can indeed be a sign of its possession, it

cannot be irreducible to the question of use. Someone can
use a cup of coffee in a brewery without being the owner of
the cup. In the clothing industry, an individual can rent an
outfit without owning it. Similarly, the right of destruction
cannot define possession. A man may own his dog without
the right to kill him, otherwise he may be concerned about the
law or animal welfare associations. Possession and
appropriation, in other words possession and the right of
possession, must be separated. A man can indeed possess
an object without appropriating it, in other words without
“making it his own”, and appropriate it without possessing it.
Hence Sartre’s refutation of the Proudhonian equivalence
between ownership and theft (Proudhon said: “ownership is
theft”), since ownership can very well be the result of theft
without affecting the relationship between the thief and his
new possession.

Possession as being

The object cannot therefore be defined by a total exteriority to

its owner. We speak of a “possessed” man to mean that he
no longer belongs to himself, that he belongs to others, that
he is someone else. Sartre mentions the existence of
primitive societies where people are buried with their
property, where these two entities (the person and its
belonging) are inseparable. Even today, objects that
belonged to a dead person may still be placed in his grave to
mark their indissoluble connection. The author also evokes
haunted houses belonging in a sense, even after their death,
still to their owners. Hence Sartre’s remark: “to be possessed
means to be for someone”, which means that “the bond of
possession is an internal bond of being”, that “having” finally
amounts to “being”, that there is finally an equivalence what is
possessed and who is possessing. The exhibition of old
celebrity clothes is precisely a similar case: a jacket that once
owned Jim Morrison still seems to have his memory in it.

Possession as a union

In addition, Sartre notes that the object refers to

“permanence”, “non-temporality”, “substantiality” (it exists in
itself) when the possessor is completely dependent on it. “To
possess is to be united with the object possessed in the form
of appropriation; to wish to possess is to wish to be united to
an object in this relationship”. The desire to have is the same
as the desire to be. I do not only want jeans, I want to unite
with them to form a single entity. I am therefore composed of
the self and the not-self (jeans). Thus, the person is in a way
the purpose of the object he owns. The original notion of
luxury that haute couture exemplifies, also testifies to this. A
dress is made for me, so the dress has no other purpose, no
other possible purpose than to be worn by me.

Possession as a continuous creation

For Sartre, the act of purchase also amounts to an act of

creation. In fact, the wearer gives meaning to the garment
purchased. He contextualizes it, actualizes it in the middle of
other clothes, etc. My jeans are not just any jeans, it’s the
way I use them. My jeans are the way I use them, the way I
interact with them (personalization, how to roll them up, etc.).
The object cannot make sense without my act of use, without
a relationship of appropriation. But what I create for Sartre is
“me”. He notes that “the totality of my possessions reflects the
totality of my being. I am what I have. It is I myself which I
touch in this cup, in this trinket”.
Also, the relationship of possession cannot be anything other
than a continuous creation. If the object is placed under my
dependence, there is no less of it by itself. The object
therefore exists without me (in itself) and by me. A certain
univocity of the relationship is found here. It is still my usage
that defines possession. Jeans are irrelevant if they are
simply placed on a hanger. To own them, I have to wear
them, wear them out, patch them, etc. Sartre notices the
alienation of the possessor, who cannot exist outside the
possessed object. The object belongs to me but it remains
independent, or “originally in itself”.

The infinity of possession

The relationship to an individual’s possession is thus defined

as “symbolic and ideal”. The consumption of a possession is
continuous. It seems impossible for Sartre to achieve
possession all at once. He takes the example of the bicycle. If
it only takes one act of purchase to own it, this act is
accompanied by multiple gestures: I touch it, contemplate it,
then drive with it to get the bread, before going on a tour of
France, etc. In the case of buying a jacket, I can simply
contemplate it on a hanger, but I very quickly have to touch it,
to wear it, otherwise I won’t appropriate it. Thus its use
remains uninterrupted. And since I’m going to die, I can’t help
but exhaust his consumption. But destruction and
deterioration are also an appropriation. I can’t have an object
in itself, I destroy it somehow to make it my own. I wear out
my clothes, I alter and destroy them little by little, but at the
same time I take them over. The deterioration can therefore
sometimes be synonymous with enjoyment, especially in the
clothing industry. This gives prestige to certain raw jeans that
are worn, perforated, frayed, etc. The object is then marked
by consumption, by appropriation, and therefore by
possession. Sartre draws a parallel with the elegance of G.
Brummel and his hatred of the new.

