Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis

Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

Fashion Cultures Revisited

Theories, explorations and analysis

Edited by

Stella Bruzzi and

Pamela Church Gibson
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

First published as ‘Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis’ 2000

This edition published as ‘Fashion Cultures Revisited’ 2013
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2000, 2013 Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson for selection
and editorial matter; individual contributions the contributors
The right of Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson to be identified as author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification
and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Fashion cultures revisited: theories, explorations and analysis/[edited by]
Stella Bruzzi, Pamela Church Gibson. – Second edition.
pages cm
1. Fashion – Social aspects. 2. Mass media – Social aspects. I. Bruzzi,
Stella, 1962– II. Gibson, Pamela Church.
GT525.F37 2013
391—dc23
2013020815

ISBN: 978-0-415-68005-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-68006-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-13054-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Perpetua and Bell Gothic

by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

Contents

List of figures ix
List of contributors xii
Acknowledgements xix

Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson 1

INTRODUCTION: THE CHANGED FASHION LANDSCAPE OF
THE NEW MILLENNIUM

PART ONE 9
Shopping, spaces and globalisation

1 David Gilbert 11
A NEW WORLD ORDER? FASHION AND ITS CAPITALS
IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

2 Silvano Mendes and Nick Rees-Roberts 31

BRANDING BRAZILIAN FASHION: GLOBAL VISIBILITY
AND INTERCULTURAL PERSPECTIVES

3 Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber 43
INDIA AND FASHION’S NEW GEOGRAPHY

4 Armida de la Garza and Peng Ding 55

A NEW FASHION CAPITAL: SHANGHAI
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

vi CONTENTS

5 Sally Gray 64
‘SYDNEY STYLE’: CAMPING IT UP IN THE EMERALD
CITY

PART TWO 75
Changing imagery, changing media

6 Caroline Evans 77
YESTERDAY’S EMBLEMS AND TOMORROW’S
COMMODITIES: THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED
IN FASHION IMAGERY TODAY

FOREWORD BY CAROLINE EVANS

7 Gary Needham 103

THE DIGITAL FASHION FILM

8 Agnès Rocamora 112

PERSONAL FASHION BLOGS: SCREENS AND MIRRORS
IN DIGITAL SELF-PORTRAITS

9 Monica Titton 128

STYLING THE STREET – FASHION PERFORMANCE,
STARDOM AND NEO-DANDYISM IN STREET STYLE
BLOGS

10 Christopher Breward and Judith Clark 138

EXHIBITION-MAKING: A CONVERSATION

PART THREE 145

Altered landscapes, new modes of production

11 Alistair O’Neill 147

FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY: COMMUNICATION, CRITICISM
AND CURATION FROM 1975

12 Elliott Smedley 161

ESCAPING TO REALITY: FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY
IN THE 1990S

FOREWORD BY PAMELA CHURCH GIBSON

 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

CONTENTS vii

13 Rachel Lifter 175

FASHIONING INDIE: THE CONSECRATION OF A
SUBCULTURE AND THE EMERGENCE OF ‘STYLISH’
FEMININITY

14 Adam Briggs 186

‘CAPITALISM’S FAVOURITE CHILD’: THE PRODUCTION
OF FASHION

15 Louise Crewe 200

TAILORING AND TWEED: MAPPING THE SPACES OF
‘SLOW FASHION’

PART FOUR 215

Icons and their legacies

16 Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello 217

THE ‘FASHION ARTS’: JEAN MICHEL FRANK, ELSA
SCHIAPARELLI AND THE INTERWAR AESTHETIC
PROJECT

17 Stella Bruzzi 234

THE PINK SUIT

18 Fiona Cox 249

FAB LESBIANISM AND FAMILY VALUES: COSTUMING
OF LESBIAN IDENTITIES IN THE L WORD AND
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

19 Nathalie Khan 261

FASHION AS MYTHOLOGY: CONSIDERING THE LEGACY
OF ALEXANDER MCQUEEN

PART FIVE 273

Contestation, compliance, feminisms

20 Hilary Radner and Natalie Smith 275

FASHION, FEMINISM AND THE NEO-FEMINIST IDEAL:
FROM COCO CHANEL TO JENNIFER LOPEZ
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

viii CONTENTS

21 Meredith Jones 287

NEW CLOTHES, NEW FACES, NEW BODIES:
COSMETIC SURGERY AND FASHION

22 Lorraine Gamman 296

FEMALE SLENDERNESS AND THE CASE OF PERVERSE
COMPLIANT DECEPTION – OR WHY SIZE MATTERS . . .

