The International Politics of Fashion

This book seeks to address and fill a puzzling omission in contemporary

critical international relations
scholarship. Following on from the aesthetic
turn in international relations, critical and postmodern
international
relations has produced an impressive array of studies into film, literature,
music and art and the
way that these media produce, mediate and represent
international politics. By contrast, the proponents of the
aesthetic turn have
overlooked fashion as a source of knowledge about global politics.
Yet stories about the political role of fashion abound in the news media.
Former British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher used dress to define her
political image, and more recently the fascination with US First Lady
Michelle
Obama, former French First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and other
women in similar positions, and the discussions
about the appropriateness
of their wardrobes, regularly make the news. In Sudan, a female writer and
activist
successfully challenged the government over her right to wear
trousers in public, and in Europe, the debate on
women’s headscarves has
politicized a garment item and turned it into a symbol of fundamentalism
and oppression.
In response, the contributors to this book investigate the
politics of fashion from a variety of perspectives,
addressing theoretical as
well as empirical issues, establishing the critical study of fashion and its
protagonists as a central contribution to the aesthetic turn in international
politics.
The politics of fashion go beyond these examples of the uses and abuses
of textiles and fabrics for political
purposes, extending into its very
‘grammar’ and vocabulary. This book will be a unique contribution to the
field
and of interest to students and scholars of international relations,
critical international relations theory,
popular culture and world politics.

Andreas Behnke is Associate Professor in International Political Theory at

the University of Reading, UK.
Popular Culture and World Politics
Edited by Matt Davies, Newcastle University, Kyle Grayson, Newcastle
University,
Simon Philpott, Newcastle University, Christina Rowley,
University of Bristol and
Jutta Weldes, University of Bristol

The Popular Culture and World Politics book series is the forum for leading
interdisciplinary research that
explores the profound and diverse
interconnections between popular culture and world politics. It aims to
bring
further innovation, rigour and recognition to this emerging sub-field
of international relations.
To these ends, this series is interested in various themes, from the
juxtaposition of cultural artefacts that are
increasingly global in scope and
regional, local and domestic forms of production, distribution and
consumption;
to the confrontations between cultural life and global
political, social and economic forces; to the new or
emergent forms of
politics that result from the rescaling or internationalization of popular
culture.
Similarly, the series provides a venue for work that explores the effects
of new technologies and new media on
established practices of
representation and the making of political meaning. It encourages
engagement with
popular culture as a means for contesting powerful
narratives of particular events and political settlements, as
well as
explorations of the ways that popular culture informs mainstream political
discourse. The series promotes
investigation into how popular culture
contributes to changing perceptions of time, space, scale, identity and
participation, while establishing the outer limits of what is popularly
understood as ‘political’ or ‘cultural’.
In addition to film, television, literature and art, the series actively
encourages research into diverse
artefacts including sound, music, food
cultures, gaming, design, architecture, programming, leisure, sport,
fandom
and celebrity. The series is fiercely pluralist in its approaches to the study of
popular culture and
world politics, and is interested in the past, present and
future cultural dimensions of hegemony, resistance and
power.

Gender, Violence and Popular Culture

Telling stories
Laura J. Shepherd

Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy

John Champagne

Genre, Gender and the Effects of Neoliberalism

The new millennium Hollywood rom com
Betty Kaklamanidou

Battlestar Galactica and International Relations

Edited by Iver B. Neumann and Nicholas J. Kiersey

The Politics of HBO’s The Wire

Everything is connected
Edited by Shirin Deylami and Jonathan Havercroft

Documenting World Politics

A critical companion to international relations and non-fiction film
Edited by Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest

Sexing War/Policing Gender

Motherhood, myth and women’s political violence
Linda Ahall

Popular Culture, Political Economy and the Death of Feminism

Why women are in refrigerators and other stories
Penny Griffin

Post-communist Aesthetics
Revolutions, capitalism, violence
Anca M. Pusca

Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age

Laura J. Shepherd and Caitlin Hamilton

Political Torture in Popular Culture

The role of representations in the post 9/11 torture debate
Alex Adams

The International Politics of Fashion

Being fab in a dangerous world
Edited by Andreas Behnke
In many of our scholarly books and articles, international politics appears to
take place between and among
abstract, fleshless entities without
personality or perspective. Focusing on fashion as both a site and a medium
of political and social life goes a long way towards addressing this gap and
curing this blindness. This
collection of insightful essays on the
‘enfashioning’ that goes on all throughout international affairs is an
impressive show indeed!
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson,
Professor of International Studies,
School of International Service, American University, USA

Covering an impressive range of issues and ideas related to all things

sartorial, Behnke’s The International
Politics of Fashion offers a refreshing
refashioning of the interconnections between culture and politics.
Elspeth Van Veeren, Lecturer in Political Science, University of
Bristol, UK
The International Politics of Fashion
Being fab in a dangerous world

Edited by
Andreas Behnke
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 selection and editorial material, Andreas Behnke; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Andreas Behnke to be identified as author of the editorial
material, and of the individual authors
as authors of their contributions, has
been asserted by them 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
utilized 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 Cataloguing in Publication Data

Names: Behnke, Andreas, editor.Title: The international politics of fashion : being fab in a dangerous
world /
edited by Andreas Behnke.Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Popular
culture and world
politics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN
2016019192 | ISBN 9781138788985
(hardback) | ISBN 9781315765082 (ebook)Subjects: LCSH:
Fashion–Political aspects. | Clothing and
dress–Political aspects.Classification: LCC GT523.9.I67
2016 | DDC 391–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019192

ISBN: 978-1-138-78898-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-76508-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Out of House Publishing
Contents

List of figures
List of contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1 This is not a mannequin:
enfashioning bodies of resistance
Rosemary E. Shinko

2 The art of (un)dressing

dangerously: the veil and/as fashion
M.I. Franklin

3 Orientalism refashioned:
‘Eastern moon’ in ‘Western waters’ reflecting
back on the East China Sea
L.H.M. Ling

4 Fashion statements:
wearing trousers in Sudan
Linda Bishai

5 (Un)dressing the
sovereign: fashion as symbolic form
Andreas Behnke

6 The evolution of Somali

women’s fashion during changing security
contexts
Mary Hope Schwoebel

7 Margaret Thatcher, dress

and the politics of fashion
Daniel Conway

8 Fashion studies takes on

politics
Hazel Clark and Molly Rottman

Index
List of figures

1.1 An Yves Saint

Laurent mannequin
2.1 ‘On the street:
Corso Venezia, Milan’, by The Sartorialist, 2014
2.2a and 2.2b Diptych
of Burqa and Tits, by Sarah Maple, 2009
2.3 You,
double self-portrait by Sarah Maple, 2007
3.1 Jean-Paul Gaultier
haute couture evening dress, Autumn/Winter
2001/02
3.2 Guo Pei, haute
couture gold lamé gown, 2007
3.3
Paris-Shanghai: A Fantasy (video still), 2009
4.1 Lubna Hussein
leaves the cafe where she was arrested in Khartoum,
31 July 2009
4.2 Sudanese woman
wearing traditional dress, the thobe
4.3 Two Nubian women
standing in front of a hut
5.1 Portrait of
Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743), 1702 (oil on
canvas)
5.2 La Reine en
Gaulle, portrait of Marie-Antoinette by Louise Élisabeth
Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842), 1783 (oil on canvas)
5.3 Michelle Obama
in Naeem Khan at the state dinner for the Indian
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, November 2009
5.4 Michelle Obama
in Alexander McQueen at the state dinner for
Chinese President Hu Jintao, January 2011
6.1 Guntiino
and garbasar made of aliindi or Merca cloth, handwoven
from the coastal town of Merca
6.2 A dirac
and gorgoro with a lightweight garbasar
6.3 A
cambuur, or dress with a larger garbasar
6.4 A
jilbaab, the garment worn by the majority of women throughout
Somalia today
6.5 An abaya,
hijab and niqab, as worn by women in the Gulf, but also by
Somali women
7.1 Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher meets President Ronald Reagan at
the White House, 1988
7.2 Margaret
Thatcher, newly-elected leader of the Conservative Party,
poses in her kitchen for the press, 1975
7.3 Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher wears an Aquascutum fur hat and
coat while meeting the Russian public in Moscow, 1987
List of contributors

Andreas Behnke is Associate Professor of International Political Theory at

the University of Reading,
UK. His research interests include the
political theory of international relations, in particular Carl Schmitt,
critical security studies, critical geopolitics, security and globalization
and the aesthetics of global
politics. He is the author of NATO’s Security
Discourse after the Cold War: Representing the West
(Routledge 2013),
the co-editor (with Christina Hellmich) of Knowing al-Qaeda: The
Epistemology of
Terrorism (Ashgate 2012) and the author of numerous
articles on international security and terrorism,
including ‘Dressed to
Kill: The Sartorial Code of Anders Behring Brevik’ in Terrorist
Transgressions: Gender
and the Visual Culture of the Terrorist (edited by
Sue Malvern and Gabriel Koureas, I.B. Tauris 2014).
Linda Bishai is the Director of North Africa Programs at the United States
Institute of Peace, and
professorial lecturer at the Elliott School of
International Affairs, George Washington University, USA. She is
the
author of Forgetting Ourselves: Secession and the (Im)possibility of
Territorial Identity (Lexington
Books 2006) and numerous articles on the
interstices between international law and politics. Her research
interests
include identity politics, peace-building and social transformation, and
international law and the
use of force.
Hazel Clark is Professor of Design Studies and Fashion Studies, and
Research Chair of Fashion at Parsons
School of Design, New York. She
has a specialist interest in fashion, textiles and design and cultural
identity. She has taught and researched in Europe, Asia, Australia and the
 USA. Her books include: The
Cheongsam (2000), the co-edited Old
Clothes, New Looks: Second Hand Fashion (with Alexandra Palma,
Berg
2005), The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity, and Globalization (with
Eugenia Paulicelli,
Routledge 2009), Design Studies: A Reader (with
David Brody, Berg 2009) and the co-edited The
Handbook of Textile
Culture (with Janis Jeffries and Diana Wood-Conroy, Bloomsbury 2016).
Her forthcoming
publications include: Fashion and Everyday Life:
London and New York, 1890–2010, (with Cheryl Buckley,
Bloomsbury
2017) and Fashion Curating: Critical Practice in the Museum and
Beyond
(co-edited with Annamari Vanska, Bloomsbury 2017).
Daniel Conway is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at
the University of
Westminster, UK. His main research interests are in
gendered and feminist approaches to international relations
and critical
whiteness studies. His key publications include Migration, Space and
Transnational Identities:
The British in South Africa (with Pauline
Leonard, Southampton 2014) and Masculinities, Militarisation
and the
End Conscription Campaign: War Resistance in Apartheid South Africa
(Manchester University Press
2012).
M.I. Franklin is Professor of Global Media and Politics at Goldsmiths,
University of London, UK. Her
research and publications explore the
geocultural politics of the technoculture, politics and society nexus
from
a postcolonial feminist and multidisciplinary perspective. She is currently
Chair of the Global Internet
Governance Academic Network (GigaNet)
and former co-Chair of the Internet Rights & Principles Coalition
(IRPC)
at the Internet Governance Forum.
L.H.M. Ling is Professor of International Affairs at The New School, New
York, USA. She is the author of
four books: Postcolonial International
Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West (2002),
Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (with
A.M. Agathangelou, 2009); The Dao
of World Politics: Towards a Post-
Westphalian, Worldist International Relations (2014); and Imagining
World Politics: Sihar & Shenya, A Fable for Our Times (2014). Her next
 two books are forthcoming: A
Worldly World Order: Epistemic
Compassion for International Relations (Oxford University Press) and
Between India and China: An Ancient Dialectic for Contemporary World
Politics (with Payal Banerjee,
Rowman & Littlefield). She seeks to
decolonize the discipline of international relations by introducing
non-
Western, non-Westphalian philosophies and practices such as Daoism, as
well as traditional Indian and
Chinese medicine, to world politics.
Molly Rottman is the Assistant Director of Academic Communications at
Parsons School of Design, New
York, USA. Molly’s work has appeared
in Fashion Studies Journal (FSJ). Currently she is working on a
large
project dealing with the intersections of luxury consumption and sexual
identity among gay men in
downtown Manhattan.
Mary Hope Schwoebel is Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict
Studies at Nova Southeastern
University, USA. She has 30 years’
experience in the fields of peacebuilding, governance, humanitarian
assistance and development, and has worked for United Nations
agencies, bilateral and multilateral and
non-governmental organizations.
She served for five years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay,
followed by
six years managing programs for UNICEF and non-
governmental organizations in Somalia and
Kenya. Most recently, she
spent five years at the Academy for International Conflict Management
and
Peacebuilding at the US Institute of Peace, where she designed and
conducted dialogues and training in dozens
of war-torn countries,
including Afghanistan, Colombia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Yemen. She has
been working in
and on Somalia, Somaliland and Somali regions in
Kenya and Ethiopia since 1988.
Rosemary E. Shinko is Assistant Professor in the School of International
Service, American University,
USA. Her research interests span a range
of topics within international relations theory, including
problematizing
the body in international relations and, most recently, questions involving
visuality and
textuality and the seeing in thinking. She has published
articles in Millennium: Journal of International
Studies, International
Studies Perspectives, Journal of International Relations and
Development, International Studies Association Encyclopedia and
various book chapters.
Foreword

One of the most fundamental facts about human beings is that they have
bodies, and these bodies are dressed, and
rarely but always significantly
undressed, in very specific and meaningful ways (Entwistle, 2000: 6). Dress
–
practices of adorning and (un)covering the body – is fundamentally
meaningful and political. Ghandi’s donning of
the dhoti and his
commitment to hand weaving and hand spinning supported the anti-
imperial swadeshi
movement and represented, performed and inspired a
wider anti-colonial Indian identity. Gender relations are, in
many contexts
and times, debated and fought over through attempts, formally and
informally, to legislate and
regulate women’s dress: ongoing disputes over
veiling, the Badminton World Federation’s skirt/shorts controversy
of 2012,
and the ethics of SlutWalk protest marches amongst feminists are but a few
recent examples. Fashion –
wider institutionalised practices for the
production of dress – is also meaningful and political. That President
Obama allows himself to be photographed in shirt sleeves and that Michelle
Obama, like Jackie O, appeared in a
sleeveless dress may be ‘fashion
statements’ – or fashion faux pas – but they are simultaneously
politically
meaningful and consequential.
Whilst popular culture has begun to be more systematically examined in
International Relations (IR) scholarship
in relation to diverse world politics
texts, institutions and practices (not least in this series, of course),
fashion
continues to be ignored. Dress and fashion – arguably one of the most
fundamental of human semiotic
activities – remains almost entirely
invisible in IR but (see Saco, 1997) – perhaps, as Andreas Behnke observes,
because it is fundamentally associated with the ‘frivolous and insignificant’,
not to mention the female and the
domestic. As Behnke also notes, even
scholars arguing for an IR turn to the aesthetic tend to do so with a high
culture focus on proper Art, which sidelines dress and fashion as less
worthy of attention.
However, just as with other forms of popular culture, whether film,
television, video games, news media, tourism,
social media or sport, fashion
is implicated in diverse aspects of world politics. The fashion industry and
its
corollaries contribute significantly to national and international trade, for
instance: International Fashion
Weeks are just big international business. In
a different arena of world politics, the fashion for the diamond
engagement
ring, invented for DeBeers by the Ayers advertising agency in the 1930s,
has been
instrumental both in fuelling trade in ‘blood diamonds’ and the
civil wars they support and in prompting the
international regulation of that
trade (Rowley and Weldes, 2015). Fashion is thus not as insignificant as it
may
first appear.
The authors in this volume take fashion seriously in IR and world
politics. For them, fashion and dress are
implicated, in particular, in diverse
performances of identity, power and authority that are, or should be, of
central import to scholars of IR. As a result, ‘sartorial performance of
political subjectivity’ through dress
and fashion takes centre stage in the
diverse analyses of political identities and differences provided in this
volume. A few examples will have to suffice. Consonant with her ongoing
project of constructing an alternative,
non-Western, Taoist IR, L.H.M Ling
examines the deployment of China, Chinoise imagery and Orientalism –
‘daydreams about China’ – in Karl Lagersfeld’s 2010 Chanel season to
examine the possibility of a reimagined
Orientalism and reimagined
relations between the West and the rest. Daniel Conway examines political
agency as it
manifests itself in former UK Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher’s diverse gendered performances of ‘The Iron Lady’
and their
implication in both her political rise and her political demise. Through an
examination of the policing
of dress – the arrest in 2009 of a Sudanese
journalist for wearing trousers – fashion becomes a lens through
which
Linda Bishai examines a failed attempt by the Sudanese government to
perform Islamic credentials and the
subsequent creation of spaces of
political resistance and protest in a dramatic case of the ‘politics of
“what-
not-to-wear”’. Together, the chapters in this timely volume open an exciting
new research agenda within the
wider terrain of PCWP.
Jutta Weldes
Co-editor of the Popular Culture and World Politics Series

References
Entwistle, Joanne (2000) The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory,
Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Rowley, Christina, and Jutta Weldes (2015) ‘So, how does popular culture relate to world politics?’
in
Federica Caso and Caitlin Hamilton, eds., Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories,
Methods,
Pedagogies, Bristol: E-International Relations Publishing, pp. 11–33.
Saco, Diana (1997) ‘Gendering sovereignty: marriage and international relations in Elizabethan
times’,
European Journal of International Relations, 3(3): 291–318.
Acknowledgements

This project started some time ago with a stroll on the South Bank along the
River Thames in London, when I
noticed an advertisement of the British
Film Institute (BFI) for an advance screening of The September
Issue (dir.
R.J. Cutler, 2009). Giving in to a vaguely articulated fascination with
fashion, I took this
opportunity to see what fashion is all about. I did so
without any expectation that this experience would be
relevant to my
professional interests in any way, but on leaving the BFI I wondered what it
would mean to enquire
into the politics of fashion. An initial idea about the
lack of interest in fashion and sartorial competence
among many students of
politics and international relations was quickly abandoned, although I now
do think that
Valerie Steele’s famous essay on ‘The F Word’ (‘F’ for
fashion) deserves an update. Instead, I began to ask a
select group of
colleagues about what they associated with that notion. The responses were
nothing short of
amazing, betraying a widely shared desire finally to
address fashion and its role in politics. So my first and
foremost expression
of gratitude goes to the authors of this volume, including David Conway,
who had the courage
to join this project at a later stage. Their contributions
are all examples of innovative and fascinating
research into different
aspects of the interstices of politics and fashion. It has been a fabulous
pleasure
working with them.
The project started in 2011, with a two-session panel, ‘Being Fab in a
Dangerous World’, at the International
Studies Association Annual
Convention in Montreal. My thanks go to Xavier Guillaume, then the
International
Political Sociology Section Programme Chair, for his open-
mindedness and for granting us those sessions. The
project continued with a
one-day workshop in April 2012 at Parsons School of Design. I am grateful
to Hazel Clark
and L.H.M. Ling for organizing the workshop, and to its
participants for their lively and productive comments,
feedback and
critiques.
This book project has benefited significantly from the feedback and
input of its reviewers and the series
editors, whose support and enthusiasm
for it are much appreciated. The fact that the book finally made it into
print
is due not least to the patience and competence of the Routledge editors, in
particular Lydia de Cruz, who
did a superb job in guiding it over the finish
line.
The authors would also like to thank the following agencies,
organizations and individuals
for permission to reprint images in this book:
AP/Press Association Images for Figure 1.1 and Figures 5.3 and 5.4; The
Sartorialist for Figure 2.1; Sarah Maple for Figures 2.2a,
2.2b and 2.3;
Platon/Trunk Archive for Figure 3.1; Rose Studio Couture for Figure 3.2;
Reuters for Figure 4.1; Linda
Bishai for Figure 4.2; US Library of Congress
for Figure 4.3; Wikimedia Commons for Figures 5.1 and 5.2; Ronald
Reagan Library
for Figure 7.1; Hulton Archives/Getty Images for Figure
7.2; and Corbis Images for Figure 7.3.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their
permission to reprint material in this book.
The publishers would be
grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged,
and will
undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of
this book. This book is dedicated to my sister
Connie, the joyous fashionista
I grew up with.
Introduction

‘Clothes make the man. Naked people have no or little influence in

society.’
(Twain 1927)

Much like politics, fashion is an integral and inescapable part of our lives.
Yet while scholars in sociology,
ethnography, culture studies, history and
even philosophy have discussed the different aspects of how we dress
from
their particular perspectives, with few exceptions the study of politics has
ignored fashion consistently.
One might well wonder what the reasons for
this adamant lack of interest are.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Valerie Steele’s essay on ‘The F-Word’ (Steele
1991) still rings true to the researcher
who surveys university colleagues’
opinions about fashion. A common reply is the argument that one of the
perks
of an academic job is precisely not having to pay attention to
appearance; one might hear dismissive comments
invoking the Cartesian
duality of mind and body even from philosophically trained scholars who,
one would have
thought, had long since rejected this peculiar dichotomy.
Yet assertions to be a ‘person of the mind’ who would
betray his or her
academic status and identity by wasting time with sartorial concerns are
made quite frequently.
So Steele’s quote from a history professor at UCLA
still rings true today, at least among scholars of politics:

To dress fashionably is to be labeled frivolous, to seem to … downplay

the life of the mind. Most colleagues
view sartorial interest and
especially sartorial ‘play’ … with a mixture of amusement,
 condescension, and fear.
[Through] bad dressing … academics can
project the illusion of other-worldliness.
(Steele 1991)

Thus, to study ‘the politics of fashion’ betrays a willingness to waste time

with a ‘frivolous and insignificant’
topic.1 In a field
preoccupied with war,
violence and terrorism, nuclear codes are certainly more important than
dress codes, and
the uniforms of soldiers invading other countries need not
be subjected to a fashion review. Yet perhaps the line
between high politics
and frivolous fashion is drawn less clearly than expected.
For example, in
the wake of the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014
(which itself was interesting
for its use of ‘little green man’, i.e. combatants
wearing unmarked green ‘uniforms’), the Russian Ministry of
Defence
teamed up with Leonid Alexeev, a Russian fashion designer, to create a new
clothing line called ‘Army of
Russia’, which is ‘inspired by the “Crimean
spring”’ (Noack 2015). In the words of the designer: ‘I do not sew
army
uniforms, but I can help make the army attractive to people. This is my
personal form of patriotism.’
Vladimir Pavlov, general director of the
military supply shop Voentorg, reveals the defence ministry’s
motivation
behind this fashion strategy, stating that the collection is designed for
people ‘leading an active
lifestyle and sharing military values – patriotism,
camaraderie and mobility’ (Beard 2015).
Therefore, there is reason to accept Roland Bleiker’s emphatic argument
for ‘an aesthetic engagement with
politics’ and the recognition of
‘aesthetics as an essential aspect of understanding world politics …
questions
of taste are central to who we are and what we do’ (Bleiker 2009:
1, cf. also 2001). In the case of the Russian
military–sartorial complex, the
illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory is fashioned into a commodified
expression of Russian nationalism, celebrating the event by issuing
commemorative T-shirts. Among the words or
slogans printed on them, two
stand out: vezhliv and vezhlivost goroda beret – ‘polite’ and
‘politeness
takes cities’: references to the unmarked pro-Russian fighters in the Crimea
that the Crimean
citizens referred to as ‘polite people’:
 Witnesses noted that the people in uniform did not have identifying
badges, did not comment on where they came
from, but conducted
themselves ‘very politely.’ In fact, voentorg tried to register the
expression
‘polite people’ as a trademark.
(Demidiuk 2014; author’s translation)

Yet for reasons unexplained, Bleiker excludes fashion from the aesthetics of
world politics – thereby implicitly,
but very clearly, repeating the prejudices
unearthed by Steele almost 25 years ago. For all the exultation of art
and the
aesthetic, Bleiker purposefully excludes the most direct, ubiquitous and, as I
shall argue below,
significant aesthetic form of the political. For him, only
the ‘proper arts’ of painting, music, poetry,
photography and film are
relevant for the development of an aesthetic investigation of international
politics.
‘Aesthetics, in this sense, is about the ability to step back, reflect
and see political conflict and dilemmas in
new ways’ (Bleiker 2009: 2).
Later, ‘aesthetic politics … has to do with the ability of artistic engagements
to
challenge, in a more fundamental way, how we think about and represent
the political’ (Bleiker 2009: 8). Bleiker
approaches the aesthetic realm as a
epistemological reservoir: as a realm that renders the political differently
and thereby opens up new ways of thinking and knowing about it. It opens
spaces of critical thought and
reflection with which the standard archives of
international politics cannot
provide us. This is without doubt a valid and
valuable expansion of where we can possibly find the political, but
it does
make it difficult to include fashion in this approach. It would be possible,
indeed quite easy, to
discern a political message in, for example, Alexeev’s
recent clothing line. His runway show expressed a clear
nationalistic
message in support of Russian expansionism and revisionism. This might
not fulfil Bleiker’s desire
to render the political in a new fashion and to
inspire new thinking, but nonetheless it is a political message
within an
aesthetic item. Beyond this, fashion in fact escapes Bleiker’s definition as
an epistemic (and perhaps
ethical) reservoir for our political thinking. He is
interested in the political elements within art, yet
fashion is understood and
investigated better in terms of a fashioning of the political. Politics, the
present
argument asserts, is not prior to fashion, as it is to painting, poetry,
music or photography; but fashion –
dressing in particular ways, according
to socially mediated sartorial codes – is a constitutive element of the
political. This definition of ‘fashion’ plays on the particular English term of
what is rendered as ‘mode’ or
‘moda’ in other European languages. The
terms ‘fashion’ and ‘fashioning’ allow us to appreciate the active,
productive and practical aspects of this process of visualization. To begin
with, fashion refers to the adornment
or dressing of socially and politically
situated bodies, and the social and political effects that this process
entails.
As the chapters in this volume will demonstrate, political subjectivities,
political authority,
political power and discipline are rendered visible, and
thereby real, through the way that fashion
co-establishes them. This is not
to say that the political can be reduced to fashion – no such reductionism is
implied here. Politics is not always about fashion, and fashion is not always
political. However, it is possible
to study both the fashioning of the
political, as well as the politicization of fashion. Fashion is part and
parcel
of the performativity of the political. This reasoning shows up in some
unlikely places. In the 1987
McDowell’s Directory of Twentieth Century
Fashion, reflecting on the halcyon days of monarchy and
aristocracy,
McDowell asserts that in ‘the past … clothes became not only the trapping
of power, but part of the
exercise of power itself’ (1987: 9). Thomas
Carlyle’s nineteenth-century protagonist in Sartor Resartus,
Dr
Teufelsdröckh, takes on a more general position: ‘Society is founded upon
Cloth’ (Carlyle 2008: 41). As the
anonymous narrator and chronicler of
Teufelsdröck’s life and work summarizes it:

The thing Visible, nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any way
conceived as Visible, what is it but a Garment,
a clothing of the higher,
celestial Invisible, ‘unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of
bright?’
(Carlyle 2008: 52)
Garment and clothing, Teufelsdröckh seems to suggest, make visible the
metaphysical ideas, ‘dark with excess of
bright’, that are the foundations of
our (political) order. How then to relate garment and clothing to the
fashioning of the political?

Fashion and the performativity of the political

A number of authors in this volume explicitly link their investigation into
the politics of fashion to Judith
Butler’s concept of performativity, first
formulated within her discussion of gender. For Butler, gender has no
essence or true nature, it cannot be assumed to exist prior to social
interactions, expressing itself in the
latter. Any notion of an essence or
‘substance’ of gender is rejected because

words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core
or substance, but produce this on
the surface of the body. Such acts,
gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in
the
sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express
are fabrications
manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs
and other discursive means.
(Butler 1999: 173; emphasis in original).

In summary, in her by-now well-established characterization:

Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of

agency from which various acts follow;
rather, gender is an identity
tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a
stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the
stylization of the body and,
hence, must be understood as the mundane
way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds
constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.
(Butler 1999: 179; emphasis in original)

In other words, gender is not a fixed attribute; rather, it is a constant,

reiterative performance of gender
roles as defined and expected by society.
The fact that an ‘audience’ witnesses and sanctions or condemns these
performances is the constant counterweight to the rather agential rendering
of gender by Butler. It is also the
necessary condition for the relevance of
gender-bending, transgender identities and drag. All these performances
have social and political relevance to the extent that they defy, reject and
resist social norms and
expectations. Any performance is reviewed and
elicits responses that judge and adjudicate it socially,
politically and legally.
The adaptation of Butler’s conceptualization of identity in this chapter
focuses on a central element that Butler
does not fully address. While dress
and sartorial code are involved implicitly in her discussion of drag and
cross-dressing, there is no systematic engagement with the way that women
dress in order to perform their social
roles. However, as any actor knows, a
performance depends to a large extent on the costume worn in it. Much of
the identity of the performed characters is revealed or concealed by the
costumes they wear.2 Similarly, in feminist politics, dress has
always played
a central role, from the suffragettes of the turn of the twentieth
century
(Parkins 2002b) to the ‘slut walks’ of 2011 (Valenti 2011; critically: Phillips
2011). Dress fashioned
and fashions the identity of these women by making
them visible in their performances. Thus, the provocativeness
of the ‘slut
walks’ was produced not by the mere appearance of women on the streets
of Toronto, New York and
Washington, DC, but by their sartorial
appearance in bras, panties, stockings and other forms of sexualized
undergarment.
Therefore, Butler’s emphasis on the performativity of identity should be
amended by a focus on the sartorial
choices of women performing their
gender. Fashion makes those performances visible, and thus real. Women,
men,
cross-dressers, drag queens and transsexuals make themselves visible
through the clothes they wear. There would
be no cross-dresser, no drag
queen and no transsexual dressed in the ‘opposite’ gender’s clothing
without fashion.
However, fashion, as the argument presented here asserts, goes beyond
the performance of gender. It is involved
also in the performative
constitution of political subjectivities, of power and authority, as well as of
the
subjects and victims of such power. Crucially, the analysis
acknowledges Butler’s point that there is no easy
transposition of the theory
of performativity onto other identities than gender. Rather, different
‘categories
always work as background for one another, and they often find
their most powerful articulation through one
another’ (Butler 1999: xvi).
Hence, the femaleness of the relevant actors is a significant part of the role
that
they play in sartorial and visual performances of the political. The
female body, it appears, remains the primary
site of symbolic political
practices that fashion the body politic (Parkins 2002a). This does not mean
that male
fashion is irrelevant. First, in authoritarian regimes, male sartorial
appearances frequently signify the nature
of that regime in often highly
stylized and elaborate fashion. From the austere outfits of North Korean
leaders
and the creative flamboyance of Muammar al-Qaddafi to the
proscription of ties in Iranian political dress, male
vestiary conventions
inform the sartorial performances of these regimes’ identity (Photo Essay
2010). Second,
even in Western liberal societies, the very fact that male
politicians’ sartorial appearance is usually not an
issue for discussion or
review, while female politicians are almost constantly under the public
gaze, indicates
the normalization of male-dominated political structures.
While women need to demonstrate their ability to hold
or assume office
through their fashion choices (cf. Givhan 2010), men only appear under the
glaring lights of
fashion critics when they violate the ‘uniform code of
political dress’ all too blatantly.3
Therefore, the sartorial performance of political subjectivity always
establishes a relation between the involved
parties; however, while it is a
relation that often draws on gender roles, it also exceeds the latter and
cannot
be reduced to it. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, this is
about establishing relations of power and
authority, involved in the
production and performance of relations between cultures, religions,
‘races’,
sovereign states, geopolitical spaces and, indeed, gender. The
political, then, emerges in the power–knowledge
nexus that defines these
relations, and the sartorial performances of political identity and difference
that visualize this nexus. Such a relational perspective contrasts with the
predominant approach found in much of the sociological, anthropological
or cultural studies literature on
fashion, moving away from fashion theory’s
dominant focus on the body as the object of adornment and dressing
(cf.
Entwistle 2015: 1) to the performance of relational social and political
subjectivities. These subjects
themselves only emerge in these
performances; they are not ontologically prior to them.4
Within fashion theory, dressing and adorning predominantly refers to the
body as a way of ‘making it appropriate,
acceptable, indeed respectable’.
Thus, fashion negotiates ‘the boundary between self and other … the
individual
and the social world’ (Entwistle 2015: 7). The relationship that
Entwistle and other fashion theorists focus on
is the one between the
individual(ized) body and the social context within which the former
presents itself. For
these authors, this ‘micro-social order’ (2015: 9) defines
the limits of the relevance of fashion.
Obviously, it would be pointless to deny that the corporeality of the
fashioned subject matters as the medium in
which fashion becomes a
central part of the performance of politics and society. Clothing without a
body wearing
it is but cloth. Yet from a political analytical viewpoint, the
‘micro-social order’ that defines the reach of
sartorial performances does
not suffice. As the different chapters in this volume demonstrate, fashion
also needs
to be analysed in terms of the macro-structures of political
power, subjectivities and institutions. In order to
understand fully the
political nature of sartorial performances and the role that power plays in
them, a set of
final amendments is necessary.
First, these sartorially performed relationships are not confined to the
inside of a society. As the title of
this book indicates, the authors are
interested in the role of fashion in international politics. The last
term
should be understood in a nominalist fashion, encompassing intercultural,
interreligious and interstate
relations. The mediation of these relations of
difference via particular sartorial codes and policies is
what gives fashion its
distinct political role. The growing globalization of world politics renders
traditional
solutions to the problem of difference – that is, its spatial
exclusion beyond the conceptual and legal
boundaries of the state –
increasingly ineffective (cf. Inayatullah and Blaney 2004). The Other
performs his or
her otherness in front of our very eyes, raising the question
of how to read and relate to his or her presence.
Moreover, with modern
mass media extending our gaze beyond the boundaries of our own national,
cultural and
political contexts, the international politics of fashion becomes
a central part of how we make sense of
an increasingly complex world.
Second, sartorial performances are not always the free choice of a
particular subject. It is important to
understand that fashioning the political
subject does not begin with the voluntary, and sometimes joyful, choice
of
dress, or even professional ‘business uniform’. Rather, as the appalling
images of abused, humiliated and
tortured inmates of the US-administered
Iraqi prison in Abu Ghraib in 2003
demonstrate, this process begins with
stripping human beings of any clothing, rendering them naked and soiled
with dirt and faeces. Stripped of all clothing, they are reduced to being what
Giorgio Agamben (1998) labelled
‘homo sacer’ – a creature reduced to bare
life, barely alive. Relations between the excess of sovereign power and
the
incarcerated and tortured life that this produces are sartorially performed
also in the orange jumpsuits made
notorious by images of terrorist suspects
in the US Guantánamo Bay detention camp (van Veeren 2011; cf. Foster
2015). Ironically, these jumpsuits have been adopted by the ‘Islamic State’
in Syria and Iraq, as a symbol of its
sovereign power over the life and death
of its captives in its ominous beheading videos. One also should include
the
evolution of military uniforms in the study of the interstices of fashion and
the political. As Xavier
Guillaume and colleagues (2016) demonstrate, a
semiotic analysis of the colouring and patterns of uniforms
reflects and
creates historically changing imageries, tactics and practices of the
battlefield. A critical study
of the politics of fashion needs to acknowledge
and include the noxious as well as the creative aspects of the
political: the
violent as well as the sublime vestiary performances that visualize
structures of power, authority
and agency.

Fashion as an ambiguous semiotic system

If indeed fashion is significantly involved in the performance of political
identity, subjectivity, power and
authority – if it is, in Butler’s words, part
of the stylized repetition of acts that perform identity –
what methodology
can capture this function of fashion? A number of scholars have approached
this communicative
role of fashion via a semiotics of fashion, considering it
as a language of sorts. In its most radical or literal
version, Roland Barthes
investigates the language used in fashion magazines to describe women’s
clothing. What he
is interested in is not the visual code of women’s dresses
and adornment but, following Saussure’s semiology, the
‘written garment’
as it appears in the descriptions accompanying images of clothing in
magazines (Barthes
1985).5 Whether or not
this particular approach renders
any interesting insights into a medium that is, first and foremost, visual and
material, cannot be decided here. Barthes’ finding that much of the writing
about fashion in magazines is ‘banal
rhetoric’ and hardly worth a systematic
semiotic analysis, is hardly surprising for anybody familiar with the
standardized language of these magazines (Barthes 1985: 237).6 More
attuned to the visuality of fashion is Alison Lurie’s book, The
Language of
Clothes (1981). Fashion, she asserts, is a language with a particular
‘grammar’ and
vocabulary; clothes are a visual vocabulary (Lurie 1981).
However, this argument is supported by a set of
examples based on
analogies, rather than fully fledged theory. Moreover, even a brief critical
reflection on
people’s day-to-day appearances will reveal that while clothes
do communicate something, most of the time that
message remains
ambiguous and unclear. In order to capture this ambiguity it
seems to be
more useful to consider fashion a particular code, or quasi-code:

which, although it must necessarily draw on the conventional visual

and tactile symbols of a culture, does so
allusively, ambiguously, and
inchoately, so that the meaning evoked by the combinations and
permutations of the
code’s key terms (fabric, texture, color, pattern,
volume, silhouette, and occasion) are forever shifting or
‘in process’.
(Davis 1994: 5)
Davis offers three defining features of the fashion code that give it its
particular ambiguity:

1 context-dependency – the meaning of garments will depend on ‘the

identity of the
wearer, the occasion, the place, the company, and even …
the wearer’s and the viewers’ moods’;
2 a ‘high social variability in the signifier–signified relationship’–
‘clothing
styles and fashions do not mean the same things to all members
of a society’;
3 ‘undercoding occurs when in the absence of reliable interpretative rules
persons
presume or infer, often unwittingly … molar meanings in a text,
score, performance, or other communication’
(Davis 1994: 11).

Davis’ exposition is compelling, although it requires some modification:

(military) uniforms demonstrate that
some sartorial codes are less
ambiguous than others. By definition, uniforms are designed to erase
ambiguity and
to make the collective that is wearing them transparent.
Revolutionary regimes, such as the ones in France after
1789 or in China
after 1949, either contemplated or implemented a uniform dress code – a
national costume or the
‘Mao suit’ – for their revolutionary societies.
Fashion in this context signifies and performs the unity of
revolutionary
government and people. However, not even the uniform can completely
escape the creative ambiguity
of fashion. Its particular features are
frequently appropriated for haute couture or ready-to-wear designs.
Conversely, for example, the US Special Forces that waged war on
horseback in Afghanistan in 2001 adjusted their
appearance to the
unconventional circumstances and wore no identifiable standard uniform.
Beyond the uniform, it is the ambiguity of the fashion code and the
inescapable mobility of its signifiers that
weaves it into the fabric of power
and politics. It resists any direct disciplinary control and the impulse to
arrest its meaning, while at the same time calling, even inciting it. Fashion
becomes political because it is,
first and foremost, a scandal for power and
order. Writes Jean Baudrillard:7
 Fashion is immoral, this is what’s in question; and all power (or all
those who dream of it) necessarily hates
it.
[…]
Fashion … knows nothing of value systems, nor of criteria of
judgement: good
and evil, beauty and ugliness, the rational/irrational –
it plays within and beyond these, it acts therefore as
the subversion of
all order, including revolutionary rationality. It is power’s hell, the hell
of all
relativity of all signs which all power is forced to crush in order
to maintain its own signs.
(Baudrillard 2007b[1993]: 472)

The performativity of fashion, its involvement in the performance of

political identity and subjectivity, then,
draws on this ‘immorality’ and
denial and rejection of all pre-established code. For example, to mobilize
the
fashion of the boudoir in order to make a feminist point about sexual
harassment – as the participants in the
‘slut walks’ mentioned above did –
plays precisely on the irreverence of this code towards social propriety. At
the same time, power always tries to, if not ‘crush’, then control sartorial
code. From the desire for social
transparency via national or ideological
uniforms to the signification of a terrorist identity via orange
jumpsuits,
political power seeks to provide (or rather, impose) a stable referent object
in order to arrest the
play of sartorial signs. Therefore, the performance of
sartorial politics constantly oscillates between the
subversion of power
through fashion’s ‘immorality’ and power’s disciplinary encoding of
fashion for its own
purposes – be it by disciplining or appropriating it.
These introductory remarks are meant to provide a conceptual
framework for the following chapters; they do not
seek to develop a fully
fledged theory of the politics of fashion. The impossibility of any
comprehensive and
single-focus theorizing about fashion has been aptly
demonstrated by Elizabeth Wilson in her survey of such
attempts (2003:
47–66). All these efforts to explain fashion in terms of functionalism,
economic needs, social
status, anthropological perspectives or feminism
ultimately result in the authors ‘explaining it away’.
Therefore, we should
be careful not to repeat this mistake by trying to reduce fashion to a prior
political logic
or necessity.