“To possess the world”

Finally, the philosopher focuses on the meaning of
possession: “What then is it which we seek to appropriate?”
To possess is to want to appropriate at the abstract level what
he calls the “the mode of being of an object as the actual
being of this object”, i.e. its existence as a solitary object
devoid of my use, but also, at the empirical level, its
extensions, i.e. the possibility of use that I can make of it.
Owning jeans is both owning jeans, in that it belongs to a
specific category of trousers (jeans are not formal pants), but
also owning their possibilities of use (wearing it, etc.).
Basically, possession is defined as the synthesis between
these two particularities. “Each possessed object which raises
itself on the foundation of the world, manifests the entire
world (…). To appropriate this object is then to appropriate
the world symbolically.” Sartre mentions his experience with
tobacco, and his fear of losing the flavor of events such as a
dinner or a show, by quitting smoking. Finally, the act of
smoking was for him to achieve a destructive appropriation
function of tobacco, meaning an appropriate destruction of
the whole world. Consuming an object would therefore,
according to Sartre, amount to consuming it individually, but
also to consuming the world. “To possess is to wish to
possess the world across a particular object.”

To conclude, if desire refers at the same time to the desire to

be and the desire to have, these two are distinct, although
they are inseparable in daily life. The first is related to for-
itself, when “the desire to have aims at the for-itself on, in and
through the world”. Consumption choices therefore reflect a
certain way of being in the world. The purchase of one
garment among others is not insignificant, translating
“symbolically to our perception a certain way which being has
of giving itself”.

Bibliography

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and nothingness (1943),

Washington Square Press, 1993.
Fashion as "bricolage"
98 comments

We were first interested in the specificities of fashion

production and consumption. Let us now focus on
alternative consumption, in other words on
countercultural or subcultural practices (we will combine
the two terms) of clothing consumption, which we will
analyse with the help of the Levi-straussian concept of
“bricolage”. How do countercultures destabilize the
dominant culture through their consumer practices?
What are their specificities? How do they differ from the
consumptions we have described until now?

In his article “Style”, published in the second part of the

book Resistance Through Rituals edited by T. Jefferson and
S. Hall (1976), John Clarke, a sociologist attached at the time
to the famous CCCS of Birmingham (Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies), the initiator of British Cultural
Studies, proposes to make a “partial” and “somewhat eclectic”
use of the concept of bricolage, first formulated by the French
anthropologist C. Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (1962).
Originally taking place within an opposition between
craftsmen and engineers, between on the one hand the ability
to perform a large number of diversified tasks in a “closed
instrumental universe”, working with “the means of the edge”,
and “pre-constrained” elements, and on the other hand an
individual acting by “project”, the concept designates in the
work of J. Clarke the attitude of subcultures towards clothes
and objects. Indeed, for the author, subcultural bricolage acts
through a “re-ordering and re-contextualisation of objects to
communicate fresh meanings, within a total system of
significances, which already includes prior and sedimented
meanings attached to the objects used”. In other words, the
subcultural “bricoleur” would effectively draw on a “matrix” of
pre-existing objects, before reinterpreting them to bring out a
new discourse. Applied to clothing, the individual would
borrow from the “fashion” repertoire to subvert the meaning of
the pieces she selects. The author illustrates his point with
the example of the British Teddy Boys, cheerfully resignifying
the “Edwardian Look” by means of bootlace tie or brothel-
creepers.