23 Reina Lewis 305

HIJAB STORIES: CHOICE, POLITICS, FASHION

24 Pamela Church Gibson 322

FASHION, FEARS AND AGEING: CONTRADICTIONS
AND COMPLEXITY ACROSS THE MEDIA

PART SIX 339

Making masculinities

25 Janice Miller 341

HEROES AND VILLAINS: WHEN MEN WEAR MAKEUP

26 Stella Bruzzi 352

THE ITALIAN JOB: FOOTBALL, FASHION AND THAT
SARONG

FOREWORD BY STELLA BRUZZI AND PAMELA CHURCH

GIBSON

27 Vicki Karaminas 366

VAMPIRE DANDIES: FASHIONABLE MASCULINE
IDENTITIES AND STYLE IN POPULAR CULTURE

28 Claire Jenkins 377

‘I’M SAVING THE WORLD, I NEED A DECENT SHIRT’:
MASCULINITY AND SEXUALITY IN THE NEW
DOCTOR WHO

29 Lauren Jade Thompson 390

SUITING UP AND STRIPPING OFF: THE MALE
MAKEOVER

Index 401
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

Chapter 2

Silvano Mendes and

Nick Rees-Roberts

BRANDING BRAZILIAN FASHION

Global visibility and intercultural
perspectives

Just a few years ago, Brazil’s only famous fashion exports were bikinis,
Havaianas and Victoria’s Secret models. Now, established brands such
as Osklen, Issa, Carlos Miele, Pedro Lourenço, Alexandre Herchcovitch
and Lucas Nascimento sell internationally, and at home a diverse camp
of designers is proving that Brazilian fashion has grown up.
(Helen Jennings, Guardian, 22 November 2012)

I N O C T O B E R 2 0 1 2 B R A Z I L ’ S M A I N F A S H I O N events, the São

Paulo Fashion Week and Rio FashionWeek, announced a radical calendar
change. Instead of hosting events each January and June, the Autumn/Winter col-
lections are now presented in October and November and the Spring/Summer
collections in March and April, part of a broader global shift in the presentational
strategy of fashion. In a sector still dominated by the four main fashion capitals –
London, Milan, New York and Paris – the decision signals Brazil’s national ambition
to have a fashion industry befitting its status as the world’s sixth economic power
in 2013. Brazilian designers have traditionally taken advantage of the chronological
division of the fashion calendar by editing Western designs and adapting styles
shown on the runways of Europe and New York. The emergence since the 1990s
of a young generation of fashion designers is part of the drive to be taken more
seriously as a creative force, to move beyond the traditional imitation of European
and North American labels to a position of stylistic influence. Previously, collections
by Brazilian designers were on sale six months after their American and European
competitors, given the time delay. The decision to bypass the official calendar
shows the high financial stakes and national-political implications of the economic
ascendency of Brazil, whose strategy is to position its fashion industry at the start
of the design, image and production chain.
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

32 SILVANO MENDES AND NICK REES-ROBERTS

Brazil is currently the world’s third largest cotton manufacturer. However,

given its booming domestic market, its manufacturing competition with East Asian
markets, and the ongoing difficulties linked to uncompetitive import and export
tariffs, the Brazilian fashion industry is now looking for a new business model
adapted to the country’s current economic positioning and future aspirations.
Rejecting the low-level option of following China as the latest emblem of globalised
fast fashion, the Brazilian fashion sector seems intent on investing in creativity,
with its inevitable added value, as the means to make its mark on the global stage.
Despite having an integral production chain, the country has been more successful
at exporting its image than its fashion, which in part explains the Western focus
on Brazilian models rather than designers. With its important cotton and denim
production, the manufacturing capacity of the textile industry is a major strength.
Brazilian fashion has yet to emerge as a global player due to government-imposed
barriers such as taxes on manufacturing, overpriced labour costs and poor trans-
portation infrastructure. The domestic market is a priority for Brazilian designers
given the commercial potential of a population of over 200 million, half of which
is an affluent middle class. Given the size of this market and the country’s wealth
of natural resources and its industrial capacity, the question is why Brazil has not
actively promoted its own fashion design more successfully to compete with the
local presence and market dominance of the global fashion brands.