Structure of the book

While the chapters of this book all address the relational performativity of
sartorial codes, they do so in a
variety of ways and in different contexts.
Rosemary Shinko’s chapter elaborates on the relevance of, as she calls
it,
‘enfashioning’ bodies in the creation of political identities: in particular,
bodies of resistance. Drawing
on Foucault’s technologies of the self, she
explores how dress is involved in the construction of the self’s
subjectivity
and identity. With Butler, she asks how reiterative sartorial performances
can operate in a
subversive, rather than affirmative or resigned, way in
order to effect transformations in existing structures of
identity and
meaning. At the same time, this can be investigated only if we also
understand how fashion practices
are involved in the normalizing
inscriptions of power onto the body, and in the
resistance to it. Drawing on
Foucault’s reading of Magritte’s famous painting Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe
(This Is Not A Pipe), an artwork that emphasizes the play of meanings
produced by the disjuncture between
representation and language, she
develops the idea of the ‘mannequin’ as a juxtapositional site: a point of
convergence that can absorb all signs and renders their play as a similitude,
defying the logic of representation
and signification. Bringing together the
body as a corporeal entity and the body-as-mannequin allows Shinko to
investigate the politics of fashion in terms of compliance and resistance.
Her analysis culminates in the case of
Emmett Till, a young black teenager
who was brutally killed in Mississippi in 1955, and the role of the ‘Sunday
best’ dress code that his dead body traverses. The fact that the gawking
white witnesses to lynchings in the
American South wore their best suits
and dresses at these occasions, gave these murders an air of social
acceptability and imbued the event with special significance. Yet the
meaning of this dress code cannot be fixed.
As Shinko explains, Emmett’s
mother, Mamie Till, reappropriated the suit as a signifier with a very
different,
yet related, message. She dressed the beaten-up and tortured
corpse of her son in his best suit, and left the
casket open at the funeral
ceremony. Thereby, she reclaimed Emmett’s humanity, dignity and identity,
acknowledging the sartorial code of power in American society at the time
while utilizing it to claim respect,
recognition and inclusion in this power
structure. Yet Shinko goes further. Imagining Emmett Till as a
‘mannequin’,
the gesture of dressing him in his best suit, and thereby dramatizing his
beaten and abused face,
invites further plays of similitude, including the
hoods of the Ku Klux Klan, or the T-shirts worn by Israeli
soldiers
depicting the killing of pregnant Palestinian women. Similitude, the very
openness and ambiguity of the
fashion code then becomes a problem and a
challenge to our expectation that it can refer to stable origins of
identity and
humanity. Therefore, any analysis of the subversive potential of fashion,
and its potential for
resistance, needs to draw attention not to facile gestures
to such origins, but to the situated and structured
contexts of material bodies
and the values that define the dress codes for these bodies.
M.I. Franklin’s chapter continues with the theme of the dressed body as
a site of resistance. She analyses the
recent ‘burqa laws’ in a number of
European countries, which ban the public wearing of headscarves
(hijab),
niqabs and burqas in public. Franklin’s focus is on the attempts of state
authorities and lawmakers to arrest the play of signifiers with regard to
‘Muslim fashion’, and to impose a
particular meaning on wearing these
items. Wearing the veil as an expression of religious mores and modesty is
defined ipso facto as an act of Islamic fundamentalism, demonizing women
as the suspect ‘Other’ inside
Western societies as part of an increasingly
xenophobic and racist discourse about Muslims in the West. Here, the
en(fashioning) of the subject is forcefully, and often violently, conducted by
state authority, denying the
affected women any agency in the performance
of their religious and cultural beliefs. As Franklin points out,
criticism and
rejection of the veil make for strange bedfellows, as critical
theory and
liberal feminism traditionally have shared this view. Against this reification
of the veil outside of
culture and history, and in order to bring into
analytical focus the sartorial competence and corporeal
experience of the
affected women, Franklin sketches four scenarios in which she explores the
potentials and
limits of (un)dressing as a Muslim woman living in the West.
The first scenario links the legal and political
pressures on Muslim women
not to wear the veil, to the related pressures exerted by popular culture and
media,
specifically makeover shows. Yet while participants in the latter are
cast as willing participants in what
Franklin defines as ‘hyperliberal
consumerism’, Muslim women are cast as oppressed victims of patriarchal
traditions, thereby limiting our understanding of their capability to choose
and define their own sartorial
codes.
We begin to recognize this competence in the growing field and business
of ‘modest fashion’, which combines
religious with sartorial norms in a
creative way. To comprehend this agency we have to unlink it from various
stages of undressing, and instead appreciate this sartorial agency ‘as
resistance to, or freedom from, the
dominant normative culture’ (Franklin,
p. 49 in this volume). An even more explicit political agency emerges in
the
work of such artists as Sarah Maple and Shirin Neshat who, through their
visual art, upset and deconstruct
any stable and assigned meaning to
Muslim dress code. Grafting provocative slogans (‘I ♥ orgasm’ or ‘I ♥
jihad’)
onto a burqa, as Maple does, or confronting the gaze of the viewer
by gazing back at them, or pointing a
gun at him in Neshat’s photographic
work, upsets the putative submissiveness of Muslim women and explores
their
agency through this strategy of defiance. Finally, Franklin examines
the display of female activists during the
Arab Spring who published nude
images of their bodies via social media. Here, the rejection of disciplinary
attempts to control the female body is translated into anti-fashion: the
provocation of the female naked body.
What this strategy reveals are
societies’ institutionalized regime of power structures that appropriate
visibility and gender status. Finally, as no clothes are outside of fashion, and
fashion itself is part of
modernity, what the ‘burqa laws’ seem to index are
perhaps the last remnants of a Eurocentric
understanding of modernity in
the face of transnational and transcultural movements of corporeal and
dressed
human beings.
 Linda Bishai’s chapter continues the discussion of the politicization of
fashion and the politics of ‘what not to
wear’ from a different angle. She
investigates the case of Lubna Hussein, a Sudanese journalist working for
the
UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) who was arrested on 3 July 2009 by
Sudanese police and charged with perpetrating an
indecent and immoral act:
wearing trousers. As Bishai explains, the arrest was not really about
trousers; it was
about the arbitrary enforcement of a general sartorial code
that is politicized by the government to signify
compliance with the public
order regime. In this case, the ambiguity of sartorial code was supposed to
be
contained and arrested by an equally ambiguous and arbitrary code of
power. Yet this politicization of wearing
trousers backfired significantly for
the Sudanese regime, which attempted to
assert its Islamic credentials
through this imposition of an anti-Western dress code. By refusing to
acquiesce to
the government’s demands, and by going public about the
court proceedings – Hussein invited 500 friends and
journalists to her trial –
she turned the attempt to control women’s dress code into an incitement to
use that
code as a form of protest against the regime’s oppressive policies
against women in particular, and civil society
in general. The very
politicization enacted by the state thereby creates a space of resistance
against it.
Interestingly enough, the vagueness of the Public Order Law
(Criminal Act of 1991) empowered individual police
officers to decide what
dress they find objectionable. As in the case of Muslim women’s dress code
in the cases
that M.I. Franklin analyses, the meaning of the code is actually
decided not by the woman wearing it, but by the
authority of the state.
As Bishai points out, the Lubna Hussein case brought into the spotlight a
long-standing sartorial policy
of the Sudanese regime in which female dress
became a significant symbolic resource for the production of its
legitimacy.
This policy in effect attempted to erase a long history of vestiary diversity
and tradition,
replacing it with conservative Islamic garb. At the same time,
Sudanese women found a way of resisting the regime
simply by refusing to
adhere to government restriction. Even Western dress code can be found,
either within the
privacy of homes, or in safe spaces such as cafes and
restaurants in Khartoum, popular with the rich and
established. Wearing
Western dress here designates and performs a subjectivity that rejects and
escapes the
‘imprisonment in public’ that the government tries to impose on
women. As Bishai also notes, it is precisely the
politicization of the dress
code and its arbitrary enforcement that offers perverse incentives to the
regime’s
female opponents to defy it, as this practice becomes associated
with pride and individuality. The mirror-image
logic to the wearing of the
niqab and hijab in the European countries in Franklin’s chapter is
remarkable indeed. As their counterparts in Europe, they are willing to risk
arrest, pain and legal prosecution.
For L.H.M. Ling, the role of fashion extends beyond the context of
resistance to national regimes. The ambiguity
of fashion that she explores in
her chapter relates to a mode of knowing the world which has the potential
to
reform power relations. In order to investigate the potential for a
‘positive Orientalism’, she explores perhaps
one of the most unlikely
sources imaginable: Karl Lagerfeld and Coco Chanel’s daydreams about
China. What might
appear as a frivolous diversion in the attempt to
formulate an alternative version of orientalism actually
amounts to a radical
rearticulation of the relationship ‘between the West and the Rest’. While
traditional, or
‘negative’, orientalism as first defined by Edward Said (2003)
focuses on existing power structures that render
‘the East’ a gendered,
sexualized and civilizationally inferior space, positive orientalism seeks to
explore the
opportunities for crossing cultural boundaries with imagination,
playfulness and creativity. Rather then focus
exclusively on the obstacles
intercultural exchange encounters, this version of
orientalism seeks to open
the conceptual, theoretical and empirical spaces in which such exchanges
can take
place. Fashion, according to Ling, have both an epistemic and a
material role in this effort. First, drawing on
Lagerfeld’s Chanel pre-
Autumn 2010 fashion runway in Shanghai, and his associated short video,
Ling establishes
the critical potential of fashion to undermine any
objectivist or realist epistemology. As she points out, the
video is so camp
that it is impossible to take it seriously – and this is precisely the point. The
video and its
chinoise imagery is nothing but Lagerfeld’s imagination of
Coco Chanel’s dreams about a place – China – to
which she had never been.
In other words, the China we see in this video is composed of nothing but
the
imaginations of its Western admirers and students – and this, Lagerfeld
tells us, is all there is to know about
China. What we know as ‘China’ is
never anything more than our own culturally and historically situated
representations and imaginations of it. What we know are Western
chinoiseries, not China itself; and as we
cannot claim to truly know it, a
sense of self-irony infuses this fashioning of the other. After all, in
Lagerfeld’s words, ‘It is amusing … Sometimes the idea of thing is more
creative than the reality’ (Lagerfeld
2009). The same idea is the basis of one
of the most successful fashion exhibitions in the history of the
Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York City, ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’,
which ran from May to September
2015 to record crowds. Ling investigates
the way in which the Western fashion on display is inspired by Chinese
traditional dress, its colours and patterns, and opens up the possibility for
the reformulation of orientalism.
As the curator of the exhibition states:

China: Through the Looking Glass attempts to propose a less

politicized and more positivistic examination of
Orientalism as a locus
of infinite and unbridled creativity. … [T]‌his catalogue presents a
rethinking of
Orientalism as an appreciative cultural response by the
West to its encounters with the East.
(Bolton 2015: 17)

Based on this anti-foundationalist epistemology of fashion, Ling develops

an alternative philosophy of
international relations that builds on the
Buddhist notion of kōans. What kōans contributes to the
relationship
between states are the creativity, non-fundamental knowledge claims and
irony – now turned into a
quest for enlightenment – that inhere within
Lagerfeld’s chinoise fashion. A politics informed by
kōans, Ling asserts,
‘seeks to loosen ways of thinking and behaving that shackle us to
established icons,
rituals, thoughts or traditions – even reason itself – so a
fresh outlook could spring from, as well as assist
in, spiritual
enlightenment’ (Ling, p. 70 in this volume). In a world of perennial and
ritualized conflict and
limited – indeed, inadequate – thinking, this is a
highly desirable perspective.
Andreas Behnke’s chapter focuses on the present-day performance of
sovereignty via the sartorial code of First
Ladies. Combining the extensive
coverage of US First Lady Michelle Obama’s
politics of style with the latest
theoretical approach regarding sovereignty, Behnke conceptualizes First
Lady
fashion as a symbolic form that is a constitutive part of this
performance of sovereign splendour. While we have
relegated our
fascination with First Lady fashion mostly to the style or fashion sections of
newspapers and
journals, Behnke argues that its continued allure refers to a
long-standing tradition in which the power and
glory of sovereignty have
been organized into a division of gendered labour. Since the days of Marie-
Antoinette,
and after the ‘great masculine renunciation’ (Behnke, p. 128 in
this volume), the task of symbolizing and
performing the sublime and
metaphysical aspects of sovereignty has been invested in female monarchs
and First
Ladies. While the magnificent dresses worn by Obama can no
longer ‘frighten peasants into submission’, they
nonetheless establish the
exceptional status of the sovereign (McDowell 1987: 9–10). However,
beyond the
sartorial distinction from ‘ordinary’ citizens, Obama also
performs the particular version of US sovereignty
vis-à-vis other nations’
sovereigns. As Behnke argues, her sartorial habit to wear dresses designed
by
Americanized natives of the guest country at state dinners performs the
imperial and inclusive sovereignty that
characterizes the USA (Hardt and
Negri 2000: 167), and that defines an inclusive and hierarchical structure in
which inclusion into the American fashion world becomes the requirement
for global success. Any successful
designer, this performance indicates, is
an American in the making. Conversely, the choice of Alexander McQueen
as the design house for a state visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao
indicated a more equal relationship between
the USA and China within an
increasingly globalized fashion world.
Power of a different kind is evident in Mary Hope Schwoebel’s
anthropological analysis of the history of women’s
dress in Somalia, from
the precolonial past to the present. What emerges is a process in which the
female body
again becomes the ‘mannequin’ of, in this case international,
power structures, from the simple, but colourful
and comparatively
revealing clothes of the precolonial period to Western-style business
uniforms, or the
colourful dirac worn in the days of the socialist regime of
Siad Barre, to the current period of Islamism
and the ‘War on Terror’ in
which women began to wear the drab jilbaab, and often the niqab. While
the jilbaab is a dress of distinctly Somali fashion, the combination of the
abaya and niqab
worn today reflect the reality of the inclusion of Somalia
in the ‘War on Terror’ and the presence of the
al-Qaeda affiliate, Al-
Shabaab. Schwoebel traces this genealogy of Somali fashion to the
changing security
contexts for women in these different periods, which
themselves reflect the particular geopolitical
constellations for Somalia. As
in Bishai’s analysis of Sudanese dress, Schwoebel demonstrates that
Western
readings of contemporary women’s vestiary codes in these states as
performing an essential Islamic identity are
deeply flawed. Rather, women’s
sartorial choices are tied to changing and historically contingent domestic
and
international structures of power and security. Thus, as Schwoebel
points out,
where the security situation is improving, colourful clothes are
making a comeback.
David Conway’s chapter investigates the agency of female politicians in
terms of fashioning their careers. As his
case study of former British Prime
Minister and ‘Iron Lady’, Margaret Thatcher, illustrates, feminist criticism
of the gendered nature of political fashion depicts the latter as both
restrictive and demeaning to women. While
support for this diagnosis is
easily found, it does not provide the whole picture. Contrary to this
oversimplified argument, one of the most (in)famous and powerful female
politicians of her time went to great
lengths to control her appearance, use
fashion as a way to enhance her power and authority, and communicate
symbolic messages about herself and her place in British history. In fact, the
very fashioning of herself as the
‘Iron Lady’ could include references to her
dress, a chiffon gown (Conway, p. 167 in this volume). Drawing on the
experiences of her youth and the democratization of fashion in the 1930s,
and very much aware of the constant
public gaze and very responsive to
critical feedback, Thatcher performed a purposefully gendered political
authority in which she drew on different codes – from ‘housewife with
apron’ to ‘stateswoman in fur’. Yet while
her fashion sense served her well
as opposition leader and later as prime minister, ultimately it would become
an
element in her downfall. Her sometimes ostentatious dress code became
a problem when changed political and
economic conditions in Britain
required a more sober approach. As Conway argues, her continued
preference for an
almost-regal style of dressing enhanced perceptions that
she was callous and out of touch. Therefore, the case of
Thatcher illustrates
both the potentiality, as well as the limits, of dress as a form of symbolic
power.
The final chapter in this volume is written by two eminent fashion
theorists, Hazel Clark and Molly Rottman. As
this project has been intended
from the start as a conversation between international relations scholars and
fashion theorists, their contribution is a welcome change of perspective.
Acknowledging the interdisciplinarity
of fashion studies, Clark and
Rottman mention in their reflections on the relationship between politics
and
fashion the political economy that supports the fashion system under
often appalling conditions, but otherwise
note the absence of politics and
international relations in this field of studies. Given the global reach of
fashion, and the role it plays in different cultural and national settings, this
lacuna needs to be filled.
Fashion, Clark and Rottman argue, can serve both
as an anti-democratic smokescreen or distraction, as it happened
in China; it
also can serve as a site of social protest and transformation, as it frequently
does in Western
states. Fashion itself, as noted above, remains highly
ambiguous, but it is this characteristic that allows its
deployment in various
settings for different purposes. Above all, Clark and Rottman focus on the
politics of the
runway: the way in which new fashion styles challenge
established social norms about the body and its display.
One is reminded
here of the ending of the 1994 Robert Altman’s 1994 film Prêt-à-Porter
(Ready to Wear), in which models walk down the runway completely
undressed. Nudity, of
course, is the vanishing point for high fashion, an
integral part of its seductiveness, yet a point that must
never be reached, lest
fashion abolishes itself. In its most compelling form, the Western body
image – and with
it, the social and gender norms that define it – are
challenged by Asian designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Yohji
Yamamoto, who create a very different space around the female body than
the figure-oriented dresses on Western
designers’ runways.
As these different contributions to fashion, and thereby to the lived,
performed and material reality transgress
national and cultural boundaries,
as fashion in this way constitutes a vast discourse about societies and their
cultural values, politics is called upon to add its perspective to this
conversation. This volume is meant as a
first contribution to this effect.

Notes
1 There are a number of problems
with this attitude. First, it wrongly insinuates that representatives
of the disciplines mentioned above cannot
contribute anything relevant to the study of politics.
Second, it seems to suggest that experts on fashion are
not proper scholars: a proposition that any
encounter with fashion studies and its representatives easily
dispels.
2 A large number of studies now
exist on the relationship between fashion and identity, mostly
from a sociological, cultural studies or gender
studies perspective. While these analyses are
valuable in their own right, they also provide the lacuna that
this book is filling, as the concept
and the realm of the political is rarely and, at best, superficially
touched upon. For some recent
contributions, see for example Breward and Evans (2005), Paulicelli and Clark
(2009), Edwards
(2011), Gonzalez and Bovone (2012), Lewis (2013) and Entwistle (2015). See also the
contributions on fashioning identity in the journal Fashion Theory. The most explicit and
systematic
investigation of the relationship between politics and fashion is still Parkins (2002a).
3 British Prime Minster David
Cameron’s initial choice of a business suit to wear to the royal
wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton
caused an uproar in the British media, leading
him to reverse this decision and to wear the proper morning
dress (Rayner 2011). When President
Barack Obama wore a tan suit to a White House press conference in August
2014, violating the
code of ‘dark suit, white shirt, red or blue tie’, critical commentary and scrutiny lit up
social
media (Friedman 2014).
4 Whether this position is
reconcilable with Butler’s performativity approach or is closer to
Goffman’s (1971) notion of performance is of
little material concern here, as both approaches
agree on the constitutive priority of social relations over
subjects (for a discussion of these and
similar approaches, see Brickell (2003)).
5 See also the collection of
essays collected in Barthes (2006) with a much more varied set of
approaches to fashion.
6 See also Svendsen (2006: 66–9)
for a critical review of Barthes’ The Fashion System (1985).
7 Baudrillard is not a writer
usually known for his appreciation of fashion. In his earlier work (e.g.
Baudrillard 2007a[1981]), he
criticises its role in the ‘fetishization of the commodity’, fabricating
‘the “beautiful” on the basis of a
radical denial of beauty’. ‘Truly beautiful … clothing would put
an end to fashion. The latter can do nothing
but deny, repress and efface it’ (Baudrillard
2007a[1981]: 453).
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1 This
is not a mannequin
Enfashioning bodies of resistance
Rosemary E. Shinko

Introduction
This chapter recognizes that fashion plays a seminal role in the creation of
political identities, from the
crafting of national identity to various iterations
of individual forms of subjectivity. It pushes this line of
analysis one step
further in order to examine what types of practices contribute to
enfashioning bodies of
resistance in international politics. Enfashioning
draws together intentionality and performativity, not to
establish an
ontologically prior body that serves as the foundation for some original
model, but as a political
site where enfashioning bodies signifies the ways in
which certain bodies become visible, and others are rendered
invisible. This
chapter will take up the issue of the body via the contrapuntal role that ‘the
mannequin’ plays
between resemblance and similitude.
The point is to highlight the body’s location between the ideational and
the material in order to play within and
against the tensions of a body
enmeshed in linguistic structures of meaning that performativity evades,
contests
and shatters.1 I am
intrigued by the overlapping trajectories of
Butler and Foucault’s enquiries into identity, the openings for
creative
repeatability indicated by Butler, and the possibilities for self-transformation
introduced by Foucault.
Both lines of critique work from an understanding
of subjectivity that can create spaces to be other than one
that is presently
recognized or constituted, while also being aware of the structural
constraints of technologies
of production and signification. Leaving aside the
issue of the body’s question of being, I want to enquire into
the ways in
which Foucault challenges signification via his engagement with Magritte’s
aesthetics, and Butler’s
Derridian inspired formulation of iterability and its
application to her concept of performativity.
The point is not only to enquire as to how the ‘enfashioned body’ relates
to repetitions which track back into
structures of production and domination
and why; but also to enquire into those instances where ‘enfashioned
bodies’
incite sites or instances of creative irruption. Enfashioning does not seek to
create a context of
resemblance between the body and its sartorial choices,
where the clothed body serves as some stable referent of
meaning or anchors
some order of interpretive necessity. Quite the opposite:
the relationship
between fashion and the body is one of similitude, opening a series of
contestations that range
across the creation of competing chains of meaning.
The point is to recognize the agonistic relationship between
the sovereignty
of the name, the label, the sign and that which it would conclusively attempt
to define, delimit
or deny. To this end, we need to consider how strategies of
self-transformation rely on fashion in order to
effect transformations in
existing structures of identity and meaning, as well as signalling a shift in the
understanding of the self in its relation to those structures of domination and
constraint. This chapter will
address how enfashioning the body affects
operations on the self, and their broader implications for the
structures of
inclusion and exclusion, and self-worth and abjection.

Enfashioning technologies of the self and performativity

Foucault’s work on the aesthetics of care for the self indicates ‘a critical
attitude towards the self that both
is aware of the contingency of the self’s
traits and displays a willingness to rework them’ (Moss 1998: 4). The
ethical
impact of such a critical attitude is that it implicates us in the formulation of
our own subjectivity,
such that we can identify our present formulation of
subjectivity and make determined choices to become the
subject that
ethically we would prefer to be (see Martin et al. 1998). In furtherance of the
processes by which
the self constitutes itself as a subject, Foucault initiated
an investigation into those
 techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a
certain number of operations on their own
bodies, on their own souls,
on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as
to
transform themselves.
(Foucault 1993: 203)

Of course, this is what he meant by the term ‘technology of the self’.

However, Foucault never picked up
explicitly on the relationship of dress to
these self-fashioning practices, neither did he enquire as to their
role in
processes of subjectification. Thus, one may rightly wonder what role
fashion plays in the interstices
between the techniques of domination and the
techniques of self.
Foucault’s insights are relatively rich with regard to this query, because
his examination of the body–power
nexus enables us to consider how
resistance emerges within, on and through the body. This, as McLaren
insightfully demonstrates, draws together Foucault’s complex view of the
body as ‘oscillating between modes of
inscription, internalization, and
interpretation’ (2002: 106). Foucauldian terms such as ‘marked and
engraved’
refer to bodily processes of inscription, while his use of ‘molded,
shaped and trained’ alludes to the body–power
nexus, and finally when he
references how bodies ‘respond and increase their forces’, he implies an
active body
(McLaren 2002: 106). This multifaceted view of bodily
subjectification is
complemented by Foucault’s later concern with ethics and
the care of the self.
In conjunction, these two trajectories of thought expand ‘the political
arena to include social and cultural
factors that have political implications’
(McLaren 2002: 145). Thus we can begin to theorize not only how fashion
reflects disciplinary cultural norms, but also how enfashioning the body can
be understood as a site where
individuals actively participate in their own
self-construction. The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
strategic use
of the kurta exquisitely illuminates the entwined aspects of performativity
and
intentionality that the term ‘enfashioning’ encapsulates. As a
premiership candidate, Modi strategically used his
wearing of a crisp, clean
white kurta not only to distinguish himself from the other candidates, but to
convey his political beliefs. The Modi kurta emerged as an embodied site
where political values and
personal style aligned to construct a ‘strong
convergence between what a politician in India stands for and his
clothing’
(Friedman 2014). Discussions emerged around his enfashioned body
regarding the construction of Indian
identity, democratic equality based on
accessibility to the same form of dress, and professionalism and
commitment
to economic development. Power produces bodily effects but as Foucault
reminds us, ‘power, after
investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a
counter attack in that same body’ (1980: 56). So the
issue here is to consider
how these various performative enactments, in conjunction with sartorial
interventions
in, on and around the body, construct and/or contest certain
forms of subjectivity and identity. Focusing on
various strategies of
enfashioning the body offers us a site where power becomes politically
visible and
contestable.
In contrast to Foucault, Butler directly addressed the question of fashion
in the guise of drag and its
implications for gender performativity. She
provides us with an intriguing opening to consider the connective
lines
between dress, performance of gender and normative resistance. Further, she
alerts us to the ways in which
performitivity embodies processes of
signification, as well as the possibilities for resignification due to the
fact
that ‘acts, gestures, enactments are performative in the sense that the essence
or identity that they
otherwise purport to express are fabrications
manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other
discursive
means’ (Butler 1990: 136; emphasis in original). The strength of Butler’s
(1990, 1993, 2004) lines of
enquiry into the performative aspects of gender
is that she opens a conceptual space for analysing embodied
iterations of
subversion. Gender norms require repetition in order to make them function
as natural attributes of
particular bodies, and due to this constant need for
reconfirmation, they open the space for such repetitious
acts to be altered or
revised in ways that contest or subvert established patterns.
However, with respect to drag, Butler (1993) acknowledges that not all
performatives constitute challenges to
existing social, political or cultural
modes of life. So how is it that performativity could rise to the level of
challenging exclusionary historical practices which validate the lives of
some culturally recognized bodies, but
not those demarcated as the abject?
What makes performative acts subversive,
then, relates to the ways in which
abjection is itself politicized and that it is unequivocally an ‘inside job’.
As
Lloyd explains:

Regulatory regimes are sustained by reiteration. Reiteration lends itself

to resignification. Resignification
can lead to reconfiguration of the
norms governing society. So, making ontological claims on behalf of
those
politically unimportant and unreal bodies is one way to contest,
and reshape, the terms of cultural
intelligibility.
(Lloyd 2007: 75–6)

Drag reworks the norms of gender from within the culturally acceptable
patterns of female and male gestures,
dress and bodily enactments to expose
the fabricated aspects of gender and sex. Drag does not copy an original
expression of gender, but instead reveals that those culturally acceptable and
recognizable expressions of gender
are, themselves, merely a copy without
an original. If we think about the role of fashion, and how it too may
enable
the reworking of cultural norms, we can immediately grasp the significance
of Butler’s notion of
performativity because it emphasizes the role of
repetition as an immanent instance of agentic constraint and
freedom. Of
course, the crucial determination here turns on reading the moments of
subversion immanent in the
process of enfashioning bodies of resistance.
For example, the wearing of jeans by female parliamentarians in Italy and
in the California State Assembly
functioned as a deliberate act of political
protest against a ruling by the Italian Supreme Court, which had
declared
that ‘it is impossible to rape a woman wearing jeans’ (Parkins 2002: 1). In
this case, enfashioning the
legislators’ bodies in jeans provoked discussions
about what constitutes consent as opposed to violent assault.
Jeans – that
ubiquitous cultural item – were deployed in a political setting where their
wearing was
inappropriate; but this very inappropriateness challenged and
doubled back on the inappropriateness of the court
ruling itself. Thus, the
term ‘enfashioning’ is intended to draw attention to those instances where
fashion and
the body are mutually implicated in the creation or contestation
of various forms of political identity. Perhaps
Rei Kawakubo best
encapsulates this dynamic interrelationship: ‘Body becomes dress becomes
body becomes dress’
(cited in Witzig 2012: 89).

The body: absorptive and resistant

This section turns to a consideration of the body and issues of embodiment,
especially in light of Sweetman’s
criticism that fashion writers not only
neglect the lived body, but they treat the ‘body in fashion [as] simply a
mannequin or shop-window dummy – it is the clothing, rather than the
wearing of it, that is regarded as
significant’ (2001: 59). There has been a
determined effort to ‘give due recognition to the way in which fashion
and
dress are not merely textual or discursive but embodied practices’ (Entwistle
and Wilson 2001: 4).2 What is significant about this line of enquiry is that it
interrogates the ways in which clothing and
other forms of bodily adornment
provide contextualized frames of reference for understanding the ways in
which
bodies become culturally meaningful, and the creative ways in which
bodies fashion themselves through various
aesthetic practices. However,
before engaging the question of bodily dress, we need to examine the body’s
dual
role as an absorptive, reflective surface of power, and its potential as a
creative site of embodied resistance
and self-making.3
Foucault reiterates the centrality of the body, and makes it the focus of his
genealogical efforts. He
contextualizes the body as ‘the inscribed surface of
events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the
locus of a dissociated
self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual
disintegration’ (Foucault 1984: 83). From this conceptual vantage point, the
body would appear to be a very
unstable and unreliable place from which to
begin a series of analytics of modern power; however, it is the
malleability
of the body which accounts for its location at the nexus between materiality
(the fleshy substance
of the physiological human body) and disciplinarity
(those representational practices and discursive fields which
serve to train
and mould the body). Bakare-Yusuf credits Foucault with drawing our
attention to ‘how different
material practices are interwoven with the
discursive to affect and shape the materiality of the body’ (1999:
313).
Riley admonishes those feminists that miss the full import of Foucault’s
analysis of the body with its
‘deliquescing effect; composed but constantly
falling away from itself’ (1999: 223), yet who nonetheless strive
to resurrect
another iteration of a newly emancipated version of the feminine body. She
demands that we take
Foucault seriously enough to admit that radical
openings can emerge only in those spaces where we recognize the
body’s
instabilities – and for feminists, in particular, to recognize ‘that nothing more
radical than the facts
of intermittent physiology really holds the bodies of
women together’ (Riley, 1999: 224). To follow Foucault’s
lead implicates
one in a critical self-interrogation about one’s own body, and what one may
unwittingly attempt
to preserve in an effort to secure a privileged ground for
it.
However, just as one may seek the solace of a privileged bodily ground in
search of emancipatory utopias, it is
also just as likely that one may be
scripting the ever-tightening sovereign embrace with all of its dark,
disciplinary dangers. It is Foucault who not only alerts us to those dangers,
but also pushes us to gaze squarely
at our fears and to recognize that the
body is an effect of power relations, not an end point of salvation or a
point
of unblemished mystical origin. Punday characterizes Foucault’s references
to the body as a body-site trope
through which the inscribed body ‘can be
read to understand historical changes but the body itself never provides
an
actual text that is interpreted’ (2000: 514). According to Punday, such a
reading of the body draws attention
to the ways in which it fulfils both a
symbolic role that references how individuals are uniformly organized
within particular societies, and a concrete role as a ‘point of resistance to
larger discursive systems’ (2000: 524). What is interesting in Punday’s
analysis is his conclusion that our
approach to contextualizing the body is
always reflective of how we view both the larger body politic, and how we
contribute to its construction along the pathways opened through our critical
interrogations of ‘the body’.
 Along these same lines of analysis, McWhorter combines her
contextualization of the Foucauldian body – as that
which refuses a timeless,
eternal identity – with her desires for a body politic that validates difference
and
refuses the dream ‘of some eternal presence of the same’ (1989: 613).
Foucault’s interrogations of the body have
opened up spaces for us to
interrogate reflexively the effects that we strive to inscribe via the
stylizations of
our own bodies, the ways in which we conceptually
characterize the body’s roles, and how those conceptualizations
inform, and
are informed by, the larger body politic. As Montag (1995: 71) indicates,
Foucault recognizes that it
is always the body that is at stake in processes of
subjection. Obviously, there are physical forms of subjection
which are
violent and take direct physical hold of the material, fleshy body, but also
there are those more
subtle forms which do not touch the body at all, – and
these are the forms of subjection that individualize,
categorize and distribute
individuals along a continuum of normality.
What many have come to realize is that ‘the body has no intrinsic
meaning [because] [p]‌opulations create their
own meanings and thus their
own bodies; but how they create, and then change them, and why reflects the
social
body’ (Synnott 1992: 79). Thus bodies are differently lived and
experienced, as Synnott concludes, ‘any
construction of the body, however,
is also a construction of the self as embodied; and as such influences not
only how the body is treated but also life is lived’ (1992: 105). It is
imperative, then, to think about the ways
in which the body and society
interact, because such an enquiry opens up a discussion about the borders
‘between
subjectivity and the symbolic order, agency and social control,
experience and representation’ (Kleinman and
Kleinman 1994: 708).
Representation never fully captures the body, in that the body can never be
definitively
defined. Representational practices may enmesh the physical
material body momentarily, by creating frames of
reference through which it
can be identified and discussed as ‘such and such’ type of a body; however,
as Butler
attests, embodied practices can operate in ways that ‘occupy the
norm in myriad ways, exceed the norm, rework the
norm and expose
realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation’
(2004: 217). Thus, what
is incumbent on us is to consider ‘how [the body] is
inscribed by culture, mediates power, and expresses
resistance to the
normalizing practices of society’ (Shapiro and Shapiro 1995: 51), by
specifically examining how
the body does so through embodied fashion
practices.

This is not a mannequin

The body can be regarded as ‘the quintessential subversive object sign, since
it refers almost inevitably to
individual as well as to group intentions and
identities, which are always at
issue – and at risk – in a changing, plural,
social and cultural world’ (Hendrickson 1996:15). Thus, enfashioning
the
body reflects multiple, ambiguous and even contradictory performative sites,
where the productive and
disciplinary effects of power can be reconfirmed or
contested. This complex dynamic can be clearly seen in the
case of
indigenous Mayan women, who wear traditional dress as part of their effort
to retain their cultural
identity and preserve their heritage and traditions.
Their adoption of traditional dress operates as a strategy
of contestation to
draw attention to pervasive structural discrimination, but they are also
keenly aware of how
their dress can be reabsorbed by sovereign power
which recasts them as little more than ‘cultural artifacts’,
helping to attract
tourist dollars (Rapone and Simpson 1996: 124). Thus representational
practices can serve to
shore up sovereign power when they are redirected to
serving hegemonic political or economic interests. Moments
of dissent
always have the potential to be redirected and end up sustaining existing
structures of disciplinarity
and constraint.
Thus Foucault’s (1983) reading of Magritte’s art and the theories that
inform it are illustrative of this effort
to deflect the ability of power to
reabsorb dissent, by blunting its provocative challenges. What Foucault finds
compelling is that Magritte’s visual non sequiturs disrupt the entire notion of
an originary presence by
replacing resemblance with similitude.
Resemblance is rooted in representation, which strives to establish the
connection between an object and its painted or visual image. However,
Magritte breaks with these conventions by
casting objects adrift and severing
the connections between signifier and signified (Foucault 1983: 5–9). In
sum,
‘the effacement of bonds and the celebration of difference are at the
center of Magritte’s art’ (Foucault 1983:
12). Similitude challenges
representation because it calls into question the tight coherence between
thing and
term, and the presupposition of a primary reference point or
original model. ‘The similar develops in series that
have neither beginning
nor end, … that obey no hierarchy, … [because] similitude serves repetition
… as an
indefinite and reversible relation of the similar to the similar’
(Foucault 1983: 44). Similitude enables the
multiplication of different
affirmations that open up a play of transferences and possibilities for
metamorphoses, which can occur along the entire political spectrum,
encompassing image and identity. As Foucault
concludes, ‘a day will come
when, by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a
series, the
image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity’
(1983: 54). Thus, the key is to envision ‘the
mannequin’ as a contrapuntal
figure that will enable us to glimpse a radical plane of equality where image
and
identity are cut loose from representational practices, and non-
hierarchical similitudes intersect and multiply,
evading capture and
reintegration into sovereign forms of knowledge and power.
What I am challenging us to do here is to think through the ways in which
enfashioning the body entraps the body
as a mere mannequin – a reflective
surface for the exercise of power – and to call into question those very
same
representational practices that the phrase ‘this is not a mannequin’ both
establishes and shatters. The figure of the mannequin, then, emerges as a
performative site because it
simultaneously captures and liberates, as it sits
ambiguously perched between the body as an ideal representation
of the
human form, and as its denial as such. What Foucault (1983: 26) notes is that
a battle transpires between
the figure and the text in Magritte’s art and, as a
result, a whole series of juxtapositions are made accessible
to us. Opposition
and complementarity play continuously throughout Magritte’s art, enabling
him to create new
relations between words and objects, and to introduce
disorder into those meticulous efforts to solidify the
image through
representation (Foucault 1983: 38–41).
The mannequin: a contrapuntal/juxtapositional figure
Juxtaposition has been most commonly deployed as a way to align two
opposite terms, but I want to explore its
much more creative potential, as
revealed by Magritte, to work simultaneously with multiple terms, images
and/or
representations. It offers a way to contemplate the contradictory and
the incongruous by using our imaginations
in a layering process of addition
and subtraction – much like how fashion itself operates. We can imagine
items
in various spatial arrangements, from lying side-by-side, to being
positioned above and below, or complexly
layered over one another. The key
to juxtaposition is the creation of nearness with no delimiter, and no clear
linking elements other than those we chose to narrate and identify.
Of course, part of this exploration is aesthetic, because drawing such
incongruous or contradictory images
together has the potential to spark
creative and inventive associations, insights and observations. Provocative
juxtapositional overlays can jar the mind into thinking things as other than
they are at present. Juxtaposition
also presumes an operative ethical content,
because its spatial overlapping and arrangements can result in the
creation of
various personal or interpersonal narratives or commentaries on pressing
social, political, cultural
or economic issues. In sum, juxtaposition highlights
the terms of relationality by enabling us to operate more
effectively in the
space of indeterminacy, because it disrupts entrenched ways of seeing,
allows us to shift
between competing and conflicting narrative levels, and to
collapse space, distance and margins in an effort to
dislodge hegemonic
narrative structures.
This next section will provide a rationale for deploying the mannequin as
a contrapuntal figure, enabling an
exploration of how dressing the body
functions to capture it as an absorptive, reflective surface of power
tangled
in a web of representation; while simultaneously recasting the body as a
surface of resistance and
struggle that brings similitude into play against the
former. The mannequin can function as a juxtapositional
site of radical
equality where similitude makes it possible to unhinge identities from their
associations with
particular bodies. Fashion can function along chains of
similitude, wherein
clothing circulates ‘as an indefinite and reversible
relation of the similar to the similar’, opening up
possibilities for multiple
and different affirmations (Foucault 1983: 44). It is similitude that enables us
to
see ‘what recognizable objects, familiar silhouettes hide, prevent from
being seen, render invisible’ (Foucault
1983: 46). Thus the figure of the
mannequin becomes a point of convergence that can absorb all signs,
rendering
them on the same plane of radical equality. It absorbs all of the
layers of clothing and enables us to shatter
their previously intended
meanings by recombining them and imagining them in other contexts to
create a
disjuncture where the mannequin, by obliterating its own solidity,
and calling into question its own presence as
a site of meaning,
representation and identity, renders the body similarly unmoored.
Mannequins are perhaps associated most often with haute couture and
retail fashion window displays, but they also
have served in other bodily
capacities for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training, nursing studies,
as
diagnostic tools for medical students, as crash dummies for auto safety
tests, fire rescue training and in
various other technical settings. However,
the key to a mannequin’s social function is its representational
capacity: in
other words, its ability to serve as a model of the human figure. According to
Michael Southgate,
creative director of Adel Rootstein Display Mannequins
(of London and New York), the fact that ‘People love
fantasy versions of the
human figure’ accounts for our continuing interest in the mannequin
(D’Aulaire and
D’Aulaire 1991). Mannequins are absorptive and reflective
surfaces, which track societal expressions of the ideal
formulation of beauty,
as well as the economic forces that underwrite and sustain such expressions.
Although the
French sometimes have been credited with creating the first
full-figured mannequin, no one seems to know for
certain exactly where or
when it made its first appearance. Most experts agree that the succession of
stages set
in motion during the Industrial Revolution – the manufacture or
large, steel-framed, plate-glass windows, the
invention of the sewing
machine, the electrification of cities – cleared the way for its arrival. The
men and
women who strolled the boulevards were the audience; all that was
needed were players. Enter stage left, the
mannequin (D’Aulaire and
D’Aulaire 1991). Early on, American mannequins came to chart the
expanding and changing
dynamics of women’s lives, as fashion moved from
the post-First World War working woman to the 1920s era of the
flapper,
then to the more sombre and subdued women of the Second World War era,
through more voluptuous
mannequins revealing a new sense of prosperity
and promise in the post-war years. Their continuing hold on our
imaginations is partly because, as Hoskins asserts, ‘You can’t help but relate
to mannequins as human’ because
they do look like real people (in
D’Aulaire and D’Aulaire 1991).
However, the mannequin’s productive power has raised substantive
questions about its role in the idealization and
promulgation of certain forms
of female subjectivity and identity. According to Hoskins, the most
significant
cultural attribute of mannequins is that: ‘They must convey
idealized images of
ourselves, what we aspire to be rather than what we
actually are’ (in D’Aulaire and D’Aulaire 1991). However, the
problem is
who decides what these idealized images, reflective of glamour and youth,
are, and how we recognize
the ways in which they operate to discipline and
constrain the bodies of living women. Gronberg argues that the
1920s
‘discourse on the mannequin’ reflects not the representation of women but
conversely operates ‘as a
cancellation of the conventional signs of feminine
beauty’ (1997: 379). He concludes, ‘the modern mannequin was
characterized as an eradication of the “naturalistic” female body, as that
body’s translation into “a mere
cubistic chaos of intersecting surfaces” and
as a “decorative hieroglyphic”’ – rendering the female body
illegible. This
defamiliarization of women involved not only a reconfiguration of
expressive parts of the body
(such as face and hands), but also a
transformation of surface; the modern mannequin might have ‘skin’ that was
‘gilt’ or ‘silvered over’ (Gronberg 1997: 379).
Gronberg draws our attention to how desire is displaced ‘from the female
body to the commodity’ via the
mannequin, which serves as a device
‘whereby the “distracting” quality of the female body might be transferred to
the object for sale’ (1997: 381, 382). Along with the perils of
commodification come the more widely acknowledged
dismorphic effects
that mannequins as idealized images can produce. Rintala and Pertti (1992:
1575) attempt to
link mannequins to women’s perceptions of the ideal body
size, via their conclusion that a woman as thin as a
mannequin probably
would not menstruate. They point out how display figures have become
thinner over time, and
that their proportions now differ considerably from
those of normal young women (1992: 1575). Of course, the
dangers they are
alluding to are those young women who become so overly anxious about
their weight that they
engage in physically harmful eating disorders,
associated in part with a desire to be extremely thin (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 An Yves Saint Laurent mannequin.

Note: Fashion creates the politicized sites of compliance/resistance where the body–
mannequin conjunction
emerges and is destabilized.
Source: Ed Andrieski/AP/Press Association Images.
 Consider the role that the mannequin plays in its relationship to haute
couture: the ‘featureless family of
mannequins’ fade into a supporting role,
where the aesthetics of display and exotic forms of dress serve to
illuminate
the role of ‘fashion as a performance of aesthetics, meaning and value’
(Witzig 2012: 84). Witzig
offers a brilliant analysis of the ways in which
mannequins function as visual referent points for ‘our dreams of
an idealized
self, an aesthetics of being’ (2012: 86). She discusses how we become
enchanted by the visual
display of haute couture, but this display only
functions in tandem with ‘the disembodied mannequins, untouchable
and
removed, [who] serve as icons of an idealized world’ (2012: 88). Thus the
concept I want to explore here is
her idea of ‘the metonymy between fashion
and flesh’ via the role of the mannequin (Witzig 2012: 89). Drawing our
attention back to Magritte and the open-ended play of meanings provoked by
his disjuncture between the physical
representation of the pipe, and the
language which declares it not to be a pipe, affords us an opportunity to
open
sites of indetermination around the body’s dual role as both a mannequin (in
its aesthetic and aspirational
sense), and in its human and enfleshed
materiality. What creates the
body–mannequin conjunction and the
destabilizations between them is fashion, and the various politicized aspects
of enfashioning bodies of compliance/resistance.