Another sociologist, known for The Meaning of

Style published in 1979 (see 2.6. The forms of incorporation),
Dick Hebdige will also use the concept of “bricolage”. Quoting
J. Clarke, the subcultural bricoleur would target “distinctive
rituals of consumption” allowing subcultures to reveal “their
‘secret’ identity and communicates its forbidden meanings”.
The fashion discourse thus would be resignified by
subcultures within an unconscious process. The author brings
these practices closer to Dadaist and Surrealist works. Like
the author of a surrealist collage, the “bricoleur” would tend to
“juxtapose two apparently incompatible realities on an
apparently unsuitable scale”.

After a brief definition of the concept of “bricolage”, let us now

try to give a typology of it. We will distinguish between time
bricolage, cultural bricolage, and gendered bricolage. The first
will extract clothing elements from the past, the second will
aim at the juxtaposition of clothes/objects from different
cultural fields, while the third will define the “camp” practice of
clothing.

Bibliography

Hall, Stuart, Jefferson, Tony, Resistance Through Rituals:

Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain, HarperCollins
Publishers Ltd, 1976.

© Institut Français de la Mode

Temporal bricolage
147 comments
Let’s start by studying our first “bricolage”, which we will
call “temporal bricolage”, since it is based on a
juxtaposition of elements borrowed from outdated/past
wardrobes. This consumption pattern is typical of
alternative cultures. Beatniks, Hippies, or Punks used the
secondhand circuit. Let us try to understand this
phenomenon more broadly by studying part of Second-
Hand Cultures (2003), a book written by Nicky Gregson
and Louise Crewe, respectively researcher in the
Department of Geography at Durham University and
Professor of Human Geography at the University of
Nottingham.

Reconnecting with the past

In “Transformations: Commodity recovery, Redifinition,

Divestment and Re-enchantment”, the authors focus on the
role of second-hand objects in the construction of the
individual’s identity. Through the consumption of used
products, they would first participate in an attempt to faithfully
reconstruct the past. The case of Josephine and Ian is
exemplary, Josephine only looking for original 1960’s clothes
for their quality and cut. The notion of value is no longer as
much an economic logic as a cultural one. It is in culture that
the value originates, even for the purchase of a 50-cent
garment, the alleged authenticity participating directly in a
logic of cultural distinction. But this type of purchase also
demonstrates an attempt to rebuild an imaginary past. This is
the case with Rupert’s relationship with charity shops,
perceived as “make accessible earlier constructions of
working-class masculinity”.

A negotiation between old and new owners

In addition, the use of second-hand objects or clothing would

be linked to “divestment rituals” in opposition to the attempts
at revalorization discussed below. In this case, the wearer
may feel perfectly free to erase the traces of the old object,
the marks of the former owner, or simply to personalize it, and
thus “liberate” the meaning of the original object. If I buy a
Levi’s 501 in a vintage store, redo it, shorten it, I’m working
somewhere to redesign it. We note here the existence of a
negotiation between the old and the new holder. The authors
also observe that this dialogue is sometimes paradoxically
refused, as some buyers try to find the clothes that have been
the least worn. In this respect, Val is implementing a whole
strategy to notice the newest labels, which are signs of a
garment that has been seldom washed and therefore not
worn. Janet will refuse to buy jeans because of blood marks
in one of the pockets. Basically, there seems to be an
impassable barrier for visitors to charity shops. The purchase
of underwear is very largely inconceivable for the
respondents, followed by “nightwear” or “shoes”. Hence the
journey of some buyers like Judy, who started by buying
“safe” parts like “outerwear” and gradually moved on to
shoes. In addition, these choices may reflect a class
relationship. Rupert would never buy underwear, shoes,
except if it was “Paul Smith boxers” because probably worn
by “a Young trendy person” and not by “an 80-years-old
granddad that hasn’t washed”. It is also more reassuring for
some to know the path of the garment or its former wearer.
This results in a particular relationship to washing,
representing a barrier against disease or contamination, i.e. a
barrier between the old and the new wearer.