Global fashion
It may be that the emergence of new circuits of production, distribution and
exhibition that see the current balance of power shift to the emerging economies
of the BRICs will mark a dramatic change in the industrial practices of clothing
production. The move away from the model of global convergence (multinational
conglomerates housing super-brands reliant on delocalised labour practices) to a
more self-contained model in which global brands produce locally – in Brazil for
Brazil for example – would involve exploiting the growth of an affluent middle
class and relying on local design talent and creative industries. This shift in the
location and production of global fashion would have the potential to feed back
into the overall branding strategy of the label, thereby varying its geographical
focus and displacing the current top-down focus of the super-brands whose design
creativity and corporate implementation strategies are driven almost entirely from
the Western fashion capitals.
This potential recalibration of the global assembly line would short-circuit
some of the current geographical disadvantages of de-territorialised production,
namely distance, complex delivery schedules, quality control, labour exploitation,
and the risk of devaluation in the case of the high-end fashion and luxury goods
that superficially bear a heritage stamp of approval. In fact they are often in part
outsourced to any number of interchangeable contractors and anonymous
subcontractors on the fringes of Europe (Romania, Morocco and Turkey), or in
China, Mexico and Bangladesh. Since the shift towards a globalised network
economy in the early 1980s the main preoccupations of Western fashion cultures
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

BRANDING BRAZILIAN FASHION 33

have been more obviously focused on advertising imagery, brand identity and
patterns of consumption rather than the less visibly attractive modes and circuits
of production (Rabine 2010: 372). Such shifts in the material organisation of the
global fashion industry signal more problematic tensions between the promotion
of local specificity and individual creativity; between the specifically local and the
broader cosmopolitan appeal of fashion design; in short, between the promotion
of a discrete national identity and a specific design identity.
For Brazilian designers the difficulty is how to find a language that can speak
to the domestic market and translate to the sensibilities of global consumers, a
productive tension paralleled by the global super-brands whose own aspirations
are similarly founded on the contrived promotion of their national provenance –
Louis Vuitton’s elaborate articulation of a specifically French design heritage of
luxury travel, for example. In their discussion of the relationship between fashion,
identity and globalisation, Eugenia Paulicelli and Hazel Clark explain how locally
specific designs are both formative of a national fabric while also circulating widely
within a global market (Paulicelli and Clark 2009: 2). The branding of Brazilian
fashion involves not only the circulation of consumables domestically and inter-
nationally, but also the exportation of a Brazilian design identity channelled through
the iconographic branding of the nation. In her historical assessment of Brazilian
fashion in terms of its stylistic influences blending the exotic, the urban and the
marginal, Valéria Brandini raises the issue of cultural identity in the definition of
a specific Brazilian design heritage, one including the imposed and assumed exotic
stereotypes of Latin physicality and the more varied cosmology of local street
culture. Brandini asks ‘whether fashion expropriates cultural meanings for
commercial ends, or whether it elevates them, turning their aesthetic content into
clothes that exalt cultural richness’ (Brandini 2009: 167), thereby differentiating
between the two ends of the spectrum, from the textile industry’s mass production
of apparel to the individual creative strategies of contemporary Brazilian designers
working through questions of cultural specificity and ethnic diversity.
The polarising image of contemporary Brazilian fashion as framed by the
dominance of mass-produced clothing complemented by a limited number of
designers – from established names Alexandre Herchcovitch and Carlos Miele to
the emerging talents Pedro Lourenço and Lucas Nascimento – reflects broader
tensions relating to the integrative processes of globalisation. The view of globalisa-
tion as the import and export of culture shows how it operates as a portmanteau
term for a number of competing economic, political and socio-cultural shifts in
connectivity, or else ‘a communicational concept, which alternately masks and
transmits cultural or economic meanings’ (Jameson 1998: 55). It is axiomatic in
understandings of globalisation to assume that the process does not only reproduce
the homogenising effect of Western imperialism but also signals the more complex
commercial engagement in intercultural exchange between the ‘peripheries’ and
the ‘centre’. By tracking the global flows of capital, commodities, ideas, images
and people, anthropologists Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo build on the
preoccupation with the shrinking globe – the speeding-up and shortening of time
that geographer David Harvey earlier theorised as the fundamental compression of
space and time in postmodernity (Harvey 1989). Inda and Rosaldo accept the basic
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