Enfashioning the body

What troubles Entwistle most about Foucault’s analytics of power and the
body is that ‘it does not provide an
account of dress as it is lived,
experienced and embodied by individuals’ (2001: 40–1). Dressing the body
incorporates a field of social meaning and cultural context through which we
come to know and recognize bodies;
but without the body, clothes would
remain lifeless, insignificant pieces of cloth. At the intersection of dress
and
bodies lies the ever-shifting boundary demarcating self from other, and
individual from society (Entwistle
2001: 37). Yet these borders are not only
porous and ambiguous, they also indicate the intersubjective sites
where
bodies engage in creative practices of self-articulation. Thus, dress
encompasses both societal influences
and individual choices that involve
‘practical actions directed by the body upon the body which result in ways of
being and ways of dressing’ (Entwistle 2001: 55).
However, there is no simple, linear relationship between society, fashion
and
individual identity – as indicated by recent scholarship detailing the
complex interrelationships and exchanges
across different cultural contexts
involving questions of dress (see also Hendrickson 1996; Veillon 2002;
Maynard
2004). With reference to the politics of fashion in Asia and the
Americas, Roces and Edwards alert us to the
dynamism and transcultural
interactions which have resulted in the creation of hybrid forms of dress
designed to
signal ‘ideological values and political aspirations as well as
[serving] as a fundamental marker of “us” and
“them” in struggles for
political power’ (2007: 2). These interrelationships across cultural lines are
mutually
transformative and interpenetrating, but more importantly:

[D]‌ress regimes were not just mechanisms of European-led cultural

oppression in a mono-directional flow of
influence – they also became
sites for trans-cultural and trans-national dialogue and exchange in the
creation
of new forms of national and cultural identities.
(Roces and Edwards 2007: 8)

Fashion is a site where politicized embodiment emerges in response to

various local, national and global
influences, and where power is both
formative and transformative.
Enfashioning the body also involves both an appreciation for how the
body appears, and how it is experienced.
This is exactly the point that
Sweetman (2001: 67) wants us to consider, because adorning the body
requires an
appreciation for carnal knowledge and cognitive apprehension.
Perhaps this is demonstrated most dramatically in
those cases where bodies
are deliberately undressed as a way to humiliate and render abject. Here, the
power of
dress is reconfirmed by its very absence, and clothes are ‘used to
mark out differing degrees of access to …
[dignity and moral personhood],
to undermine or deny it altogether’ (Entwistle and Wilson 2001: 20). Thus
we
cannot fail to understand the powerful reversal in play when the torturers
of Luis Muñoz dressed in his
clothes,4 or the inmates
at Abu Ghraib were
forced to wear women’s undergarments.5 Enfashioning matters due in part to
the ‘unique and peculiar role that
clothing plays in perceptions of identity …
and that their peculiar proximity to our bodies gives them a special
potential
for symbolic elaboration’ (Tarlo 1996: 16). Fashion sits at the confluence of
the social–cultural
milieu and the individual–material body, and as such it is
one of the most politicized sites for meaning-making,
disciplinary
conformity and practices of resistance.
Perhaps one of the most paradigmatic of bodies that enables us to
interrogate these complex and shifting
relationships involves Mahatma
Gandhi, who deployed both his body and dress as a way to explore his
search for
individual identity and affirmation, engage in practices of bodily
resistance, and give human content and form to
India’s nationalist
aspirations and freedom. Eisenstein (2004: 102) discusses in detail how
Gandhi made ‘his body part of his political practice’ and ‘through his body
he brought
extraordinary attention to the intimate politics of the self’. It was
not just that Gandhi embodied a whole set
of aesthetic practices of the self
which included fasting, cleansing and sexual self-denial, but that he
specifically engaged with the question of dress. Questions of dress are so
seminal to political practices because
they indicate ‘one of the ways in which
people try to “pin down meanings” and control both presentations and
interpretations of the self’ (Tarlo 1996: 18). Gandhi’s engagement with the
politics of fashion fits squarely
within this dynamic.
What is illustrative of Gandhi’s experiences with dress is how initially he
actively chose to dress according to
English fashion, as a testament to his
ability to tap into cultural definitions of Western modernity and
civilization.
Thus consciously dressing in a Western style enabled him to access British
societal codes of
dignity and moral personhood. However, as Tarlo recounts,
Gandhi’s experiences in South Africa with
discrimination and inequality led
him to ‘adopt clothes which he knew to be socially unacceptable and
provocative’ (1996: 67); thus he began to experiment with the resistance
practices of dress to draw attention to
injustices. After the shooting of Indian
coal miners in South Africa, Gandhi adopted Indian dress as a way to
deploy
fashion as ‘an outward sign of grief’ (Tarlo 1996: 69). After he returned to
India, he often found it
increasingly necessary to explain what his dress
signified, and perhaps the most important of these discursive
explanations of
his choice of dress involves his adoption of the dhoti: the loincloth. This
choice of
dress has become emblematic of both Gandhi’s commitment to
satyagraha (the struggle for truth) and
ahimsa (non-violence) as driving
forces in his political struggle for India’s independence. Thus for
Gandhi,
fashion enabled him to reinvent his body and to refine the forms of his
political resistance.
The politics of appearance is so fascinating precisely because of the
creative ways in which dress has been used
both to impose identities and to
subvert these intentions. Hence, dress has not just been central to hardcore
politics; it has also been the instrument of underground movements and
everyday forms of resistance – to be used
against the very inventors of
particular costumes, including national and revolutionary attire. The endless
possibilities for fashioning the human body, and the need to express identity
in public spaces, have made dress a
highly charged site for performing
politics (Roces and Edwards 2007: 16).

Dressing mannequins of resistance

Fashion opens the site where practices of inclusion and exclusion operate, so
‘in this sense, the history of
most, though not all, hitherto existing sartorial
regimes has been the history of struggle – class, gender-based,
ethnic or
national’ (Ross 2008: 8). It would not be too far off the mark to argue that
when people make
conscientious choices about their dress, these can be read
as highly politicized acts. The political aspects of
these choices come into
play where individuals choose certain forms of dress in
order to access
political rights based on equality, justice and recognition of their status as
valued and
dignified members of the larger social polity. In one sense these
deliberate clothing choices can serve to
reconfirm the conservative aspects
of social forms of dress; however, by their extension to other members of
society whose struggle includes recognition, they also simultaneously
function as a form of resistance by
accessing socially recognized forms of
dress in order to push the boundaries of inclusion.
 Hendrickson establishes the link between bodies and dress as a site where
we can observe both the expression and
formulation of ‘ideas about the most
potent kinds of political and spiritual power thought to be available to
human
beings’ (1996: 3). Enfashioning the body is an act that demarcates the
productive aspects of power, because
its deployment reveals the location of
struggles over the legitimacy of the status quo. As Hendrickson (1996:
14–
15) notes, these struggles indicate the complex and intersecting operations of
power reverberating between the
confirmation and subversion of existing
structures. Practices of enfashioning the body indicate inherently
unstable
politicized sites where questions of self-making, identity, qualities of
humanness and dignity form the
basis for individual and group aspirations.
These aspirations can be tracked as a highly charged struggle carried
out on
the surface of the body as a political stage for the enactment of recognition.
One of the most troublesome and politically charged sites can be located
in the interactions between self and
other, and how structures of power
operate to deny not only the conceptual humanness of the other, but their
actual physical access to the most basic of life-sustaining requirements. The
mannequin will serve as a
juxtapositional site where ‘Sunday best’ attire
intersects the predatory practice of lynching, and where T-shirts
circulate as
markers of threatening and dehumanizing political practices. Arthur (2000:
2) identifies three key
aspects of dress: the manipulation of social settings,
the location of individuals within particular social and
cultural settings, and
the ability to play various roles. Dressing the part is the entry point for
acceptance and
recognition, and it serves as the site where individuals create
or contest not only the symbolic content of
dress, but who can access its
social meanings and to what political effect.
The revelation that humiliating and sexually degrading photographs were
taken of prisoners held in Abu Ghraib,
shared with soldiers’ family members
and friends, and eventually widely disseminated via the Internet,
immediately brings to mind another eerily similar historical pattern of
photographically documenting and
circulating visual images in an attempt to
bear witness to the inscription of the truth of ‘the violent’ on the
body of ‘the
other’. My reference here is to the postcard photographs taken during
lynchings of African Americans
in the American South. They bear a striking
resemblance to the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, in that the
bodies of
‘the violent’ are presented as trophies, while the captors’ unabashed, prideful
look directs itself
beyond the lens of the camera, documenting itself as a
moment of historical triumph to be shared with family and friends.6 These
most recent photographic documents draw our attention to the body
because
they place bodies, captors/victims–victims/captors, in our direct line of sight.
An even more politically charged enquiry reopens this earlier period of
the American past to interrogate the
question of dress and, in particular, the
‘Sunday best’ attire worn by those virtuous white Americans who, with
children in tow, unabashedly participated in and validated the genocidal
practice of lynching. Not only do the
bodies of the lynched victims attest to
its horrific aspects as a disciplinary political practice, but the torn
and
tattered clothing of its victims problematize issues of human dignity in the
face of the punishing effects of
poverty and racial discrimination.
Here I would like to introduce a black 14-year-old boy, Emmett, only son
of Mamie Till, from Chicago. In August
1955, while visiting family in
Mississippi, Emmett was lynched by two white men who wanted to teach
him a lesson
for violating the strict social codes of comportment between
blacks and whites. His offence involved rising to a
dare to go into a store and
talk to the white woman behind the counter, Carolyn Bryant. He reportedly
said, ‘Bye
baby’ to her as he walked out of the store.7
Emmett’s body traverses the various plays of power involved in the
enfashioning of political identities, because
on and around his body we can
read the politically charged expressions of support for the legitimacy of the
racialized status quo and its subversion. The postcard photographs collected
in Without Sanctuary (Allen
2000) revealed both the flagrant disregard for
the implications of lynching and the participants’ celebratory
mood, in
combination with a deliberate, conscientious choice among some of the most
prominent male citizens to
wear their ‘Sunday best’ suits.8 This choice of
attire can be read as a highly charged, politicized act which corroborates the
fact that lynching was intended to keep ‘uppity’ and/or insolent black people
in their place, and to reconfirm
the supremacy of white power structures. It
attests to the deliberate attempt to recast such predatory acts as a
display of
intense civic pride and protection of the southern way of life. The suit
confirms not just the
wearer’s status, but includes a complex play of dressing
up in order to draw on notions of both the seriousness
of the events and their
exceptional nature. Consequently, the suit places lynching both within the
social bounds
of the acceptable while simultaneously demarcating it as
something outside the boundaries of the ordinary of
everyday events. Thus
the suit can be read as a confirmatory symbol of the justness of the act of
participating
in a lynching, but also as contesting its very normalness by the
way in which it is cast as an event with special
social significance and
import.
The suit played a leading role in the funeral of Emmett Till. His body
bore the marks of torture, and his face
was so bloated and battered as to be
unrecognizable; yet at his funeral his mother dressed the body of her son in
his ‘Sunday best’ suit, and left the casket open.9 Not only was this an
intensely politicized decision on her part, it also
opens up multiple
interpretations of the role that the suit itself played. On the one hand,
funerals are
exceptional moments of private and social mourning outside the
ordinary course
of everyday events, specifically intended to draw attention
to the moment of personal and civic loss. Thus the
suit represents a socially
acceptable form of dress that reconfirms the special nature of someone’s
passing, and
the powerful sense of loss and absence. On the other hand, the
suit in this instance also represents an attempt
to reclaim Emmett’s humanity,
dignity and identity because, as a form of socially acceptable dress, it
indicates
both a civilizing imperative as well as a confirmation of one’s
social stature. Thus the suit reconfirms the
operative social structures of
power, yet it also serves as a demand for inclusion in that power structure –
while clearly attempting to make painfully visible the punishing effects of
that very same structure’s inhuman
face.
Dress also functions as tie-signs that indicate challenges to various forms
of the status quo or established
forms of dress, in that clothing is deliberately
chosen as a way to embody counter-normative values, beliefs or
ideas
(Rubinstein 2000: 15). Rubinstein notes that there are ‘clothing tie-symbols,
elements of dress and styles
of appearance that reflect an individual’s fears,
hopes, dreams, or desires’ (2000: 15). Individuals may
deliberately choose to
wear clothing tie-symbols as a way to demonstrate acceptance or rejection of
a particular
political goal or social value. Thus the Ku Klux Klan’s
distinctive form of dress, including white gowns and
pointed hoods, operated
as a from of clothing tie-symbol designed to identify and confirm its
wearer’s support
for a political agenda based on white supremacy, racial
purity and segregation. This distinctive attire became
emblematic of the
terror and fear that it was intended to create in black communities in
particular. Enfashioning
the bodies of the Klansmen was a statement of
political resistance among white southern men both contesting
integration,
and expressing the political abnegation of the human dignity and value of
African American lives.
The dress itself only became deadly when the
bodies that it enfashioned enacted their own forms of punishment on
those it
hunted down and executed.
T-shirts are perhaps the most familiar example of a tie-sign, boasting
slogans from ‘Just Say No’ to ‘A Woman
Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a
Bicycle’ as a way to identify individual political stances, as well as to draw
attention to various political and social issues. However, the fear of
resistance practices associated with the
wearing of politically explicit T-
shirts is confirmed by a ban imposed by the Cape Town police from 1953
onwards
on wearing T-shirts which proclaimed support for anti-apartheid
groups (Reed 1999: 153). Thus, T-shirts can serve
as powerful public points
of individual or group affiliation, drawing attention to proliferating locations
of
support or as a challenge to existing structures. Further, they can serve as
innocuous reminders of travel,
family reunions or various other rather
ordinary pursuits, but they can serve also to indicate moments of intense
political conflict and controversy. Such a politically charged adaption of the
T-shirt has been designed by
Israeli soldiers to directly target and intimidate
Palestinian women. Some of these T-shirts have featured

a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the

slogan ‘Bet you get raped’ … a soldier
raping a Palestinian girl that
 reads ‘No virgins, no terror’ … [and] a pregnant Palestinian woman
with a
bull’s-eye superimposed over her belly, with the slogan in
English, ‘1 shot, 2 kills’.
(Blau 2009, cited in Bloom 2010: 447)

What these last examples reveal is how enfashioning operates in conjunction

with structures of power and
domination, and how it can be deployed as
ways to confirm hierarchies of order and to discipline those that would
contest its control. So those who dismiss fashion and the political aspects of
enfashioning bodies of compliance
and contestation miss an entire realm of
strategic aesthetic choices located in, on and around the body, to
visually
signify relations of power and the formation of subject positions.
What are we to make of fashion and its political implications? According
to Wrigley, ‘attitudes and responses to
dress are a touchstone for matters of
collective and individual self-representation, and the negotiation of
questions
of identity apprehended through the culturally complex business of the
legibility of appearances’(2002:
5). Fashion indicates the site where
representation, identity and appearance emerge as embodied practices that
confirm the social significance of dress as emblematic of sovereign
disciplinary practice, yet also can function
as indications of subversion and
contestation.
However, it is not representation that enables these moments of
subversion to elude recapture by regulatory or
disciplinary forms of power,
but the introduction of similitude that enables us to conceive of these
moments of
legible appearance as sliding along a continuum of similarity.
‘This is not a mannequin’ enables us conceptually
to do just that: by dressing
our mannequin in overlapping articles of clothing and bodily comportment
to effect a
radical plane of equality. Envision ‘this is not a mannequin’ as
bearing the death mask of Emmett Till, replete
with a removable white,
pointed hood, a ‘Sunday best’ suit and a T-shirt emblazoned with the image
of a bull’s
eye covering a pregnant belly. I have chosen to dress ‘this is not a
mannequin’ in this particular fashion in
order to engage the challenges
presented by similitude, and in order to begin to think through the various
ways
in which fashion carries within it its own socially limiting and
constraining sets of expectations and
disciplines.
If a suit denotes dignity, humanity, individual stature and social
acknowledgement as such, then similitude
denies its originary association
with one particular formulation of humanity and poses the question of
humanity
itself. The unrecognizable face of Emmett Till is provoked by the
wearing of the suit to draw attention to the
facelessness and abjection
contained within the concept of humanity. The very presence of a faceless
human
unsettles any beliefs in an originary presence of humanness. The
hood both denies and reveals identity, but it
evokes the absence of humanity
in the evocation of presence via absence, while the T-shirt operates to disrupt
pristine notions of natality because the act of naming and identifying the
human in humanity shatters both the sign and the signified. There can be no
excess that the concept of humanity
does not already absorb and encompass.
Humanity is rendered meaningless in the naming because ‘this is not a
human’ and ‘this is not a mannequin’ opens up a radical plain of equality,
because both the human body and its
representational form, the mannequin,
absorb all signs, recombines them and creates a narrative where the
human/mannequin obliterates its own solidity and calls into question its own
presence as a site of meaning,
representation and identity.
Fashion functions not as some moment of unencumbered freedom and
site of self-making, but as a reconfirmation of
powerful structures of
disciplinary constraint which operate to delimit and (re)capture.
‘This is not a mannequin’ provokes us to render suspect the
representational practices of dress, and to question
their attachment to an
originary source of meaning. It is within this recognition of the lack of an
originary
source of meaning that the possibility of repetition, which could
potentially repeat in some novel and unexpected
ways, even becomes
thinkable, let alone doable.

Conclusion
Enfashioning bodies, perfomative resistances
What breaks referentiality? What challenges signification? The answer to
both questions lies in the complex and
multilayered relationship between
bodies and fashion. Yoko Ono’s performative artwork, ‘Cut Piece’, is an apt
illustration of the intersubjective nature of dress, its implications for bodily
materialization and its role in
attempts to reconfigure cultural, political and
social contexts where bodies and fashion intersect to provoke
moments of
resistance, subversion or resignification.10 What is significant is that in this
instance the artist’s clothing is
being cut away bit by bit by volunteers from
the audience, who carry the pieces away with them. In the cutting
away of
bits and pieces of her clothing, the layered meanings of dress are at once
falling away and reemerging.
There is no original fount of meaning to
proclaim or to discover anew, only a radical plane of equality where
meaning is intersubjectively layered in-between the actions of cutting away
the fabric, and the clothing’s
dissolution into fragmentary bits and pieces.
The process of cutting away disrupts the conceptual wholeness of
the
cultural meanings of dress, and yet it also reconfirms the cultural
significance of dress as a shared moment
of materiality and meaning-
making.
The care of the self that accompanies a particular mode of fashion both
reflects (especially when one considers
the broader social reactions and
irruption of meanings attached to or recognized in one’s dress) and can
instigate or prompt a space of experimentation and creativity (see Foucault
1988, 1993).11 It is within this space that the self can
begin to regard itself in
a somewhat different way. Here I am referring to the
emergence of a shift in
attitude about oneself and one’s movement in the world, one’s emergence
and efficacy: in
sum, one’s own recognition of an altered set of skills and
attitudes.
Enfashioning bodies of resistance involves a process of repetition that can
either repeat in ways that confirm
existing cultural norms, prohibitions or
expectations, or in ways that provoke or question them. The space
between
signification, resignification and reconfiguration is a space navigated by
socially recognizable and
unrecognizable bodies, and dress is highly
contingent upon those very same bodies in those very same subject
positions. To assess the possibilities for resistance in the enfashioned body
entails, first and foremost, a
complex rendering of the contextual history of
particular materialized bodies and the social values and norms
that attach
dress codes to those bodies. Next, we need to enquire into the ways in which
alterations in bodily
enactments, gestures and comportment are accompanied
by various items of dress, their arrangement, layering and
or juxtapositions.
Thus, following Butler’s (1993) lead, enfashioning the body of resistance
entails those
sartorial practices that can be read as bringing abjected bodies
into view, and questioning those structural
constraints that rendered them
immaterial and invisible.
Thus the problematique remains: ‘This Is Not A Mannequin.’

Notes
1 To examine these disagreements
over varying conceptualizations of the body, see Butler (1989),
Benhabib et al. (1995), Bordo (1991, 1992,
1995), Meijer and Prins (1998), Dudrick (2005), Lloyd
(2007), Chambers and Carver (2008) and Jaggar (2008).
2 For additional arguments for
bringing the body back into the analysis of fashion and dress, see
Gaines and Herzog (1990), Wilson (1992) and
Entwistle (2000).
3 For discussions of resistance
and freedom with respect to the body, see Heyes (2007) and
Hengehold (2007).
4 Louis Muñoz spent 18 months
in jail during the rule of Augusto Pinochet. He was a trade union
activist and he reported how his torturers
would dress in his own clothes.
5 There have been some
interesting reverberations relating to humiliation and its association with
women’s dress by Puar, who argues
that the sexualized torture of the inmates at Abu Ghraib was
not exceptional at all, but reflects ‘a normalized
facet of prisoner life and the sexual is always
already inscribed in necropolitics’ (2004: 533).
6 James Allen’s Without
Sanctuary (2000) draws together a collection of photographs of lynching
victims, many of which were mailed
replete with handwritten notes as souvenir postcards to
relatives back home. See also Sontag (2004) who, in
noting the eerie similarity between these two
sets of images, concludes ‘the photographs are us’.
7 For a detailed account of the
events surrounding Emmett’s death, see Cozens (1997).
8 An article in the online
edition of The Economist (2010) reviews the history of the origin and
development of the suit and
attests to its present status as a ‘symbol of conformity’.
9 For photographs of Emmett Till, see the PBS website for the film The Murder of Emmett Till,
shown on American Experience: www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/peopleevents/p_till.html For photos
of young Emmett with his mother, and
of him as a teenager in shirt and tie, see:
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeature/pop_remember.html. Jet magazine also published articles
and photographs about the lynching and funeral of Emmett Till.
10 A video clip of Ono’s
performance artwork can be found at: www.youtube.com/watch?
v=F2IgqYiaywU She has performed this piece on several occasions over the
years, the first one
being in 1964 in Japan, and the most recent in 2003 as her offering toward the cause of
world
peace.
11 For commentaries on the
significance and implications of Foucault’s arts of the self, see Longford
(2001), who argues that Foucault’s
ethics of care opens the way to the ability to care for others;
and Moss (1998), who concludes that Foucault’s
ethics does offer a way to assess whether a form
of power involves domination.

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2 The
art of (un)dressing dangerously
The veil and/as fashion
M.I. Franklin

Introduction
Recent legislation criminalizing the outward appearance of Muslim women
living in some European Union (EU) Member
States has implications for
critical theory and research into the micro–macro analytical nexus of world
politics
and popular culture, and the gender geopolitics of fashion in
particular. In Belgium and France, appearing in
public dressed in clothes that
mark you out as ‘visibly Muslim’ (Tarlo 2010) is now illegal, while in the
Netherlands comparable legislation has been close to becoming law for
several years (Moors 2009; Franklin 2013).
In other parts of the EU, Muslim
women wearing clothing deemed to be ‘too openly religious’ (the Guardian
2015) – for example, wearing full-length skirts or a headscarf (hijab) to
work or school – can be sent
home to change. Refusing to comply by
asserting your right to religious freedom under European or international
human rights law in the workplace can mean losing your job or being
subjected to disciplinary action. Wearing the
veil in public can expose you to
a fine, verbal abuse, harassment and even violence (Abu-Lughod 2010; The
Veiled
Woman 2011). Veil dressing – construed by its most vocal critics as a
provocatively religious act of defiance,
rather than an expression of
culturally multiplex dress practices – is a controversial issue. It causes
concern
not only for policymakers and politicians in Western societies
marked by increasingly xenophobic and religiously
intolerant discourses, but
also critical scholars, feminists in particular (Eltahawy 2010; Nussbaum
2012). Considering veil dressing in sartorial terms, as or in fashion,
adds an
extra edge to these already polarized debates about what the Muslim veil
means, for wearer and onlooker,
in democratic liberal polities (El Guindi
2003; Wallach Scott 2007; Ahmed 2011).1
‘Burqa ban’ legislation in the EU, and ensuing debates about its legal and
ethical veracity, effectively
demonize the way that some Muslim women
living in these countries go about their everyday lives: that is, they
legitimize
perceptions of a veiled woman in Western settings as an embodiment of the
suspect ‘Other’ (Göle 1996).
In the politically polarized context in which
debates about veil dressing in general have been raging,
interlocutors tend to
reify the Muslim veil. First, by rendering the veil – a culturally loaded item
of clothing – and its associated dressing practices outside history. Second,
placing the
veil outside history means refusing to acknowledge that veil
dressing can be subject to change, and so open to
those socio-economic
forces that constitute the rise of modernity’s ‘fashion system’ (Barthes 1983;
Lehmann
2001). The Muslim veil – an element of one major faith system
extolling the virtues of ‘modest’ dress and bodily
mores – has become
branded as ipso facto religiously fundamentalist. This reductionist – when it
is
not overtly racist – viewpoint has acquired a lot of political traction and
media coverage in the EU as well as
in North America (Khiabany and
Williamson 2008). More troubling for critical scholarship is that these views
intersect with long-standing liberal feminist critiques of veil dressing as a
form of patriarchal oppression.
Even within veil-prescriptive societies such as Saudi Arabia or Iran, veil-
dressing practices include the
sartorial (e.g. culturally inflected styles,
differences in folding, colours and fabrics) at the intersection of
shifting
populations and fashion trends. Stronger still, maintaining a political and
analytical position that
would read all forms of veil dressing as a function of
either patriarchal oppression or Islamic fundamentalism
runs another risk:
namely, of eliding women as active agents from these complex scenarios of
gender power
relations that are being played out in the struggles of everyday
life, and being transmuted into the visceral
horrors of contemporary theatres
of war.
These political and cultural perturbations are the context for this chapter’s
consideration of veil dressing
and/as fashion, however defined (Behnke, in
this volume; Barthes 1983; Brydon and Niessen 1998 Brown 2013).2 It
reflects on the fashion
geopolitics of the veil through the prism of
increasingly polarized debates in Western neoliberal polities about
the
impact of Muslim populations on established wisdoms about cultural
integration, identity and national
allegiance. My argument is that, refracted
through concerns about the (un)fashionably veiled bodies of Muslim
women,
we are witnessing the institutionalization of xenophobic discourses about the
legal and moral ‘rights and
responsibilities’ of ethnic minority citizenries to
comply with a monolithic cultural understanding of
citizenship. As I will
show, while clothes may or may not ‘make the woman’ (to paraphrase Mark
Twain), the
racialized, subjected or defiant bodies that wear them (or not)
need to be brought into our frame of
analysis.3
The way that forces of power and domination, resistance or compliance
arguably can be read off clothes as they
adorn, conceal and reveal the human
body is a rich vein of enquiry for scholars of world politics, who are
engaged
in exploring how classical, macro-levels of analysis are constituted by the
intricacies of sociocultural
practices and lived experience, and said micro-
level levels of analysis (Shepherd 2014; Zalewski 2014). These
post-Third
Debate research interests explore the geopolitical dimensions to everyday
life, material and popular
cultures, and the psycho-emotional and physical
embodiments that constitute multiple and transborder, rather than
singular,
state-bound subjectivities. They offer avenues for critical work on the way
that gendered, racialized
and class-encoded narratives accompany physical
‘body conduits’ for the power
hierarchies underpinning today’s ‘global
cultural economy’ (Appadurai 2002). This approach means taking seriously
‘the dynamic rapport [that] the body has with the surrounding material
world’ (Belasescu 2013: 26).
After establishing what I argue is a necessary conceptual connection
between veil dressing and/as fashion and
Foucauldian-inflected theories of
embodiment, the chapter unpacks the complexity of veil dressing and
undressing
controversies at the imaginary and geopolitical crossroads where
the putative East meets West. It is organized
around four scenarios of
conflicting notions and images of what it means to (un)dress as a Muslim
woman, living
in the West or Muslim world. The first begins with the
aforementioned ‘burqa ban’ laws in the EU.
Recalling arguments made
elsewhere (Franklin 2013), I juxtapose these legislative moves with feminist
debates
about the less-than-benign influence that beauty and fashion
industry-sponsored representations of female bodies
and dress codes have on
younger women’s body image and political consciousness. The latest
generation of popular
television makeover shows encapsulate these forces at
work, in the guise of celebrity expert advice. Global
franchises such as the
UK shows What Not to Wear (BBC, 2001–7) and How to Look Good Naked
(Channel
4, 2006–2010) are cases in point (Franklin 2013: 346–8).
The second scenario looks at the emerging literature on veil dressing
and/as fashion, namely work on Islamic
fashion (Tarlo and Moors 2013):
understood here as cross-cultural and transnational dress practices designed
and
worn by Muslim women living in European and North American urban
centres. This literature addresses lacunae in
predominately Eurocentric
fashion studies and corollary disciplines interested in the race–class–gender
vectors
of popular culture, by focusing on what Muslim women really think
and feel about veil dressing as citizens of
societies that mark them as
‘forbidden Moderns’ (Göle 1996) – even when their wardrobes comprise
innovations in
veil-dressing techniques, styles, colours and designs (Lewis
2007; Tarlo and Moors 2013). With the fashion
aesthetic in mind, I then turn
to artists’ representations of these contradictory forces.
The third scenario looks at two Muslim women whose work focuses on
the space between those gazing at, and those
gazing from, ‘behind the veil’,
to use the popular cliché: playing with the ambiguity of who is looking at
whom.
These artists are working at an historical conjuncture of religiously
inscribed and militarized geopolitical
divides in which women’s (un)veiled
bodies become conduits of resistance, defiance and conformity.
The last scenario addresses the other side of the well-dressed or wrongly
dressed coin: going naked in public as
protest. The two women in Egypt and
Tunisia whose naked ‘selfies’ online highlight the ways in which women in
the
Muslim world and the West deploy and react to nakedness as embodied
mobilization around women’s rights. The
ensuing controversies about these
women’s use of nakedness at an individual level highlight the perplexing
ways
in which both dressed and undressed bodies have become marked by
the gender
geopolitics of post-Arab Spring societies, further complicated by
what they mean for post-9/11 sensitivities in
the Middle East and North
African region. The role played by social media in disseminating these
images to a
global audience goes hand-in-hand with debates between
Muslim and non-Muslim feminists about the role played by
Femen activism
in support of these two women’s actions (Franklin, in press).4 This scenario
highlights the ways in which
these dressed bodies of Muslim women not
only depict, but also respond to, the dynamics of resistance and
domination
that comprise the gender geopolitics of contemporary world politics.
Moreover, these actions
(artistic, spontaneous, designed) and the violent
responses that they evoke, underscore how veil (un)dressing
practices are
conjoining with the ‘aesthetically organized times and spaces’ (Belasescu
2013: 77) of the fashion
retail cycle. Before summing up with reference to
this latter observation, I briefly return to how
conceptualizing the body as
and in world politics from a gendered perspective can offer avenues for
further
research into the geopolitics of fashion.

Conceptualizing bodies and Islamic fashion

[Fashion] informs modern subjectivities through actions on three levels:

time, space, and the body. Fashion
organizes time … a calendar of
events that in turn re-organize urban life, and operates class
distinctions; it
introduces seasonal aesthetic canons … style epochs. …
Geographical space is also organized through fashion
styles that borrow
their name from ‘exotic’ locations. Aesthetically organized times and
spaces are frameworks
for the dressed body that is constituted through
its movement.
(Belasescu 2013: 77)

Belasescu’s insight here can serve as the first methodological-conceptual

anchor for this discussion, drawing as
he does on theories of fashion,
modernity and embodiment (Barthes 1983; see Lehmann 2001; Benjamin
2002). He also
makes explicit how the local–global interconnections of a
fashion industry subject (un)dressed bodies to a
multiplicity of aesthetic and
economic reorganizations of time and space. In his study, Belasescu shows
how
Parisian fashion houses have developed their production and retailing to
cater for Middle Eastern clients, living
in societies where state-imposed
‘regimes of dress’ (Belasescu 2013) decree what women must wear in
public, for
their personal and ostensibly private consumption. In the Islamic
Republic of Iran this regime is based on the
infamous hijabi laws (Sreberny
and Khiabany 2010), also in place in Taliban-controlled parts of
Afghanistan, and in Saudi Arabia. Belasescu’s observations dovetail with
studies of the emerging transnational
Islamic fashion nexus (Moors and
Tarlo 2013) in Western Europe, one that also overlaps with a lively online
market in ‘modest dressing’ that, in turn, cuts across faith communities –
Muslim, Jewish or Amish, for example
(Brydon and Niessen 1998; Lewis
2007; Tarlo 2010). Established trade routes
between the West’s fashion
centres and those societies where women’s public attire is strictly regulated
fly in
the face of ingrained attitudes about the intransigence of all ‘Muslim
dress practices’ (Moors and Tarlo 2013:
1). These trends, and the material,
sartorial cultures that they create based on these practices, in all their
geographical and stylistic diversity across the Muslim world, are
provocations for defenders of anti-veil
dressing legislation laws in Western
Europe.
At a more abstract level of analysis, these studies underscore the
multiplex ways in which bodies are (un)dressed
and, in turn, clothes both
dress and address living subjects. At the experiential level of analysis they
also
allow investigation into the meanings with which people imbue
different sorts of clothes and styles in daily
life. In this sense, the clothes that
cover our corporeal selves – particularly, but not exclusively, in those
societies where the fashion cycle celebrates a neoliberal subjectivity of
consumer choice – are intimately
connected, albeit distinct from the minds
and bodies that wear them. These connections are not always harmonious
or
synchronous, in that clothes and/on bodies move through individual life
paths and across imaginary and
physical borders, in sometimes conflicting
ways (Julavits et al. 2014; Reynolds 2014). In short, sometimes what
we
wear is not what or who we are.
Moving up another level of analysis, these personal and increasingly
politicized decisions by and for a group of
women who are being
systematically marginalized and de-subjected by virtue of how they dress,
demarcate an
emergent domain of analysis: namely, the post-9/11 geopolitics
of fashion. The conceptual challenge for scholars
of world politics is to
avoid reproducing the mutually exclusive polarity between the West and its
history of
modernity (as exemplified by consumer culture and fashion
centres) at one end, and at the other, the Muslim world
of the East and its
presumed lack of sartorial consciousness (Belasescu 2013; Al-Qasimi 2010).
The way that
Muslim women dress, whether by their own volition or not,
needs to be repositioned within the push-and-pull of
the ‘seasonal aesthetic
canons’ (Belasescu 2013: 77) of overlapping fashion industries, and within
the history of
the modern nation-state. The veil is no more impervious to the
‘absolute, dogmatic [and] vengeful present tense
in which Fashion speaks’
(Barthes, cited in Brown 2013: 297) than any other item of clothing that
women may wear,
or refuse to wear. These ebbs and flows, experiences and
(mis)perceptions are brought into relief when
considering the different
scenarios in which Muslim veil dressing – and by association, Muslim
women’s bodies –
are used as a vehicle for sociocultural and political
projects by vested interests. For the Western (scholarly)
gaze, both the veil
and the (un)veiled body have become positioned as undesired and contested
forms
of embodiment and sartorial practice.
The political and aesthetic unease expressed by liberal and feminist
opponents to both anti-veil dressing laws
and Muslim veil dressing itself
(see Khiabany and Williamson 2008; Moors 2009; Franklin 2013)
accompanies the most recent wave of political campaigns to restrict – if not
outlaw – the Muslim
veil in public spaces; or for those in public office, in
parts of the EU such as Germany or Belgium at least.
Always political, when
not overtly politicized by both Islamicist and anti-colonial movements in the
past
(Yeğenoğlu 1998; Ahmed 2011), Muslim veil dressing has become a
hostage of national and geopolitical power plays
in two respects. First,
through its symbolic use by the US administration in its call to arms in the
global ‘War
on Terror’, responding to the events of 9/11. Second, through its
recurring use as a politicized signifier for
the ‘enemy from within’ in those
Western societies undertaking legislative moves against veil dressing before
9/11, as a response to groups deemed too visibly Muslim for the public (or
indeed, their own good). Stronger
still,

through their visual material and bodily presence young women who
wear Islamic fashion disrupt and challenge
public stereotypes about
Islam, women, social integration and the veil even if their voices are
drowned out in
political and legal debates on these issues.
(Moors and Tarlo 2013: 3)

However, these disruptions are largely inchoate, as these women move and
live in civic spaces marked by social
disapproval, rendering their everyday
dress practices and sartorial inflections as transgressive by circumstance.
As
Moors and Tarlo argue, these practices need to be considered as a part of
how minority ethnic groups manage
these ‘complex forms of critical and
creative engagement [with] European and American cultural norms’ (2013:
1).
That said, unpacking such a dynamic rapport between clothing and the
bodies they are ‘designed to wear’ is not a
straightforward mapping exercise
(for example, ‘hijab equals Islamic fundamentalist’, ‘bare midriff equals
false consciousness’, ‘such and such a brand equals neo-Nazi’). This
paradox also begs the question of whether a
piece of clothing has any
meaning if it is not worn, and if taken out of its sociocultural and political
context
of use. However, clothes on their own do carry meaning: an outfit
we may not wear anymore maintains an
emotionally or economic (e.g.
expensive item) significance. These nuances to how clothes are made,
marketed and
then acquired and worn need to be borne in mind, as scholars
turn their attention to how world politics are
inscribed in popular cultural
practices, literature and the arts – and as in the case of this volume, fashion.
They also need to take into account the insights of those who study the
practice of everyday life and dress as a
cultural practice from close-up:
namely, the ‘impossibility of simply reading from appearances’ (Moors and
Tarlo
2013: 2). The paradox is that in the case of Muslim veil dressing, as a
voluntary or prescribed practice, this is
exactly what has been occurring in
the European and North American settings. Despite its multifarious styles,
embodiments and meanings, veil dressing has become the target of virulent
political campaigns, punitive laws and
regulations.

Four scenarios of (un)dressing dangerously

‘Burqa bans’ and ‘What not to wear’
Moves to outlaw veil dressing in the EU date back to the 1990s, at least, in
the case of France and the
Netherlands, with variable levels of success in
legislative and enforcement terms. However, it was the national
legislatures
in France and Belgium which, in 2011, managed to pass laws that would
make the wearing of face and
body-covering forms of Muslim dress illegal,
despite public protest and legal appeals (Franklin 2013: 395). A
comparable
law came very close to being passed in the Netherlands in 2012 (Moors
2009, 2013). However, a swathe
of regulations and unwritten rules have
been in place in the EU for some time that allow employers, including
local
governments, to determine how Muslim women employees should dress in
the public sector, such as schools or
the civil service, public swimming pools
and other recreational spaces or at work. Whether or not these laws are
tenable under human rights norms is less the point for their advocates at this
historical conjuncture.
‘Burqa bans’ have become a political and public
relations success for anti-Islamic, anti-migration
hardliners in these
countries. They also signal a hardening of attitude towards Muslim
communities across the
political spectrum, partly as a response to the rise of
militant forms of political Islam on a global scale that
accompany, yet are
not reducible, to the visible signs of ‘a global Islamic revival and the
increased emphasis
placed on reflexive forms of Islam’ (Moors and Tarlo
2013: 3; El Guindi 2003; Ahmed 2011). Nationalist and
xenophobic political
parties have been quick to conflate these two tendencies in order to argue for
measures to
counteract what, for them, is an unacceptable level of Muslim
presence in liberal, secular societies undergoing
significant demographic and
socio-economic change. Supporters of this view argue that Muslim
populations are
mounting a direct challenge to a vision of Europe founded
on secular modernity, and its unwritten dress codes and
practices of
embodiment.
This first scenario links veil-dressing debates in Europe and North
America with feminist debates about the
corrosive effects of makeover TV
shows on younger generations of women’s body image and political
consciousness
in the neoliberal era: one that, in turn, has ushered in what
some cultural critics have called the problem of
‘post-feminism’ (McRobbie
2004a, 2004b). As I have argued elsewhere (Franklin 2013), feminist politics
and
analysis are implicated in both cases, because both call to account the
blind spots of liberal sensibilities
about freedom and agency. While anti-veil
dressing advocates in the EU and their counterparts in
veil-prescriptive parts
of the world look to coerce by use of punitive laws, there are other sorts of
coercive
power in play at the nexus of popular culture and global circuits or
practices of consumption: namely, the overt
and covert ways in which the
fashion and beauty industries touch on the body politics of everyday life.
Getting
dressed is a ‘problem’ that faces women, and more than a few men,
every day.5 Style gurus,
fashion designers for the upper and lower ends of
the market, parents, siblings and peer groups also have
pervasive power to
set the terms of what counts as ‘looking good’ or ‘suitably attired’ in secular
as well as
religious contexts.
As an expression of European anxieties about living alongside others
whose bodies are covered in ways considered
unacceptable to the dominant
cultural norm, the legalities of anti-veil laws are intertwined with the
normalizing
pressures exerted on women’s corporeal practices by a
globalized beauty and fashion aesthetic. Feminist scholars
are ambivalent
and divided in how they assess the political connotations of these
commercial forces to get young
women to dress fashionably, and which
fashion the body in certain ways that reproduce race and class lines of
socio-
economic opportunity and aspiration. Notwithstanding the anti-fashion
literature from Marxian schools of
thought, feminist scholars have critiqued
these trends: for example, focusing on evidence of the ‘pornification’
of
young women’s bodies through the promotion of hypersexual items of
clothing (see Duits and van Zoonen 2007;
Gill 2007). Critiques of makeover
shows focus on how dominant narratives of heteronormative attractiveness
and
social mobility link to signs of a decline in feminist political engagement
in younger generations of women
(McRobbie 2004b), as they debate the
moral and political implications of why women undergo ‘various forms of
denigration [albeit] with a degree of self-conscious irony’ (McRobbie 2004a:
100).
These forms of coercion – as subtle forms of mediagenic persuasion –
work in another register to legislation
criminalizing how ethnic or religious
minorities must look, in the name of public order or cultural integration:
coercion by law. Nonetheless, at the intersection of feminist critiques of
(sexist or sexualized) consumer
culture and the veil, the ways in which
Muslim women exercise their sartorial preferences for their veil
dressing are
positioned differently to those women who volunteer to be made over on
prime time TV. The former are
positioned as victims subjected to patriarchal
tradition, while the latter are regarded as active participants in
reality TV’s
celebration of hyperliberal consumerism. Feminists have issues with both.