Customisations

Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe conclude by studying the

repairs and customizations that vintage clothing undergoes.
For some, transformation is proving to be a way to invest the
focus of particular attention. The clothes will be reshaped, the
shoulder seams modified, fringes added, a skirt diverted into
trousers, the buyer finally revealing himself as a designer
capable of recognizing the cultural ability to recognize the
potential of a garment before its transformation, often helped
however by the intervention of a third party (a tailor for
example).These interventions can also emerge in “spaces of
juxtaposition”, with reinvested objects or clothing cohabiting
with, for example, new clothes or other periods. This is the
example of Lily who never fully dresses in “second-hand for
fear of looking “like a tramp”, to prefer a DIY silhouette made
by a second-hand dress, a new hat, a customized vintage
scarf, and new shoes to produce a clean and contemporary
style.

If they are contemporary, the analyses realized by Nicky

Gregson and Louise Crewe around second-hand clothes are
decisive to determine the propensity for the resignification of
old clothes by certain alternative cultures. Thus they seem to
echo at the same time attempts to reconnect with a real or
fantasized past, or on the contrary practices of juxtaposition
of disparate elements that are completely disrespectful of the
object’s original time. Let us illustrate the first case with two
photographs of the “Fifties” of France in the 1970s taken by
Yan Morvan. The band’s propensity to draw from a dressing
room straight from 1950s America is a sign of an attempt by
them to pay tribute to this imaginary past. Car, teddy jacket,
checked flannel shirt, Levi’s jeans are here reintroduced
almost literally into a totally anachronistic Parisian
environment (Place des Vosges).
On the opposite, the first wave of British Teddy Boys aimed at
the juxtaposition of disparate elements. If some of them
acquired second-hand “suits” reminiscent of the Edwardian
aristocratic dress, they would mix them with other elements
borrowed from American rock of the 1950s such as banana
hairstyle, knives, or bootlace tie.

Bibliography

Gregson, Nicky, Crewe Louise, Second-Hand Cultures, Berg

Publishers, 2003.

© Institut Français de la Mode

Cultural bricolage
115 comments

French historian Michel de Certeau, famous for his

research on religious trends in the 16th and 17th
centuries, published the first volume of The Practice of
Everyday Life in 1980. A report on research conducted
for the DGRST (Délégation générale à la recherche
scientifique et technique) from the end of 1974 to 1978,
the study focuses on “common and everyday culture as
appropriation or re-appropriation”, in other words, on
consumption perceived as “the way of practicing”, in
order to forge a theory of daily practices. Following the
emergence of British Cultural Studies focused on the
study of “popular culture” (R. Hoggart published The
Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with
Special References to Publications and Entertainments in
1957, R. Williams Culture and Society: 1780-1950 in 1958,
E.P. Thompson The Making of the English Working
Class in 1963), the text now allows us to refer to what we
will call “cultural crafts”, the juxtaposition of clothing
elements borrowed from different cultural fields within
the same outfit. We will focus here on the punk practice
of clothing.

The consumer producer

Chapter 3 “Making Do: Uses and Tactics” of the first part

begins with an analogy between the idea of literary styles and
“ways of operating”, of reading, living, talking - let’s add here -
of dressing. According to De Certeau, the housing methods of
Kabyle immigrants in France in the 1970s can be assimilated
to “styles”, as they are forced to make an effort to re-
appropriate an imposed area. The author therefore proposes
to consider the goods consumed as “repertory with which
users carry out operations of their own”. He defends the
following thesis:

“In reality, a rationalised, expansionist, centralised,

spectacular and clamorous production is confronted by an
entirely different kind of production, called “consumption” and
characterised bu its ruses, its fragmentation (the result of the
circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature, its
tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since
it shows itself not in its own products (where would it place
them?) but in an art of using those imposed on it.”