34 SILVANO MENDES AND NICK REES-ROBERTS

spatial-temporal parameters of globalisation as the combination of ‘speeding up,

intensification, and stretching’ (Inda and Rosaldo 2008: 11), but they also emphasise
the complex two-way traffic between the global and the local in any conceptual
grasp of the de-territorialising processes at work in the production and distribution
of consumables across the globe. This follows Arjun Appadurai’s critique of a
simplistic model of homogenisation emphasising in its place the uneven and local-
ising processes of globalisation (Appadurai 1996: 17). Appadurai argued that the
creative models transposed from Western metropolises are indigenised through
fusion with local artistic practices. The Brazilian Tropicália movement of the 1960s,
for example, witnessed the creative overlap between the social politics of
contestation and a broad spectrum of cultural expression from across the arts –
in visual art, fashion, design, cinema and music – that mirrored concurrent political
upheavals elsewhere in the West. Against the imposition of the super-narratives
of economic modernisation channelled through Western media, Appadurai argued
that disjuncture better epitomised the flows of contemporary culture beyond a
centrifugal model of dissemination from the Western centres of power to a number
of multiple peripheries.
One of the difficulties in writing on fashion from a global perspective is the
tendency to position the consumers of the ‘Global South’ as passively in thrall to
Western designer brands, which leaves very little room for coverage of local fashion
per se, or for analysis of the more complex negotiations of local practices and
design aesthetics that work both through and against the templates of Western
fashion history. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil point to the challenges faced by
scholars today in

redefining the meaning of fashion to include fashion consumers,

producers and mediators well beyond the geographical boundaries of
Western Europe, North America and perhaps those outposts frequently
forgotten in the northern hemisphere, of South Africa, Australia, and
parts of South America, the latter two being in the post-war period
significant markets for French couture.
(Riello and McNeil 2010: 4)

The history of trade between Brazil and the West positions Brazilian fashion on
the cusp – at once in creative dialogue and commercial exchange with the West,
yet also stylistically and culturally distinct from it. Riello and McNeil point to
the history of exchange between French couture and the metropolitan centres
of South America, as well as their instrumental position in the change of perspective
from a Eurocentric appreciation of fashion to its global recalibration in terms
of industrial production, consumer base and cultural specificity. However, this
global perspective should not simply equate to fashion history rewritten from an
integrative vantage point (Riello and McNeil: 5). Against this image of convergence,
we argue that the emerging Brazilian fashion industry, while eager for European
recognition of its creative innovations, is more preoccupied with the consumer
demands of its own affluent middle class. The key to understanding the recent
global strategy of Brazilian fashion is to be found closer to home.
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

BRANDING BRAZILIAN FASHION 35

Intercultural fashion history

The international promotion of Brazilian design predates the country’s economic
emergence over the last decade. It is worth noting that the domestic fashion industry
itself did not miraculously emerge out of post-1980s globalisation. From attempts
to professionalise the sector, Brazil has attempted to export its national image
through its clothing industry. Paris has consistently figured as the critical arbiter
of stylistic trends, the vector through which Brazilian industry could display its
textiles and designs to the world. This relationship predates the more recent
manifestation of Brazilian fashion designers on the Parisian stage such as Pedro
Lourenço, who has been part of the ready-to-wear calendar since 2010. Lourenço
made his debut at the age of twelve at the São Paulo Fashion Week, and has since
garnered impressive reviews from editors for his early collections, which displayed
a creative manipulation of fabric through futuristic geometric shapes. Lourenço’s
first Paris show in 2010 at the age of nineteen attracted the attention of a number
of key fashion editors: in attendance were Carine Roitfeld, Anna Dello Russo,
Virginie Mouzat, Jefferson Hack and Hamish Bowles. Against the neo-tropical
imagery so skilfully blended with digital technology by Carlos Miele for inter-
national appeal, the more modernist forms of Lourenço’s Spring/Summer 2013
collection referenced the saturated colours used by surrealist photographer Richard
Mosse, known for his artificially modulated landscapes. Lourenço is an example
of a Brazilian designer using the Parisian stage for reasons of prestige, recognition
and visibility. Beyond the obvious impact on international sales, it is worth
questioning who constitutes the target consumers for such collections. Is the target
for an emerging Brazilian designer not more realistically the domestic consumer,
access to whom is assured through the cosmopolitan cachet of Parisian recognition?
The manipulation of an archetypal French modernity for aspirational Brazilian
consumers draws on a history of intercultural influence, itself part of the more
generalised imagery of France circulating within Brazilian culture during the
twentieth century. Paris has played a pivotal role in the international circulation
of Brazilian fashion imagery. Despite its history of Portuguese colonisation Brazil
has always maintained a special relationship with France, investing in the mythical
importance of the capital city. France had as much indirect cultural influence on
the formation of Brazilian national identity as Portugal, the coloniser whose own
sixteenth-century court was itself heavily Francophile and consequently influenced
by French art, language and thought in shaping its own moral codes and cultural
values (Skidmore 1994: 36).
Mario Carelli has traced the history of cultural interchange between Brazil and
France, emphasising the former’s primitivism and exotic allure and the latter’s
civilisation and intellectual heritage, a problematic form of reciprocal admiration
founded on a dissymmetrical power structure and a bedrock of casual stereotypes,
aptly described as a sort of ‘ready-to-wear of the mind’ (Carelli 1993: 21). The
Brazilian elites of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were willing
receptacles for the assimilation of a European modernity channelled through an
ethnocentric gaze and the universalising tendencies of French civilisation. The
transposition of metropolitan fashions was part of this larger process of cultural
modernisation and national identity-formation. For example, the silhouette of the
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