Veil fashionistas and their malcontents

As a particular piece of clothing, and as part of a global commodity chain
(Salem 2013) that marks a particular
community of faith for some and
ongoing patriarchal oppression for others, the veil remains a stumbling block
for
many critics of ‘burqa ban’ laws and the veil dressing practices that they
target. Working within a rich
literature about the link between veil dressing,
politics and religion from a postcolonial perspective, and from
the viewpoint
of Muslim women (Abu-Lughod 2010; El Guindi 2003; Abdul-Ghafur 2005;
Al-Qasimi 2010; Eltahawy
2010), Leila Ahmed (2011) advocates the need to
apprehend fully the ‘dynamics and meanings with which these
debates over
the veil [have been] charged … [and] why this garment continues to be such
a volatile, sensitive, and politically fraught symbol today’ (Ahmed 2011:
11). These accounts address
the wider sociocultural context and the practices
of veil dressing as a multicultural modality; albeit one
occurring within a
polarized geopolitical context that has put religious politics – and with that,
the politics
of religion as lived and embodied by minority communities of
faith – at the centre of attention. Again, what
makes things more complicated
is how to address agency and subjectivity in cases where Muslim women
attest to
being actively engaged in everyday practices of veil dressing as a
personal – cultural and/or religious –
practice that may, or may not, be part
of an outward expression of piety.
As Göle (2002) argues, a shift in the analyst’s gaze is needed, and with
that a shift in the frame of reference
where dichotomies rule. By the latter, I
mean to move out of liberationist registers of individual freedom – in
which
exuberant states of undress are the only marker of personal and gender
freedom – which made its case
through the mid-twentieth-century women’s
movement. It means taking a more circumspect view of the sociocultural,
political and economic limits to ‘agency as resistance to or freedom from
[the dominant] normative
culture’ (Mahmood, cited in Anderson and
Greifenhagen 2013: 59, emphasis in original; Franklin in press).
Just like their counterparts in other cultures and societies, Muslim women
differ between themselves about veil
dressing as a devout and a style-
conscious sartorial practice. They also articulate their own sense of propriety
and style according to cross-cutting cultural pressures from peer groups,
elders and wider moods. In Western
urban centres – in the same societies
that have labelled all Muslim forms of dress retrograde, repressive and
thereby unacceptable for liberal norms – anthropologists have been studying
how second and third-generation
Muslim women dress. They listen to what
Muslim women think about what they wear, and how they reconcile the
conflicting expectations and judgements that come their way as ‘burqa ban’
discourses frame how others see
them, in the street and at work. Emma Tarlo
is an anthropologist who looks at the material cultures, the
sartorial
practices, of young Muslim women growing up in the West from close-up
(Tarlo 2013). Her findings show
them adopting and adapting a variety of
dress codes to create ensembles that conform to the religious codes of
how
to dress modestly, or the cultural conventions of veil dressing as simply
something one does (Tarlo 2010).
Skinny jeans, high-heeled shoes and
headscarf are combined and enhanced in any number of ways that may well
cover
the body, but not necessarily conceal its form. These styles, and a
burgeoning market in modest fashion lines,
are infused with local economies
and the micro-politics of style, subcultures and patterns of ethnic diversity
and community.
These cosmopolitan women living in societies where anti-veil dressing
sentiments are part of public and political
debates find themselves bearing
the burden of narratives that position veil dressing as an inherently
retrograde,
misogynist cultural practice. That these women can differ
vehemently with one another about ‘burqa ban’
moves in their parents’
adopted homes, countries of which they are full
citizens, is overlooked too
often. While the exercising of choice takes place in variously circumscribed
contexts, the point of Tarlo’s work, as well as that of Annalies Moors and the
other contributors to their 2013
volume, Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion
(Tarlo and Moors, 2013), is that within and across the cultural
geographies
of veil dressing practice there are nuances, tensions between dressing
correctly and dressing well,
and decisions about the latest trends within the
remit of Islamic dress codes (The Veiled Woman 2011; Moors and
Tarlo
2013).
For example, designers of modest fashion lines, or of innovations in veil-
dressing styles (such as
hijab-based sportswear, or the highly publicized
development of the ‘burkini’, a modest dress-inspired
version of the bikini,
in Australia), have created commercial outlets for veils and veiling
techniques practised
by Muslim women everywhere (Tarlo and Moors
2013). These refashioning techniques need not always be construed as
either
symptomatic of oppression, or a conscious decision to contest the liberal
moral order in Western settings.
Conversely, wearing a hijab for religious
reasons need not exclude a desire to look ‘hip’. Alongside these
variations, it
bears noting that within Western high fashion, the incorporation of ‘exotic’
clothing styles (from
the kaftan to the turban) is hardly new. As global
fashion houses such as Dior, designers such as Vivienne
Westwood, Tom
Ford and others create designer veils in some of their recent collections, the
relative dearth of
Muslim fashion designers, or designers of Islamic fashion,
becomes apparent. As Selim (2013) and Belasescu (2013)
underscore,
fashion and lifestyle publications catering for Muslim women in the West
and Middle Eastern
readerships provide an abundance of styles, trends and
designer labels. The Western global fashion industry
remains firmly
embedded in Euro-Anglo-American sartorial traditions, picking and
choosing at will the sorts of
non-Western, said ‘traditional’ garments and
styles that they might incorporate. Fashion designers from the
Muslim
world, or who work with veil dressing elements – as is the case with Chinese
designers, for example – are
the exception rather than the rule in Western
fashion hubs: Hussein Chalayan is one case in point.6
Another example of these sartorial dynamics is the way in which fashion
photographers depict the veil as fashion
alongside, as well as within,
Western fashion trends (Selim 2013; Tarlo 2013). Distinctively Islamic and
fashionable, these images are created and enjoyed though the working of the
fashion photographer’s lens, use of
composition and lighting. Even when
shooting spontaneously in the street, fashion bloggers such as Scott
Schumann
(who blogs and tweets as The Sartorialist,
www.thesartorialist.com) understand this effect: a ‘politically incorrect’
outfit in one setting
becomes sartorially acceptable through the lighting or
angle to evoke an aesthetic image.7 For example, take the photo from The
Sartorialist Twitter feed (Figure 2.1), shot one fine day
in Milan, as his tweet
affirms (‘Wednesday, May 21, 2014, On the Street: Corso Venezia, Milan’).8
This photo is of a woman,
apparently in hijab, from behind as she walks out
of bright sunlight into the shadow. It generated 50-odd
comments, mostly
positive – either about the shot itself or the aesthetic
qualities of the
woman’s ensemble, which features a white headscarf, pink over-garment
below the knee over white
trousers and flat, gold ‘shiny shoes’. A few
comments on the web page do focus on the fact that this photo of a
veiled
woman is rendered in this composition as aesthetically pleasing, rather than
culturally dissonant. For
example, Peggy comments: ‘How beautiful to carry
your faith with timeless sense of fashion’ (The
Sartorialist, 22 May 2014).
Elissa encapsulates the tensions evident when veil dressing is depicted as
fashionable for onlookers unaccustomed to the idea: ‘Beautiful. Thank you
for this shot. Not obvious – what a
relief in this age’ (21 May 2014).

Figure 2.1 ‘On the street: Corso Venezia, Milan’, by The

Sartorialist,
2014.
Source: The Sartorialist (www.thesartorialist.com).
 These comments highlight some of the aesthetics and cultural politics of
this juncture. At stake is the
orientalist problematic. As Yeğenoğlu (1998),
Ahmed (2002), Göle (2002), Belasescu (2013) and other authors
concerned
with recentring the scholarly gaze from the outside-in to inside-out note, the
issue rests too often on
who is looking at whom, and by whose aesthetic-
ethical standards.9 This is a methodological as much as it is a political
question. It
is one that sees the analyst walking a fine line between drawing
inferences about what certain forms of dress can
tell us about the wearer, and
considering the experience from the wearer’s
viewpoint. Belasescu puts his
finger on the hazards of the first approach, when he talks about the ‘semiotic
vanishing point’ of approaches that look to tell ‘us in a kind of vivisectional
manner what is inside the
clothes, and what is acceptable to be inside them’
(2013: 28). As a pivotal part of the capitalist desiring
machine, fashion lines
(haute couture and prêt-à-porter alike) and fashion photography in particular
also work as
a mechanism by which Muslim women’s bodies are enticed
into ‘accommodating clothing in such a way [as to] signify
Fashion’s ideal
body: to lengthen, fill out, reduce, enlarge, take in, refine – by these
artifices’ (Barthes
1983: 259–60). On this point, religious authorities and
anti-fashion adepts across the putative East–West divide
may indeed concur:
fashion is unethical. The next two sections shift the emphasis from what
counts (or not) as
sartorial or legally possible with respect to veil dressing in
general, and Islamic fashion trends in particular,
to the gender geopolitics of
resistant embodiments in a post-9/11 context.10

Artists’ interventions
The British artist Sarah Maple has made a name for herself with a series of
self-portraits in which she depicts
herself in hijab, chador and burqa doing
‘odd’ things: for example, with a cigarette hanging
out of her mouth, fully
veiled, while wearing a lapel pin with the words ‘I ♥ Orgasms’. Alongside
these
self-portraits is a range of political poster mock-ups: for example, as a
woman in a hijab’s political
campaign with the caption, ‘Vote for me or
you’re Islamaphobic’. These images challenge head-on both Islamophobic
and Islamicist doctrinaire renderings of veiled Muslim womanhood as she
pokes fun, or her finger, at those who
would impose as well as judge the
stricter forms of veil dressing. Humour is her main device, and pop art
idioms
her means of challenging the racist and culturally reductionist media
stereotypes of Islam that have preoccupied
the British tabloid press in recent
years (Khiabany and Williamson 2008).
These images provoke strong responses because they make you chuckle,
at the same time as they might make you
squirm, at their exposing of the
undercurrents of media-driven representations of female sexuality and
desirability. For example, in her “Who Wore it BEST?” diptych (Figures
2.2a and 2.2b), which contrasts photos of herself and a mate sombrely
covered, head-to-toe in
black on the left side of the diptych, taken inside and
on the street. On the right-hand side they are clad in
black T-shirt and jeans,
but this time with large pink breasts pinned on the outside of their tops: an
anti-fashion, street fashion statement and thumbed-nose to both the
guardians of propriety on both sides of the
veil dressing debates, and
promulgators of sexist media representations of women.
Figures 2.2a and 2.2b Diptych of Burqa and Tits, by Sarah
Maple, 2009.
Source: The artist (www.sarahmaple.com).

Maple’s main object of critique in her work is the assumption that veiled
Muslim women must be, for this reason
alone, non-corporeal beings,
asexual, abstemious and therefore politically passive subjects. As observers
such as
Leila Ahmed and others note about women’s role in the Muslim
Brotherhood or in
mosque communities, this is far from the case (El Guindi
2003; Ahmed 2011). The disembodying and hollowing out of
all agency by
both the religiously dogmatic and the liberally orientalist gaze would have
this so.
For all its whimsical humour, Maple’s project is a serious one that cuts
across the reductionist dichotomies that
serve the political goals of pro- and
anti-veiling advocates around the world. In this respect she draws
inspiration
from, and speaks to, the work of the US-based Iranian artist and filmmaker
Shirin Neshat, whose
photographic (self-)portraits and feature films depict
sombre yet intimate scenes of everyday life for women
living in Iran since
the 1978 Islamic Revolution, which put it on a collision course with the
USA–UK geopolitical
and economic axis in the region. Her focus is a
depiction of the unequivocal and unrelenting separation between
female and
male domains in Iran, where hijabi laws rule.11 The series of self-portraits
and photographs for which she first
made her name dates from the 1990s,
entitled Women of Allah. In these photos, Neshat uses calligraphic
Farsi
texts, taken from contemporary Iranian women poets (drawing on cultural
references of another order to
Maple’s tongue-in-cheek captions), and
superimposes them onto or behind bodies, faces and hands. As with Maples’
subjects a generation later, those depicted in this work look straight out,
directly into the viewer’s gaze.
There is a lot more to explore in the aesthetic and geopolitical import of
these photographs, and debates about
Neshat’s own position as an expatriate
Iranian artist living in the USA that underpin her stark depictions of
gendered separations in contemporary Iran vis-à-vis the sexual politics of
American society. Suffice it to say that the veil dressing depicted here
conforms to the ‘anti-fashion’
dimensions (Moors and Tarlo 2013: 11) of a
religiously devout dress code. Commentators on Neshat’s work have
noted
how she deploys four symbolic elements: ‘the veil, the gun, the text, and the
gaze’ (Mukhopadhay 2013) to
convey the complex interaction between
everyday life and geopolitical power plays in which Iran and the Western
powers are still embroiled. In Women of Allah (1997), Neshat strikes a
number of poses, directly facing
the camera, in a chador, with a gun either
pointed at the viewer or fondled. Neshat’s aphoristic images of
Iranian
women gaze out at the camera, at you – silent, perhaps militant, yet also
defiant inhabitants of
their world.
Whether or not she is reproducing a certain exotica in her regard on Iran’s
hijabi laws for western
onlookers, or seeking to subvert their power, these
images do mount a challenge to
 enduring assumptions of what constitutes an ‘Islamic woman’ [that] are
at once domestic to that culture and
colonially crafted on it. … Her
photographs show and tell what has been forbidden to show and tell …
without
violating the bodily codes of an ‘Islamic woman’.
(Dabashi 1997)

For her part, Maple takes these bodily codes and their discontents to meet
ongoing sexism in British society at
large, as her subjects refuse to take these
attitudes lying down. As her double self-portrait entitled You
(2007) shows
(Figure 2.3), the gun and the finger can point
both ways.
Figure 2.3 You, double self-portrait by Sarah Maple, 2007.
Source: The artist (www.sarahmaple.com).

As artists, Maple and Neshat play with the polysemic layers of meaning
of image-making and reception, as do
fashion photographers and designers.
In the current anti-Muslim mood of Western public debates about citizenship
today, both artists look to capture and then challenge the unease of publics
suffering from what Nancy Nussbaum
(2012: 9) argues is the narcissistic
fear fuelling the rise of religious intolerance around the world. Using
different aesthetic idioms, both artists are part of what some commentators
call ‘a new politics of vision’
(Mukhopadhay 2013), in that these works
articulate their having a personal, internal conversation at the same
time as
they mount a wider critique of assumptions about

the ability of the ‘Orient’ to speak back and address a systemic denial
of expression, but they also contort
multiple power relations, often
stemming from rigid gender roles. … [They] manage to ‘undo’ this
matrix of
privilege by challenging understandings of who derives actual
benefit from this power.
(Mukhopadhay 2013)

A final point before moving on to the last of these four scenarios. As noted
above, the veil dressing that
features in both Neshat and Maple’s work is one
of the more stringent forms:
the dark sombre colours and full body covering
associated with Islamicist militancy and punitive veil dressing
regimes in
parts of the Muslim world. Nonetheless, and despite the propaganda uses to
which this form of veil
dressing has been put in political campaigns in parts
of Europe (e.g. Switzerland and Belgium), women who cover
from head to
foot cannot be so easily cast as mindless victims. As Anderson and
Greifenhagen (2013) point out in
their study of Muslim identity in Canada,
these pieces of

cloth worn or unworn can capture seemingly contradictory notions of

subversiveness and compliance [which] means
that agency is not only
 about resisting norms but can also be understood in how and why we
[and others] inhabit
norms and is still, therefore, a matter of choice.
(Anderson and Greifenhagen 2013: 59)

While Western feminists still debate the form and substance of choice under
the aegis of global capitalism (as
noted in our first scenario), the point here
is that in the space that joins and separates these two artists’
work. there is an
intergenerational conversation going on about conformity, defiance and
agency that charts
another, underresearched geography of distinctions within
Muslim corporeal dressing practices.

Naked protests: undressing dangerously

In February and August 2013, Amina Sboui-Tyler placed several photos of
herself topless on her Facebook page, in
protest at the poor record of
women’s rights in post-Arab Spring Tunisia, and also to inaugurate the
Tunisian
chapter of the controversial activist group, Femen. This photo
became a social media phenomenon that linked the
fate and views of women
living in the Middle East and North African region after the Arab uprising
with feminist
politics in Western Europe. This photo depicts Sboui-Tyler
reading the Qur’an and smoking a cigarette topless,
with the words in Arabic
across her chest: ‘My body belongs to me. It is the source of no-one else’s
honour’ (in
Greenhouse 2013). The image went viral as Sboui-Tyler was
arrested and imprisoned by authorities. Protests in
support of her actions
took off in Tunisia and abroad, led by Femen activists.
However, this naked protest in a web-immersed setting was not the first.
Two years earlier in Egypt, Aliaa
Elmahdy posed fully naked on her blog in
a photograph that she termed as ‘nude art’ (Elmahdy 2011; Franklin in
press). A different aesthetic but a similar motivation and effect, as both
women used this medium – nudity and
the Internet – to protest against the
poor progress in women’s rights under the Muslim Brotherhood’s tutelage in
both countries. As these images were picked up by leading bloggers and
media outlets such as The New
Yorker and Huffington Post, a backlash
against Femen’s provocative interventions on behalf of
Sboui-Tyler
sharpened debates about the Femen political agenda and, moreover, the
effectiveness of their use of
nakedness (or rather, going topless) as a form of
direct action. This debate about female nakedness in public,
from the UK
campaign against The Sun newspaper’s ‘Page 3 girls’ to Femen activists
posing
semi-naked outside the Vatican is one that still preoccupies feminists
in the West, as well as critics of both
these women’s actions and their links
to Femen from Muslim women around the world (Murphy 2012; Salem
2012, 2013;
Marayam 2013). For these critics, Femen’s appropriation of
Sboui-Tyler’s action meant that

nuance is lost, the actual material realities of Tunisian women are

ignored, and feminist activism that has
been taking place in Tunisia for
decades is erased. … Yet again, the lives of Muslim women are to be
judged by
European feminists, who yet again have decided that Islam –
and the veil – are key components of patriarchy.
Where do women who
disagree with this fit? Where is the space for a plurality of voices?
(Salem 2012)

The flipside to these debates about appropriate political uses, indeed degrees,
of public nakedness or states of
undress that leave the naked body exposed
in the region was a series of social media campaigns reasserting Muslim
women’s veil dressing as a point of principle and pride. This is where the
latest generation of web-based social media outlets make their entrance into
how these controversies
circulate around the world. A popular and important
medium during the Arab uprisings, Facebook also became a
platform for
these counter-protests to the Sboui-Tyler actions, particularly in response to
Femen’s ‘Topless
Jihad Day’ in April 2013.12
What about the women at the centre of this row? First, Elmahdy whose
response to the question about why she did
it is as follows:

[This] photo is an expression of my being and I see the human body as

the best artistic representation of that.
I took the photo myself using a
timer on my personal camera. The powerful colors black and red inspire
me.
(cited in Fahmy 2011)
Next, Sboui-Tyler, who continued to publish a series of increasingly
politicized photographs of herself topless –
after publicly distancing herself
from Femen – as the audience she was addressing took on a global
dimension.
Originally addressing conservative religious and political forces
at home, these later images also challenge
Western-based sympathizers
assuming to speak on her behalf (Ben Hamadi 2013; Huffington Post 2013).
One of
these later images is particularly striking in this regard: an
elaboration on themes broached by Neshat and
Maple, albeit in the
contemporary, social media-based idiom of the ‘selfie’. In a photo from her
Facebook page,
reproduced in the Maghreb edition of the Huffington Post
(Ben Hamadi 2013), Sboui-Tyler stands topless,
this time in profile lighting
a cigarette from a flaming Molotov cocktail. Across her bare torso in English
she
has written: ‘We don’t need your Dimocracy [sic]’ (see Beji 2013).
Guns, cigarettes and naked torsos are
traditionally a masculine trope across
cultural zones. Here, the way that these women deploy these tropes are all
the more subversive, in the context of more tightly controlled domains for
women’s attire and outward demeanour.
The Muslim versus Western feminist debates that ensued from these
actions conjure up the uneasy line of division
that commentators and
scholars like to draw between religious politics, personal conviction and
civil liberties,
where Western women’s liberation has gone hand-in-hand
with uncovering, rejecting items of clothing that confine
and constrict (see
Scott, in Nussbaum 2012: 136). These two women put their bodies on the
front line and online,
in a well-honoured tradition of women’s embodied
activism from the suffragette movement, anti-colonialist
mobilizations in the
Arab world (Yeğenoğlu, 1998; Ahmed 2011), to Femen itself. At all points
along the timelines
of what counts, on the one hand, as feminist political
tactics and, on the other, feminist standpoints on
fashion, we see these two
young women insisting on setting the terms for their own protest. The furore
around
Sboui-Tyler and Elmahdy’s actions, their supporters and detractors in
the West and the Muslim world, go to the
heart of vexed debates about
whose agency – and with that, which forms of political action – matters in a
world still premised on structural hierarchies of gendered
inequality:
 [The] underlying assumption … [that] female liberation can be directly
linked to what women wear … is not a new
idea, and in fact has formed
the basis of much of western feminism. … This type of logic
automatically leads to
the conclusion that in order to progress, women
who veil must unveil, and therefore ‘free’ themselves.
(Salem 2012; see also Yeğenoğlu 1998; see also Ahmed 2011: 8, 293)

By the same token, naked protests as the other extreme to women opting to
take up the veil or, as the case may
be, ‘de-hajibize’ (Ahmed 2011), point to
the complex ways in which women’s (un)dressed bodies, when enacted as
individual yet rendered as archetypical subjects, come to embody resistance
to the vested order, every day
(Appadurai 2012: 11–12).
Acts of (un)dressing in ways that evoke, indeed provoke, strong
responses from the guardians of virtue, political
mobilization or public order,
link the politics of veil-dressing practices, artistic interventions and naked
protests. This is because the depiction and physical presence of an
inappropriately clothed or unclothed body
makes explicit the intricate and
institutionalized labour and effort required for a society, as a whole and
within the home or community, to maintain its respective ‘regimes of power
organized on principles of visibility’
(Belasescu 2013: 280). In these four
scenarios, we see women engaging in a ‘morality of refusal’ (Appadurai
2012)
– if not by their own volition, then by force of circumstance within a
mediatized atmosphere of fear and
intolerance whipped up by political and
religious powerbrokers.

Bodies in world politics after 9/11

This chapter has explored four scenarios in which veil dressing and, by
association, Muslim women’s bodies have
become ‘involved in [the]
political field’ (Foucault, in Rabinow 1984: 173) of our times. Addressing
both dressed
and undressed bodies in the context of anti-immigrant and/or
anti-Muslim sentiments in the West, encapsulated by
veil-dressing
controversies, provides an opportunity to explore the material and symbolic
dimensions to how
designated bodies both ‘emit’ and ‘resist’ local and
global forces of order. In the case of the veil and acts of
(un)dressing in
public, we see the ways in which women’s bodies, clothed and unclothed,
‘signal resistance or
protest against the views of the majority … [by making]
visible a presence of a dissenting minority’ (Ahmed 2011:
210). In these
scenarios the presence of non-conforming bodies from strong female actors
‘invite the forces of
violence to declare and enact themselves and to manifest
themselves practically’ (Appadurai 2012: 10).
For scholars of world politics, these contortions in Anglo-Euro-American
public and political spaces about who
decides what women should or should
not wear, mean that several themes emerge
as challenges to conventional,
critical modes of enquiry into the religion–politics–society nexus of an
unevenly
and unjustly globalized world. First, the limits to analytical
frameworks that rely on one, if not two
dichotomies: that which is posited
between tradition and modernity/progress, and that between individual and
community/nation. This divide also permeates scholarly work on fashion:
one that stretches from the earliest –
mostly male – commentators on the
power and fascination that clothing trends exerted on, and through, the rise
of
industrialized and consumer societies in the nineteenth century (see for
example, Barthes 1983; Lehmann 2001;
Benjamin (2002: 19, 62–4, 79).13 It
also still tends to dictate the terms of feminist debate about women’s rights,
when these
struggles take place outside the purview and historical trajectory
of Anglo-Euro-American Second Wave feminism.
Postcolonial feminist
thought and women’s activism within faith communities push back against
this hegemonic
discourse in their own ways. However, it becomes even more
problematic to contest in the context of rising
religious intolerance around
the world (Nussbaum 2012), the politics of white ethnic nationalism in the
EU, and
the radicalization of young Muslims (mostly, but not exclusively,
male) under the aegis of a worldwide Islamic
revival, as a militarized
political force but also as a personal expression of piety (Ahmed 2011;
Moors and Tarlo
2013: 8–11).
In this context, Foucault’s way of thinking about the political implications
of how bodies move, and are moved in
time and space, provides the second
analytical-methodological anchor for the rest of this discussion: namely, his
insight into how bodies, well dressed or naked, are

also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an

immediate hold on it, mark it, torture it,
force it to carry out tasks, to
perform ceremonies, to emit signs. The political investment of the body
is
bound up [in] complex reciprocal social relations … the body
becomes a useful force only if it is both a
productive body and a
subjected body.
(Foucault, in Rabinow 1984: 173)

Theory and research in international relations have done a lot with the
political and economic permutations of
two of the three levels of analysis in
Belasescu’s aforementioned study of how ‘fashion informs modern
subjectivities’ (2013: 77), time and space. The third level, the body – that is,
how specifically situated,
living and breathing physical (corporeal) bodies
are subjected to, and in turn co-constitute these changes in
terms of
‘aesthetically organized time and spaces’ (2007: 77) – remains relatively
underresearched. As a
theoretical abstraction, the body does figure for those
scholars interested in exploring the geopolitical
implications of Foucault’s
critiques of liberal subjectivity, sexuality and modern statecraft’s techniques
of
surveillance and control. It also figures for Bourdieu’s theories of practice
and habitus, in light of the
twinned techno-economic and geopolitical
rearrangement of the world’s sociocultural spaces. How bodies move, act
and are responded to in physical, say empirical terms, remains
under-
elucidated, and variously dressed bodies even less so – this volume being the
exception that confirms the
rule. Any study of the geopolitics of fashion, and
anti-fashion, needs to take into account the movements of
dressed, and
undressed, bodies and the material cultures that they carry and convey –
because clothing ‘is
central in shaping body conduits that, in turn, form the
matrix of subjectivication’ (Belasescu 2013: 277).
That said, feminist scholars have taken the lead in bringing the body,
quite literally and theoretically, into
these debates. That is, construed as
‘performative’ bodies that live as, and respond to, gendered, racialized and
class-based expectations or affiliations (Shepherd 2014) that are no longer
confined to national borders, nor
indeed to physically proximate forms of
interaction now that web-based media and communications mediate what
people see, feel and do, but also how they do so (Franklin 2014). As Jindy
Pettman notes, ‘it should be possible
to write the body into a discipline that
tracks power relations and practices which impact so directly and often
so
devastatingly on actual bodies’ (cited in Shepherd 2014: 24). As Laura
Shepherd and others have argued across
the spectrum of gender-inflected
and feminist enquiries into world politics:

[If] this is the case … then it behoves us to delve deep into the meaning
of the body and explore the
implications of studying gender in a global
political context. … why and how gender matters, and interrogates
various conceptions of the body in global politics through the
discussion of some key gendered narratives of
international relations
(and international relations as an academic discipline).
(Shepherd 2014: 24–5)

However, what feminist scholars of world politics can offer is an awareness

of, and focus on, examples that
countermand

stories which fit comfortably within a Western neoliberal frame …

[and] Westernised senses of agency ‘in terms
of a subject’ and how this
‘accords with our ideas of personal responsibility’. This might give us
further
feminist pause for thought about how this feeds ongoing
justifications for interventions into the ‘Greater
Middle East’ region
(and elsewhere) all couched in the implicit superiority of Western
rationality and
individualism.
(Butler, in Zalewski 2014: 8)

When contesting national, local or global ‘regimes of power organized on

principles of visibility’ (Belasescu
2013: 280), the women above find
themselves inviting ‘the forces of violence to declare and enact themselves
and
to manifest themselves practically’ (Appadurai 2012: 10). These
regimes, and their modalities of violence, are
parental, parochial and
transnational. They are visceral and digitally exercised and enhanced,
emerging through
laws, surveillance mechanisms and public imaginaries
about the ‘forbidden’ and
the ‘unwelcome’ (un)veiled Other. Anti-veil
dressing laws and attitudes for that matter, can be seen in this
respect as
examples of what Bigo and Tsoukala call the ‘banopticon’. That is, a literal
and figurative

logic of exclusion resting upon the construction of profiles [and I would

add, bodies] that frame who is
‘abnormal’, and upon the imperative of
freedom transformed into a [criminalization14] of groups whose
behaviours are monitored
for their present and their future.
(Bigo and Tsoukala 2008: 2)

That said, addressing fashion and, more so, non-Western fashions, means
taking account of another fine line: on
the one hand, between an apologetics
of the global fashion industry and its skewed political economies of
production, seduction and desire; and on the other hand, critical explorations
of (un)dressed bodies as a prism
for the gender power struggles that
constitute global culture–society–politics nexus of the age.
However, there is a paradox in considering how (un)dressing in public
carries another sort of cultural and
political inflection, when placed or
enacted in Western as well as non-Western context: as political protests,
personal defiance or agitprop. For veiled-dressing cultures and Western
societies, nakedness transmits dissent:
protest in ways that cast light on how
veil dressing is perceived by its detractors and supporters. Disapproval
of a
most visceral, if not violent, form is expressed immediately by the forces of
order on the ground, and
relayed by commentators online and elsewhere.
These palpitations on the part of political leaderships, when not
owners of
private establishments, about what women should (or should not) wear in
public, or how women should (or
should not) comport themselves when
outside the home, is not restricted to the Muslim world, or non-Western
(read: ‘less developed’) societies. Recent media furores about public
breastfeeding in the UK are a case in
point. As for female celebrities, public
disapprobation about their looks or life-changes is just as sharp.15 Fashion,
then, is about
more than clothes designers, the latest catwalk shows or
magazine covers. It is also about moral conventions
around embodiment,
dressed and undressed subjects. Women’s bodies, and concomitant gendered
narratives, have been
the focus of the fashion industry and its affiliation with
high modernity from the outset.
Fashion, also understood here as an industry that capitalizes on personal
sartorial and sociocultural practices,
both engages and targets embodied
subjects across traditional and digitally mediated times and spaces. If no
‘clothes are outside of fashion’ (Wilson, cited in Moors and Tarlo 2013: 12),
and fashion is regarded as
‘indigenous’ to modernity (Lehmann, 2001;
Belasescu 2013: 25–6), then in the case of discourses that place veil
dressing
outside of both fashion and modernity, we see how lawmakers are now
agents in the demarcation
lines between acceptable and unacceptable
subjects. Anti-veil-dressing sentiments, political programmes and laws
are
redrawing the intimate relationship between subject and body at the point
that clothes touch, reveal or conceal the skin: to date, a relationship that has
been dominated by the fashion
industry and corollary image-making media.

Conclusion
In 2013, a video of the singer Lady Gaga performing a track called
‘Aura/Burqa’ in a pink, see-through
burqa, leaked online before the release
of her ArtPop album, came under intense scrutiny; if not
for the sexual
connotations of the lyrics, then for this latest example of Gaga’s penchant for
controversial,
‘burqa-like fashion statements’ (Safi 2013; see also Reich
2013). The social media furore around the words and
the video, which both
play on a long-standing orientalist trope, fusing the erotic with the exotic
(Yeğenoğlu
1998; Marayam 2013), put their finger on the sore point:

This kind of erotic portrayal of women wearing the burqa is part of

what makes Islamophobia a pressing, rampant
issue in the Western
world. … It’s images like this that strip Muslim women of any
individual identity and
reduce them into hypersexualized beings lacking
tangible, human qualities. … Muslim women are individuals. They
do
 not belong to a monolithic group. They do not all cover in the same
way. Many don’t even cover at all. They
have varying sexualities, and
opinions on modesty. The statement Lady Gaga is making here not only
shows her
ignorance of this fact, but also demonstrates the pressing
need for us to move on from such simplistic and
damaging views of
Muslim women.
(Elba 2013)

Some might say, ‘But it’s only Lady Gaga, only an act’ and consider the
controversy a storm in a teacup. However,
in the current hostile atmosphere
to all things visibly Muslim, and narratives of ‘Islamification’ by the tabloid
press and political demagogues lapped up by increasingly nervous publics in
the West, this video encapsulates the
double standards of anti-veil-dressing
regulations. Responses to it from Muslim women encapsulate the double
burden of those who are the object of such laws, and liberal squeamishness
about the threat that they pose to
democratic ideals of equality under the law.
Gendered, racialized and style-conscious narratives in the public
media and
halls of political power have coded the act of ‘getting dressed [as] an
everyday corporeal practice’
(Moors and Tarlo 2013: 7) for Muslim women
with global ‘War on Terror’ tropes of post-9/11 geopolitics. In so
doing,
these interlocutors have managed to (re)brand non-Western, Muslim covered
bodies as the fundamentalist
Other.
Here, I want to return to how veil dressing, and the rise of ‘Islamic
fashion’ as a transnational and
cosmopolitan phenomenon, call into relief the
way that individual and social bodies act as conduits for meaning,
action and
response, oppressive strategies and tactics of resistance. These underscore
how those with the upper
hand in the ‘power relations that have an
immediate hold on the body’
(Foucault, in Rabinow 1984: 173) rationalize
the measures that they take in the name of the public good: by
recourse to
religious precepts (as is the case in Iran), social cohesion or security
imperatives (in the EU). The
latter case, rationalizations for punitive, unjust
laws, have become a feature of Western governments, as they
deploy a range
of measures ostensibly to protect citizens from external terrorist threats, but
also increasingly
from ‘home-grown terrorists’. These modes of surveillance
and control operate ‘at a level that supersedes the
nation-state and forces
governments to strengthen their collaboration in more or less globalized
spaces, both
physical and virtual, sometimes global or Westernized, and still
more frequently Europeanized’ (Bigo 2008: 32).
This ‘network of
heterogeneous and transversal practices’ (2008: 32) has gendered and
racialized repercussions
for Muslim bodies living in those societies whose
leaderships are investing in this generalized ‘management of
unease’ (Bigo
and Tsoukala 2008: 2) about Islam in the heart of modern, nominally
Christian Europe.
The case of veil dressing as/and fashion begs the question of who is in
charge of the already troubled
(post)modernist narrative and its discontents
in the face of rising religious intolerance (Ahmed 2011; Nussbaum
2012).
So, to end this discussion with a provocation. In the opening statement to his
book on Tigersprung:
Fashion in Modernity, Ulrich Lehmann has this to
say:

[M]‌odernité not only defines the pictorial and verbal expressions that
have shaped the past 150 years;
more specifically it stands for the
stylistic qualities of what is modern. … Fashion is the supreme
expression
of that contemporary spirit. It changes constantly and
remains necessarily incomplete; it is transitory,
mobile, and
fragmentary. This quality ties it in with the pace and rhythm of modern
life.
(Lehmann 2001: 1)

If we take this line of thinking – one that is well established in the scholarly
canon – to its logical
conclusion in light of the full spectrum of veil-dressing
practices, we see that considering the veil as/and
fashion reveals a
thoroughly modern undertaking that is an engagement with this ‘pace and
rhythm’ of ‘this
contemporary spirit’ (Lehmann 2001: 1). In this sense, anti-
Muslim, anti-veil-dressing discourses and regulations
can be seen as the
echoes of the last vestiges of ethnocentric understandings of said modernité
that would
confine – and, I would argue – press into military service one
historical reading of what (not) to wear. Ongoing
debates about the political
economies of fashion as a global industry, and the concomitant socializing
forces
that arise from its everyday and strategic power to mediate ‘between
aesthetic concept and sartorial expression’
(Lehmann 2001: 2), can now
include those expressions that are not strictly modernist in the exclusively
Western
sense of the term. That is progress of another order, perhaps. As for
going naked in public, this is a debate
that will preoccupy women and men
for some time to come.

Notes
1 The term veil dressing
refers in part to forms of ‘modest dressing’ for religious observance in
Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The
colloquial and its perjorative, loaded term ‘burqa ban’ took
hold during the lead-up to the French and
Belgian laws forbidding wearing ‘the burqa in public
[because it] is not compatible with an open, liberal,
tolerant society’ (Bacquelaine, cited in
Franklin 2013: 394). These regulations target veil dressing in general
through headscarves (hijab),
face veils (niqab), and other forms of full-body covering such as
the chador, of which the burqa is
a regional variation.
2 This chapter draws on
Franklin (2013, in press).
3 The rest of this quote
attributed to Mark Twain is as follows: ‘Clothes make the man. Naked
people have little or no influence on
society.’ As the rest of this chapter aims to show, female
nakedness is still another matter altogether.
4 Femen, a feminist activist
group founded in the Ukraine and now based in Paris, France, organizes
direct protest action: for example,
against human trafficking or sexist advertising at major sporting
events such as the football World Cup or the
Olympic Games. Its modus operandi is nudity or,
rather, toplessness. Its use of nudity and high media profile
are controversial for both Western and
non-Western feminists, as is its source of funding and targeting of
religious institutions, including
the Catholic Church. See http://femen.org/.
5 On this point, see the wide
range of conversations from different women and their daily dressing
practices, likes and concerns, collected
in Juvavits et al. (2014). See also Biggs (2014) for another
woman’s reaction to these testimonies.
6 See the contributors to Tarlo
and Moors (2013) for more examples of young European Muslim
women who are part of an emerging Islamic fashion
scene. In the USA, catering for African
American Muslim fashionistas in particular, publications such as
Azizah magazine set the tone.
7 Schumann (2014) has an
interesting series of photographs of fully veiled women in Varanasi,
India, on bikes. Henotes that the photos
were taken from a higher position as he was sitting in a
rickshaw going the other way. He loves the ‘speed,
strength, and [vitality] you see in these young,
mobile wom[e]‌n’. This series generated more than 100
comments, varying from admiring to those
finding these cycling covered women ‘creepy’. Others find the variety
of colours, footwear and
white gloves quite normal: ‘Very usual among eastern women … tan skin is not their
pattern of
beauty’.
8 See all the comments at:
www.thesartorialist.com/photos/on-the-street-corso-venezia-milan-6/.
9 Leaving aside for the moment
ongoing debates among feminist scholars and activists about
whether the veil is, or is not, the sine qua
non of religious fundamentalism and patriarchy no
matter the setting.
10 These two sections draw on
Franklin (in press).
11 For some of the nuances to
how women in Iran, and young people, live within these strict codes
for dress and behavious in Iran, see
Sreberny and Khiabany (2010).
12 Two examples are the
‘Muslimah Pride’ and ‘Muslim Women Against Femen’ social media
campaigns replete with Twitter accounts,
hashtags and articulate bloggers (Marayam 2013; Sofia
Ahmed 2013).
13 The references to fashion in
Walter Benjamin’s work have generated a literature of their own.
14 In the original the term is
‘normalization’.
15 Keira Knightley, British
actor, is another case. She generated a brief global online media moment
by publishing photos of herself
topless, her breasts not retouched by editorial intervention to
enhance their size or shape (Reynolds 2014).

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3 Orientalism refashioned
‘Eastern moon’ in ‘Western waters’ reflecting
back on the East China Sea
L.H.M. Ling

Introduction
Conventional international relations self-contradicts.1 As a system, it
promotes, not prevents, conflict precisely due to supposed
safeguards such
as sovereignty, balance of power and international community. The current
crisis between China
and Japan in the East China Sea exemplifies the case.
Both states battle for sovereignty over eight uninhabited
and barren islets,
named Diaoyutai in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese, to maintain what each
views as its right
to balance of power, so as to live justly in an international
community. Yet each goal, if achieved, destabilizes
if not disrupts the others.
We need to reconceive world politics if we want another kind of world and
its
politics.
The aesthetic turn in international relations can help (Bleiker 2009). Art
and aesthetics give pause to the usual
and the mundane; they prompt
reflection which, in turn, invites new ways of thinking and doing, being and
relating. For this reason I turn to fashion as an epistemological intervention:
it offers a means of reconceiving
the world by feeling it. As demonstration, I
refer to the Spring 2015 exhibit, ‘China: Through the Looking
Glass’, at
New York’s Metropolitan Museum (the Met).2 It demonstrates a kind of
epistemic creativity that can only come from
encounters between the Self
and Other worlds. I call it ‘positive orientalism’: it crosses boundaries with
imagination, playfulness and poetry. In the China exhibit, ‘the bright moon
of the East’ finds its reflection on
‘Western waters’ (Wong 2015: 10),
producing sheer magic through fabrics, colours, designs and sensibilities.
The
Met’s record crowds affirm such enchantment: one cannot look away.3
Sovereign relations in world politics, this chapter will argue, can
draw on
this same deep, aesthetic well to transform our current Westphalian fix.4 This
chapter will explore the implications of
positive orientalism with Sino–
Japanese relations. It asks: what can the ‘Eastern moon’ in ‘Western waters’
reflect back for the East China Sea?
Before proceeding, we need to flush out the negative orientalism within
positive orientalism. The Met’s
‘Western waters’, for example, still tend to
hyperfeminize and hypersexualize the ‘Chinese moon’, especially
under a
cloud of drug-induced decadence. These recall Edward Said’s (1979)
original formulation of orientalism, and it bears severe, real-world
consequences. Two recent examples come
from political adverts aired during
the 2010 and 2012 elections in the USA. These unabashedly demonize the
Chinese state, culture and people. I characterize this binary as ‘grey flannel’
America versus ‘Mao suit’ China.
Here, Buddhist kōans come into play. Usually conveyed through a non
sequitur or nonsensical story, a
kōan seeks to loosen ways of thinking and
behaving that shackle us to established icons, rituals, thoughts
or traditions –
even reason itself – so a fresh outlook can spring from, as well as assist in,
spiritual
enlightenment. That is, we begin to see how a ‘thousand arms and
eyes’ – a Buddhist metaphor for compassion – can
harmonize within one,
global interbeing (Thich Nhat 1998).5 Of particular relevance here is Karl
Lagerfeld’s self-satirizing,
nonsensical short film Paris–Shanghai: A
Fantasy (2010).
All this may be well and good, a critical reader might interject, but what
has it to do with international
relations and world politics? For too long, I
submit, the world has borne the crushing weight of negative
orientalism. It
constricts by half the inspiring, exciting possibilities of cross-border
discovery and learning.
Recognizing these dynamics helps to shift our
understanding of power from coercion to creativity. From this
basis, we can
head towards a more balanced, equitable and sustainable world politics. We
need to assess where we
are, after all, before knowing which way to go, how
and why.
 The Orient especially is facing a crossroads. Under Western colonialism
and imperialism, the subjects of
orientalism themselves have orientalized
Others, both internal and external, thereby entrenching their own
orientalization – and reaping its conflictual consequences.6 China and Japan
are no exceptions. Each has orientalized the other since
the onset of
Westphalia in Asia in the nineteenth century, despite a long and interwoven
history of exchange.
Buddhism was one such cultural pivot. For this reason,
I conduct a thought experiment: I draw on this
pre-Westphalian resource,
common to both China and Japan, to reframe their relations for post-
Westphalian times.
My purpose is transformation, not just resolution. I begin
with Said’s Orientalism.