Thus, De Certeau shows the difficulty of a “critical”

consumption practice based on products imposed on
consumers. Instead of a simple passive receiver, the
consumer would become a producer of new meanings from
an established repertoire of products. He draws a parallel
here between these subversion practices and Indian acts of
misuse of laws, practices or representations forced during the
Spanish colonization. It is therefore impossible to define a a
consumer by his own practices, in other words by simple
statistical measures, since it is unable to grasp the true use of
objects. The author is gradually moving towards a linguistic
approach. If language is assimilated to a “system” and
speech to an “act”, then production would be precisely the
“system” providing the capital or repertoire, when
consumption would approach the “act”, i.e. the way of using
this pre-established capital. Basically, the “arts de faire” could
be confused with the enunciative model, “use of language
and an operation performed on it”, composed of a “realization
of the linguistic system through a speech act that actualizes
some of its potential”, the “appropriation of language by the
speaker”, the establishment of a relationship with a speaker,
and an act of locution establishing a “present”.

Consumer tactics

The second part of the chapter introduces a fundamental

distinction between strategy and tactics. Defined by a
calculation, a specific place, the existence of external
targets/threats, by the postulate of a power, the strategic
model is rather related to the organization of a company, an
army or a scientific institution. Thus it responds to three
characteristics: the preponderance of place over time, a
control of place by sight (panoptism) and a transformation of
the “uncertainties of history into readable spaces”. The
“tactics”, as the “arts of the weak”, as arts of deception, are
opposed to it. Tactics only act on the outside, according to an
external law, without a global project and are reduced to
acting “blow by blow”, to poaching.

Thus, the practices of “making” consumers would rather be

assimilated to tactics, tricks, poaching, especially necessary
since they would be based on “the generalization and
expansion of technocratic rationality”, possibly prefiguring a
“cybernetic” society. Like the immigrant, the consumer would
be forced to operate on an outside field with imposed
products. For De Certeau, these tactics could precisely
escape the repressive apparatus because of their flexibility
and their ability to adapt to change.

The punk practice of clothing

While De Certeau does not dwell on clothing “tactics”,

preferring the reading practices (chapter XII), the parallel
between counter-cultural clothing practices and poaching
seems easy. Let’s illustrate this with a brief study of the
elements worn out by the actors of the punk movement in the
late 1970s. Similar to popular consumer practices, punk
practices have also been built on the diversion of elements
borrowed from a consumer repertoire set by the “language
producing elites”. Many ordinary everyday objects may have
been resignified and emptied of their original meaning. This is
precisely what we noticed in the attached photographs.
Captured by the famous photographer Derek Ridgers, the first
one is emblematic. In particular, dog collars and safety pins
are recontextualized in a setting that is completely different
from their “regular” practices.
This propensity to reconfigure everyday objects is also
present in many photographs taken during the second Mont
de Marsan punk festival. Taken by Jean Gaumy, the picture
shows us a participant wearing the famous razor blade and a
t-shirt made of a can of Coca-Cola, a postcard from the city,
but also a banana peel.
Recognizing the consumer’s ability to resignify the products
imposed to him, De Certeau was able to provide a major
contribution to the understanding of subcultural consumer
practices. Let’s now take a look at our latest form of bricolage,
the “camp” practice of clothing.

Bibliography

De Certeau, Michel, The practice of everyday life(1980),

University of California Press, 2011.

© Institut Français de la Mode

Gendered bricolage
121 comments

Until now, we have studied two types of counter-

hegemonic bricolages, namely temporal and cultural
bricolage. Let us now look at a third form of bricolage
that we will call “gendered bricolage” or “camp”. To do
so, let us first try to clarify our definition of “camp”,
which we extract from the reading of Mother Camp, the
famous book by American anthropologist Esther Newton.

Be warned, the article includes some images containing

nudity.