36 SILVANO MENDES AND NICK REES-ROBERTS

Parisienne was imported wholesale to mid-nineteenth century Brazil including the

linguistic borrowing of vernacular terms for evening jacket, corset and petticoat,
used to label garments cut from imported fabrics with certain morphological
adjustments made to emphasise chest and waist, despite the reluctance to tailor
according to a tropical climate. This preference for French style was accentuated
at the start of the twentieth century by the economic modernisation that followed
the coffee boom. Economic expansion financed the launch of a Brazilian garment
industry eager to edit European styles and to imitate consumer practices. An
example of this was the importation of the department store, a concept that had
originated in England and France in the 1830s, transposed to the expanding
metropolises of South America by the chain Mappin (Andrade 2005: 181). The
chain drew inspiration from the original Parisian model conceived by Aristide
Boucicaut, the founder of the prototypical ladies’ paradise, Le Bon Marché, in
1838. From the mid-1920s onwards the São Paulo store hosted its very own fashion
shows, establishing the main metropolitan stage to display the collections of many
of the influential Parisian designers of the day such as Drécoll and Patou, and in
so doing served as a permanent conduit for the transmission of a European stylistic
heritage.
The textile industry began a concurrent initiative, expanding the number of
cotton-producing factories (Braga and Prado 2011: 116). While Europe rebuilt
itself following the devastation of the First World War, a publicly bankrolled
Brazilian business culture began to emerge in response to the commercial needs
of an expanding domestic market. The international visibility of this emerging
textile industry only developed later in the 1950s through a promotional initiative
of Brazilian industrialists, who hosted extravagant private parties in France and
Italy to show off their cotton production displayed on dresses worn by live models.
In 1952 the textile manufacturer Companhia Progresso Industrial do Brasil (Bangu)
began to host events in Brazil and abroad to generate international publicity, which
is how Bangu encountered the mid-century French couturier Jacques Fath, known
for his costume designs for Powell and Pressburger’s film The Red Shoes (1948)
and for his clientèle of major Hollywood stars of the postwar era. Fath agreed to
host an extravagant Brazilian-themed ball at the Château de Corbeville in 1952
aimed at exhibiting cotton production displayed on the dresses worn by the guests.
There was no fashion design as such on show; instead the clothing was simply
perceived as a means to an end. The incentive was to publicise Brazilian fabrics
through journalistic coverage of the sophisticated lifestyles of the Parisian elites,
mediated through reports in newspapers belonging to the local Diários Associados
press group, owned by the controversial media mogul Assis Chateaubriand –
nicknamed the Brazilian Citizen Kane – whose sphere of influence spanned the
clothing industry (Braga and Prado 2011: 207). The star-studded event – guests
included Orson Welles and Ginger Rogers – attracted two whole convoys of artists,
models and denizens of Brazilian high society. Beyond the event’s inclusion in the
history of postwar Parisian glamour – the star turn was Elsa Schiaparelli’s spectac-
ular arrival on horseback – the extensive press coverage in Brazil ensured a return
on investment for the industrialists. The event successfully promoted tropical fibres
not to the Europeans but to the Brazilian elites, who thought it demeaning to wear
locally produced garments.
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