Said’s Orientalism
When I first discovered Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), I drank in the
book in a gulp. Finally, someone
had articulated what it means to be
orientalized – and it was not just a condition found in the West about
the
East. Orientalism pervaded everywhere.
One example comes early in my education. I was in the sixth grade at an
international school in Tokyo. Although a
Catholic girls’ school, it was a
truly international learning environment. Both the student body and faculty
came
from all corners of the globe. My history teacher happened to be a
white American woman whose husband worked for
the US military
stationed nearby. One day, when discussing US history, she
mentioned that
Chinese people have a geographical affinity for laundry: that is why there
are so many Chinese
laundries in America. Piqued, I raised my hand:
‘What’s geography got to do with it?’ ‘Silk’, she explained
patiently, ‘comes
from the silkworm which eats the leaves of the mulberry tree, which grows
in China – that’s the
connection.’ End of discussion. Yet this incident
remains fresh in my mind even after almost half a century.
Said’s Orientalism watered my soul. It gave me an accounting of why this
white woman would destine
me for the laundry business. Orientalism also
revealed myself to me: why this memory sticks like a bad allergy.
Nonetheless, I must now admit, Said’s understanding of orientalism is partial
at best: not only does it collude
with global and local patriarchies,
particularly in his construction of home as an idyllic haven in contrast to
the
seemingly undetermined condition of exile (Ling 2007); but his version of
orientalism also overlooks the
positive legacies that it has produced.
‘Reactionary hogwash!’ I can hear the critics charge. Indeed, I might
have responded similarly a few years ago,
but I hope the reader will bear
with me. I do not deny orientalism’s negative consequences – as this chapter
will
show – but we also need to consider the creative, positive possibilities,
otherwise we rob ourselves of an
effective means of countering and, more
importantly dissolving, negative orientalism.

Negative Orientalism
Orientalism, according to Said, reflects the cultural face of imperialism.7 It
involves a variety of domains: – for
example, literature, education, politics,
economics – and means – for example, speeches, travelogues, scientific
tracts – as found in the three empires that Said studied: British, French and
American. Said wrote that
Orientalism enables these imperial centres of the
West (‘the Occident’) to structure a relationship of power and
domination
with the East (‘the Orient’) because ‘it could be – that is, submitted to being
– made
Oriental’ (Said 1979: 6; emphasis in original). However, given its
fantastical nature, orientalism reveals more
about the West than any actual
understanding of the East – and this fantasy concocts the West as not only
all-powerful and all-knowing, but also all-desiring. In particular, orientalism
casts the West as an entitled,
virile lover who sows seeds of little Wests in
the cultural-historical womb of the Orient:

Colonization is the expansive force of a people; it is its power of

reproduction; it is its enlargement and
its multiplication through space;
it is the subjection of the universe or a vast part of it to that
people’s
language, customs, ideas, and laws.
(an Orientalist writing in the 1870s, quoted in Said 1979: 219; emphasis added)

Orientalizing the Other, according to orientalism, traces linearly from

ancient
to modern times:
 The Greeks and the Romans showed us [the West] how to deal with the
monsters of Asia, how to treat them by
analysis, how to extract from
them their quintessence.
(another Orientalist writing in the 1920s, quoted in Said 1979: 251)

Here, a normative hierarchy arises. The West and the Orient find themselves
in an immutable binary where, in the
words of a popular poem, ‘East is East
and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’ (Kipling 1899). More
than
simply dividing the two, the binary’s first term always supersedes its second.
Power, rationality, progress
and, of course, civilization define the West;
whereas just the opposite afflicts the Orient (Said 1979).
Designations of
‘race’, gender and sexuality also accompany this binary, given orientalism’s
application to the
non-white Other.
Samuel P. Huntington (1996) updated orientalism for contemporary
times. Instead of ideology or religion, he
pronounced, a ‘clash of
civilizations’ will bedevil the post-Cold War world. He identified eight
major
civilizations of which two – the Islamic and the Confucian – would
prove ‘unassimilable’ for the West. Watch out
for these two, Huntington
warned (apparently, his West has no Islamic or Confucian members).
A generation of scholars has critiqued Huntington’s clash thesis. Its
history and method, let alone definition of
civilization, falters in so many
ways that the concept cannot stand. One especially trenchant critique comes
from
within the West itself. Huntington’s clash of civilizations, Hayward R.
Alker (1995) pointed out, undermines the
West’s own multivalent,
multicultural history, rendering it flat, monolithic and singular – thereby
depriving it
of any richness or complexity that would qualify the West as a
‘great civilization’. However, the clash thesis
sticks in the popular
imagination due to at least three centuries of ‘negative orientalism’, as I now
label
Said’s formulation.
Indeed, anti-Islamic attitudes in the West have escalated in recent
decades. Al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and
Washington, DC on 11
September 2001 provoked an immediate retaliation of wars and invasions,
occupations and
sieges by the West and its allies. In response, organizations
such as Isis, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and the Taliban
further stoke anti-
Western, anti-Christian hostility. Both sides pit Muslims against Christians,
the Orient
against the West. Note French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy’s
self-congratulatory crowing during the memorial
march in Paris for those
killed at Charlie Hebdo in January 2015: ‘France is back, the West is back,
democracy is back!’ (CNN, 2015)8 Referring to ISIS and al Qaeda, US
Senator Tom Cotton states: ‘[W]‌e kill them there before
they kill us here,
very simple’ (Stallworth 2015). Lévy and Cotton eerily echo Osama bin
Ladin shortly after the
9/11 attacks: ‘What the United States tastes today is a
very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens
of years’ (BBC
News, 2001).
Negative orientalism targets Confucian civilization equally, but for
different
reasons. China, as the designated centre of Confucian civilization,
has integrated too much into the
Western-led international order. A China
threat thesis now dominates both academic and media discourses (Ling
2013), emphasizing how China jeopardizes the rest of the world
environmentally (pollution, industrial disasters),
economically (financial
manipulation, resource exploitation), politically (corruption, military
ambition), and
morally (human rights violations).
The China threat thesis and its negative orientalism not only preoccupy
the West as rhetoric, but also bear
significant policy implications. Note, for
example, two political adverts aired during the 2010 and 2012
elections in
the USA (Weinger 2012).9 These demonize China outright in all the
orientalist ways that Said identified: indulgent in
fantastical ambition, full of
unbridled emotions and manipulation and deviant in all ways.10 It is Grey
Flannel America versus Mao
Jacket China.

Grey flannel America versus Mao jacket China

One advert stands out from the rest. Titled ‘Chinese Professor’, it opens with
a man in a Mao suit entering a
giant, futuristic hall filled with students.11 A
label appears on screen: ‘Beijing, China 2030.’ The professor stands
next to
a giant poster of Mao along with two other images from the Cultural
Revolution. The students attending
the lecture look ethnically Chinese or
Asian (except one who seems Arab, African or South Asian). They look like
any students in the USA today, dressed in T-shirts and jeans. The professor
begins in Shanghai-accented Mandarin
by stating that the United States of
America, like all ‘great powers’ of the past (the ancient Greeks, the Roman
and British empires – he fails to mention the Middle Kingdom), fell by
committing ‘the same mistakes’: that is,
‘turning back on the principles that
made them great’. He elaborates: ‘America tried to spend and tax itself out
of a great recession. Enormous so-called stimulus spending, massive
changes to health care, government takeovers
of private industries and
crushing debt.’ He looks directly at the camera and, by extension, the viewer.
‘Of
course, we owned most of their debt [dramatic pause] so now they work
for us!’ Maniacal laughter erupts,
resounding throughout the hall.
Another advert comes from the Los Angeles County Democratic Party. It
focuses on an equally sore subject for
American voters: outsourcing. The
advert skewers Carly Fiorina, a candidate for the US Senate seat from
California in 2010, for outsourcing jobs to China when she was head of
Hewlett-Packard. It announces: “Happy
Labor Day – if you live in China!”
Fiorina did not win in 2010, but she learned fast for 2015. Running for
president, she has depicted China as a
bastion of thieves. In an interview
with Time magazine, she stated:

I have been doing business in China for decades, and I will tell you that
yeah, the Chinese can take a test,
but what they can’t do is innovate …
They are not terribly imaginative.
They’re not entrepreneurial, they
don’t innovate, that is why they are stealing our intellectual property.
(Fiorina, quoted in Huddleston 2015)

By implication, these adverts portray the West as reasonable and normal,

epitomizing an iconic image: the man in
the grey flannel suit. A 1955 novel
of the same title by Sloan Wilson, later turned into a popular Hollywood film
(dir. Nunnally Johnson, 1956), the man in the grey flannel suit conveys post-
war America’s ideal man and
masculinity: white, heterosexual, professional
and leading the American/Western way of life with wife and
children in the
suburbs. The grey flannel suit symbolizes this social order as the norm, the
standard, the
routine. Any racial slur hurled at China by the man in the grey
flannel suit, then, would seem reasonable and
normal. ‘It’s all about China’,
an expert commented on the PBS Newshour in November 2010 (Suarez
2010). He
was discussing the season’s most prominent campaign adverts,
and focused immediately on China. All of them, he
concluded, proclaim the
same message: ‘We’ (Americans) should fear ‘them’ (Chinese).
Geography, culture, ‘race’ and ideology sum up China and Chinese for
mainstream America. The Chinese professor’s
Mao suit essentializes his
irreconcilable difference from grey flannel America. The adverts completely
ignore the
fact that no one in China today wears a Mao suit (except by
leaders on major state occasions, as noted later in
this chapter): it
disappeared in 1976 with the fall of the Gang of Four and the rise of Dengist
capitalism.
Indeed, images of Mao in China today surface only as curios for
tourists, not ideological icons. Even the Chinese
Communist Party has
repudiated the later Mao for his excesses in the Great Leap Forward and the
Cultural
Revolution. Moreover, the unions’ understandable concern with
jobs going overseas neglects to consider that
all workers, no matter where
they live, face similar conditions of exploitation and abuse under global
corporate capital.
We have seen such orientalist propaganda before – in Asia by Asians
against other Asians.12 The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,
Japan’s
imperialist doctrine of the 1930s and 1940s, justified Japanese military
aggression against China and
elsewhere in the region on the assumption of
hypermasculine, patriarchal entitlement as reflected in dominant
international (Western) discourse at the time (Mikanagi 2011). In this case,
the doctrine spouted, it is ‘Asia
for Asians’, but with Japan in the grey
flannel role.13 The Chinese government continues to orientalize Japan as
rapists,
murderers and general villains through TV dramas and film. One
long-running Chinese TV drama, aired in the early
2000s, centres on a
rivalry between two gang bosses in Shanghai’s underworld in the 1930s –
until the last scene
when they join forces to fight the Japanese.14
We are by now all-too familiar with these features and outcomes of
negative orientalism. Less appreciated is its
opposite: positive Orientalism.
This is where art and aesthetics have much to teach politics and social
science
(Sylvester 2001).

Positive Orientalism
The Met’s Spring 2015 exhibit, ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’,
exemplifies positive orientalism. The exhibit
explicitly acknowledges an
inability – indeed, a lack of desire – to convey China accurately, concretely
and
seriously; instead, it invokes Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. It
fittingly captures the flights of
fancy that China gifts to the West. Like
Alice’s looking glass, the exhibit suggests, China allows the West to
engage
in ‘fictional, fabulous invention[s]‌, offering an alternate reality with a
dream-like illogic’ (Bolton
2015: 16). Contrary to the snob’s dismissal of
chinoiserie as fake or mimicked, it provides instead an ‘aesthetic
opportunity
to play’ (Geczy 2015: 25).

[A]‌ literal copy was never the objective, and labeling something as a
‘misunderstanding’ misses the point.
Rather, the Chinese originals [in
the exhibit] are points of departure for excitingly creative
reinterpretations, demonstrating how easily art crosses boundaries of
time, space, and cultural language to
serve its own purposes.
(Hearn 2015: 15)

The Hong Kong film director, Wong Kar-Wai, consulted for the exhibit. In a
note to the exhibit’s extensive
catalogue, he writes:

‘Mirror Flower Water Moon’, the Chinese title of the exhibition,

includes recurring symbols in Chinese art and
literature and represents
projection, reflection, and fascination. As the Tang dynasty poet Pei
Xiu wrote in
the ninth century: ‘Like moon in the water, image on a
mirror / It comes and goes, with no inherent reality’.
The couplet
suggests the subtle nuances that separate cultures – as when the bright
moon of the East finds its
reflection on Western waters. What appears
does not correlate with reality. The aesthetic experience might also
be at
 variance … When we look into a mirror, we only see ourselves, but
when this mirror turns into a window,
we see the world around us.
(Wong 2015: 10)

Indeed, a dazzling array of beauty, charm, fantasy and creativity greet the
visitor on entering the exhibit.
Under moody lighting and surrounded by
mirrors, one gallery juxtaposes Chinese originals (Qing imperial robes) in
the back with related reinterpretations by Western designers (John Galliano,
Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent
and Valentino, to name but a few) in
front. They graft ideas from China’s ancien monde onto current
forms
through colour, fabric and design. Sometimes Western designers draw on
Chinese artefacts such as vases,
plates, jewellery or calligraphy to
reconceive a gown or jacket or dress using similar colours, patterns and
shapes. Other times, they simply absorb an aura or sense of allure, like Ralph
Lauren’s Autumn/Winter 2011/12
evening dress: a form-fitting, ‘black
synthetic double georgette’ revealing a
sheer, low scoop in the back that is
‘net embroidered with black silk and beads’ (Bolton et al. 2015: 147, 242).
Jean-Paul Gaultier conjures a similar vision in an Autumn/Winter 2001/02
‘black lacquered silk satin’
qipao (Figure 3.1).15 Its high Mandarin collar
buttons up demurely
in front, but a ‘nude silk tulle’ dips daringly, invitingly,
to the torso on the back. Despite its tantalizing
sensuality, the tulle depicts a
pastoral scene: a lone figure in conical hat carries a hoe over one shoulder
while crossing a tree-like bridge, surrounded by appliqués of black
butterflies in mid-flight among reedy flowers
(Bolton et al. 2015: 116, 240).
A fifth-century bronze bell inspires a 2013 Valentino dress. Looking almost
militaristic, the tunic consists of: ‘Red-purple silk satin and synthetic net
embroidered with red-purple beads’
(Bolton et al. 2015: 199, 245).
Figure 3.1 Jean-Paul Gaultier haute couture evening dress, Autumn/Winter
2001/02.
Source: Platon/Trunk Archive.
 The exhibit also displays Chinese appropriations of these Western
reinterpretations. Contemporary Chinese
designers in the West (Anna Sui,
Vivienne Tam, Jason Wu) as well as those in China (Guo Pei, Li Xiaofeng)
add
another layer of contemporaneity to these modern forms. For example,
Li Xiaofeng applies shards of the famous
white-and-blue Ming ceramic as
folds in a dress (entitled ‘The Weight of the Millennium’). Jason Wu
fashions a
jaunty cap of ‘black silk velvet with fringe of red silk and finial of
gold metal and synthetic pearl bead’
(Bolton et al. 2015: 97, 239). It refracts
a Manchurian ‘summer court hat [with] red basketry; pink and green
glass;
[and] peacock feather’ (Bolton et al. 2015: 96, 239). Guo Pei’s sweeping,
gold-lamé evening gown (2007)
lobes bodice and hem to resemble the lotus
blossoms of Buddhist art (Figure 3.2).
Figure 3.2 Guo Pei, haute couture gold lamé gown, 2007.
Source: Photograph by Andreas Behnke, 2007, with permission from Guo Pei’s Rose Studio.
 Films comprise the third element in the exhibit.16 Clips from Bertolucci’s
The Last Emperor (1987), Wong Kar-Wai’s
In the Mood for Love (2000),
and Ang Lee’s Lust/Caution (2007) among others play simultaneously on
side screens. Evocative images and haunting soundtracks fill the galleries
with an otherworldly yet highly
glamorous sophistication. The exhibit also
gives pride of place to the Chinese-American actress, Anna May Wong
(1905–1961). An international fashion icon, she exemplifies the ‘Eastern
moon’ shining brightly on ‘Western
waters’.
These beautiful, beguiling rewards of positive orientalism would seem to
counter, if not neutralize, the
demonizing effects of negative orientalism.
Without the muse of China, designers in the West would not have
soared to
such creative heights with the unusual, exotic, hybrid and the illogical in the
way that they have.
Through art and aesthetics, the Met’s catalogue notes,
we may ‘reflect on our common heritage and envision new
creative
possibilities’ (Hearn 2015: 15).

Negative/positive entwinements
Yet a discerning mind cannot overlook elements of negative orientalism
within positive orientalism. (Of
course, positive orientalism also infiltrates
negative orientalism, but that is a discussion for another
time.17) One source
of
negative entwinement within the positive is the West’s continued
feminization
and sexualization of China. This cultural redux – what an
orientalist in the 1920s called the Other’s
quintessence – ressurects those
stereotypes propagated by the political adverts mentioned above, and noted
by
Said: that is, the West represents reason and normality, despite its ‘rapist’
mentality towards the Other,
because the East cannot help but rile with
fantastical ambitions, unbridled emotion and manipulation and
deviance in
all ways.
One example suffices. In the juxtaposition of Qing imperial robes with
Western reinterpretations, an immediate
contrast strikes the eye: the imperial
robes are all gender-neutral, while the Western reinterpretations
hypersexualize the female body. The imperial robes retain the same, simple
design for both emperors and
empresses, lords and ladies: long, straight
sleeves, with a side panel to the right for buttons, stretching from
a large,
triangular shape with the base ending, clearly yet gracefully, just above the
ankles. The individual body does not appear. Neither in fabric nor design,
nor colours nor
motifs, do the robes distinguish one sex from another. A robe
for the Emperor Daoguang (1821–1850), for example,
glistens quietly. The
display tag describes it as ‘gold-wrapped metallic-thread embroidery on red
silk patterned
gauze’. Any woman today or then would (and could) have
happily worn it. Other robes for emperors fold into a
skirt from the waist
down, reaching mid-calf. Indeed, the robes fascinate precisely for their
muted, transgender
elegance, given who wore them and why.
In contrast, the Western reinterpretations adorn women. (Two small
galleries show unisex outfits from the
Cultural Revolution and martial arts
films, but these are dwarfed by the sheer size and variety of women’s
couture in the rest of the exhibit.) The female body undulates voluptuously
through form-fitting gowns, like
those mentioned above by Valentino and
Gaultier, or bare shoulders, backs, cleavage and/or legs through strategic
cuts of fabric. These Western reinterpretations build on prior Chinese
adaptations since the 1920s. To fit modern times, Chinese tailors redesigned
the upper-class Chinese woman’s
dress into what we know today as the
qipao (Ling 1999). It becomes a sexy national dress popularized by
political
luminaries such as Madame Chiang Kai-shek and early film stars such as
Butterfly Wu. These dresses now
live in perpetuity in films such as
Lust/Caution (Shanghai in the 1940s)18 and In the Mood for Love (Hong
Kong in
the 1960s).
For this reason, too, the Western imaginary equates the body-hugging,
slit-baring qipao with Asian women
as prostitutes, also immortalized in
films such as The World of Suzy Wong (dir. Richard Quine, 1960). The
Madame Butterfly syndrome continues to entrance: an oriental woman
always falls tragically and uncontrollably for
a white man, who spurns her
for his white world.19 Even the paean to Anna May Wong notes how
Hollywood found her too racy
(pun intended) for lead roles in A-list films
with A-list co-stars. Rumours of a lesbian relationship with
Marlene Dietrich
hounded Wong, given what censors considered to be overly suggestive
scenes in Shanghai
Express (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1932), even though
both were portraying ‘ladies of the night’. (Dietrich
faced no such
prohibitions.)
Of special affront in the exhibit are the two rooms dedicated to Yves Saint
Laurent’s perfume, Opium. One wall
shows silent film clips of Chinese men
and women, followed by scenes with a major film star, such as Robert De
Niro in Once Upon a Time in America (dir. Sergio Leone, 1984). All lie
prone in a crowded, degenerate
opium den, pulling on pipes and dreaming
their lives away. Mournful, poignant music (‘Deborah’s Theme’, composed
by Ennio Morricone for the film Once Upon a Time in America)
romanticizes the swirling smoke of opium,
evoking memories of an eternal
regret. Perhaps a love, once treasured, is now forever lost.
Nowhere in this ‘fictional, fabulous … alternate reality’ with its ‘dream-
like illogic’ do we hear the screams of
an addicted, ruined nation. The
British East India Company, with the full sanction of London’s parliament,
deliberately and maliciously manufactured opium in Calcutta to sell in
Canton. Their objective: to reverse a
century-long trade deficit. With opium,
the British knew, the ledger would soon turn in their favour – and it
did. In
one decade, the drug slashed China into a shadow of its millennial self. No
prince or lord, not to
mention soldier or farmer, even mother and daughter,
was beyond the reach of this instant addiction. (Opium
affected the next
generation as well. It was well-known that babies born to fathers who were
or had been opium
addicts would suffer a premature birth, and often death.
One can only imagine what happened to babies born to
mothers who were,
or had been, opium addicts.) Empowered by Emperor Daoguang to stop the
trafficking,
Commissioner Lin (1785–1850) wrote to Queen Victoria and
beseeched the foreign sovereign to rein in her
profiteers: ‘What has become
of that conscience which heaven has implanted in the breasts of all men
[shiwen
tianliang he zai]?’ (Lin, quoted in Liu 2004: 233). The letter never
reached Victoria, despite six copies
sent by six different routes.
Recognition of these negatives within positive orientalism aims not to
dismiss
the latter. Beauty, charm, fantasy and creativity appeal wherever
they emerge. More profoundly, they convey a
kind of visionary, cultural
power that cannot be denied: it deserves not just acknowledgment, but also
enhancement. Towards this end, I turn to Buddhist kōans.

Buddhist kōans
Buddhist kōans started in Tang China. A public record (gong an) sought to
make an argument through
speech, reasoning and judgement. Later,
Buddhist monasteries absorbed this practice. In Japan, it became known as
a
kōan and entered the West under this term. Given its origins in Taoist and
Hindu dialectics, a
kōan highlights the dialectical contradictions between,
and complicities within, opposites (Brincat and
Ling 2014). A non sequitur,
puzzle or funny or nonsensical story, accordingly, can help to open cognitive
and
spiritual space by startling complacency from thought or worship. The
novice begins to see what was previously
obscure, and puts into perspective
what had previously obsessed. Through this process of self-discovery,
enlightenment becomes possible: ‘Kōans exhaust the logical activity of the
mind so that the mind will
break out of its conventional view of the nature of
reality’ (Grenard 2008: 153).
Here is an illustration of a kōan from the Japanese zen master, Dōgen
(1200–1253). He often rewrote
original kōans with commentaries to reverse
conventional understandings, so as ‘to support several
different didactic and
metaphysical positions concerning the doctrines, rituals, and practices of Zen
monastic
life’ (Heine 2004: 5).
One story tells of an old woman who wants to donate her estate to a local
monastery. In exchange, she requests
its abbot to recite the entire collection
of Buddhist sutras, and sends her servant to convey the message.
On hearing
it, the abbot rises from his chair, walks around it once, and declares that he
has recited all the
sutras. The servant returns with the news. The old woman
reacts: ‘Why did he recite only half the
sutras?’ (Heine 2004: 17).
In his commentary, Dōgen criticizes the old woman for being fixated on
the number of sutras recited,
rather than the act itself – critiquing his own
critique. ‘At the same time Dōgen suggests that perhaps the old
woman
really wanted to see [the Abbot] walk around the chair backwards, or in the
opposite direction, to expose
his appreciation of absurdity’, thereby
expressing the enlightenment of detachment (Heine 2004: 17). Still, Dōgen
exhorts his readers to think more deeply. What does it matter, Dōgen asks,
how many sutras the abbot
recited, so long it was done with sincerity? At
the same time, Dōgen reflects on his own critique to speculate
that
something else might have disturbed the old woman. Given Buddhism’s
embeddedness in Taoist dialectics, with
its yin/yang philosophy of contesting
yet complementary polarities, how could the abbot – who
claims to be a
master – not recognize that his walk around the chair requires a backwards
turn? That is,
he performed the yang without the yin. Dōgen implies, then,
that
the old woman was more Buddhist than the abbot. With this reflection,
Dōgen restores the balance between
yin and yang, the old woman and the
abbot, the recitation and the performance, religious knowledge
and personal
insight. Such is the gateway to enlightenment.
By its very nature, a kōan need not be Buddhist, or even come from Asia.
(To think so would repudiate the
ethos of a kōan.) After all, similar kinds of
subversive play also enjoy a long-standing tradition in the
West.20 Any
method that
shakes us from standard thinking, stimulates creative self-
reflection and urges detachment from icons, bears
kōanic properties – and no
one practises detachment from icons with greater élan than that zen-like
master of haute couture, Karl Lagerfeld.

Lagerfeld in China
Lagerfeld has staged two fashion shows in China. One was on the Great
Wall for Fendi’s Spring 2008 collection,
and the other, in Shanghai for
Chanel’s pre-Autumn/Winter 2010 show. For both, Lagerfeld displayed the
usual
array of dresses, gowns, suits and coordinates in fabrics ranging from
silks, velvets and feathers to beads. What
distinguished these shows were the
explicit references to Chinese motifs in his outfits – e.g. Mandarin collar,
conical hat, side panelling, crocheted buttons, three-quarter sleeves, hanging
tassels, fur collars and sleeves,
floating chiffon. These mixed elegantly with
Fendi’s renowned, ladylike look and Chanel’s distinctive
jacket-and-skirt
suit, two-tone shoes, classic quilted bag and so on. The Fendi show ended
with a jazzy tribute
to the qipao, à là Lagerfeld. Long, slinky and black, the
dress featured a high Mandarin collar,
tight sleeves that billowed, bell-like,
towards the wrists, and a flirtatious hem that flipped
hither-and-thither,
revealing slender, bare legs as the model sauntered down the steps of the
Great Wall.
Lagerfeld also made a 22-minute film titled Paris–Shanghai: A Fantasy.
An ‘accessory’ to the 2010 show,
the film opens with the designer Coco
Chanel, thin and worldweary in her mature years, taking a nap in her
private
quarters at her studio in Paris. She dreams she has landed in China. The film
shows her in China in four
time-travelling sequences: 1960s, 1940s, 1920s
and the Qing Court.
Some charge that Lagerfeld’s film reproduces all the tired clichés of
negative orientalism (see for example,
Minh-ha, 2009). Indeed, they are all
there: white actors made up in yellow faces (heavy eyeliner drawn to a
slant); whiffs of Asiatic decadence and violence; China’s empress and
emperor sitting grandly yet emptily on
their thrones, doll-like figures in
outlandish costumes (Figure
3.3).
Figure 3.3 Paris-Shanghai: A Fantasy (video still), 2009.
Source: Karl Lagerfeld/Chanel.

But the film is so campy, so outrageously fanciful that one cannot take it
seriously. Lagerfeld himself admits as
much. ‘[The film] is an homage to
Europeans trying to look Chinese’, he told the press. Forecasting the Met
exhibit six years before its time, Lagerfeld adds: ‘It is about the idea of
China, not the reality.’ In another interview, he reiterates the point: ‘I love
eighteenth-century French
chinoiseries because it’s an idea of China painted
by people who never saw China – and that’s amusing because
there’s real
imagination’.21 When the interviewer mentions that Coco Chanel had never
been to China yet was ‘steeped in a
love of China’, Lagerfeld responds:
‘Sometimes the idea of things is more creative than the reality.’
I neither excuse nor commend Lagerfeld’s film. Even for 22 minutes, it
drags on dully. What I take from the film,
instead, is its amusing
ridiculousness. In it, Lagerfeld seems to parody the European Self’s
stereotyping of the
Chinese Other. Looking at how Europeans ‘tr[y]‌ to look
Chinese’, he subjects the European gaze to a European
gaze, winking: I
know exactly how you think about China and the Chinese because I’ve
thought the same myself,
and, by the way, aren’t we ridiculous? Coco Chanel
fronts the charade, but Lagerfeld is really representing
himself. As a world-
class expert at illusion and fantasy, he is precisely not subject to being
deluded and
fantastical. Instead, Lagerfeld directs a hard-nosed, clear-eyed
realism at who and what he is. In so doing, he
underlines a commonality
among all peoples and cultures, fashions and whimsies. Are we not all
ridiculous?, he chortles.
Still, Lagerfeld’s film falls short of a kōan. Self-satire helps us open
cognitive and emotional, if not
spiritual, space for taking the risks of
inspiration, playfulness and border-crossings – in a word:
creativity.
However, a kōan involves more than amusement: it aims for enlightenment.
Like
creativity, such enlightenment emanates from inside and below, through
learning and inspiration. Moreover, Kōanic enlightenment brings about an
interbeing of intersubjectivity
and trans-subjectivity. Difference exists, but
not in binary form; instead, it serves as a source of magical
excess, as if a
‘thousand arms and eyes’ were operating in tandem from one, celestial body.
Contrary to simply
imagining the Other, as suggested by Lagerfeld,
interbeing requires actual engagement.22 As Thich Nhat elaborates:

What are we to be in touch with? The answer is reality, the reality of the
world and the reality of the [true]
mind … Getting in touch with true
mind is like digging deep in the soil and reaching a hidden source that
fills
our well with fresh water. When we discover our true mind, we are
filled with understanding and compassion,
which nourishes us and
those around us as well.
(Thich Nhat 1998: 3)

The reality of the mind can become a reality of the world, but not through
sheer imagination. Rather,
reality and mind are mutually realized through
deep, intimate and nourishing interaction, like ‘digging deep in
the soil [to
reach] fresh water’.
Were that world politics could experience the same! To explore this
possibility, I take international relations
on a trip through the kōanic journey
of the looking glass. I extend interbeing to Wong Kar-Wai’s note:
what the
Eastern moon, as reflected on Western waters, could reflect back on the true
mind of the East China Sea.

The Diaoyutai–Senkaku Islands dispute

The Diaoyutai–Senkaku Islands dispute displays all the attributes of classic
Westphalian international relations:
territorial claims, interstate rivalry,
military might. Barbs fly back and forth almost daily between the Chinese
and Japanese governments, stirring general unrest in the region (Marquand
2015). Even the USA has considered
sending navy patrols (Lendon and
Sciutto, 2015). Many fear that China and Japan are teetering on the brink of
war. Ching-Chang Chen (2014) tells us why:

[In September 2010] the Japanese government [purchased] the islands

from their private landlord … This move
[incited] large-scale anti-
Japanese demonstrations in major Chinese cities, a slump in Japanese
exports to China
and in Chinese tourists to Japan, and frequent
appearance of Chinese petrol vessels and aircraft in the
surrounding
waters and airspace … in January 2013, Chinese warships [allegedly]
pointed their fire-control radar
at a Japanese helicopter and a destroyer
in close distance in the East China Sea … [The] PRC foreign ministry
in
April referred to the Diaoyus as a part of China’s ‘core interests’, a
term normally associated with [‘rogue’
territories such as] Xinjiang,
Tibet, and Taiwan … Beijing [declared] the
islands [as part of] its self-
declared East Sea Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) in
November 2013.

Ownership is at the root of this dispute. Both China and Japan claim
sovereignty over these eight, uninhabited
islets known as Diaoyutai in
Chinese, and Senkaku in Japanese,23 and no compromise appears possible:

The Diaoyu islands have belonged to China since ancient times …

China will continue to take necessary measures
to safeguard its
territorial sovereignty and Japan should not hold any unrealistic
illusions.
(Lu Kang, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, quoted in the Guardian 2015)

There is no doubt that the Senkaku Islands are clearly an inherent part
of the territory of Japan, in light of
historical facts and based upon
international law … Japan will act firmly and calmly to maintain its
territorial integrity.
(Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan 2014)

Still, why does this dispute persist? These islets have no strategic value.
They may hold oil reserves but
these remain untapped and unconfirmed.
Other than this one caveat, the islets’ small size (2,703 m2) and remote
location (located east of China, northeast of Taiwan, west of Okinawa Island
and
north of the south-western end of the Ryukyu Islands) render them
useless for either defensive or offensive
purposes.
Ching-Chang Chen (forthcoming) traces the dispute to its origins in the
nineteenth century. He debunks the myth
that Qing officials failed to
anticipate the consequences of ceding the Ryukyu Kingdom, whose domain
included but
did not rule the Diaoyutai–Senkaku islets,24 to administration by
the Okinawa Prefecture in 1896; neither was it simply a case of Qing
weakness after defeat in two Opium Wars (1839–42, 1856–60). In returning
to the documents sent by Qing officials
to the Grand Council, Chen finds
ample evidence of a clear-eyed understanding of the stakes involved. He
cites
one Qing diplomat who warned that ‘tolerating Japan’s actions
[regarding Ryukyu] would amount to “feeding a tiger
which China can no
longer rein in”’ (quoted in Chen forthcoming). Another diplomat, stationed
in Japan, cautioned
presciently that Japan’s seizure of Ryukyu would
embolden the Meiji government to aspire for Korea next. He
advised
sending warships, despite China’s military weakness at the time, by
rationalizing that ‘Japan’s recent
situation [the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877]25
was even worse than ours’ (quoted in Chen forthcoming).
Instead, Chen finds another worldview at play. Li Hongzhang (1823–
1901), the Qing Court’s all-powerful Viceroy of
Zhili (zhili zungdu) and
Minister of Beiyang (beiyang tongshang da chen), did not want to violate a
principle of the Confucian world order: yishi lizhong (taking advantage
of a
just cause for one’s own benefit).

His purpose [in abstaining from coercive diplomacy against Japan] was
not simply to appease Tokyo or to prevent
Japan from leaning towards
Russia. Despite the Qing officials’ increasing realization that Meiji
leaders would
yield only to (European) international law or superior
military might (a necessary instrument of any
‘civilized’ state in the age
of imperialism), Li appeared to believe in what ‘ought to be done’ for
China – and
that was to pursue harmonious intercourse with Japan
[jiaoji zhong yinyozhiyi] … Li even offered 100,000
rifle bullets from
the Tianjin Arsenal to the troubled Meiji government [to deal with the
Satsuma Rebellion] as
a gesture of goodwill.
(Chen forthcoming)

Li decided, in short, that China’s moral authority as patriarch of the

Confucian world order superseded the
strategic value of a few islets. At the
same time, the Qing Court upheld the Ryukyu Kingdom’s double tributary
status: it was subject to both Chinese and Japanese suzerainty and protection.
In a letter in 1879 to the
Japanese government, Prince Gong, as head of the
zungli yamen (Qing Ministry of Foreign Affairs), lamented
that:

Japan should have protected, not subsumed, a ‘weak and small’ state
like the Ryukyu Kingdom … [implying] that
Japan had violated the
‘moral purpose of the state’ which was to promote cosmic harmony in
East Asia’s
international society.
(Chen forthcoming)

This history may recall Saint Laurent’s Opium display at the Met. Swirling
in a smoke of eternal regret, Qing
China chose to go down with the
Confucian world order, even as Meiji Japan had pledged allegiance to
Westphalia.
In effect, Li Hongzhang and the rest of the Qing Court were
dreaming the world away in a drug-induced haze for a
treasured love now
forever lost. Unless, of course, we kōanize the discourse.

Kōanizing Sino–Japanese relations

Kōans remind us to think ‘disobediently’ (Mignolo 2009). Kōans need not
always resort to humour or
satire, but they require at base a critical
detachment. We need to see and see again, as Dōgen urged by iterating
his
critiques and self-critiques, and as Lagerfeld suggested with his knowing
gaze directed onto the Self by the
Self. Both underscore the rewards of self-
knowledge through self-critique, if not self-ridicule. Only then can we
liberate ourselves from some arbitrary measure of success (the old woman
and her sutras), or think we
could get away with a partial act (the abbot and
his half-circle), or delude ourselves into thinking that an idea of something
equates with the thing itself (Lagerfeld’s
Paris–Shanghai fantasy). Kōans, in
short, prompt us to examine ourselves – and the world around us
– from
inside-out and bottom-up.
Feminist and postcolonial analyses effect the same. Feminists expose two
long-standing conventions: for example,
‘madonna versus whore’ and
‘madam versus maid’ (Hamermesh 1986; Moon 1997; Chin 1998;
Agathangelou and Ling 2003;
Agathangelou 2004). Each may clash with the
other but all serve a larger, institutional structure of patriarchy
and its
interests, even if some subalterns are savvy enough to negotiate the system
to their advantage
(Stoler 2002; Chin 2013). David Palumbo-Liu (1994)
finds a corresponding dynamic at work with ‘race’. In the
rioting and looting
after the first Rodney King trial in 1992, the media fixated on racial tensions
between
Koreans and African-Americans in South Central Los Angeles.
Obscured from view, Palumbo-Liu (1994) notes, was the
white power
structure that accounts for these minority competitions in the first place. He
calls this hegemonic
move ‘white absence’.
These insights offer useful analogies for Sino–Japanese relations. China
and Japan need to realize the larger,
institutional structure that produces their
crisis. Conflict necessarily arises when Westphalia fixes sovereignty
into
singular, bordered territories of national ownership (Mishra forthcoming).
Borders and sovereign relations
before Westphalia, as suggested by
Ryukyu’s double tributary status, operated fluidly, overlappingly and full of
negotiated compromise (Winichakul 1994); but European colonialists exiled
these sovereign relations as
inefficient, confusing, and irreducibly Other.26
China and Japan need to consider: who benefits most from this
Westphalian absence? Sino–Japanese tensions, along
with greater
instabilities in the region, ressurect Said’s orientalist of old: the
hypermasculinized,
hypersexualized West now updated into grey flannel
respectability. It endows the USA and other, ‘rational’
Western powers with
the capability and the right to take over. After all, they represent the norm,
the
standard, the routine.27
Sino–Japanese conformity to Westphalian norms
also colonizes the Other for the orientalizing West. Stephen Chan
(forthcoming) notes that exclusive attention to China and Japan in the
Diaoyutai–Senkaku dispute ‘leaves out a
peculiar but still compelling
Okinawan narrative built around the self-views of the Sho dynasty;
something which
is still a strong cultural force in the Okinawan resistance to
the proliferation of US bases on the islands’.
I do not deny Japan’s devastations in China. The Sino–Japanese War
(1937–45) afflicted Asia with its largest,
most consuming war. ‘By the end
of the war [China] had lost more people – soldiers and civilians – than any
other
country bar the Soviet Union’ (Economist, 2015).28 The Tokyo War
Crimes Tribunal in 1946 revealed atrocities of human
experimentation by
Japanese doctors on Chinese men, women and children. For almost a year
leading up to China’s
celebration of the 70th anniversary of the end of the
Second World War (billed in China as the end of the
anti-Japanese war),
Chinese television has played and replayed these gruesome facts through
dramas and
documentaries. The scars run deep.
Still, contemporary China and Japan need to move on. George Santayana
wrote in
1905, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it’ (1905: 284). But staying mired in history
also risks the same, as
indicated by the Diaoyutai–Senkaku Islands dispute. Moreover, China today
is richer, more
unified and fortified, with a two-million-strong army. Conflict
in the region would mean greater and more
prolonged destruction to humans
and the globe alike than in the previous century.
China and Japan need to recognize their linked fates under Westphalia.
Japan joined the West’s imperialist
club in the nineteenth century only after
witnessing China’s painful inability to withstand a newly-ascendant,
highly-
muscularized West in Asia (Ling 2002). The Opium Wars victimized both
China and Japan: China with a
century of humiliation through unequal
treaties, colonized territories and national bankruptcy; and Japan, with
the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Let us not forget,
also, that the imperial Japanese
government victimized its own citizens,
especially young men doomed to fly kamikaze planes and young women
enslaved as comfort women.29
Positive orientalism redefined as creative interbeing could help Sino–
Japanese relations. Crossing boundaries of
time, space and cultural language
would highlight that true mind between China and Japan, from ancient to
contemporary times. Well-documented is how China’s bright moon has
reflected on Japanese waters through art,
poetry, calligraphy, language,
philosophy, customs, institutions and a myriad of other self-defining venues
(Maruyama 1974; Ooms 1985; Najita 1987).30 Less well-known, though no
less deserving, are reflections of Japan’s bright moon on Chinese
waters.
Today, popular culture founts a new regional community in Asia as music,
film, TV dramas, anime
and manga, not to mention sushi and sake, Shiseido
and Commes des Garçons, stream from Japan to its
regional neighbours
(Katsumata 2012), just as cultural products from former colonial outposts –
China, Hong Kong,
Korea, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan – flood into
Japan (Ling 2014b; Lee forthcoming). The turn of the last
century did not
just involve Japanese transgressions against China. Almost all of China’s
revolutionary leaders,
from Sun Yatsen, founder of the Chinese republic, to
Zhou Enlai, Mao’s lieutenant for almost four decades,
received much-needed
respite and refuge in an independent, modern Japan. Scientific knowledge
from the West
entered China primarily through Japan (Zheng 2008), as a
new generation of Chinese intellectuals, including many
Chinese
Communist Party leaders, eagerly sought new knowledge for a new era.
Japanese neologisms such as
‘revolution’ (ge ming), for example, helped to
mobilize their struggles for national renewal. Even at the
height of the anti-
Japanese war, segments of Chinese society refused to succumb to
interpersonal, anti-Japanese
sentiment.31 Earlier,
millennial exchanges such
as Buddhism and Confucianism had solidified Chinese and Japanese into
‘brush-talking’
(bi tan) cultural cousins (Ling 2003). Where the spoken word
may falter, communication could still succeed
through writing.
The time for change seems right. As the 70th anniversary of the end of
the Second World War approached, Japan’s
Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe,
made a major speech on 14 August 2015. Abe
acknowledged Japan’s past
mistakes on ‘the road to war’ and what it had cost the dead and the living.
But, he
acknowledged: ‘What is done cannot be undone.’ Looking forward,
he vowed Japan’s commitment to peace because it
is only due to the
‘tolerance’ of others who had fought Japan but helped to rebuild it, that
Japan today can
enjoy peace and prosperity. For this reason:

Japan will continue to firmly uphold the principle that any disputes
must be settled peacefully and
diplomatically based on the respect for
the rule of law and not through the use of force, and to reach out to
other countries in the world to do the same. As the only country to have
ever suffered the devastation of
atomic bombings during war, Japan
will fulfil its responsibility in the international community, aiming at
the
non-proliferation and ultimate abolition of nuclear weapons.
(Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet, 2015)

On 3 September 2015, China celebrated the 70th anniversary with a massive

show of military might. Along with
tanks on the ground and fighter jets
zooming overhead, some 12,000 troops marched down Chang’an Avenue
toward
Tiananmen Square (Hunt et al. 2015). Yet Chinese President Xi
Jinping, outfitted in a Mao jacket (following Hu
Jintao’s precedent in 2009
on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic),
announced a
reduction of the military by 300,000 personnel (Wong et al.
2015). Many consider this gesture symbolic only,
given recent advances in
Chinese air and sea power. However, one could speculate dialectically: that
is, it is at
this moment of national self-confidence that the Chinese
government could consider alternatives to
hypermasculine, Westphalian
power.
In this context, Xi’s Mao jacket takes on greater nuance. Superficially, it
signals the maturation of Mao’s
creation, the People’s Republic. On a quieter
note, the jacket recalls its original owner: Sun Yatsen. As founder
of the
Chinese republic that overthrew three millennia of dynastic rule, Sun
represents another kind of power. He
explicitly sought to syncretize a
modern, Chinese republic with the West. His Three Principles of the People
(sanmin zhuyi) integrated Abraham Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg of
‘government of the people, by the
people, for the people’ (Lincoln 1863)
with a Confucian–Mengist tradition of ‘people-based’ governance
(minbeng
zhengzhi). Like a ceramic dress or a jaunty cap or a lotus-lobed, gold-lamé
gown, Chinese
appropriations of the West impress with their elegance and
inventiveness.