American cultural anthropologist, Esther Newton is

particularly famous for being one of the founders of LGBTQ
studies. Based on his thesis in anthropology, her
book Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America,
published in 1972, offers an ethnography of the lives of
female impersonators and drag queens professional
performers in the United States, specifically in the cities of
New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Kansas City, San
Francisco and Los Angeles. In its chapter 5, entitled “Role
Models”, it gives us a definition of the attitude camp.
For Newton, camp cannot be confused with the totality of
female impersonators and drag queens, although these two
attitudes remain “expressive performing roles”, “both
specialize in transformation”. The two approaches are
precisely distinguished in that the drag queen only aims at the
transition from male to female, thus testifying to an image of a
depreciated homosexuality, while the “camp” tends rather
towards a “higher synthesis” and would be found at all levels
of the homosexual subculture.

Similar to the “soul” of “Negro subculture”, the camp is

defined as “a relationship between things, people, activities or
qualities, and homosexuality”, in other words as “homosexual
taste”, and is summed up in three recurring characteristics:
incongruity, theatricality and humor.

1. Inconsistency is the first. By aiming at the juxtaposition

of opposite elements, the “camp” finally reveals the
homosexual experience, itself based on a form of
incongruity. Newton retains that the incongruous image
of two women or two men in the same bed.

2. The “camp” is based, moreover, on a certain form of

theatricality. In this respect, an emphatic clothing style is
decisive, as a “dramatic form” implying the presence of
an actor and an audience, and the perception of “being
as playing role”. The author focuses here on the
character of Greta Garbo, perceived as “high camp”. By
disguising herself in her films as a femme fatale, she
finally resembles the way homosexuals dress up as
heterosexuals for “playing men”. The author sketches
out here the idea of gender performativity, later taken up
by Judith Butler in Gender trouble (1990).

3. Finally, since its purpose is to make the audience laugh,

the third quality of the “camp” is humor taking place in a
“system of laughing from its incongruous position
instead of crying”.
Esther Newton therefore describes the camp’s productions
and performances as “a continuous creative strategy for
dealing with the homosexual situation” with a view to “defining
a positive homosexual identity”. While all impersonators and
homosexuals cannot be defined as such, the camp is a
“homosexual wit and clown”, in other words a way of
highlighting the “stigmas” of homosexuality to neutralize them.

On the counter-cultural level, this tactic, which we can also

define as a form of “counter-hegemonic bricolage”, was used
by some groups challenging gender norms in the early
1970’s. Among them, the informal Parisian group on
Gazolines is exemplary. Defined as a group of “folles”, it
evolved on the fringes of the Homosexual Front of
Revolutionary Actions (FHAR) in the early 1970s, and their
“main activity consisted in being seen and being scandalous”
by noisy staged events. Let us focus on the analysis of some
photos of its members, or of people who might be related to it.
The first image is a photograph of Hélène Hazera, a former
member of the informal group. She wears purple and white
tie-dye tights, hand-dyed by hand, accompanied by 1940’s
silver shoes with Greta Garbo strass, a high panther print,
and a vintage handbag and scarf. The acting, the pose, the
use of blush and the masculine features started from a
blurring of the codes making the reading of the silhouette
equivocal.
Another example is given by Dina and Marlène, two Parisian
transgenders. Taken in 1977 in the lounge of the Théâtre
Montparnasse by the “Belle Journée en perspective”
collective, the photograph presents the two protagonists in a
provocative pose, arms above, arms below, lower abdomen
and bare breasts, visibly drunk. The elements of the wardrobe
are significant in more than one way. The two characters
seem to enjoy dressing up in products from the Parisian
tourist industry. Marlene presents herself with a t-shirt printed
with an Eiffel Tower, when Dina matches her friend with a
pocket worn on her shoulder on which is similarly visible the
Parisian monument. But there is also an interest in Marlène
wearing work pants. The cohabitation of tourist effects, work
trousers, alongside masculine features and theatrical poses
introduce an archetypal equivocal silhouette of the “camp”.
To conclude, the camp defines a third way to subvert the
dominant culture through clothing. Through incongruity,
theatricality and humor, it ultimately constitutes a formidable
strategy of resistance aimed at “destabilizing what emerges
from a naturalized norm”.

Bibliography

Newton, Esther, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in

America (1972), University of Chicago Press, 1979.

© Institut Français de la Mode