BRANDING BRAZILIAN FASHION 37

The stylistic sensibilities of the elites, however, were still orientated towards
the traditional models of French haute couture. Dener, the prestigious imitator of
haute couture, aspired to reproduce the aura of the star couturier for the Brazilian
elites, editing French designs for his sophisticated public. He claimed to direct
consumer tastes towards the dominant styles of haute couture in order to reflect
back a specifically Brazilian image, thereby removing the stigma attached to wearing
locally designed and manufactured garments. The cultural shift marked by the
fashionable pop styles of the 1960s was also reflected in changes to the relation-
ship between the Brazilian clothing industry and its French design templates. Trade
between the two countries took off in the 1960s following the expansion of the
French chemical company Rhodia to Brazil. Rhodia organised trade fairs and intro-
duced synthetic fibres, publicising their advantages to receptive local consumers
preoccupied with modernisation and efficiency. Rhodia essentially used these
collections to communicate, touring Europe with Brazilian-themed fashion shows
such as the ‘Coffee Collection’ presented in Paris at an exclusive function in 1960.
This was followed by collections promoting ‘Brazilian Nature’ in 1962 and
‘Brazilian Style’ in 1964, both manipulating cultural identity not to sell the designs
themselves but to showcase the country’s manufacturing. The designs worked as
pastiche copies of Parisian haute couture transposed to local fabrics, including
explicit homages to Dior’s New Look graphically adapted to tropical prints. These
commercial operations were not primarily concerned with promoting Brazilian
design to a European audience, but had the inadvertent knock-on effect of creating
a national design identity based on the skilful packaging of tropical exoticism. These
operations began with the presentations in Europe and were adapted to Brazil
following international attention. A few select presentations in France and Italy
would be rolled out months later in cities across Brazil. The story of European
approval was spun as a narrative for the domestic market, thereby laying the
foundations for the clothing industry to create in embryonic form a national design
tradition.

Emerging designers, celebrity models and foreign

ambassadors
The international promotion of the Brazilian national brand over the first decade
of the 2000s follows the country’s emergence as a global economic power, and
its strategic visibility in the current decade ensures continuing investment in the
country’s infrastructure and lucrative partnerships with the local creative industries.
The promotion of São Paulo Fashion Week from the late 1990s as a design platform
has been crucial to this latest phase of national-global visibility, garnering intense
international press interest. In 2000 Guy Trebay in The New York Times noted a tilt
in the global fashion axis, welcoming the new wave of models and designers (Trebay
2000). In the 1990s a young generation of designers had emerged as the creative
focus for the commercial fashion circuit, including labels such as Alexandre
Herchcovitch and Fause Haten, both taking inspiration from street styles and urban
subcultures, complemented by Lino Villaventura and Ronaldo Fraga, both drawing
on traditional craftsmanship and national folklore. Fraga’s idiosyncratic designs are
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

38 SILVANO MENDES AND NICK REES-ROBERTS

Figure 2.1 Fraga’s runway look here combines, in one image, the myth of the
forest and of football with the bamboo frame, constructed across
the catwalk. From Summer 2014 collection. Copyright Ronaldo
Fraga. Reproduced by courtesy of Fotosite.

rooted in a creative dialogue between the world of contemporary consumer fashion

and the local socio-political realities of those artisans who craft it, his various
projects aiming to generate egalitarian labour practices within the garment industry.
Carlos Miele is similarly committed to fair-trade practices and collaboration with
Brazil’s favelas and indigenous communities. His eponymous label, launched in
2002, has consistently sought to blend technological innovation with traditional
Brazilian handicrafts including elements of indigenous folklore transposed to the
stylistic exigencies of an urban brand, which now has boutiques in New York and
Paris. Surfacing in the early 1990s, Herchcovitch has also shown at the London,
New York and Paris fashion weeks. His design aesthetic, however, while
incorporating eclectic prints, broke radically with the more traditional cultural
template of Brazilian fashion by channelling the codes of gay club culture and the
urban street trends of 1990s São Paulo into a conceptual style subverting Brazilian
ideals of beauty and physicality (Brandini 2009: 172–4).
Beyond the critical recognition of these individual designers, the 2000s also
witnessed the visibility and celebrity of a number of high-profile catwalk models,
as instrumental in promoting Brazilian fashion culture at a global level as the
creative designers, industrialists and intermediaries. Coming of age following a
period that popularised a ‘heroin chic’ norm for the shape of the fashion model,
and in the midst of mass-media fixation about anorexia in the industry, Shirley
Mallmann, Ana Claudia Michels, Fernanda Tavares, Jeísa Chiminazzo, Mariana
Weickert and Raquel Zimmermann – who was included in Vogue Paris’s top 30
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