Conclusion
In seeing and reseeing Sino–Japanese relations, we realize that emancipating
China and Japan from their mutual,
negative orientalisms compels a
departure and a return. The departure requires leaving behind a century of
Westphalia-induced hostility and conflict, apologies and accusations. The
70th
anniversary celebration should sound as a last gong to this patch of
Sino–Japanese history. After all, China and
Japan have interacted for more
than two millennia. Why should one century overshadow this entire legacy,
and
especially over an arbitrary measure of success like possession of a set
of barren, uninhabited islets? At the
same time, the departure must forfeit
any pre-Westphalian notions of a cosmic patriarchal order, with one party
in
charge and others in obeisance. Commissioner Lin’s impassioned plea to
Queen Victoria still resonates today:
where lies our common conscience?
The return means embracing the spirit of water and mirrors, moon and
reflections. The Eastern moon as reflected
on Western waters has much to
reflect back on the East China Sea. Here, the Met exhibit’s imperial robes
resurface with another kind of significance. In their exquisite, transgendered
simplicity (like the Japanese
kimono), these traditional forms of dress
convey a grandeur that transcends time and the particularities
of space. Such
power comes not from assertions of self-importance but the vitality that
others bring to it, given
the creativity, excitement and fascination that they
derive from it. Here, we would do well to appreciate anew Li
Hongzhang’s
gesture of goodwill towards Meiji Japan. External aggressions
notwithstanding, Li felt that the Meiji
government could use a friend at a
time of internal turmoil. Sovereign relations must stay relational to
be
sovereign.32
However, contrary to the poem’s claim that such reflective
exercises bear ‘no inherent reality’, I submit that
they bring as much reality
as we desire. Is the Met exhibit merely a figment of our imagination? What
about the
viewing crowds: are they not sharing and reinforcing this
imagination, turning it into reality? What about the
exhibit’s impact
culturally, economically and politically? Of course, kōans remind us, stay
alert: neither
image nor reality stays still. Both have the capacity to delude.
By kōanizing Sino–Japanese relations, we can tap into a well of real
imagination that warrants digging
deeper within. It allows for self-discovery
and the balance that it brings in relations with Others. Here,
China and Japan
could usefully direct a self-knowing gaze within, especially after all the
turmoil of their
collective rebirth in the last century. Equally important, they
can share these self-knowledges. Note, for
example, recent contestations in
China of the appropriateness of assuming Western concepts in the Chinese
context
(Wang 2014), as well as ongoing interrogations of how the Kyoto
School, despite its Buddhist philosophical
foundations, could contribute to
an imperialist doctrine such as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
(Shimizu 2011). A sense of balance emerges and, as underscored by the
kōans, enlightenment becomes
possible. That is what we need in
international relations and world politics today, not least between China and
Japan in the East China Sea.
This chapter does not specify policy proposals to redress the islands
dispute. What it offers, instead, are the
beginnings of a new framing or
discourse for Sino–Japanese relations. From this basis, I believe, new
policies
will spring. Launching this new discourse does not require
condemning the past or destroying it or even denying it. History shows that
tactic as a source of repetition only. Rather,
working towards interbeing in
world politics offers a more promising start. Through compassion and
creativity,
leavened by the kōanic practice of critical self-reflection, we may
reach a worldly world order of
true mind (Ling forthcoming).
In a sense, my old history teacher was right: geography does account for
Chinese silk – but like the abbot who
circled his chair in one direction only,
she was half-right at best. As this chapter has shown, the magnificence
of
silk – and the multiple, interwoven worlds of art and aesthetics, philosophy
and politics, culture and power
that it spins into being – involves far more.

Notes
1 I am deeply grateful to
Andreas Behnke. Not only did he spearhead this volume but Andreas also
extended great intellectual guidance and
generosity to the formation of this chapter. Thanks, also,
to Fabiola Berdiel, Roland Bleiker, Jill Boyd,
Ching-Chang Chen, Andrew Dockery and Yumiko
Mikanagi for their help in strengthening my argument. I take full
responsibility for any errors that
may be contained within the text.
2 For a video presentation of
the exhibit, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUOcySpiX80 (accessed
4 September 2015).
3 ‘China: Through the Looking
Glass’ attracted record crowds since its opening on 7 May 2015
(Kennedy 2015). Originally set to end on 16
August 2015, the museum extended the exhibit until 7
September 2015. For each day of the last week, the museum
stayed open until midnight.
4 I use ‘Westphalia’ as
shorthand to refer to our current Western-led, inter-state system, knowing that
Westphalia may be one of
international relations’ abiding myths (see Carvalho et al. 2011).
5 This imagery applies
specifically to the bodhisattva: Guanyin (Kuan-yin) in China, Kannon in
Japan,
Avalokitesvara in India. The ‘thousand arms and eyes’ refer to her charge of compassion
and mercy to
all.
6 Indian elites under British
rule, Nandy (1988) shows, sought to demonstrate they were as
emotionally ‘undeveloped’ and ‘hypermasculine’ as
their colonial masters. This manifested in two
ways: elites revised their classics to approximate British
values, while adding new layers of
oppression to their domestic underlings.
7 Said’s orientalism comes from
two main works: Orientalism (1979) followed by Culture and
Imperialism (1994). The latter
elaborates upon the former; accordingly, I focus on the first book as
the main source of his concept.
8 Two gunmen affiliated with
al-Qaeda shot and killed 12 members, wounding 11 others, at the
office of the magazine, Charlie Hebo, on
7 January 2015. The magazine had printed satirical
images of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), forbidden in Islam.
Two days later also in Paris,
another gunmen linked with Muslim militants killed four hostages at a Jewish
grocery.
9 At the time of writing, it is
too soon to tell what kind of adverts will air about China for the 2016
presidential election.
10 For an excellent, more
comprehensive review of how the West portrays contemporary China, see
Pan (2012).
11 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSQozWP-rM (accessed 14
May 2014). This commercial
comes from a conservative political group, Citizens Against Government Waste.
12 Of course, the orientalism applied by the West to the East differs from that within the East.
Pre-
existing prejudices invariably filter the latter.
13 Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910–1977)
lambasted Japan’s development along these lines as ‘the slave’s
progress, its diligence is the
slave’s diligence’ (Takeuchi 2005: 66, emphasis in original).
14 Hence the drama’s subtext
suggests that Taiwan and China can reunite against a common enemy:
Japan.
15 For a history of the
qipao (in Mandarin) or cheongsam (in Cantonese), see Clark (2000).
16 ‘Cinema plays an important
role in the exhibition as this mediator between the original Chinese
garments, or artifacts, and Western
fashion’, narrates Andrew Bolton, curator, in the Met’s video
about the exhibit. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUOcySpiX80 (accessed 6
September 2015).
17 An example of positive
orientalism within negative orientalism is the BBC comedy series,
Goodness Gracious Me (1998–2015).
Written and acted primarily by South Asians in Britain, the
show pillories prejudice on both sides of the
cultural and colour divide. The show also satirizes
South Asians in Britain: the couple that wants to be
more British-than-British, the father who
thinks everything is Indian, and the two mothers who bicker
competitively and nonsensically about
whose son or grandson is superior.
18 For a political analysis of
Lust/Caution, see Chen et al. (2009).
19 See M. Butterfly
(1988), David Henry Hwang’s satirical exposure of this longstanding myth.
20 Note, for example, the
strong tradition of absurdism in the West, ranging from the comic plays of
Aristophanes (c. 446–386
bce) to post-war existentialism from Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus,
among others,
to contemporary programmes such as The Daily Show. This tradition facilitates
democratic discourse by
exposing or ridiculing the powers-that-be through their contradictions,
hypocrisies and inconsistencies.
Intellectual enquiry in the West has a tradition of inclusion (Duffy
forthcoming), but is marginalized by
Eurocentric, colonial politics in international relations and
world politics (Hobson 2012; Vitalis 2015).
21 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ILvmLa1Ftc&spfreload=10 (accessed 19 July 2015).
22 The ancient Silk Roads (1–15
ce) offer an historical example. On them exuded an ethos of
‘difference without
alienation’, whereby multiple peoples with their vastly different goods and
capital, religions and technology,
medicines and philosophy, did not just travel or barter together,
but also learned from one another for
almost 15 centuries.
23 Taiwan also could make
claims on the Diaoyutai–Senkaku Islands. However, given its size and
history, Taiwan’s stance is more modulated
than either China’s or Japan’s (Chen forthcoming).
24 In fact, no one directly
‘ruled’ the islets, as defined by (Western) international law. I thank Ching-
Chang Chen for this clarification.
25 Disaffected former
samurai incited the Satsuma Rebellion. In the Meiji era (1868–1912), a newly-
centralized Japanese
government no longer needed samurai who had previously protected
individual lords (shōgun).
Highly-educated and highly-skilled in martial arts, these samurai
suddenly found themselves useless and
impoverished. The rebellion lasted approximately nine
months in 1877, ending with the suicide of its leader,
Saigō Takamori.
26 I do not suggest that
paradise prevailed in Asia before the rise of the West, but neither was the
continent bereft of any
virtue political, intellectual, economic or otherwise.
27 See Wang (2014) for an
analysis of China’s transition from ‘empire’ to ‘nation-state’.
28 However, some figures have been inflated. For example, many Chinese believe that the Japanese
killed almost 300,000 locals in the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 (Chang 1997), but no evidence
 supports this
figure, including that from the Nanjing Museum. By way of comparison, the United
Nations estimates that the
four-year civil war in Syria has cost 220,000 lives. I thank Ching-Chang
Chen for this correction.
29 Although the majority of
comfort women came from South-East Asia, some Japanese women also
suffered the same fate (see Yoshimi 1995).
30 The ability to compose a
poem in kanji, Chinese characters, still indicates ‘high’ education in a
person in Japan.
31 Some members of China’s
wartime urban elite, for example, circulated Erich Maria Remarque’s
1929 anti-war novel, All Quiet on the
Western Front, in comic book form. The Lianhuan hua huatu
xixian wu zhansi depicts friendly,
interpersonal relations between Chinese and Japanese, despite
the war. The Rauner Special Collections Library
at Dartmouth College stores a copy of this comic
book (see Rauner Special Collections Library 2013).
32 For an application of this
concept to contemporary international relations, see Qin (2016).

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4 Fashion statements
Wearing trousers in Sudan
Linda Bishai

Introduction
Fashion, like language, serves as a form of mediation between people as
well as an expression of the self.
Fashion, like language, is also both
obvious and apparent but fashion is often overlooked and undervalued as a
vehicle for conveying meaning. That is, until a particular fashion item
becomes invested with so much meaning
that it becomes a political
flashpoint and site of socially contested meaning. This chapter investigates
the
instance in which a pair of trousers – worn by Sudanese journalist
Lubna Hussein – triggered a jail sentence,
demonstrations, interviews, exile
and international media attention (Figure 4.1).
Figure 4.1 Lubna Hussein leaves the cafe where she was arrested in
Khartoum, 31 July 2009.
Source: Reuters/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallh.
 The trousers and their wearer took on enormous significance in a highly
complex political environment, where the
authoritarian Sudanese
government has been navigating a delicate course between teasing and
appeasing Western
arbiters of political legitimacy. Sudan’s government has
fashioned itself as both Islamist in legal codes and
moderate in its
cooperative stance against terrorism. With an International Criminal Court
indictment of its
president and the imminent secession of South Sudan as
context, banning the wearing of trousers became emblematic
of an assertion
of control over the implementation of Islam by the government, and an
example of oppression taken
too far for Sudan’s women, journalists and the
human rights community. The wearing of trousers in this context
became an
expression of free speech and a sign of political resistance. Fashion both
stated and created the
identity of Lubna Hussein as an international symbol
of political struggle and women’s rights.

Wearing trousers and public order

On 3 July 2009, Sudanese police forces stormed a popular restaurant in
Sudan’s capital Khartoum and arrested a
group of women. The women were
charged with indecent and immoral acts under the Penal Code (also known
as the
Criminal Act of 1991), Article 152 (Women Living Under Muslim
Laws and Amnesty International 2009). In court, ten
of the women had no
legal representation and pleaded guilty. The ten were each fined an amount
roughly equivalent to $100 and sentenced to ten lashes each. The sentences
were carried out
summarily, without leave to appeal (UN News Centre
2009). This night might have been like any of the other 43,000
times the
public order police in Sudan had arrested people for violating Article 152
that year, but this time one
of the detainees had legal immunity, access to
United Nations (UN) lawyers and a determination to push back
(Anonymous 2009). The events of the evening of 3 July 2009 in Khartoum
soon became international news because one
of the arrested, Lubna Ahmed
Hussein, decided that she would not be shamed and secretive, as so many
women
arrested under the same law had been. As a financially independent
professional, Hussein had more social status
and support than most
Sudanese women. She decided to contest the charges and allow the
embarrassing allegations
to become public. Her indecent and immoral act?
She was wearing trousers.
When Hussein’s status as an employee of the UN Mission in Sudan
(UNMIS) was
discovered, the court acknowledged that she had diplomatic
immunity. Instead of invoking immunity, Hussein
resigned from her
position in order to keep the case active and contest it. Furthermore, she
invited 500 friends
and fellow journalists to witness her trial, scheduled for
29 July 2009 (Women Living Under Muslim Laws and
Amnesty
International 2009). At this point the story reverberated worldwide as wire
services, TV stations,
non-governmental organization newsletters, blogs,
and editorial pages celebrated Hussein’s courage, and pointed
accusing
fingers at the inexplicable standards of Sudan’s dress codes and public order
police (see
Guardian 2009). On the day of Hussein’s trial, more than 100
women went to the court building to protest
the charges as a violation of
women’s rights. The government deployed riot police to keep them back
(Anonymous
2009). All of the attention must have unnerved the judge; he
delayed the trial for another month – an unusual
decision, since violations
of the public order law are frequently handled with extreme dispatch and
very little
due process (Amnesty International 2010a: 38). The possible
sentence for violating Article 152 included an
unlimited fine and/or
flogging up to 40 lashes. Hussein, meanwhile, went on a media offensive.
She was
interviewed repeatedly and stated that she wanted an audience to
view her punishment, so that they would be
forced to see how Sudan’s
public order laws operate. In a television interview, Hussein explained: ‘No
one would
believe that [I am] going to be flogged for wearing ordinary
clothes unless they were to witness [my] punishment’
(Amnesty
International 2010b: 3).
During the month when the trial was delayed, the international furore
increased: appetites were only whetted to
see whether a woman would be
whipped for wearing an outfit that most Sudanese would find inoffensive,
and which
can commonly be seen on any given day in the streets of
Khartoum, usually worn by educated women of the middle or
upper class.
Even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon called on all parties to abide by
relevant international human
rights standards, mentioning flogging
specifically as a violation (UN News Centre 2009). When Hussein
attempted
to travel during her wait for a sentence, she discovered that she
was under a travel ban. Undeterred, she
conducted video interviews with
foreign Arab-language media and discussed the illegality of such a ban
(France 24
2009). When the court finally heard the case, a large crowd of
supporters protested flogging outside the
building. Police used tear gas and
force to disperse the crowd, arresting many, and injuring some in the
process
(Amnesty International 2010a: 40). Hussein was not sentenced to
flogging, but she was ordered to pay a fine of
either 500 Sudanese pounds
(about $200 at the time) or spend one month in prison (Amnesty
International 2010b:
3). Hussein refused to pay the fine and went to the
women’s prison in Omdurman. Rather than allowing the case to
remain in
the spotlight, the government-supported Journalist’s Union paid the fine for
her – against her wishes
(Campbell 2009). Hussein was released after only
one day in prison. Even with the fine, this was a much lighter
sentence than
most Sudanese receive for violating the public order laws.
In November 2009, Hussein violated her travel ban and slipped out of
Sudan,
ironically wearing a niqab (a veil completely covering the face) in
order to travel to France and Great
Britain to promote her book on the
ordeal (Anne of Carversville 2009).1 At the same time, her case continued
through
the Sudanese courts on appeal. The Court of Appeal and Supreme
Court upheld the lower court decision, and Hussein
continues to await the
final decision of the Constitutional Court – still pending and in legal limbo
since June
2010 (Amnesty International 2010a: 38). She has not returned to
Sudan and continues to live in exile (2010a: 38).

‘This is not about trousers’

Lubna Hussein and the Sudanese government actually do agree on one
thing: the events of late Summer and Autumn
2009 are not really about a
pair of trousers, but rather about clothing in a larger sense. For Hussein, as
well
as for the security agents of the Sudanese government, clothing
signifies publicly whether an individual is
compliant with the public order
regime, or whether he or she (yet it is most frequently a she) wishes to test
the
arbitrary nature of its limits. Hussein said as much in an interview, when
she noted that her purpose in making
her case public was to draw attention
to the large number of floggings carried out against women and girls every
year, due to laws that she considers absurd (Anonymous 2009). The
Sudanese Embassy in London responded in the
Guardian newspaper,
claiming that the arrest was not for wearing trousers, but for affray
(fighting) and
antisocial behaviour, and that the rights of women in Sudan
are improving (al-Mubarak 2009).2 However, for Hussein, an arrest for
wearing trousers embodies everything that is wrong with Sudan today: for
women, journalists, and political
reformers. Meanwhile, the Government of
Sudan – through its ambassador to the UK – made efforts to reduce the
effect of ‘Trousergate’ as a misplaced symbol of a case blown out of all
proportion (al-Mubarak 2009). In
continuing to delay any final legal
resolution of the case, the government indicates a desire to quell the
political import of the episode, and thus to deprive Sudanese activists of the
international attention that would
strengthen their efforts to change the law.
Hussein made clear in a Guardian article (Hussein 2009a), and
in many
interviews, that her purpose in drawing attention to her own case was to
have the public order acts
repealed, and the laws of Sudan updated to
comply with the interim constitution and international human rights
obligations. Thus her purpose was to imbue the clothes she wore with
serious political meaning by explicitly
calling out the government’s own
practice of politicizing and punishing dress – in her case, specifically,
trousers (Hussein 2009a).
It is important to clarify here that wearing trousers in Sudan is not
always a political act, but that the
clothing of women is always a site of
possible politicization by the Sudanese government. So, while the Sudanese
public order police accused Hussein of being dressed improperly, thereby
politicizing her dress, she in turn made
a political statement out of that
policing and politicizing, succeeding in
drawing global attention to the
precarious protection of rights in Sudan.
A careful reading of her interviews shows that Hussein’s own goals were
quite a bit broader than the tale of
women’s rights abuse that swept around
the world. Her Guardian article describes concern for the fragile
Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended Sudan’s long civil war with
the South, general censorship and
oppression, and the ability of parties to
freely contest the general elections. She wrote:

I feel anger and frustration that our government will not allow people
to freely discuss our future. Sudan …
will never fulfil its great
potential unless we are able to contribute to our future without pressure
or fear.
(Hussein 2009a)

For Hussein, the trousers were not her main concern, but they served as
incitement to become a political
activist. She used the platform that her case
provided to highlight a long list of political grievances that
dress codes had
come to symbolize. The public support that she garnered in Sudan showed
that the case had struck
a nerve. Sudanese women had long refused to
comply with the strict uniform of the regime’s code, but they had
also taken
the risk that the public order police could arrest them on a whim. Now they
had a case to take to the
world to illustrate their plight and an articulate,
secure woman to be their spokesperson. The fact that it was
about
something ordinary like trousers was a perfect way to draw attention to the
unreasonable nature of the
regime’s political control.
The government’s enforcement of dress codes frightens its citizens and
bears little resemblance to legitimate
concerns for public order. These
practices date from the 1989 military coup that placed Sudan’s current
president, Omar al-Bashir, at the head of yet another authoritarian regime –
this one an overtly Islamist
project. As such, they are designed to intimidate
rather than protect a diverse public. If the regime controls
what you wear, it
also exerts authority over a key indicator of your identity. This control over
acceptable
manifestations of identity has significant effects on public
opposition to the regime. Attempting to ‘dress
itself’ into the Arab world,
Sudan’s government dictated a dress code that mimicked Arabian
interpretations
rather than the diverse ethnic and cultural strands of Sudan’s
own heritage. Thus, what appears to the Western
eye as an Arab-Islamic
culture and dress code, obscures the extent of control and suppression of
cultural
difference that the regime has practised for decades. Privileging
Arab identity through dress, language,
‘race’ and religion, Sudan’s
government purposefully weakened other expressions of Sudanese identity
– and
the pay-off has been political longevity. Although Sudan’s short post-
independence history contains a turbulent
mix of dictatorships, public
uprising and short-lived unstable democratic governments, the current
government has
shown remarkable durability – in part through strategic
restructuring of public institutions, including laws,
police, courts, unions,
universities and service in the military – all in the
name of the unified Arab-
Islamic identity that, it insisted, was Sudanese.
The current public order laws contained in the Criminal Act of 1991
(also known as the Penal Code), contain two
articles that have justified
most of the dress code arrests. Both articles are drafted in remarkably vague
language and leave much for the police on the scene to interpret:

Article 151:
(1) There shall be deemed to commit the offence of gross indecency,
whoever commits
any act contrary to another person’s modesty, or
does any sexual act, with another person not amounting to
adultery, or sodomy, and he shall be punished, with whipping not
exceeding forty lashes and he may also be
punished with
imprisonment for a term not exceeding one year or with a fine.
(2) Where the offence of gross indecency is committed in a public
place or without
the consent of the victim the offender shall be
punished with imprisonment for a term not exceeding 2 years or
with a fine.
Article 152:
 (1) Whoever commits, in public place, an act, or conducts himself in
an indecent
manner, or a manner contrary to public morality, or
wears an indecent or immoral dress, which causes annoyance
to
public feelings, shall be punished, with whipping not exceeding
forty lashes, or a fine or both.
(2) The act shall be deemed contrary to public morality, if it is so
considered in
the religion of the doer, or the custom of the country
where the act occurs.

This has caused confusion, inconsistency and frustration for Sudanese

trying to navigate an unknowable standard
of dress, while preserving a
modicum of personal style against the lowest acceptable common
denominator of the
abaya and niqab. According to an interview with the
director of the Public Order Police, the
criteria are completely personal to
the arresting officer: ‘any dress a policeman judges to be tight, exposing or
which might cause sexual arousal’ (African Centre for Justice and Peace
Studies 2009: 3). This means that the
wearer does not ultimately decide the
social and political meaning of dress, and that certain personal
preferences
carry political risk, as they are subject to arbitrary indecency standards. The
standard for gross
indecency is described in the law as ‘any act contrary to
another person’s modesty’ (Article 151). Indecency,
including ‘indecent or
immoral dress’ is considered to have occurred if an act ‘causes annoyance
to public
feelings’ (Article 152).
This wording allows the public order police to refer to feelings of any
bystander, or to assert their own
‘annoyance’ about lack of modesty when
enforcing the law. In the complex, multicultural, multi-faith context that
is
Sudan, and especially Khartoum, these legal standards are impossible to
predict. One of the reasons that so many women took a significant risk to
publicly support Hussein at her trial
was that trousers are a very common
form of dress for Sudanese women today, especially younger women, and
especially in the capital where there are large numbers of Christian women
from the South and other parts of the
continent.3 To add
historic context,
since taking power in 1989, the effort of the current government to control
women’s dress has
met with passive resistance by a mostly moderate
Muslim public unwilling to have standards of morality dictated
arbitrarily.
In 1996, the government issued an order for all women throughout the
country to wear the hijab that covers
the hair and neck, and sometimes the
face (African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies 2009: 2). Although
Sudan
has been largely Muslim since the late Middle Ages, Sudanese
women have not adopted conservative Arabian dress,
preferring to continue
with their traditional garb, the sari-like thobe. Thobes are colourful,
loosely
draped bolts of fabric wrapped over a layer usually consisting of a shirt and
skirt, and are instantly
recognizable as Sudanese (Figure 4.2).
Figure 4.2 Sudanese woman wearing traditional dress, the thobe.
Source: Photograph by Linda Bishai, Sudan 2009.
 Most women drape the end of the thobe over their heads as a kind of
veil, although it typically shows the
hair (Al Jazeera 2010). Women often
allow it to slip down to their shoulders when inside or among friends.
Despite the government’s order, Muslim women in Sudan continued to
wear the thobe, which does not qualify
as hijab under strict interpretation,
and allows for wide variation of styles in attractive textures and
colours.
Today the thobe continues to be widely worn, especially by married
women. Unmarried women, and
women who prefer more Western style,
often wear other variations on the headscarf, including trousers, long
shirts
or tunics, and loosely wrapped head coverings (as Hussein wore). Of
course, many Sudanese women do choose
to wear the tightly wrapped head
covering associated in Sudan with stricter Islamist sects and parties,
although
the niqab remains rare. Meanwhile, non-Muslim women have
continued to go bare-headed, despite the risk of
prosecution under the
public order laws.
It is worth noting that standards of modesty have varied greatly in Sudan
over the centuries, even after the
introduction of Islam. Sudanese historical
descriptions and drawings confirm the existence of local dress styles
that
were extremely revealing. Traditional garb for some northern Sudanese
tribal women was nothing more than a
fringed leather skirt, worn without a
top, known as a rahat (Figure 4.3).
Figure 4.3 Two Nubian women standing in front of a hut.
Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-
82893]. Date:
between 1890 and 1923.
 The rahat was worn by unmarried Nubian women into the twentieth
century, well past the time when Islam had
first become prevalent in Sudan
(Jaleela 2006: 6). The late timeline for this pattern of dress suggests that
Sudanese culture remained varied and local, even after the time when Islam
became the widely accepted and
acknowledged faith.
Although the government’s hijab order can be considered a failure in
terms of enforcing social change, it
was accompanied by the creation of the
public order police unit (African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies
2009:
2). These are the police whose arbitrary and unpredictable judgment, as
outlined previously, can result in cases such as Hussein’s, and thousands of
others too ashamed to protest.
Evidence suggests that the public order
police disproportionately target women as violators of the dress code
(Equal
Rights Trust 2009), falling into a common pattern of controlling women’s
dress as emblematic of a
maintained social order. Personal experiences and
stories of the disproportionate effect on women are abundant.
Many of these
stories, relayed by educated women in Khartoum, revolve around the
University of Khartoum – which
became the centrepiece of the
government’s efforts to enforce the new dress codes.
One illustrative example of these personal experiences occurred in the
early 1990s, when female students entering
the gates at the University of
Khartoum were suddenly stopped by guards. Some female students were
allowed to
proceed while others – without any explanation – had their
identity cards seized and were directed to go to the dean’s office. Once
there, these students had to wait in silence
without understanding why they
had been forced to be there. One student reflected on the humiliation of that
experience:

In later years when I looked back at that one-hour wait in that room
with those other girls I recognized what
we felt in that room was
‘shame’, coupled with confusion. The confusion resulted from the fact
that we did not
know what [we] were supposed to be ashamed of. We
were not being asked to meet the Dean because of an academic
 problem we had. We were clearly in trouble. We had broken a rule or
law.
(Anonymous)4

These female students were not warned about new rules at the university
beforehand. Even once they were informed
that the reason they had been
taken aside was a violation of the Islamic rules
of modest dress, it was still
not clear what exactly constituted ‘modesty’ by the university’s non-
articulated
interpretation. The women called into the University of
Khartoum dean’s office were told that they should not be
wearing anything
that could cause fitna (seduction) for their male colleagues. It is not clear
how women
were expected to know in advance what might constitute fitna
in a context where they were already
consciously dressing to be modest. As
a former student recalls:

I knew that clothes should not be too short or too body hugging. None
of what I was wearing could be described in
that way whatsoever. I
tried to look secretly at what some of the other girls ‘in the wrong’ like
me were wearing
… It was obvious to me that we were all trying to
find out what we had in common in our breach of the this
sudden,
unannounced dress code.

She continued:

I cringed at the word ‘fitna’. I had never heard it before addressed to

me … but as I looked down,
genuinely bewildered at what I was
wearing, again I suddenly understood … From the elbow to the wrist
my hand
[forearm] was uncovered. Every other bit of my body was
covered. My ID was taken and I was summoned to this
office to be
reprimanded because of the uncovered space between my elbow and
wrist.
(Anonymous)
The Sudanese government has been playing a delicate political game with
dress codes, using a strict
interpretation of Islam to solidify control over
society and to lay claim to a form of legitimacy that its path
to power belies.
The Sudanese people have been quietly resisting with fashion as a form of
free speech and
protest at an unacceptable form of social and political
control. Notably, in this case, the protest takes the
form of staying attached
to traditional garb against the more radical government prescriptions. This
contrasts
with the type of clothing usually associated with resistance or
opposition in the West (often as non-traditional
as possible in order to
transgress what are seen as settled norms). Older Sudanese women and men
today talk
nostalgically of the 1970s and 1980s as an era when Sudan was a
model of social and political progressivism, so
the use of traditional styles
of clothing indicates an appreciation of a more secular and less militarized
political era. Using the University of Khartoum as its vanguard in enforcing
the new dress codes was an effective
strategy by the government that
exerted severe forms of control over intellectual endeavour generally, and
universities in particular (see Bishai 2008). Controlling intellectuals and
their natural habitat – the
university – has long been an effective mechanism
for managing political dissent, and the Bashir regime is no
exception.
Professors and staff came to find it ‘normal’ for their female visitors to be
stopped at the
university gates for unacceptable dress, and staff began to
perpetuate the
regime’s standards by warning their female visitors to wear
hijab: ‘If for any reason the guests arrived
unexpectedly, or if we forgot for
some reason to inform them beforehand, [we would] leave the university
and move
the meeting anywhere outside’ (Anonymous).
In fact, wearing hijab itself came to be seen as a choice of dress having
political content. Wearers of
this Islamic covering came to be seen as more
likely to be pro-government than women wearing the loser
thobe or a
simple scarf (Jaleela 2006: 19). The regime did everything that it could to
enhance that
linkage with official requirements for hijab in order to obtain
identity documents or to travel. Women
were even forced to go home and
return with proper coverings before being allowed to travel (2006: 19). The
government’s standards took root within certain segments of Sudanese
society as designated features of its
‘cultural project’ – the ‘Reshaping of
the Sudanese Individual’ – along the lines of an orientation to strict
political
Islam (Anonymous).5 Since the start of the current regime, women have
noticed a pattern of public shaming and
interference with dress, even by
ordinary citizens, that was not common previously. One married woman
who
normally dresses in a thobe described it as a typical experience:

to have a security official or even a member of the public reach over

and try to cover me without permission when
my thobe is around my
shoulders. I say to myself, ‘This is Islam?!’ [to touch a female stranger
without
permission].6

She also described being in her car – a place most women would consider
protected space, similar to being inside
– and having a man in a
neighbouring car at a traffic light rolling down the window and saying ‘Will
you please
cover?’ In these situations, she always refuses.
It is striking that while these dress code standards remain technically in
place and are still arbitrarily
enforced without precise definition, the
clothing that is sold in the markets is still widely colourful and
Western. In
addition to highly ornamented hand-beaded thobes, the cloth market in
Khartoum sells many
styles of women’s trousers, including skinny jeans
and long party dresses with halter-tops, as well as skimpy
lingerie. Many of
the sellers in these shops are men. Sudanese women wear these revealing
party dresses to
private events, even if such events might have up to 1,000
guests. Sudanese weddings – frequently outdoors, with
large guest lists and
expansive, open rules of hospitality – often feature Western-style bridal
dresses for
women, and tuxedos for men. Khartoum brides from wealthy
families favour tight-fitting bodices and strapless
styles.7 Since weddings
are typically large affairs with invitations scattered freely among friends,
relatives and new acquaintances, it
can hardly be argued that brides in such
attire are in a protected private setting, yet this is the sartorial
fiction that
allows women to dress as they please for social gatherings. In discussions
with educated young
Sudanese, it becomes clear that they constantly
navigate politicized borderlines between a private dress code and the
sartorial requirements of inconsistently policed public spaces.
In one trendy Khartoum restaurant, I noticed that patrons were mostly
young, of both genders and wearing Western
clothing. The women were
loosely covered or wearing their headscarves around their shoulders. Many
of them were
hunched over computers or tablets, and it seemed surprising
to me that they were left in peace to talk together
in a public space without
being harassed by the Public Order Police, or put under surveillance by the
intelligence service (given the tacitly understood link between dress and
political preferences). When I asked
about this, educated Sudanese friends
told me that there are some public places where this behaviour is allowed
because the government cannot afford the backlash that would occur if it
shut them all down. This would include
the economic impact of closing
down successful establishments that cater to the wealthy supporters of the
government, as well as the political opposition elites.8 In Khartoum, such
‘safe spaces’ as these restaurants and cafes come and
go, rotating in
popularity and the perceived protection that they offer to women and men
who want to dress (and
talk) in ways that challenge the regime.
In addition to claiming political legitimacy through hardline religious
interpretations of Islam, the current
regime also quietly expanded the role of
the military in Sudanese society. This valorization of the military
reached
the point where mathematics problems in primary school textbooks were
about soldiers, and it became
fashionable for small boys to wear military
costumes for formal events such as weddings. Many uniforms for both
male
and female primary school students across the country are in various types
of military camouflage, with
girls wearing tight hijab, as opposed to a
wrapped scarf. University students have compulsory service in
the Popular
Defense Forces, and even civilian services such as the police have become
heavily armed. In this
militarized climate, free expression is only available
to those willing to take some risk. Agents of the National
Security Service
in Sudan routinely visit and censor newspaper columns before they are
published, but critics of
the regime continue to find new ways to enact their
resistance. Occasionally the security forces go far enough to
generate a
social backlash, facilitated by the active online and social media presence of
regime critics. In
December 2010, a video of a Sudanese woman being
lashed in public surfaced on YouTube. Her cries of pain and
efforts to avoid
the lash, coupled with police indifference and the humiliation of the event
taking place in a
public place and in front of strangers, led to a widespread
outcry in the Sudanese online community, as well as
public statements in
formal outlets in Sudan and abroad (Sudan Tribune 2010). Even Nobel
Laureate Toni
Morrison contributed an essay on the subject, writing, ‘the
unleashed are lashed: for being alone in public, for
mingling with unrelated
males, for owning a cellphone, for driving a car, for wearing trousers’
(Morrison 2011).
Although technically unrelated to dress codes or the
Lubna Hussein case, the lashing video became
intertwined with it as
another piece of evidence for the regime’s brutal oppression of women in
Sudan.
While the Lubna Hussein case remains the most influential and famous
challenge to the public order laws, they have long been the object of social,
political, legal and sartorial
resistance. A significant case, ten years before
Hussein’s, ended up before the African Commission on Human and
Peoples’ Rights. In 1999, students from Ahlia University were arrested by
the police at a picnic where male and
female students were sitting, talking
and dancing with each other. Among the charges was the allegation that the
students were not properly dressed, as the women were wearing trousers.
Eight students were sentenced to fines
and/or flogging, with punishments
carried out immediately after the verdict (African Commission on Human
and
People’s Rights 2003). The students filed a case with the African
Commission on Human and People’s Rights, on the
basis that a domestic
appeal was moot because the punishment had been already carried out. The
Government of
Sudan replied that the students had committed acts deemed
criminal under domestic law, and therefore the case
should not be
considered. The case was notable because neither side disputed the
description of the students’
behaviour. Rather, the students argued that
instant sentencing and punishment nullified their right of appeal,
and that
the punishment violated Sudan’s international obligations to uphold human
rights. The Commission agreed,
finding: ‘There is no right for individuals,
and particularly the government of a country to apply physical
violence to
individuals for offences’ (African Commission on Human and People’s
Rights 2003). The Commission
found Sudan in violation of the African
Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and requested an immediate
amendment of the Criminal Act of 1991 and the abolition of flogging as a
penalty. Yet the same laws and penalties
remain in force, unchanged, today.
The criminalization of dress as a signifier for immorality continues to be a
powerful tool – an indicator of sovereign power – for an authoritarian
regime. However, politicized dress is also
a tool for the opponents of the
regime: to protest against its interpretations of morality, and expand social
and
political space.

Identity, dress and society

Using clothing (usually women’s clothing) as a cultural totem and lever for
social control is not a new
technique, and certainly not exclusive to Islamist
regimes. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church kept a tight
rein on
concepts of morality, including dress – particularly ‘immodest display’ –
although ironically it was only
women’s dress that was accused of being
seductive in the age of the codpiece (Entwistle 2000: 149). Joanne
Entwistle argues that women have developed a heightened sense of
awareness of their dress and its impact in
cultural contexts, because they are
uniquely singled out for social condemnation when their dress transgresses
some cultural norm, particularly in the sense of display:

What is striking about this attitude to female display as seduction is

that it not only holds woman responsible
for her own sexual behaviour,
but for man’s sexual behaviour too: if a man
succumbs to sexual
temptation in thought or deed it is considered her fault for dressing
provocatively.
(Entwistle 2000: 150)
Women’s dress, then, has long been a site of contest over religious and
cultural identity, with ‘good’ and ‘bad’
women being marked in various
ways by their dress. Prostitutes in Europe, for example, were not allowed to
wear
fur at one point, in order to make them distinguishable from
‘respectable’ women (Entwistle 2000: 150). Notably,
France and Belgium
still authorize legal control over female dress by banning the wearing of
full-face veils,
reflecting concerns with the challenge to Western values (see
Franklin’s chapter in this volume). In France, face
veils were considered ‘an
affront’ to French values (El-Nager 2014). Correspondingly, the history of
the Muslim
world also reflects this use of dress to differentiate between
respectable women and women of disrespected
status. For example, slaves
and prostitutes (categories that often merged in Sudan) were not allowed to
cover
their heads, as veils or coverings were for married and free women
(Jaleela 2006: 3). Covering a woman’s head
took on the symbolic indication
of the wearer’s social pride and honour, while removing it meant
submissiveness
and surrender. Women could surrender on a battlefield by
uncovering their heads – signifying a request for
captivity and protection by
the invading forces. As Jaleela writes, ‘Folk songs of North and Central
Sudan
glorify men who would save women from the disgrace of uncovering
their heads’ (2006: 8). Although originally
related to free versus enslaved
status, the head covering gradually took on an association with increased
piety
and eventually, today, it has a close affiliation with the Islamist
Sudanese regime. The current irony is that
the Sudanese government – by
forcefully requiring covering – is providing women with a strong incentive
to
uncover in order to demonstrate their pride and refusal to be submissive.
The symbolic struggle of Sudanese women to assert their independent
identity and to define themselves differently
from government
interpretations of the moral Sudanese citizen has continued with a new
champion. In Summer 2013,
another prosecution of the Criminal Act of
1991 became infamous – again due to the insistence of the woman in
question that the law is a violation of her rights. Amira Osman is an
engineer and owner of her own business. For
15 years Osman has
consistently dressed herself without a headscarf as a ‘personal campaign
against the Sudan
Public Order Regime … as this is who she believes she is
and is how she wants to present herself’ (Strategic
Initiative on Women in
the Horn of Africa 2013). While attempting to conduct some business at a
public office,
Osman was asked by a police officer to cover her hair. She
refused the request and was ‘physically assaulted,
forced to sit on the floor,
verbally abused and later dragged out of the government office to the police
station’
(Strategic Initiative on Women in the Horn of Africa 2013). In this
case, the accused was not even attempting –
as Lubna Hussein was – to
comply with the dress code, she was someone who has consciously
disobeyed it for many
years. Osman would not submit to a summary trial
and demanded that her lawyer
be present. As of the time of writing, her
case was officially placed on hold in the Ministry of Justice.9 As with
Hussein’s case, the
penalty for violations of the public order law is 40
lashes. To date, Osman’s case has served more to galvanize
female activists
than to intimidate Sudanese women. Shortly after her arrest, a group of
activists launched an
initiative to defy the dress code under the Criminal
Act of 1991 (Sudan Radio Service 2013). Although this
initiative seems
confined to the limited number of women who were already willing to dress
in violation of the
code, Osman’s circumstances have generated significant
and continued discussion and support both socially and
online.
The continued sparring between government and citizen over dress in
Sudan has an element that goes beyond women’s
rights to fair legal process.
Indeed, many men support the women who contest dress codes because
ultimately the
codes reflect the ability of the state to define national identity
at the level of the individual. That is,
protest against the dress code is about
asserting one’s ability to express individuality, and to exercise one’s
own
judgement about the limits of social convention and tolerance of dress. The
power of the state to arbitrarily
dictate the meaning of clothing in such
detail results in a kind of imprisonment of public space, forcing women
in
particular into uniforms, and stripping them of personal expression. In all
societies, fashion exists in an
area of social tension between recognizable
conventions – uniforms almost – of national or local dress, and
individual
agency to decide how to express both common belonging and individuality.
As Entwistle puts it:

Fashion and dress have a complex relationship to identity: on the one

hand the clothes we choose to wear can be
expressive of identity,
telling others something about our gender, class, status and so on; on
the other, our
clothes cannot always be ‘read’, since they do not
straightforwardly ‘speak’ and can therefore be open to
misinterpretation.
(Entwistle 2000: 112)

Conclusion
As this chapter has discussed, Sudanese women have to navigate a shifting
political landscape of codes,
violations, fashion and conventions when they
step into the public space. Especially among the educated urban
elite, there
are global fashion trends and popular looks that signal stylistic literacy and
access, as well as
wealth and sophistication. However, the government
attempts to retain control over the definition of decent and
moral
appearance, and thus over what it means to look like a good Sudanese
citizen, regardless of beliefs or
ethnicity. The arbitrary and unpredictable
nature of the enforcement of the government’s standards actually
enhances
its controlling power. Yet such forms of political control that limit
expressions of identity risk
producing the opposite of their intended effect.
While the government may be using the law to promote its
conception of
the ideal citizen, the dress code creates perverse incentives
for violation, as
violating the law becomes associated with strength, pride and individuality.
This is not
dissimilar to the counterproductive effect created in Western
societies that struggle with regulating or banning
the veil, or where Islam
and Muslims are regarded with suspicion, as not conforming to Western
liberal values.
The headscarf, then, becomes a source of pride and
authenticity in the face of a public counter-narrative (Murphy
2009). When
women’s freedom to decide their dress is restricted (either legally or
socially), breaking the code
becomes a temptation to demonstrate the
independence of the fashion subject both to determine and project her
identity.
In Sudan, dress codes are not always the source of legal action, public
protest and activism. Sometimes they
bring Sudanese together in humour,
because laughter in these cases is the most comforting and logical response.
In Autumn 2014, the head of the national radio and television corporation
issued an order directing all female
presenters on the government station,
Sudan TV, to restrain their dress and appearance (El-Nager 2014). In
contrast with the early years of the regime, when dress prohibitions were
strictest, recent broadcast styles had
become colourful and flashy. The new
directive prohibited bright colours, lots of make-up, jewellery and fancy
henna designs on the hands. As henna is a highly popular form of
adornment, concessions were made for it on
married women, but only plain
designs. Women are also required to wear the traditional thobe instead of
modern jacket–headscarf combinations that mirror broadcasting styles in
other Arab countries. The orders were
widely discussed and pilloried in
papers and online forums, and most Sudanese considered the guidelines
ridiculous in the context of the many other channels available with no
limitations on female dress. During the
regime’s early years, the national
station was seen as an Islamist clarion, and even men were required to wear
traditional robes and to sport beards (El-Nager 2014). In a nod to the
perception that the regime’s restrictions
are out of sync with the rest of
Sudanese society, one cartoonist depicted a television set modestly draped
with
only a thin slit at the top. The entire episode reminded people of the
period when a blurred edge appeared at the
lower part of television screens
in order to obscure the bare legs of actresses in foreign programmes. This
practice was jokingly referred to as ‘electronic hijab’ (El-Nager 2014).
Humour is the most appropriate response to the ‘electronic hijab’ and
the new rules for TV presenters,
because the popularity and influence of the
national station is so limited. There are still many opportunities to
watch
brightly coloured dresses, make-up and jewellery on other channels on
Sudanese television. Satellite dishes
are also widespread, and hundreds of
channels from around the world feature fashions of all types, including
styles that certainly would be considered immodest by the Public Order
Police. Conversely, while the possibility
remains that Sudanese women risk
flogging for the decisions they make about getting dressed each day, the
conclusion must be that fashion is carrying significant political weight in
Sudan today. For Sudanese women, the
decision to wear trousers or scarves,
and whether they appear loose or tight,
is about more than an expression of
their colour preferences and individuality. For them, dress is a choice than
could mean public humiliation, physical pain and legal costs. For these
women, dress is, indeed, a fashion
statement.