BRANDING BRAZILIAN FASHION 39

models of the 2000s – all gained attention due to their healthy shapes and cultivated
sexiness. But no Brazilian model has had the individual appeal, media coverage and
commercial success of Gisele Bündchen, the most lucrative player in Brazilian
global fashion, worth an estimated 250 million dollars in 2012. A German-Brazilian
in origin, discovered as a teenager in the mid-1990s, Gisele is seen as the heir to
the late twentieth-century prenominal super-models and was known at the height
of her fame for her contract with Victoria’s Secret, which raided the bank of Latin
clichés, reuniting mixed ethnicity, tropical ‘exoticism’ and curvaceous sexiness.
Early in her career Vogue used a black-and-white photo of Gisele to illustrate an
editorial called ‘The Return of the Curve’ for its July 1999 issue, allegedly photo-
shopping the image to augment the model’s cleavage. Gisele went on to appear
on a further three Vogue covers in 2000 alone, and in so doing launched a trend
for Brazilian models.
Beyond this focus on the international profiles of celebrity models, the Brazilian
clothing industry also began to brand its fashion culture more persuasively. Foreign
journalists were invited to catwalk shows, to lecture and to visit boutiques on all-
expenses-paid tours. An example of this common practice of industry lobbying
was the late, iconic fashion editor for the Sunday Times, Isabella Blow, who was
invited to Brazil in January 2000 to attend the São Paulo Fashion Week, at the
time called Morumbi Fashion (Roberts 2012). With Blow allegedly cashing a cheque
for 15,000 dollars for her services (Marthe 2000), the operation was deemed
successful and six months later Blow was invited back along with eighteen foreign
journalists to participate in a round table discussion on the international image of
Brazilian fashion. Blow’s function was to lend an aura of personal glamour and
critical credibility to Brazilian fashion through her status as a nomadic ambassador,
whose presence at such events led to increased foreign press attention.

The emergence of a new model for Brazilian fashion

Founded in the early 1960s the Brazilian Textile and Apparel Industry Association
(ABIT) is the main sponsor of Brazilian designers and clothing companies, supporting
the sustainable development of Brazilian textiles and essential crafts. The association
plays a central role in professionalising the sector, including the launch of trend
forecasting agencies, fashion education and international PR initiatives. The huge
scale of the domestic market explains the rationale behind such international
promotion. According to ABIT/Texbrasil, the fashion industry constituted 5.5
percent of Brazilian GDP in 2012. The domestic market could therefore be self-
sufficient without fashion labels needing to sell abroad at all. Brazilian fashion brands
still operate, however, according to the same commercial logic as Rhodia a half-
century ago: Western recognition is not intended to lift global sales. Rather the
cultural prestige of a strategically positioned boutique in London, New York or Paris
implies recognition, a value that supposedly legitimises the label in the eyes of
domestic consumers. Local labels now face stiff competition from the luxury global
fashion brands that are investing massively in Brazil and from the arrival of design-
savvy European high street brands such as Topshop or Zara, which are positioning
themselves as selective mid-range brands in the Brazilian market.
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

40 SILVANO MENDES AND NICK REES-ROBERTS

The economic reason for the relatively modest exportation of Brazilian fashion
is that the production costs are prohibitively high, making the final product exces-
sively expensive for international consumers. Herchcovitch can be as expensive as
Prada or Gucci, minus the global brand appeal, therefore out-pricing the local
designer from the international market. Prohibitively high import-export taxes
represent a further obstacle for the long-term global sustainability of Brazilian
trade. Take, for example, the urban sports label Osklen, whose fashion-forward
profile has been hyped in recent years. The label’s founder, Oskar Metsavaht,
began in 1989 with leisure and sportswear collections, before turning to beachwear
in the 1990s and luxury ready-to-wear in 2003 with the launch of the Osklen
Collection, an urban style with touches of surf culture channelled through an
ecological lens. The local fashion media mention Osklen as if he were widely
celebrated in Europe and the USA. His collections are found in a handful of
department stores and luxury multi-brand boutiques and the label does own stores

Figure 2.2 Osklen’s outfit blends the straw top (typical Brazilian natural
material) with the Brazilian cultural cliché of the beach print on
the skirt. From Summer 2013 collection. Copyright Osklen.
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