Notes
1 Hussein’s book, 40 Coups
de fouet pour un pantalon (2009b), was published in France the same
year.
2 Note that the Articles of the
Criminal Act of 1991 under which Hussein was charged do not
mention affray or antisocial behaviour. Ambassador
Mubarak also declared that corporal
punishment and the death penalty in Sudanese law are holdovers from the
British colonial era.
3 The author personally attests
to this, after more than 20 visits to Sudan in eight years – all of them
wearing trousers.
4 Anonymous personal email
communication to the author, 13 March 2011. In this chapter,
correspondents' names have been withheld to
protect their identities.
5 Anonymous personal email
communication to the author, 13 March 2011.
6 Interview with anonymous
civil society activist, 14 December 2014.
7 Personal observations of the
author. It is nearly impossible to visit Sudan without being invited to
a wedding or seeing several of the many
bridal shops featuring white Western-style dresses in
their windows.
8 Conversations with the
author, 13 December 2014.
9 Conversation with human
rights lawyer Dr Nabil Adeeb, 14 December 2014.

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5 (Un)dressing the sovereign
Fashion as symbolic form
Andreas Behnke

Introduction
One of the most popular sections of the National Museum of American
History in Washington, DC is the ‘First
Ladies at the Smithsonian’
exhibition, where every day many hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of
visitors gaze
at historical and contemporary gowns worn by First Ladies of
the USA. The exhibition includes historical day
dresses, evening dresses and
inaugural gowns worn by the wives of newly-elected presidents to the
traditional
balls that celebrate his (and so far these have only been males)
taking office.
What accounts for this interest in, and indeed fascination with, what First
Ladies wore day-to-day in the White
House, on official events, banquets and
receptions, or on Inauguration Day? Traditionally, political science,
with its
ontological commitment to a disembodied subject, has little to offer in the
way of explaining this. The
relationship between fashion, femininity and
political power has often been commented on, yet hardly ever
systematically
investigated. Usually consigned to the style section of newspapers and
magazines, it is relegated
to the accidental, frivolous and, at best,
entertaining realm of political paraphernalia. More often than not,
what to
wear and what not to wear as a First Lady is considered a light-hearted social
commentary by
‘fashionistas’ obsessing about a topic that bears little
relevance to the ‘proper’ issues of high politics. To
remedy this limitation,
we might turn to cultural studies, gender studies or sociological studies, in
which the
corporeal subject and the way it is adorned and fashioned is of
much greater significance. Yet while this
literature offers a number of
fascinating insights into the role of fashion in the social production of
identities as sites of power, transgression and resistance – issues indubitably
relevant for the study of
politics – it does little to elucidate the particular
interest in First Ladies and their relationship with
fashion and power.
The lack of a conceptual and theoretical framework to understand the role
that fashion plays in politics in
general, and in the visualization of
sovereignty in particular, can be attributed to the dominant modern
rationalist understanding of politics and its concomitant rejection of
aesthetics and representation as
irrelevant to the constitution of political
order. The modern political subject appears as a disembodied (yet
curiously
gendered) entity defined by its interests, preferences, perceptions
and power.
Therefore, what First Ladies wear is, by ontological fiat, irrelevant.
However, appearances clearly matter, and one should note the effort,
purpose and creativity put into fashionable
appearances by First Ladies and
women with political power across the world (Young 2011). Moreover,
sociological
(and even philosophical) studies have long since established the
role of fashion and dress in the symbolic
construction of diverse social
identities (cf. Crane (2000); Breward and Evans (2005); Stitziel (2005);
Svendsen
(2006: 75–89; Edwards (2011). Therefore, there is no reason to
assume that the constitution of political
identities does not involve the
purposeful use of sartorial symbolism. As I shall discuss below, the very
‘uniform’ nature of political fashion, above all in the form of the business
suit of male politicians, is in
itself the contingent historical outcome of
social, political and symbolic developments, and not proof of the
irrelevance
of fashion to the constitution of political subjectivity and authority. Finally,
the notion that
fashion and politics are unrelated is a deeply ahistorical and
misleading one: for centuries, political power and
sartorial code have been in
a close relationship in which the former was not only expressed through
fashion, but
in which the latter also co-constituted political authority. As
Wendy Parkins reminds us, fashion as a symbolic
political practice was
involved in the way in which the medieval and early-modern European
‘body politic’ was
created and made visible (Parkins 2002: 2). The doctrine
of ‘the king’s two bodies’ (Kantorowicz 1997) required
that the natural, and
thus imperfect, body of the king would be transformed into the ‘body
politic’: the
metaphysical and immortal body of the state. Writes Mirzoeff
(1995: 54–5): ‘This quasi-divine Body politic was
symbolized by the ritual
anointing of the monarch during the coronation ceremony … In its denial of
the natural
body, the Body politic became entirely dependant on visual
representation’ – including vestiture and dress code.
Artistic representations
of the sovereign were part and parcel of this process, and always showed the
monarch in
spectacular dress. As long as the body of the monarch
represented the body of the state, adorning that body meant
fashioning and
making visible the reality of that state and the monarch’s sovereignty.
The argument of this chapter is that even in the age of disembodied
authority and sovereignty, the visualization
of the body politic and the
sovereign power underlying it remains a relevant, if problematic, issue of
statecraft
(Parkins 2002: 3). Sovereignty, this chapter argues, is in constant
need to be represented and visualized and, in
the process, aestheticized. Put
simply, as a metaphysical concept it requires the visualization of its glory to
sustain its power. For this reason, it is necessary to include fashion in a
‘political sociology’ and investigate
the sartorial processes through which
power and politics are produced, or more precisely, made visible.
More
specifically, this chapter deploys a sartorial ‘sociology of sovereignty’ in
which the dress codes of
sovereignty are investigated as historically
contingent and, above all, gendered symbolic practices through which
sovereignty is made visible, and thus recognizable. Writes Andrea Brighenti
(2007): ‘Recognition is a form of social visibility … And once we see social
recognition as embedded in a
visibility field’ (2007: 329, 331), new
questions about the visuality of political concepts become possible.

Sovereignty as symbolic form

In order to appreciate fully the visuality of sovereignty, the latter notion
should be conceptualized as a
‘symbolic form’. Following Jens Bartelson, as
symbolic form, ‘sovereignty is a mode of objectivation that has
been allowed
to structure the production of both meaning and experience’ (2014: 15). By
providing a template, a
symbolic form structures and organizes otherwise
disorderly and historically changing experiences into
intelligible wholes. As
Cassirer states:

[S]‌ymbolic forms are not imitations, but organs of reality; since it is

solely by their agency that anything
real becomes an object for
intellectual apprehension, and as such is made visible to us. … For the
mind only
that can be visible which has some definite form.
(Cassirer 1946: 8)

As symbolic form, sovereignty, then, becomes a reality out of historically

and culturally varying forms of
symbolic ‘embodiments’:

Claims to supreme authority have long been encoded in weaponry and

coinage, and symbols of sovereign authority
have been embodied in
sceptres and crowns, until the erection and restoration of historical
monuments became an
important way of evoking imaginaries of
national identity and belonging during the nineteenth century.
(Bartelson 2014: 17)

We should forgive Bartleson for overlooking fashion and sartorial code in

this enumeration, as its inclusion in
the list of relevant symbolic
embodiments of sovereignty suggests itself.
Therefore, what needs to be investigated is how symbolic sartorial code
visualizes and turns into reality that
notion of an authority to rule over
human beings, to extract revenues from them, and to decide over their life
and death. Historically, sovereignty has been heavily imbued with symbolic
practices that establish the position
as ordained by divine right, historical
fate, revolutionary spirit or democratic election. Part of these symbolic
practices has been the sartorial code according to which the sovereign
dresses and appears to his or her subjects
or citizens, reflecting and
expressing the sources of his or her legitimacy. In other words, sovereignty
always
deploys a regime of visuality: it always makes itself visible. We are
used to seeing symbols of sovereign power
such as flags displayed when the
sovereign appears on the political stage, the
playing of anthems and the
presence of uniformed military guards on the occasion of state visits. Yet in
modern
(Western) societies that pride themselves on having democratized
political power and subjected the sovereign
exercise of power to
constitutional constraints – in societies that legitimize sovereign power
through electoral
processes, and that choose its representatives from their
midst – the ostentatious display of power and glory
that characterized pre-
democratic monarchical regimes seems to have been relegated to museums,
galleries and
archives. The sartorial code of sovereignty, it seems, is no
longer as prominent and visible as it used to be.
While constitutional
monarchs still dress from time to time in traditional royal garb on those
occasions when the
sovereignty that they symbolize, but no longer embody,
is to be displayed, in most contemporary Western societies
such as France,
Germany, the UK or the USA there is apparently nothing remarkable,
spectacular or even symbolic
about the way sovereign power is fashioned.
Against this common (mis)understanding, this chapter asserts that
sovereignty always combines ‘power and glory’
that even today the
constitutive authority of the state is dressed up and made visible in the
grandeur of
sartorial appearance. To make this visual regime of sovereignty
visible to researchers, its gendered nature needs
to be emphasized. More
specifically, it is the political role of First Ladies to provide the sartorial
glory to
the masculinized power of the modern sovereign. The fascination
with Michelle Obama, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and
other women in similar
positions, and the discussions about the appropriateness of their wardrobes,
reflect a
desire for the symbolic production of sovereign power that cannot
be dissociated from the practices that
constitute this authority. In other
words, there is a continuity of (historically situated) symbolic practices
associated with the production of sovereignty that stretches all the way back
to at least the beginning of modern
political order, and the emergence of the
sovereign as such.

Fashioning sovereignty
The relationship between fashion and sovereignty is anything but accidental,
and goes beyond an ostentatious
display of power and glory. Both
phenomena belong to the age of modernity, the appearance of man as a
social and
political agent, and the emergence of the present as a distinct time
frame within which social processes can take
on novel, innovative and
unprecedented forms. Therefore, modernity should not be reduced to
instrumental
rationality and mastery over nature. Modernity finds its
symbolic expression precisely in fashion, its very
instability and lack of
constancy signifying, as Lipovetsky (1994) puts it:

That appearances are no longer subject to intangible ancestral laws, that

they stem from human decisions and
pure human desire. Just as people
have devoted themselves, in the modern West, to intensive exploitation
of
the material world and to the rationalization of productive tasks,
through
the fleeting nature of fashion they have asserted their power of
initiative over looks. In each case, human
sovereignty and autonomy
are affirmed, exercising their dominion over the natural world as they
do over
their own aesthetic decor.
(Lipovetsky 1994: 24; emphasis added)

With the emergence of fashion as a central element in the constitution of the

modern self, appearance becomes an
issue (1994: 29). More precisely, it
becomes a subject matter to be governed, controlled, and disciplined.
Nothing betrays the political nature of fashion more than the attempt to
regulate sartorial codes through
‘sumptuary laws’ that regulated what
members of each estate could appropriately wear, so as to prevent ‘the
confusion of status and the usurpation of privileges of dress’ (1994: 30). As
Carl Köhler describes France under
Louis XIII:

[I]‌n 1633 a law passed in 1629 was renewed forbidding all except
princes and nobles to wear clothing decked
with precious stones and
gold embroidery, or caps, shirts, cuffs, and other linen embroidered
with gold,
silver, cord or lace, either real or imitation. These edicts were
as ineffectual as all other ones had been.
(Köhler 1963[1928]: 289)

Ineffectual, one might add, not only because it proved to be difficult to

enforce the edict, but also because in
actuality, wearing certain clothes
conferred social and political status. Sumptuary laws assume that
dressing in
a particular way appropriately or inappropriately reflects the given status of a
person; yet
more often than not, wearing the right kind of clothes gave the
owner a particular status and access to
the sites of power. Thus, at the
wedding festivities of Marie-Antoinette and the future King Louis XVI at
Versailles in May 1770, the Duc de Croÿ observed ‘all the men and women
of the Court, or who claimed that they
were, by favour of their fine clothes
they had had made in order to push and shove their way in’ (de Croÿ
1906:
399; author’s translation; emphasis added). As one Johann Gottlieb Georgi
found at the court of Saint
Petersburg in 1793, ‘one admits to the Court …
all men, well dressed and with an epee at their side’ (Georgi
1793: 128,
author’s translation).1
However, the very ineffectuality of sumptuary laws only proves the
political role of fashion in the establishment
of social and political
hierarchies. At the centre, or rather the epitome, of this sartorial order stood
the
sovereign himself (or sometimes herself). The very act of dressing and
undressing the sovereign became a central
part of daily procedure at
Versailles. In contrast with most other princes, the King and Queen of France
were
dressed and undressed in front of favoured courtiers by high-level
officials such as the grand chambellan,
the maître de la garde-robe, and the
premier gentilhomme de la
chambre (Mansel 2005: 3). The reason for this
public display of sartorial ritual attests to the exalted
status of the monarch:

The King of France was an anointed monarch. Dressing him had a

semi-religious aspect, like the robing and
unrobing of priests before and
after service. [Moreover], the King’s dressing (lever) and undressing
(coucher) were not only physical processes, but also critical moments
of contact, when the King’s most
favoured relations, courtiers, and
officials could talk or listen to him.
(Mansel 2005: 3–4)

Even more significant in terms of the symbolic production of sovereignty

was, of course, what the monarch wore.
As any visit to museums, galleries
and royal collections that hold historical paintings of princes, kings and
emperors in their dress will demonstrate, sovereignty was symbolized and
visualized via sartorial abundance and
spectacle. The exalted station of the
prince was produced through a dress code that materialized, and thus made
visible, a power not of this world. In the following, a brief analysis of
Hyacinthe Rigaud’s famous portrait of
the Sun King will support this
argument.

Portrait of Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud

In 1701, Hyacinthe Rigaud created his arguably most famous painting,
Portrait of Louis XIV (Figure 5.1), then King of France and Navarre. The
life-size image
shows Louis dressed in his coronation robes and with the
symbols of his power: a golden sword with precious
stones as insets in the
sheath on his left, and a casually held gold sceptre on which his right hand
rests in a
quite relaxed pose. Yet the most striking aspect of the painting is
the detail it offers of both person and
dress. Both are rendered with exquisite
detail; the face is that of a quite ordinary 58-year-old male with tired
eyes,
sagging cheeks and a double chin. There is very little here that would give
away his exalted position. His
regal status and otherworldly authority is
evident and visible only through the robes that he wears, which Rigaud
paints with equal attention to detail. There is an almost tactile experience in
gazing at the ermine fur that
provides the lining for his coronation gown, at
the shimmering blue satin of this gown and its golden
fleur-de-lis
embroidery, and the elaborate lace embellishments. The gown is draped to
reveal his legs, dressed in
silk stockings and displayed in what a twenty-
first-century observer would judge to be a rather feminine stance.
This
femininity is further enhanced by the spectacular high-heeled shoes that he is
wearing. Their most
distinctive parts are the red heels, precursing the
distinctive feature of current Christian Louboutin
hypersexualized female
shoe design. This combination of masculinity and femininity combines
power and glory in
the figure of the sovereign. The spectacular display of
divine and exalted status served Louis in the symbolic
production of a form
of absolute sovereignty that recreated France as a
centralized state, and
demanded the subordination of the nobility under his rule at Versailles.
Figure 5.1 Portrait of Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743),
1702
(oil on canvas).
Source: Palace of Versailles/public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In a crucial move, the sartorial symbolic form of sovereignty became

gendered during the reign of
Marie-Antoinette, as she took over the sublime
and glorious representation of absolute sovereignty, while her
husband, King
Louis XVI, preferred modest and unspectacular dress. As Caroline Weber
has argued in her study of
the queen’s sartorial policies and strategies at
Versailles, Marie-Antoinette was keenly aware that her success,
power and
influence at the French court depended on her ability to conform to, and
exceed, expectations about her
appearance and sense of fashion. Exceed
expectations she did, with dresses and hairstyles that remain legend to
this
day (Weber 2007: 94ff.). However, her very success at court in this
regard
and her fondness for unorthodox styles also made her the target of the
revolutionary masses, as well as
those courtiers who ‘opposed her rise, and
who bristled at her defiance of time-honoured royal customs’ (Weber
2007:
6). Unable to properly gauge the effects of her extravagant fashion choices
on both nobility and populace,
she ended up alienating both groups.
Crucially, what she failed to do was precisely what she had intended to do:
to give sartorial symbolic form to monarchical sovereignty. By exceeding
the limits of acceptable sartorial code
she in fact undermined its legitimacy,
thus contributing to the coming revolution. In a sense, she could do no
right.
When she dressed lavishly and extravagantly to affirm her status as
dauphine, and later as queen, and in
order to command her subjects’ respect,
the initial enthusiasm of the Parisians quickly turned into contempt and
hatred, attributing to her all kinds of horrors and moral failures. Rather than
express the splendour of royal
sovereignty, she effectively detracted and
distracted from it. Writes Weber:

The charge of narcissism stood to damage her reputation to no end. For

unlike the opulent ensembles
traditionally worn by French sovereigns
… the Queen’s fanciful modes now seemed designed less to enhance
 the
monarchy’s public grandeur than to accentuate her own, private
charms.
[…]
In a land where royal glamour made sense only as a reflection and a
consecration of state power, her
extravagance risked seeming
thoroughly self-indulgent and perilously unmoored from the kingdom’s
broader
concerns.
(Weber 2007: 114)

Thus, her efforts to establish herself as ‘the court’s supermodel, its ruling
diva, the Queen of glamour’
(Saint-Amand and Curtiss Gage 1994: 390) – in
order to compensate for her perilous position as a foreigner and a
sexless
wife of the dauphin and king – backfired in an ultimately lethal fashion.
While queens at the court of
Versailles usually had been rather demure and
conservative in appearance and demeanour, Marie-Antoinette’s
emulation of
what she understood to be the glory of royal power was interpreted by an
increasingly hostile public
– already suffering from ever-increasing taxation
as one of the consequences of constant state financial crisis –
as the
adaptation of a dress code fit for the king’s mistresses, not his wife. As such,
Marie-Antoinette becomes
a symbol of the ‘absolute power that enabled a
king capriciously to bankroll unbridled female acquisitiveness’
(Weber
2007: 119). Thus the gendered dissociation of power and glory here makes it
possible to turn the queen’s
glory against the king’s power, who himself was
actually known among his subjects for his simple tastes in dress
and manners
(Mansel 2005: 65). Ironically, even when the queen indulged in a very
different, modest and simple
style of fashion, she inadvertently produced but
another crisis. When in 1783
she allowed her favourite portraitist, Louise
Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, to exhibit a portrait of her entitled La
Reine en
Gaulle (Figure 5.2) at the annual Paris Salon du
Louvre, the Paris crowds
had yet another reason to find fault with their queen.
Figure 5.2 La Reine en Gaulle, portrait of Marie-Antoinette by
Louise
Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842), 1783 (oil on canvas).
Source: Wolfsgarten Castle, Germany/public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The gaulle was a simply white muslin shift or loose-fitting dress that
Marie-Antoinette preferred for her
stays at Petit Trianon, the small
neoclassical chateau in the garden of Versailles that her husband had given
her
as a gift a few months after his accession to the throne. Here the queen
and her closest friends indulged in
their rarified pastoral imaginations, based
on a ‘cult of the simple life’. Under the influence of an apparently
rather
superficial reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings (focusing on
his
critique of aristocratic and artificial dress), Marie-Antoinette used a simple
dress code of gaulle
and straw hat to express in yet another version her
emancipation and empowerment, and her rejection of the rigid
structure and
sartorial rules of the court at Versailles (Weber 2007: 132). The painting that
caused the crowds
in Paris to turn against her once again depicted Marie-
Antoinette in such a dress, accessorized with a straw hat
and a wide pastel-
blue sash (Weber 2007: 161). Yet rather than placating a public that had
criticized her
extravagant spendthrift ways before, the painting was
considered ‘an affront to the dignity and the sanctity of
the throne’. For the
Paris audience, ‘Marie Antoinette deserved neither her special standing nor
her subjects’
respect’ (Weber 2007: 161). The fact that the muslin for these
dresses was imported from her home country of
Austria only further
emphasized her alienation from French culture, her ‘Austrian deviancy’ and
contempt for
French mores (Weber 2007: 151).
The hatred and contempt that the queen generated despite – or rather
because of – her rejection of aristocratic
sartorial code, and her explicit
preference for the cult of the simple and the gaulle, can be explained
only by
the general attitude towards her in an increasingly hostile French population
that projected its disgust
with the extravagant waste of the court upon her.
This is all the more incongruous, as Marie-Antoinette in effect
started a
sartorial revolution that anticipated the social and political upheaval that
ultimately would bring
down the monarchy. As Weber has convincingly
argued, the queen’s pastoral dress code paved the way for a more
egalitarian
society. Marie-Antoinette’s contemporary critics were quite aware of this
révolution de linon
(revolution in linen) and its consequences for the overall
social order, objecting to it on the grounds that it
made noblewomen look
like peasant girls (Faveau de Frénilly 1909: 80). By doing away with the
distinctive
sartorial markers of social rank, women’s dress no longer offered
socially recognizable markers about background
and class (Weber 2007:
160). Yet the phenomenon of severing social status from sartorial code
would reach beyond
the court and Petit Trianon. As Mansel notes, three
years after the scandal-inciting exhibition of La Reine en
Gaulle, the first
nobleman attended the Paris opera ‘in a simple coat (frac) and his hair cut in
the
fashion of a jockey without powder or pomade’ (2005: 65). In the same
year, the Cabinet des Modes noted
that it was becoming increasingly rare to
see noblewomen (and men) in full robes, or habits à la
française. France,
like much of Europe, increasingly embraced the ‘fashion for simplicity’
(2005: 64).
Yet this sartorial code of simplicity, suggestive as it was of social
equality, did not translate into, or even
indicate, social reform. A different
attitude to dress did not reflect a different approach to political and
social
order (Mansel 2005: 65). However, one of the central moments in the run-up
to the revolution has to be
understood against the backdrop of this relaxation
of sartorial codes: the opening of the Estates General in May
1789, when old
and traditional codes were reimposed, with the nobility wearing ‘rich, gold-
embroidered black
jackets, black breeches, white silk stockings, and the
plumed hats of Henri
IV’s court’ (Weber 2007: 189), while the Third Estate
was forced to dress in humble black cloth, white cambric
cravats and
untrimmed black tricorn hats. The latter replaced the original black toque in
an attempt to
accommodate some of the Third Estate’s protests against an
‘inadmissible inequality, destructive of the very
essence of the Assembly’
(Mansel 2005: 67). With the era of sumptuary laws long gone, this ‘sartorial
apartheid’
and humiliation inflicted on the Third Estate was considered
unacceptable, and provided further fuel for its
revolutionary energy. A first
challenge to the class hierarchy, expressed in the reimposed dress code and
the
privileges of sovereign and nobility, was presented at the official
convocation of the Estates General when,
after the speech of Louis XVI, the
Third Estate put their hats back on their heads in defiance of the rule that
commoners had to remain bareheaded in the presence of their sovereign
(Weber 2007: 193). Here, sartorial code and
conduct become symbolic
resources to recast and contest the ancien regime’s symbolic form of
sovereignty.
When on 17 June 1789 the members of the Third Estate
constituted themselves as the Assemblée Nationale,
proclaiming it the only
legitimate legislature ‘because the members composing it are the only
representatives
lawfully and publicly acknowledged and verified’
(Assemblée Nationale 2014[1789]), the French Revolution became a
contest
not just over political and social justice, but over sovereignty: whether it
would continue to be based
on the transcendental status of the monarch, or
whether a new form of legitimacy – the will of the nation, as
represented in
the National Assembly – henceforth would be the basis of political rule. In
fact, this question
was settled fairly quickly through the acceptance of a
sartorial item, and thus of a new symbolic form of
sovereignty by the king
himself. On 17 July 1789, Louis XVI travelled to Paris and the Hôtel de
Ville.
Whether he wanted to avoid civil war by ostensibly sanctifying the
revolution (Mansel 2005: 68), or whether he
hoped to regain the affection of
his subjects (Weber 2007: 198), is of less significance than his conduct when
presented with a cocarde nationale – the symbol of the Revolution – by the
newly-elected major of Paris.
As Weber describes it:

Baffled but compliant, the King fumbled to pin the blue and red ribbons
to his hat, on top of the royal white
rosette already there. As he did so,
the people burst into electrified cheers, hailing him as the ‘Restorer of
French Liberty’ and recognizing the move as an unheard-of concession
to their will.
(Weber 2007: 199)

In effect, accepting the cocarde, worn by thousands of ordinary Parisians

that had risen against his
absolutist rule, Louis abolished the symbolic form
of sovereignty that had sustained and expressed this rule.
That rule
 was an order which relied on the continual proclamation of difference.
In this order, the king – its political
and ritual center – was as close to
God as other men were far from the King.
He was of a nature
incommensurate with theirs. That incommensurability was not the same
as difference. The
King’s relationship with God was incommensurable
with the sorts of difference that existed between men. The
King was the
fount of honour and therefore the fount of difference. The whole social
order was thus centered on
the idea of difference.
(Outram 2004: 27)

Thus, accepting the revolutionary cocarde abolishes this idea of difference

on which the monarch’s
sovereignty rested, and recasts the latter in line with
the stated aims of the French Revolution. Gone is the
exalted state of the
sovereign, expressed in the robes that Louis had worn to distinguish himself
from ordinary
men. Keenly aware of the sartorial expressions of sovereign
symbolic form, the revolutionaries made sartorial
equality – wearing the
badge of the revolution – a virtually mandatory requirement. In addition, the
revolutionary Committee of Public Safety requested the artist David to
‘present his views and plans in relation
to modifying the present national
costume, so as to render it appropriate to republican habits and the character
of the Revolution’ (Taine 1885: 88). Louis would survive for a few more
years as a constitutional monarch, yet
the dynamics of the revolution, itself
in need of a system of difference in order to maintain its fervour, turned
the
king into the principal representative of the ancien régime – ultimately
condemning him to death under
the guillotine in January 1793.
Against this backdrop of a revolutionary redefinition of symbolic
representations of sovereignty,
Marie-Antoinette’s continued sartorial
commitment after her husband’s death to the ancien régime, as
expressed in
her black mourning dress – which invoked the monarchy’s traditional dress
code on the occasion of a
sovereign’s death – deserves notice. One might
agree with Weber’s assessment that the queen’s jailers committed a
tactical
error ‘insofar as her clothes preserved through their symbolism a monarchy
that the Revolution had
already gone to great lengths to suppress once and
for all’ (Weber 2007: 269). Yet in the greater scheme of
things, this gesture
proved to be quite futile. Much more significant is that when Marie-
Antoinette herself was
brought to the guillotine, she chose to wear only a
simple white chemise, a dress of the same colour, and a white
linen bonnet.
Accentuating the paleness of her physique, this ensemble turned her into ‘a
figure of pure radiant
white’ (Weber 2007: 287). In perhaps her most
dramatic sartorial gesture, the former Queen of France linked her
execution
to the erasure of the transcendental sovereignty she had expressed so
masterfully, and yet so
provocatively during her reign, and the rejection of
the new symbolic form of sovereignty that the revolution had
instituted.
Having turned into a figure of symbolic and sartorial purity, in death she
finally transcended both
old and new order, the monarchical order she tried
to preserve, and the modern bourgeois order that she
inadvertently helped to
inaugurate. From a fashion viewpoint, the execution of Marie-Antoinette
ended the
sartorial symbolic form that linked sovereignty to divine right.
However,
arguably, the link between fashion and the divinely ordained order
that it had symbolized already had been
severed during her lifetime – and by
her own making. In her attempt to secure her status at the court of
Versailles,
her use of outrageous and extravagant fashion resulted in the emancipation
of fashion from the
particular political order that it previously symbolized.
Marie-Antoinette’s very personal sartorial choices, her
preference for
outrageous personalized dresses that she would only wear once at balls, for
white muslin that
suggested sexual promiscuity, for masculine riding
dresses, for dress that, in other words, no longer expressed
‘an eternally
beautiful and stable cosmic order’ (Vinken 2014: 133), in fact undermines
fashion as a symbolic
form of absolutist sovereignty by releasing the former
from the feudal political order it previously served. Her
very personal choice
of garment as well as her patronage of an independent fashion designer,
Rose Bertin,
precurses the way that fashion, power and sovereignty are
aligned in the contemporary age, where the vestiary
competence of a queen
or First Lady is judged by her personal style and the designers she chooses.2
Against her most deeply
seated instincts, Marie-Antoinette therefore
anticipates the post-revolutionary, bourgeois age in which fashion
as a
symbolic form of sovereignty represents and visualizes an order in which
political authority reflects to a
significant extent the increasing power of
economic and commercial interests vis-à-vis the state in modern
capitalist
society. What First Ladies can wear today is determined by fashion designers
that operate on the
interstices of commerce and inspiration.3
In the post-revolutionary era European monarchs would dress in
indistinguishable frock coats, unless they
appeared at formal ceremonies. On
these rare occasions, the military uniform became the sartorial form of
sovereignty, invoking ‘service to the nation or the state’ rather than
transcendental nature as the basis of
their rule. In fact, in many countries
such as Prussia, Russia and Sweden, monarchs had long preferred the
military uniform to the French court’s habit habillé. Above all, Prussia’s
military successes under
Frederick II and the status that the Prussian army
acquired under him ‘helped make uniforms fashionable
throughout Europe’
(Mansel 2005: 23). While the splendour and pomp of the French monarchs’
dress was, in a sense,
transgender, the military uniform that now fulfilled its
symbolic form clearly rendered sovereignty masculine.
When in 1762
Catherine II of Russia seized power in an armed coup d’état from her
husband Peter III in St
Petersburg, her dress was the traditional green and
gold uniform of the life guards of the Semyonovsky Regiment –
in clear
sartorial opposition to the new uniforms introduced by her husband (Mansel
2005: 24). Besides expressing
her loyalty to the military units that brought
her to power, wearing the uniform also indicated that she was ‘man
enough’
to take over the reigns of the Russian Empire from her weak husband.
Against the backdrop of the ‘egalitarian’ and masculinized symbolic form
of the military uniform, the court in
Versailles appeared increasingly out of
time and out of touch with the rest of the developments in Europe. Writes
Mansel: ‘The reason for the French monarchy’s loss of respect after 1750
was
not only its perceived extravagance, immorality and protection of the
court nobility, but also its anachronistic
civilian character’ (2005: 35). While
Marie-Antoinette defined the apex of the gendered combination of power
and
glory as the symbolic form of sovereignty, she also anticipated its
demise. To be sure, to this day, sartorial
symbolic forms of sovereignty can
still refer to the exalted and transcendent state of the monarch. Any
coronation – or, as in the UK, every State Opening of Parliament by the
monarch – still becomes an event for such
a display of sublime and glorious
fashion and other-worldly splendour.4 Yet in post-revolutionary Europe,
military
uniform became the ubiquitous fashion statement of monarchs,
while the dress code of their governments succumbed
to the ‘Great
Masculine Renunciation’.

Gendering the sartorial form of sovereignty

One need not follow J.C. Flugel into a psychology of clothes in order to
agree with his historical verdict that
at the end of the 18th century:

[T]‌here occurred one of the most remarkable events in the history of

dress … men gave up their right to all
the brighter, gayer, more
elaborate, and more varied forms of ornamentation, leaving these
entirely to the use
of women.
(Flugel 1940[1930]: 111)

Within the context of this study, this means that even the male sovereign had
to abandon ‘his claim to be
considered beautiful. He henceforth aimed at
being only useful’. As noted above, for (royal) sovereigns this
meant that
their sartorial code was limited to the military uniform in order to symbolize
their usefulness and
service to the state and later to the nation. Concurrently,
‘woman was to enjoy the privilege of being the only
possessor of beauty and
magnificence, even in the purely sartorial sense’ (Flugel 1940[1930]: 111).
Despite his
stated intention to explain the evolution of dress codes with
reference to psychological factors, Flugel in fact
links this development to
causes ‘of a political and social nature’ in general, and the French
Revolution in
particular. Only in ‘archaic features of social life as are
represented by Court ceremonies’ the ‘gorgeous and
varied garments’ of old
are still displayed (Flugel 1940[1930]: 113).5
Flugel’s observations are pertinent for our analysis of the sartorial form of
sovereignty as well. The gendering
of sovereignty, the demise of ‘gender-
bending’ beautiful dress in the symbolic display of sovereignty, and the
emergence of dress codes that emphasized service and usefulness, now
linked sovereignty to the notion of
(national) community. The drastic
reduction of ostentation and splendour in the garment of politicians in
general, and sovereigns in particular, eliminated the ‘socially disintegrating
factors that are liable to be
produced by differences in clothes’ (Flugel
1940[1930]: 114). Whereas the
monarchical rule of Louis XVI and Marie-
Antoinette had relied on precisely the production of such difference,
supreme political authority now was expressed and constituted through
military uniform or simple civilian dress
to stress the contractual relationship
between sovereign and nation.6 Therefore, it would be wrong to argue that
fashion no longer matters
in the symbolic form of contemporary sovereignty.
Quite the contrary: once our analytical tools and sensitivities
are properly
attuned, we are able to discern, recognize and interpret sartorial tactics,
strategies and codes in
contemporary politics in general, and in
representations of sovereignty in particular. Neither would it suffice
to focus
solely on female fashion and dress. While at least within the realm of politics
and diplomacy it is
still possible to agree with Flugel’s conclusion that
beauty and magnificence are now the privilege of female
political actors,
nonetheless, male presidents, heads of state and other significant power
holders never truly
escape the scrutiny of public and publicized review and
critique.7 Therefore, what is needed is an analytics that recovers from history
specific dress codes as historically situated symbolic forms of sovereignty.
The following section will touch on
some of the more recent developments
in this regard. To this day, it is impossible to overlook that the gendered
distinction between ‘usefulness’ and ‘sameness’ on the one hand, and
‘beauty’ and ‘magnificence’ on the other,
significantly structure the
contemporary symbolic form of sovereignty. The gendered fashion sense,
the power
dressing of female presidents, First Ladies and female politicians
remains at the centre of public fascination,
with the dress code of most male
power holders serving as a necessary supplement. While contributing little to
the splendour and magnificence of sovereignty, their presence provides the
necessary conventional backdrop
against which the grandeur of female
power dressing becomes visible.
The gendered nature of sovereign splendour
In present-day politics, no other First Lady or high-level female politicians
has received as much attention
regarding her sartorial competence and
practices as Michelle Obama, the wife of US President Barack Obama. Not
since the days of Jacqueline Kennedy has a First Lady used fashion in such
an expressive and meaningful political
way (Bruzzi 2014: 49–50). It seems
unlikely that any other First Lady has been subjected to almost obsessive
sartorial reviews to the same extent. For example, the blog Mrs. O
(www.mrs-o.com) followed and examined each and every dress that Obama
wore at social and political
events. In a slightly more detached manner,
fashion writers of major newspapers such as the New York Times
and above
all the Washington Post regularly review, critique and occasionally criticize
Obama for her
sartorial choices. There are numerous books published about
her, some analysing her personal commitment to style
and fashion (Norwood
2009; Swimmer 2009; Betts 2011), some providing advice on ‘how to be
like Michelle Obama’
(Coleman 2013).
Part of Obama’s understanding of the political role of fashion can be
attributed to her personality and professional career (Slevin 2015: 189; 274–
5). Yet in a crucial sense her
personal motivation for her sartorial choices are
not immediately relevant here. Obama’s exceptional fashion
sense (for a
First Lady) simply defines her as the epitome and apex of the general
structure of contemporary
symbolic forms of sovereignty where femininity
and fashion serve as the necessary, rather than superfluous or
frivolous,
sublime supplement to masculinized power. In other words, the public’s,
bloggers’ and journalists’
fascination and preoccupation with her style
simply casts into sharper relief a more general phenomenon that, in
one way
or another, applies universality to ‘women in power’ (Young 2011).
Within the American context, Obama’s sartorial refinement is on display
against the backdrop of a president who
follows the convention of
contemporary masculine political sartorial culture: removing his tie and
rolling up his
shirt sleeves whenever possible, and at more formal events
dressing in the uniforms of either suit or white
tie.8 More
interestingly, the
masculinized symbolic form of contemporary sovereignty even includes the
depiction of a
shirtless president on the cover of the May 2009 edition of
Washingtonian magazine (Washingtonian
2009). In fact, this was not the first
time such ‘masculine’ images of President Obama had been published; in the
weeks before his 2009 inauguration, blogs and other publications were abuzz
with images from his vacation on
Hawaii, leading the English newspaper
The Telegraph to compare his ‘shapely frame’ and ‘muscular pectoral
muscles and flat stomach’ favourably to less flattering images of then French
President Nicolas Sarkozy and
former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The Telegraph also offered a positive assessment of Obama
compared to the
images of a shirtless Russian President Vladimir Putin (Moore 2008).9 In the
latter case, Russian presidential
sovereignty is expressed in a
hypersexualized symbolic form: the masculinity produced by the absence of
a shirt
is further enhanced (to the level of parody) by a hunting rifle
suggestively pointing upwards from his waist. As
these images indicate,
contemporary masculinized sovereignty is often distinctly non-fashionable –
in fact,
anti-fashion – with physical virility no longer mediated through
garment items such as mediaeval codpieces.
Instead, it is produced in a
flagrant and shirtless display of the male body.
Often, attempts by male political leaders to escape such stereotypes, and
the implied renunciation of style, are
met with ridicule and a reminder that
they are infringing on the prerogative of First Ladies. To wit, when in
2015
during a meeting with President Obama in New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi wore a suit
embroidered with golden letters spelling his
name, media representatives called it a ‘personalization [taken] to
a
ridiculous extreme’ (Zezima 2015). As President Obama himself noted in a
vestiary quip about Modi’s suit: ‘Move
aside, Michelle Obama, the world
has a new fashion icon’ (Sharma 2015). In a similar vein, the Wall Street
Journal pointed out that ‘Narendra Modi Outshines Michelle Obama With
Airport Outfit’, discussing in detail the ‘saffron-colored shawl embroidered
with the teardrop
pattern’ that he chose to accessorize ‘a cream-colored long
shirt and sleeveless vest with a stiff Roman collar,
sometimes called the
Modi vest’. The article did not fail to mention that Obama wore ‘a tailored
dress and
matching jacket’ designed by her ‘favourite Indian-American
designer’, Bibhu Mohapatra (Bhattacharya 2015). The
reference point for
assessing and evaluating Modi’s sartorial performance in this encounter with
the
conventionally dressed President of the USA is therefore the First Lady
of the USA. Here, the sartorial
competition between women (and First
Ladies, as will be discussed below) is transformed into a fashion contest
between sovereigns, thus in effect feminizing Modi as a new ‘fashion icon’
challenging – or even replacing –
Michelle Obama. The proper fashion
contest, the mocking commentary on Modi suggests, can take place only
between
her and fellow First Ladies. One such ‘competition’ took place
between Obama and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the wife of
Sarkozy. The first
meeting between the First Ladies in Strasbourg, France in April 2009,
accompanying their
respective husbands to a NATO summit, was
characterized by the media on both sides of the Atlantic as a ‘fashion
face-
off’ (Strzemien 2009) or a ‘sartorial battle’ (Holmes 2009). The Huffington
Post provided a
comparative analysis of both Obama’s (Thakoon) as well as
Bruni-Sarkozy’s (Dior) fashion choices (Strzemien
2009), while a Guardian
article declared the American First Lady the clear winner (Holmes 2009).
More
sober analysts provided calmer assessments, focusing on the sartorial
agency of both women and the way that their
respective fashion choices
revealed their break from stylistic restraints and traditions, and the assertion
of
their independence (Givhan 2010). Yet such a reading overlooks the
deeply politicized role of First Ladies and
their appearance in the definition
of the relations between states and societies. During the G20 meeting in
London that preceded the NATO summit, ‘Britain was wooed by Michelle
Obama’, by her personal conduct and, above
all, her style of fashion. While
a year before Bruni-Sarkozy had dazzled Britain in ‘an enchantingly formal
wardrobe of made-to-measure Christian Dior couture’, economic recession
and a general public suspicion of elites
in Britain meant that this would look
Marie Antoinette-ish now. Within this new political climate, Obama’s

low-key outfits made up of skirts and tops in colours whose deliberate

almost-mismatch lent them a casual tone:
a blush-pink cardigan with a
mint gingham skirt on Wednesday, a peacock-and-turquoise
 combination on Thursday.
The sequinned cardigan and check skirt were
bought from J Crew, a midmarket American retailer whose clothes the
Obama family often wear; instead of changing accessories with each
outfit, Michelle Obama wore the same double
string of pearls
throughout the visit. These are minor details, but ones which help fix
the first lady in the
public perception as ‘real’.
(Cartner-Morley 2009)

In the absence of Bruni-Sarkozy, who did not accompany her husband to

London,
the American First Lady had the undivided attention of the British
media. ‘Still, everyone knows that France is
the fashion capital’, so when
meeting Bruni-Sarkozy in Strasbourg:

realizing that she would be judged against a European fashion icon,

Mrs. Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer,
brought her A game.
Resplendent in a burgundy Thakoon coat and dress (her counterpart
was in Dior), her hair
coiffed into a bouffant that would have made
Mrs. Kennedy proud, she stood toe-to-toe with Mrs. Sarkozy.
(Cooper 2009)

Clearly, this is about more than the fashion choices of two prominent
women. Writes Givhan (2010): ‘Mostly, these
women remain silent in these
ceremonial situations. They stand in the background and strike a pose of
nonchalant
engagement.’ Yet in the case of Obama and Bruni-Sarkozy, the
very symbolic charge in the meeting of two
sovereigns is carried by the
respective First Ladies, the competition of sovereign states sublimated into a
‘fashion stand-off’.10
Such symbolic power, however, cannot be reduced to
formal events such as state visits. In a sense, a First Lady
is expected to
always dress the part.