BRANDING BRAZILIAN FASHION 41

in Italy, Japan and the USA; but in sales terms this is relatively marginal. Being
visible at L’Eclaireur in Paris is only a minimal entry into the global luxury market
considering that Osklen’s overall international sales account for a mere 5 percent
of the label’s total turnover (Viturino 2011).
Brazilian fashion designers and brands are torn between the power of the
cultural legacy, heritage and craftsmanship of the European tradition – with its
haute couture model of apprenticeship and succession – and the ‘American’ myth-
ology of the self-taught designer breaking free from the constraints of European
tradition. Working outside the apprentice model whereby a designer would gain
experience by working for an illustrious fashion house, ‘the new Brazilian fashion
is not established in the couture tradition, with its references to high art, but
derives its aesthetic from local culture and ethnicity’ (Brandini 2009: 165). True,
but the value of international approval, measured through geographical positioning
and press visibility, nonetheless locks the Brazilian consumer mentality into a neo-
imperial relationship of cultural dependency with its global partners.
Since the start of the global economic recession in 2008, there has been some
hope that the emerging economies of the BRICS would decouple and continue to
expand despite the downturn experienced elsewhere – a hope undermined by the
reported slowdown of both the Brazilian and Chinese economies in 2012. Global
luxury brands are nevertheless prioritising the BRICS as key expanding markets to
underwrite and revitalise the Western design houses. To achieve this goal the
luxury conglomerates are investing massively in the consumer potential of Brazil.
Despite the barrier of fiscal protectionism, the big-name fashion brands are moving
in en masse. The luxury shopping malls of Cidade Jardim or JK Iguatemi in São
Paulo host the majority of the recognisable super-brands, illustrating the decision
to plug the luxury gap before the full emergence of local design. Brazil has
understood the shift in global power and is staking out a more strategic position
on the fashion map – not simply as a consumer of global brands or as a manufacturer
of textiles but as a creative force in itself. The challenge is how to define a stylistic
grammar adapted to the ‘new’ economic order while responding to the demands
of the expanding domestic market.
Design, the creative backbone of the industry, now constitutes the main focus
of attention in Brazilian fashion culture. Designer brands are torn between the
model of cross-cultural exchange with European heritage and the ‘American’ model
of fashion empires. Although the new Brazilian fashion is embedded in local forms
of popular culture and ethnic specificity, the commercial value of cross-cultural
interaction and European recognition is not to be underestimated in the domestic
positioning and promotion of Brazilian fashion. External approval is still seen as
necessary for the domestic market, conceived in the terms of marketing discourse
as immature – however problematic the use of this linguistic imperialism to qualify
emerging markets. Nevertheless, the ideal of a creative and dynamic Brazil shared
by millions of Brazilians – an image the nation seeks actively to export – still
requires a global stamp of approval for national consumers to believe in the
economic miracle, the term used in the past to denote periods of growth such as
the 1970s, a period of parallel European economic ‘stagflation’. Ultimately, Europe
is used strategically as an adoring mirror for Brazilian fashion to reflect back its
own self-promotional ideal to domestic consumers.
 Copyrighted material - Provided by Taylor & Francis
Dr Nick Rees-Roberts. University of Bristol. 12/01/2015

42 SILVANO MENDES AND NICK REES-ROBERTS

References
Amado, Gilberto (1954) Mocidade no Rio e primeira viagem à Europa, Rio de Janerio:
José Olympio.
Andrade, Rita (2005) ‘Mappin Stores: adding an English Touch to the São Paulo Fashion
Scene’, in Regina A. Root (ed.), The Latin American Fashion Reader, Oxford: Berg,
pp. 176–87.
Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,
Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.
Braga, João and Prado, André Luis do (2011) História da Moda no Brasil – das Influências
às Autorreferências, São Paulo: Disal Edita/Pyxis Editorial.
Brandini, Valéria (2009) ‘Fashion Brazil: South American Style, Culture and Industry’,
in Eugenia Paulicelli and Hazel Clark (eds), The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity
and Globalization, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 164–76.
Carelli, Mario (1993) Cultures croisées: histoire des échanges culturels entre la France et le
Brésil de la découverte aux temps modernes, Paris: Nathan.
Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change, Oxford: Blackwell.
Inda, Jonathan Xavier and Rosaldo, Renato (2008) ‘Tracking Global Flows’, in Jonathan
Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo (eds), The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader
(second edition), Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 3–46.
Jameson, Fredric (1998) ‘Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue’, in Fredric
Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds), The Cultures of Globalization, Durham and
London: Duke University Press, pp. 54–77.
Marthe, Marcelo (2000) ‘A lobista da moda’, Veja Magazine, 15 November.
Paulicelli, Eugenia and Clark, Hazel (2009) ‘Introduction’, in Eugenia Paulicelli and
Hazel Clark (eds), The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity, and Globalization,
Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–11.
Rabine, Leslie W. (2010) ‘Globalization’, in Valerie Steele (ed.), The Berg Companion
to Fashion, London: Berg, pp. 372–4.
Riello, Giorgio and McNeil, Peter (eds) (2010) The Fashion History Reader: Global
Perspectives, Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Roberts, Michael (2012) ‘Brazilian Blow Out’, The Wall Street Journal, 15 June.
Skidmore, Thomas E. (1994) O Brasil visto de fora, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra.
Trebay, Guy (2000), ‘Big Models, Big Brands: The Year in Fashion; The Noise from
Brazil’, The New York Times, 26 December.
Viturino, Robson (2011) ‘A nova multinacional brasileira’, Época Negócios, 31 January.