Sartorial code and sartorial opprobrium

While today sovereignty can be represented symbolically through shirtless
presidents in swimming trunks, for the
First Lady herself, any demonstration
of casualness and renunciation of sartorial standards is interpreted as a
deprecation of that sovereignty. Thus, when images of Obama emerged in
August 2009 during a vacation that showed
her descending from Air Force
One wearing shorts, T-shirt and sneakers, media and public opinion went
into high
gear. After NBC’s Today show made the images the topic of a poll,
no fewer than 300,000 viewers responded
(Associated Press 2009; Slevin
2015: 277). A Huffington Post poll on the same topic garnered some 13,000
votes, with a clear majority accepting this sartorial choice. As Robin Givhan
pointed out, there was nothing
wrong as such with the outfit, as it did not
include any tasteless t-shirt, ‘bum bag’ or flip-flops – the
accessories of all
too many American tourists home and abroad. For a private vacation outing
to the Grand Canyon,
Givhan maintained, Obama’s choices were
impeccable, only to add: ‘But this does not make the ensemble ok’ (Givhan
2009). The reason she gives to support this sartorial verdict points precisely
to the gendered division of labour
in the symbolic representation of
sovereignty that is the central argument of this chapter. In Givhan’s words:

[U]‌ntil the West Wing – and not the East – starts regularly fielding
inquiries regarding china patterns,
decorators and the menu for
upcoming White House dinners and luncheons, the
first lady will be
burdened with matters of aesthetics. And her person remains the
primary device in
communicating her philosophy.
(Givhan 2009)

In other words, it is (the office of) the First Lady in the East Wing of the
White House that has primary
responsibility for the sublime symbolic forms
of sovereignty, while the West Wing – the President’s office – is
the site of
unadorned power. This function cannot be suspended for a vacation or any
other private moment. As the
integral, sublime symbolic form of US
sovereignty, the figure of the First Lady can never escape the public gaze.
In
Givhan’s critical words:

When the first couple disembarks from Air Force One, military
personnel stand at attention, shutters click and
minions scurry. It’s not
 as though they are climbing out of their own personal RV with their
backpacks – like
celebrities caught unawares by the paparazzi.
Ultimately, the first lady can’t be – nor should she be – just like
everyone else. Hers is a life of
responsibilities and privileges. She gets
the fancy jet. She has to dress for the ride.
(Givhan 2009)11

Clearly, the ghost of Marie-Antoinette is still with us. The court of public
opinion still considers and assesses
the sartorial appearance of the First Lady
in terms of its appropriateness for a sovereign. Thus, to dress down,
to dress
casually and in a private manner runs the risk of symbolically disrespecting
and diminishing the power
of the sovereign, to deny its sublime nature and
to make it ‘common’ (Givhan 2009). Of course, for
Marie-Antoinette, this
problem emerged in the opposite way: her constant overdressing, the
sartorial excesses
that she indulged in, became the focus of the critics and
the revolutionaries that overthrew the regime she
fashioned so extravagantly.
This reading of high fashion as a symbolic form of illegitimate
sovereignty – this identification of excessive
style as a signifier of a First
Lady’s moral depravity that erases the rightfulness of her husband’s regime –
re-emerged in a vivid fashion in Spring 2012. Huberta von Voss-Wittig and
Sheila Lyall Grant, the wives of the
German and British UN ambassadors,
launched an Internet-based petition on Change.org in which they appealed to
Asma al-Assad to play a more active role in bringing the civil war in Syria to
an end (Change.org 2012). The
video that accompanies the petition (which
reached almost 38,000 supporters) plays off al-Assad’s ‘care for
style’ and
‘struggle for [her] image’ against the plight of Syrian women caught in the
chaos of the civil war who
‘care for their people’ and ‘struggle for survival’
(YouTube 2012). The images used to illustrate al-Assad’s
moral corruption
are taken from a notorious spread published in March 2011 in American
Vogue.12 The exposé was published
right at the beginning of the uprising of
Syrian citizens, which would soon
trigger a violent response of the Syrian
government, which disregarded basic principles of humanitarian law. The
embarrassing political tone-deafness of the Vogue portrait did not so much
betray a complete lack of
understanding of the political role of First Ladies –
this role is at least implicitly acknowledged – but a
dangerous conflation of
sartorial style and political rightfulness. In other words, well-dressed First
Ladies who
are well versed in Western high fashion are taken to represent
high moral standards, and thereby political
legitimacy. Yet as the letter and
video of the ambassador’s wives revealed, First Ladies’ fashion sense is a
much
more unstable signifier, referring in this case to the very opposite of
Western standards of civilization and
morality. In the case of al-Assad, this
negative revalorization of her sartorial aptitude was facilitated by her
widely
publicized preference for shoes by the French designer Christian Louboutin.
The models she expressed
interest in (Daffodil 160 crystal court shoes,
Asteroid 140 suede court shoes, Devidas 140 multicoloured and
crystal
embroidered court shoes, and Sex 120 patent leather court shoes (cf. Al-
Assad 2012) are arguably footwear
that very ostentatiously express
Louboutin’s stylistic references (the infamous red soles) to Parisian
prostitutes and cabaret dancers, as well as the fashion aesthetics of the days
of Marie-Antoinette, when red
soles indicated royal privilege. Unwittingly,
one may presume, al-Assad channels Marie-Antoinette by dressing the
part
of a debauched feminine sovereign that puts her own appearance above the
fate of her people.
Such an interpretation of her sartorial style was not a given. Prior to the
civil war, her Western-style vestiary
choices were read as an indicator of a
potential reorientation of Syria towards the West.

As the West begins to take steps to build diplomatic bridges with Syria
and, in turn, Syria makes tentative
overtures towards the West, a
familiar-looking Arab first lady who dresses as though she is a
character in a
sequel to Sex and the City might do more for her
country’s image than most political pundits could
comprehend.
(Young 2011: 163)

It was only in the context of the civil war and the brutal response of the al-
Assad regime to peaceful protesters
that this dress code was no longer
interpreted as a symbolic statement of a new political and cultural
orientation of the Syrian government, and instead as proof of al-Assad’s
eccentric and morally depraved
character. Whatever fashion diplomacy she
might have intended to engage in, in order to reposition Syria in the
eyes of
the West, failed spectacularly.13

Fashion diplomacy and imperial sovereignty

Fashion diplomacy is the use by First Ladies (and female political leaders) of
dress in general, and high fashion
in particular, for the purpose of conveying
a particular symbolic form of, or
narrative about, the sovereign authority of
the state in question towards other states – and, secondarily but
inevitably,
towards domestic audiences. While Michelle Obama is certainly not the only
historical or contemporary
First Lady involved in fashion diplomacy, she
deserves particular attention, not only because of her frequently
noted
shrewdness in, and mastery of, this symbolic technique, but also because of
the particular narrative about
American sovereignty that she articulates and
expresses in this way.
The following analysis will focus on the sartorial narratives that Obama
produced on the occasion of the eight
state dinners that the White House
held between 2009 and 2014. These dinners are the politically most
symbolically charged events, celebrating the diplomatic ties between the
USA and the country represented by a
foreign head of state or government.
Therefore, sartorial splendour as an expression of the mutual respect among
sovereigns in general, and the respect conferred on the guest in particular, is
an integral part of the event.
What stands out for the fashion critics is that on
four of these occasions, Obama wore a dress by a designer with
a direct
connection to the guest nation. At the state dinner for British Prime Minster
David Cameron in March
2012, Obama wore a gown by the English
designer Georgina Chapman and her New York-based label Marchesa. On
three
further occasions she wore dresses by American-other country
designers. On the very first state dinner of the new
administration in
November 2009 in honour of the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh,
Obama wore a strapless
silver-sequined evening gown by the Indian-
American designer Naeem Khan (Figure 5.3).14
Figure 5.3 Michelle Obama in Naeem Khan at the state dinner for the
Indian
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, November 2009.
Source: Susan Walsh/AP/Press Association Images.

In October 2011 the guests of a state dinner for the South Korean
President Lee Myung-bak saw Obama in a
one-shoulder purple gown
created by the Korean-American designer Doo-ri Chung. For a state dinner
with the
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe in April 2015, she wore a
purple sleeveless and floor-length gown by the
Japanese-born American
designer Tadashi Shoji (Bennett 2015).
What message do these sartorial choices convey as symbolic forms of
sovereignty? On a superficial level, one
might see them as expressions ‘of
pride in American creativity and craftsmanship’ combined with ‘an
acknowledgement of the honoured country – an appreciation of its aesthetics
and talent’, making the First Lady’s
sartorial choices a matter of ‘good
manners and respectfulness’ (Givhan 2015). Yet on closer and more critical
reflection, a different and more politically charged interpretation emerges.
Implied in Givhan’s interpretation
is the statement that the aesthetic talent of
the designer has only been realized – indeed can be only realized –
in the
USA when it becomes part of American creativity and craftsmanship.
Therefore, the creativity and talent of
foreign nationals is rightfully
appropriated by the USA, as this move is the condition under which this
potential
can be fulfilled in a globalized (fashion) world. Foreign cultures,
aesthetics and fashion traditions are mere
raw material to be appropriated by
a New York-based fashion industry that
transforms them into globally
recognizable, rather than nationally limited, products. Thus Obama’s
sophisticated
fashion diplomacy gives symbolic form to what scholars have
characterized as the USA’s imperial sovereignty,
which underpins the
American role in the globalization of political, economic and cultural space.
In the words of
Hardt and Negri:

Perhaps the fundamental characteristic of imperial sovereignty is that

its space is always open. [The] modern
sovereignty that developed in
Europe from the sixteenth century onward conceived space as bounded,
 and its
boundaries were always policed by the sovereign administration.
Modern
sovereignty resides precisely on the limit. In the imperial
conception, by contrast, power finds the logic of
its order always
renewed and always re-created in expansion.
(Hardt and Negri 2000: 167)

The expansive logic of this sovereignty is reflected and given symbolic form
in the appropriation of the
productivity and creativity of ‘other country-
American’ designers. The hyphenation of their identity, combining
their
national heritage and tradition with the globalizing US identity, reflects the
subjectivity that this form
of sovereignty fashions: any successful designer is
an American in the making. The designer’s subjectivity and
creativity can no
longer refer to stable (national) spaces; in the age of imperial sovereignty it
becomes a
product of transnational dynamics. Therefore, the hyphenation
encompasses liberation of both subjectivity and
creativity from traditional
limits. Rather than facing fixed boundaries, imperial sovereignty encounters
a moving
frontier to be conquered, included and absorbed. Wearing gowns
by other country-American designers symbolizes and
authenticates the
inclusion and absorption of their spaces of origin into the globalizing
American space. There
is in this conception no more constitutive outside, as
produced by the classical European model of sovereignty.
There are only
obstacles, challenges and resistance to overcome for the globalizing
momentum of US imperial
sovereignty. To hyphenate identity and creativity
is not simply a merging or hybridization of identity; rather,
it gives that
identity a whole new, globalized identity.
If this interpretation of Obama’s fashion diplomacy holds up, the final
dress to be discussed deserves particular
attention. In January 2011, on the
occasion of a state dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao, the First Lady
wore a bright red evening gown designed by Sarah Burton, the brand’s new
creative director and successor to
Alexander McQueen (Figure 5.4).
Figure 5.4 Michelle Obama in Alexander McQueen at the state dinner for
Chinese President Hu Jintao, January 2011.
Source: Charles Darapak/AP/Press Association Images.

Obama had defied the expectations of fashion observers who had

expected her to choose the Chinese-American
designers Jason Wu or Vera
Wang (Shahid 2011).15 While the red colour of the dress clearly paid homage
to Chinese culture,
the choice of a European designer does not fit Obama’s
preference for other country-American designers. The
symbolic form that
this gown gives to American sovereignty does not repeat the imperial
gesture of the sartorial
choices discussed above. China, it is acknowledged,
is not part of the American frontier; it is not considered a
site of creativity
and productivity to be realized by ‘becoming American’. While it recognizes
Chinese culture
through the choice of its colour, the gown does not render it
as mere creative reservoir for American-fashioned
globalization. In Givhan’s
(2011) words, the ‘red petal print, silk organza gown wasn’t so much an act
of
diplomacy as a broad statement about the new realities of the fashion
industry’. It also fashioned a very
different symbolic narrative about
globalization in which this process takes
precedent over any lingering
nationalism and boundaries.

Mrs. Obama’s considered fashion message, her full-skirted dress, from

a British fashion house worn in
celebration of a Chinese president,
struck a blow for creativity. In grand and sweeping terms, one could
argue
that it symbolized the ability of a designer’s imagination to cross
borders, connect different cultures, and
ultimately express itself in a
singular moment of beauty.
(Givhan 2011)

In other words, the gown gives sublime symbolic form to a process that itself
is significantly driven as much by economic and financial interests as it is by
the designer’s imagination. The
border-transcending dynamics that make it
possible to put together the sartorial assemblage that Givhan describes
here
are not least an expression of late capitalism’s economic logic, and the
significant role that a
billion-dollar global fashion industry plays in it. With
regard to the apparel industry alone, China is expected
to become the
world’s largest market by 2015 with a size of $540 billion, with the USA as
a more mature market
coming third (behind the EU) with $285 billion
(Statistica n.d.). Therefore, Obama’s recognition of China as a
significant,
and in the future, dominant player in this global industry evades the imperial
gesture of
appropriation, and instead gives symbolic expression to the
material reality of globalization that lies behind
this development. Fashion in
this symbolic gesture becomes untied and liberated from any national
appropriation;
instead, it becomes pure globalized circulation.16

Conclusion
Unmasking the sovereign
What, then, does (un)dressing the sovereign do? Drawing on Foucault’s
critique of power, John Rajchman asserts
‘Power becomes acceptable or
tolerable through … the way it is given to be seen’ (1988: 105). The author
here
builds on Foucault’s argument that ‘power is tolerable only on
condition that it mask a substantial part of
itself. Its success is proportional
to its ability to hide its own mechanisms. Would power be accepted if it were
entirely cynical?’ (Foucault 2012: 86).
For Foucault, the continued understanding of power as vested in an
individual or personalized sovereign as in the
‘juridico-monarchic’ model is
precisely such a masking mechanism that makes it impossible to visualize
the
decentred, capillary and anonymous operation of power. As Foucault
laments, we still have not ‘cut off the head
of the king’ (2012: 89).
Therefore, our fascination with First Ladies’ fashion choices, with the ‘pomp
[and] the
“ostentatious signs of power”’ (Rajchman 1988: 105) masks the
death of the sovereign and the fact that power is
no longer owned or
possessed by such a figure, but rather exercised within new forms of
(globalized)
governance.17 Yet such a
position ties the concept of sovereignty
too much to the state and its traditional exclusionary iteration. As
discussed
above, a different, imperial form of sovereignty can be identified as
constitutive of an order that,
while not abolishing the state, nonetheless
redefines the relationship between inside and outside, and makes
possible
the political governance of globalization. Rather than a mask for a
decapitated sovereign, Michelle
Obama’s fashion diplomacy provides a
sartorial symbolic form for this sovereignty, making it visible and
appreciable, and providing it with the splendour that sovereign power
requires both in its traditional and
imperial articulation. As noted above, the
gown worn for the Chinese state
dinner very much expressed the
involvement of the USA within a globalized (fashion) system characterized
by
transaction and exchange, rather than the exclusionary logic of traditional
sovereignty.
Yet for all the changes that fashion as a symbolic form of sovereignty has
undergone in the last 250 years, one
thing remains the same. The fact that
the symbolic form of this new sovereignty still refers to the sartorial
appearance of women, that it still is almost completely feminized, only
demonstrates that in terms of
fashion diplomacy, we still live in the shadows
of Marie-Antoinette.

Notes
1 The phenomenon of
well-dressed ‘party-crashers’ continues into the present: see the Autumn 2009
news story about Tareq and
Michaele Salahi, who were able to attend a White House state dinner
in honour of the Indian Prime Minister
without an invitation (see Argetsinger and Roberts 2009;
Horowitz et al. 2009).
2 I disagree with Barbara
Vinken’s assessment that Marie-Antoinette ‘did not dress as a Queen, but
as a woman’, adding ‘She was only a
woman, precisely what was intolerable in a queen’ (Vinken
2014: 139–40). I think it is more fruitful to
understand her choices and sartorial strategies as
harbingers of things to come. For a contemporary display of
the interstices of femininity, royalty
and designer fashion, see the exhibition ‘Fashion Rules’ at Kensington
Palace in London, a display
of dresses worn by The Queen, Princess Margaret and Diana, Princess of Wales
(Historic Royal
Palaces 2015).
3 The more famous historical
example for this association is the relationship between Empress
Eugénie and Charles Fredrick Worth (Courteaux
2008). For a fascinating study of the tension
between these impulses see Dana Thomas’ (2015) story of the
careers of Alexander McQueen and
John Galliano.
4 In addition, British coins
still carry the inscription ‘Elizabeth II DG REG FD’ (‘by the Grace of
God, Queen and Defender of the Faith’).
5 One might also agree with
Flugel’s lament that the ‘world has undoubtedly become aesthetically
the poorer for this change, as the result
of which brightness and contrast have been replaced by
 drabness and similarity’ (Flugel 1940[1930]: 113–14);
cf. Hill (2005) for a more contemporary and
gender-neutral complaint.
6 The pre-eminent female
sovereign of the age, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and Ireland,
pursued a markedly conservative
strategy of fashioning herself as the ruler of the most powerful
country of the world at the time, emphasizing
‘older dress-codes and well-established styles’ that
reflected the bourgeois values of her times. As Neumann
(2014: 18) argues convincingly, by ‘self-
fashioning’ her appearance without any hint of royal (and feminine)
excessive flamboyance,
Victoria succeeded in ‘normalising the notion of female power’ and offered a sartorial
form of
sovereignty that reconciled her roles as wife and queen.
7 Cf. Breward 1999).
Historically speaking, the role of the beau, the dandy and more
contemporaneously, the metrosexual, has to be
acknowledged within the context of male sartorial
variation.
8 In June 2015, Jeb Bush became
the first politician to announce his intention to run for the office of
US president without wearing a tie,
thus further popularizing the symbolic representation of the
office (cf. Itkowitz 2015).
9 The contemporary social and
political acceptance of political leaders and presidents without shirt
or only in bathing suits as a symbolic
form of (hyper-)masculinized sovereignty contrasts
dramatically with political sartorial code some 100 years ago. For example, in August 1919, on the
very day of his inauguration,
German President-elect Friedrich Ebert was greeted with the
publication by a conservative German newspaper of a
photo showing himself and
Reichswehrminister Gustav Noske in bathing trunks. In the form of easily
reproducible postcards,
the ‘Badehosen-Photo’ became a visual instrument of conservative and monarchist
political groups
to denounce and delegitimize both the despised social-democratic president and the new Weimar
Republic he represented. Ebert and Noske in their swimming trunks were contrasted with images
of former Emperor
Wilhelm II and Field-Marshal von Hindenburg in their imperial parade
uniforms. The caption ‘Then and Now!’
insinuates a moral decay, due to the demise of the German
Reich in 1918. Hypermasculinized sovereignty here
still relies on the military uniform as its
legitimate symbolic form (cf. Kohli 2008).
10 There is an echo here of
President John F. Kennedy’s self-deprecating introduction on a state visit
to Paris in 1961: ‘I do not think it
altogether inappropriate to introduce myself … I am the man
who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I
have enjoyed it’ (cf. John F. Kennedy
Presidential Library and Museum n.d., and the YouTube video ‘President
John F. Kennedy’s 12th
News Conference, June 2, 1961 in Paris’, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzGlXZEsUAY.
11 As Obama conceded in a TV
show four years after the event, she ‘forgot’ that she was the First
Lady, acknowledging it as her ‘biggest
fashion regret’ (cf. BET.com 2013).
12 Vogue has since
deleted any reference to this article from its electronic online archives. For the
article, see Buck (2013).
13 Al-Assad’s failure recalls
another First Lady’s more successful fashionable contribution to the
reorientation of her state and government
towards the West. Fashioning a radically new image of
Russian identity, Raisa Gorbacheva embodied and gave
symbolic form to perestroika and ‘new
thinking’, as defined by her husband, the Secretary General of the
Communist Party and later
President of the Soviet Union.
14 Khan was also the designer
of Obama’s gown for the state dinner with German Chancellor Angela
Merkel. Together with the dresses for the
Mexican state dinner in May 2010 (designed by Peter
Soronen) and the French state dinner in February 2014
(designed by Carolina Herrera), these are
the least symbolically charged sartorial choices in terms of
sovereignty. However, see Givhan
(2014) for a discussion of the Herrera-designed gown.
15 The choice of a European
designer caused consternation and even protests among some American
fashion designers. Diane von Fürstenberg
expressed her disappointment about American designers
not being represented (Sun 2011), and Oscar de la Renta
voiced a commercial concern about
promoting a European design house at an event that was to promote
American–Chinese trade
(Peralta 2011).
16 The fact that Obama wore a
Vera Wang gown to the China state dinner in September 2015 does
not undermine the argument presented here.
While it is plausible to interpret this choice as a
gesture of recognition towards their Chinese guests, as
Wang is of Chinese extraction, both her
personal history as well as her fashion style put her squarely within
the American fashion system.
She learned her trade with Ralph Lauren before starting her own design studio,
focusing primarily
on bridal wear. Her ‘ethnic identity has never been a feature of her designs or her identity
as a
designer’ (personal email communication from Hazel Clark, 30 September 2015). Therefore, her
use in the
First Lady’s fashion diplomacy does not replicate the particular structure of the other
country-American
designers. More relevant in this context seems to be Obama’s willingness to
assuage the criticism of those
commentators that took umbrage at her previous choice of
McQueen, by choosing an established American designer.
17 See Prozorov (2004) for a
pertinent critique of this position and an argument for the continued
relevance of sovereignty.

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6 The
evolution of Somali women’s fashion
during changing security contexts
Mary Hope Schwoebel

Introduction
The nation, and sometime state, of Somalia has been without a bona fide
central government since 1990, when the
government of General Mohamed
Siad Barre collapsed and insurgents overran the capital city of Mogadishu.
Since
then, the Somali population of the Horn of Africa has experienced
ongoing insecurity and instability, and Somalia
has become the poster child
for the definition of a failed state. This chapter will examine the evolution
of
Somali women’s fashions through the different eras of modern Somali
history from the precolonial period to the
present. It will describe the
overarching peace and security contexts, the changes in women’s status and
circumstances, and what women were wearing during each era.
It would be stating the obvious to suggest that changes in ideology –
particularly those related to political
Islam – are reflected in women’s
fashion. However, this chapter will suggest that changes in the security
context
are reflected in, and possibly the main driver of, changes in
women’s fashion. Thus the chapter will focus on the
changes that occurred
in relation to women’s physical security during the past 25 years, and the
concurrent
evolution of women’s fashion.
The material pertaining to clothing styles for this chapter comes from 26
years, from 1988 to 2014, of living and
working in Somalia, membership in
a Somali family by marriage and regular travel to Somalia. Each trip I have
taken has included a trip to the clothing stores and tailors to purchase the
latest fashions. The reasons are
twofold: personal and professional.
Personal, because I was shopping for myself as a member of a Somali
family
and professional, because dressing like the locals, both out of respect
and as an effort to blend in as much as
possible, when working or
conducting research in conflict zones, is part and parcel of my personal
security
policy. The material also comes from both formal interviews and
informal conversations with hundreds of Somali
women since 1988, on
topics ranging from sexual assault, female genital mutilation, women in
development, women
in politics, women in peace and conflict, and women
and violent extremism, to gossip about marriages and divorce,
and of
course, fashion.
Even had I not been traveling to Somalia, I would have been able to
follow the
evolution of Somali fashion through the diaspora. Although
some have never travelled to Somalia, diasporic women
almost always have
a sense of Somali fashion because they are able to observe what the
different generations of
first wave immigrants wear, as well as what the
steady flow of new immigrants are wearing. In addition, there is
a great deal
of travel back and forth, and travel is always accompanied by gifts borne by
the traveller to family
and friends on both ends of the journey. Attending
diaspora events, it is easy to identify who has been in the
West and more or
less for how long, because their fashions are frozen in the particular period
in which they
immigrated. In the past years, as we will see, newcomers are
wearing ever more conservative Islamic dress,
reflecting developments in
Somalia.
This chapter addresses the question of why specific fashions have come
into or gone out of style. I asked this
question of all the Somali women I
encountered in my personal and professional lives over the past two years.
These included women in Mogadishu and Hargeisa, ethnic Somali Kenyans
in Nairobi and Garissa, as well as women
friends and family among the
Somali diaspora living in Washington, DC, who had left Somalia during
different
times during the past 25 years. I talked to women how I found
them – individually or in small groups in homes,
offices, restaurants and at
social functions, with or without men present. Men seldom joined the
conversation as
women’s clothes is out of their domain, unless related to
religion. Four themes emerged: security, religion,
style or fashion and the
influences of immigration to various parts of the world.
 Because Somalia has long suffered various humanitarian crises and
violent conflicts, it has been on the receiving
end of successive waves of
development, humanitarian assistance, transition initiatives, and state-
building and
peace-building interventions.1 Thus, most foreigners who work
in Somalia do so for short periods of time and, as a result,
their view of
Somali culture, including fashion, is more or less static. In addition, few
foreigners become
familiar with the nuances of Somali dress, in part
because it is rare for foreigners to adopt it. Indeed,
international assistance
workers tend to dress as if they were either on safari or combatants: in other
words,
they wear a lot of khaki and olive drab. This is as true of women as
of men; although women give a nod to Muslim
culture by wearing a
Western-style scarf around the neck and occasionally on the head.

Precolonial Somali society

Somalis belong to the Cushitic family of African Asiatic peoples. Historical
and linguistic evidence indicates
that Somali people have inhabited the
Horn of Africa for at least two millennia (Cassanelli 1982: 15), occupying
the territory now encompassing the states of Somalia, Djibouti, the north-
eastern part of Kenya and the
south-eastern part of Ethiopia. The land
inhabited by Somalis is predominantly
arid and semi-arid, and the Somali
subsistence base is predominantly pastoralist.
Somali society is organized according to a segmentary lineage system.
Clan lineage is agnatically, or
patrilineally, determined, and constitutes the
most fundamental building block of an individual’s identity in
society.
However, often overlooked by non-Somalis are the importance of
matrilineal and affinial ties, which also
play important roles in the political
and economic lives of Somalis, along with patrilineal ties (Lewis 1994:
47–
51).
Thus the position of women in Somali society is inextricably tied to their
roles in their fathers’ and husbands’
clans. Children belong exclusively to
the father’s lineage and therefore share their father’s, rather than their
mother’s, clan identity, while women remain members of their father’s clan
for life. However, a woman’s identity
is somewhat more fluid, once she
marries and bears children. Her clan loyalties then become divided between
those
of her father’s and her husband’s clans, since her children belong to
her husband’s lineage. Yet children are
recognized also as having bonds
with their mother’s family and clan, although those bonds are understood to
be
more emotional than political or economic. The male relatives of the
bride and groom traditionally arrange
marriages, with the goal of
consolidating political and economic alliances or as a means of resolving
conflict,
as the children produced by the marriage strengthen connections
between the lineages (Lewis 1994: 47–51).
As in many, if not most, patrilineal societies, a high premium is placed
on women’s virginity. A legacy of
pre-Islamic Somali society is the practice
of female circumcision,2 or female genital mutilation (FGM), which was
practised to control
women’s sexual desire and preserve their virginity until
marriage. The most extreme type of FGM, infibulation, is
practised in
Somalia and is called pharaonic (fircooniga in Somali), which leads some
to believe
that it is related to the FGM practised in ancient Egypt. However
FGM is also practised in Sudan, Ethiopia,
Eritrea and other parts of the
continent. Regardless of its origins, FGM later came to be incorporated into
Somali understandings of Islam, although there is little evidence for this in
Islamic texts (El Saadawi 2007:
60–61).
In addition to bearing sons, women were valued for their labour.
Pastoralism is a labour-intensive form of
subsistence, and women were
traditionally responsible for constructing the family tents and loading them
onto
camels during migration. Women were also responsible for the
management of small livestock – goats and sheep –
and their milking, while
men were responsible for the care of the large livestock, mainly camels and
cattle.
Where agropastoralist dryland farming is practised, women were
responsible for all aspects of cultivation, except
soil preparation. Women
were also responsible for all care of the young, old and infirm, the
collection of water
and firewood, all food preparation and housework.
Nevertheless, women enjoyed considerable freedom of movement,
especially in rural areas where women’s labour was essential. In urban
areas, women tended to have less freedom
of movement, but they were still
expected to contribute in the productive as well as the reproductive spheres.
Islam is believed to have come to Somalia in successive waves from the
seventh
to the seventeenth centuries, coming to different regions at different
times. Somalis consider being a Muslim to
be an essential component of
being Somali. However, as in other non-Arab Muslim societies, the Islam
practised by
Somalis has been shaped by Somali culture. While Somali
culture always has been a conservative one in relation to
gender roles and
relations, traditionally, women have had more rights and freedom in the
private, if not the
public, spheres than women have had in some other
Muslim societies (El Saadawi 2007: 33).
There is little information available about Somali women’s fashions
before the arrival of European colonists, who
left behind scattered
photographs, drawings and written descriptions. However, the Horn of
Africa has a long
history of trade within the region, with the Arabian
peninsula, Persia and throughout the Indian Ocean, and was
likely
influenced – at least in the coastal towns, which were settled by Yemenis,
Omanis and Persians, in
precolonial times as it is today – by the jewellery
and fabrics arriving from those markets (Cassanelli 1982:
25–6).
Traditionally, pastoralist and agropastoralist women wore a single cloth,
called a guntiino (Figure 6.1),3 knotted on one shoulder and wrapped around
the body to form a long,
one-shouldered dress. This dress is ‘one size fits
all’, and therefore easily adapted to pregnancy. It also
facilitates
breastfeeding, as women simply have to move the cloth to one side. In rural
areas, guntiino
were constituted by unbleached, handwoven cotton,
sometimes with an embroidered ribbon along the borders. In the
coastal
towns, they were woven into striped fabric called aliindi. At weddings, the
bride and bridal party
often wore an aliindi guntiino. Women normally
covered their hair in a scarf that left their neck and
faces bare, and used a
shawl or garbasar,4 which doubled as a sling to carry infants on their back.
Sometimes the
garbasar was simply draped over the shoulders, and at other
times, over the head. What is remarkable about
these garments is their
practicality and surprising amount of skin that they reveal vis-à-vis current
conceptions
of what is considered ‘Muslim’ dress, by both many westerners
and many Muslims alike.
Figure 6.1 Guntiino and garbasar made of aliindi or
Merca cloth,
handwoven from the coastal town of Merca.
Note: This combination is often worn at weddings by the bride and the women in the bridal party.
Source: Photograph by Mary Hope Schwoebel.

Colonialism and independence

In 1960, two portions of the lands of the Somalis – Somalia and Somaliland
– achieved independence from the
Italians and the British respectively, and
joined to form the state of Somalia. For the first 17 years following
independence, Somalia enjoyed a period of peace and development, in spite
of the bloodless coup d’état
staged by General Mohamed Siad Barre in
1969 (Bradbury 2008: 35). While Barre’s regime was characterized
increasingly by the corruption, nepotism, clanism and human rights
violations that were ultimately responsible
for the civil war, his regime did a
great deal to improve the legal status of women and to promote women’s
rights
(Bradbury 2008: 37).
The establishment of the Labour Code in 1972 promoted women’s
equality in the
workplace. Under Law No. 173 of 1975, which made all
land state property, women could obtain land leases or
inherit leaseholds.
The Family Law of 1975 gave equal rights to women and men in matters of
marriage, divorce and
inheritance. The establishment of the party system in
1976 gave women the opportunity to hold positions of
leadership in the
civil administration. Finally, the promulgation of the 1978 Constitution
established equal
rights and responsibilities for women and men;
unsurprisingly, implementation
was another matter (Schwoebel 2007: 230).
Under Barre’s philosophy of scientific socialism, women entered the
government workforce in droves, where they
wore a uniform of maxi-
length, dark green, western-style skirts and long-sleeved, white Western-
style white
shirts and headscarves. Both Somali men and women became
migrant workers in the Gulf states, sending money to
their families in
Somalia, while other women began import businesses, traveling to the Gulf
states and India to
bring back jewellery and fabrics for sale. The
government was repressive, and both dissidents and criminals were
denied
fundamental human rights; however, most people enjoyed considerable
physical security, and both women and
men were able to walk unmolested
in the capital of Mogadishu at all hours of the day and night.5
During this period, urban women started replacing the guntiino with a
dress called a dirac
(Figure 6.2). It was made from a single piece of cloth,
stitched up the sides along the selvages of the fabric; with holes left for the
arms, and a hole cut out and
stitched for the neck. It was one-size-fits-all
and, on most women, went past the floor. Underneath women wore a
decorative long half-slip called a gorgoro, whose excess cloth was tucked
into at the waist. On top of
this, women wore a garbasar on their shoulders
or head and shoulders, and a headscarf of which there were
different names
depending on the fabric and the region, including shaash (made from silk,
traditionally in
red and black), malgabad (made from diaphanous silk
gorgette) ilyar (made from tulle), or
safaletti (made from patterned silk).
Figure 6.2 A dirac and gorgoro with a lightweight
garbasar.
Note: This was the most popular style in urban areas prior to the outbreak of the civil war. Many
women would
wear the garbasar around their neck like a neckscarf.
Source: Photograph by Mary Hope Schwoebel.

Nationalist critics said that the dirac was not a Somali style, but an
imitation of Gulf styles. However,
while women in the Gulf wore their
dresses of thicker fabrics under the abaya, a coatdress worn out of the
house that is commonly black, Somali women wore the dirac in public
without an abaya. Even more
remarkable was that the dirac is made of
diaphanous cotton voile, through which the body is clearly seen.
More
traditional women usually covered the top of their body effectively with
their garbasar, but more
fashionable women wore an equally diaphanous
and small garbasar slung around their necks.
Although single women were not traditionally required to cover their
heads, married women were. The shaash
was a headscarf made of Rajastani
tie-dye in red and black. One part of the marriage celebration, the shaash
sar, entails the bride’s mother-in-law putting a shaash on her daughter-in-
law.
Gold jewellery is the one form of property that belongs exclusively to
women. Men are not allowed to wear gold
jewellery, according to Islam.
Women receive gold jewellery from both their husband’s and their own
families on
marriage, and this remains their personal property throughout
their lives, including if they divorce. It is
understood that they may sell the
jewellery in times of need. When they have some extra cash, women will
often
invest it in gold jewellery. Before the civil war, women in Mogadishu
and other cities flaunted their gold
jewellery.

The civil war and first international intervention

Some Somalis assert that the defeat of Somalia in the 1977–8 Ogaden War
with Ethiopia was the beginning of the
end for the Barre regime. It certainly
marked the beginning of overt opposition to his regime, since a coup
attempt was launched in April 1978 by a group of disenchanted military
officers. Although the attempt failed, the
remnants of this group formed the
first armed opposition group in 1981 (Bradbury 2008: 38–9).
The government’s response to the attempted coup was to launch a
campaign of persecution against the clan whose
officers had led it. During
this campaign, sexual assaults were perpetrated
against women from the
officers’ clan (Barnes et al. 1995: 336). Some Somalis assert that this was
the first time
in living history that they could remember sexual assualt being
used as a weapon of war. Somalis assert that this
was an extremely rare
occurrence in Somali society. That may have been true, as Somali
traditional collective
justice provided a strong deterrent, and what cases
occurred were addressed swiftly to the satisfaction of the
families and clans
involved (if perhaps not to the satisfaction of the victims).
Although the state did not formally collapse until Siad Barre fled
Mogadishu in January 1991, most Somalis and
Somalia observers agree that
the beginning of the civil war was May 1988, when forces loyal to Barre
attacked the
city of Hargeisa, the capital of what was then the north-west
region, now Somaliland. At the time, Somaliland’s
dominant clan, the Isaq,
were Barre’s fiercest armed opposition group. From the perspective of
Mogadishu
residents of the time, it was from then onwards that the armed
conflict began moving ineluctably from the
countryside towards the capital.
Life in the capital began to change palpably as well. Among the tangible
changes
included a hardship-inducing deterioration of public services and
deterioration in the security situation.
Thousands of internally displaced
persons began moving into the capital and swelled the ranks of squatter
settlements.6
Rumours of both government human rights abuses and violent crime
became rampant. One such rumour was of a woman
whose arm had been
cut off because the criminals who broke into her house had not been able to
take off her gold
bangles.7 The first
noticeable change in fashion was that
women stopped wearing their gold jewellery. It was a conflict early-
warning
indicator that most expatriates (especially most expatriate men)
would have been unlikely to have noticed.
 During the next two years, Barre lost control of one region of the
country after the other, as other armed
opposition groups formed and
maintained bases in neighboring countries. On 30 December, the United
Somali
Congress, an armed opposition group led by Mohamed Farrah
Aideed, marched into the capital and began fighting
government forces.
The violence quickly escalated, and as both sides brought out heavy
weapons for the first time
in the city, residents began fleeing for the
countryside. In January 1991, Barre and the remnants of his forces
fled
Mogadishu (Bradbury 2008: 46–7).
The country entered a period of warlordism and displacement, from
which it has yet to emerge. Clan-based armed
militias dominated the
countryside and fought for control of Mogadishu. It became unsafe for
people to live
outside the regions controlled by their own clans. At least a
million people died from conflict-induced famine,
while another million
fled the country (Bradbury 2008: 46–7).
Those who had connections in Western and Arab countries immigrated.
At least a million fled to neighbouring
African countries, mainly Kenya and
Ethiopia; the insecurity spilled over into the ethnic Somali regions of Kenya
and Ethiopia as well. The least fortunate became internally displaced
persons within Somalia, creating large camps in Mogadishu and other areas,
where international and Somali aid
organizations provided food and other
forms of assistance. Over the next two decades, violence and
conflict-
induced famine and migration have occurred in different places at different
times, but most of the
insecurity has occurred in the southern regions of
Somalia, and most of the migration has been from these
regions. Into this
situation the international community launched its first large-scale
intervention in the form
of the United Nations Operation in Somalia
(UNOSOM I and II), which operated from 1992–5. There followed a long
period of little international presence in Somalia itself due to insecurity.
Most international aid organizations
that serve Somalia have operated out of
Nairobi since 1992.
During this period, sexual assault against women and children became
rampant in the cities and throughout the
countryside. As mentioned
previously, most of the assaults were carried out against women of
opposing clans as a
weapon of war. Especially vulnerable were women of
minority and marginalized clans who did not benefit from the
protection of
(and threat of revenge from) powerful, clan-based warlords. In both urban
and rural areas,
drug-addled armed militias and armed criminal gangs
carried out gang rape and abducted women and girls into
sexual slavery.
Women in refugee and internally displaced persons’ camps were preyed
upon when they went to
collect water and firewood, as well as in the camps
themselves – sometimes by foreign and local security forces
that were
ostensibly there to protect them (Pickering 2010: 21).
In the face of this insecurity, women became afraid of calling attention to
themselves, began to cover themselves
in ways that would not call attention
to neither their wealth nor their bodies. Women still wore guntiino
and
garbasar made from the bright Kenyan fabric called the kanga, but long-
sleeved, loose-fitting
dresses made from thicker and darker fabrics became
the fashion for those who could afford to use dressmakers.
Most notably,
the garbasar became larger, and thicker fabrics were used (Figure 6.3).
Figure 6.3 A cambuur, or dress with a larger garbasar.
Source: Photograph by Mary Hope Schwoebel.

Somali culture has undergone, and continues to undergo, tremendous

changes due to the conflict itself. At the
time of writing, an entire
generation has reached adulthood in a context of ongoing instability and
conflict. The
breadth and depth of the culture change that has resulted has
yet to be understood. However, during the past two
and a half decades of
insecurity, fashions have continued to change in ways that this chapter has
suggested, have
had as much to do with the changing security conditions as
with ideology.

Political Islam and the ‘War on Terror’

During the years leading up to the civil war and following the collapse of
the government, political Islam began
making inroads into Somalia.
Responding to the need for and availability of funding, Islamic non-
governmental
organizations (NGOs) began providing services inside
Somalia and in refugee camps in neighbouring countries. As
with Western
faith-based NGOs, some were simply service-oriented and some were of a
missionary nature. Some
were proponents of political Islam (with a
comprehensive vision, not unlike
that of their neoliberal western
counterparts), while others were linked to Islamist militant groups inside
and
outside the country.
Not all Somali women opposed the Islamists: they offered some benefits
to women that were not provided by the
warlords. Generally, they provided
security in the areas that they controlled. Most early Islamist groups did not
engage in or tolerate sexual assault. They also banned cigarettes, alcohol
and khat,8 the latter being the bane of many women’s
and children’s
existence, consuming large portions of household income and men’s time.
During these years, immediately before and following the outbreak of
the civil war, a minority of Somali women –
not only in Somalia, but also in
neighbouring countries – began sporting the
jilbaab, which appears to be a
uniquely Somali version (I have never seen the exact style elsewhere in the
Muslim world) (Figure 6.4). It was often made in the drabbest
colors of
beige and grey, in heavy polyester, and worn with a white niqab (face
covering) as well as socks
and, rarely, gloves. Over time the colours became
darker, black being the most common, but the fabrics became
lighter and
more comfortable. Over the years, especially as the Islamists gained ground
and insecurity remained
rampant, an increasing number of adopted this
style.
Figure 6.4 A jilbaab, the garment worn by the majority of women
throughout Somalia today.
Note: The one shown here is black, but some women wear this style in bright colours, such as red,
purple, pink
and orange. Religiously conservative women may also wear a niqab with this garment.
Source: Photograph by Mary Hope Schwoebel.

Following at least 14 conferences aimed at forming a national

government, the Transitional Federal Government
(TFG) was formed in
2004. It was recognized by the international community as an interim
government from 2004
until 2012, when the Somali Federal Government
(SFG) was established. However continuing insecurity in and around
Mogadishu and some of the regions led some clans to form shari’a courts in
the absence of functioning
state courts. (Hansen 2013: 31) In 2006, these
shari’a courts joined to create the Islamic Courts Union
(ICU, or the Union
of Islamic Courts UIC), and took control of much of southern Somalia. The
TFG and the ICU were
soon in conflict for control of the country, with the
TFG being supported by Ethiopia and the USA, and the ICU
supported by
Eritrea and foreign Islamist groups. Many Somalis reported that this was
the worst period of
violence that the country had experienced in more than a
decade. The ICU was defeated, but various splinter
groups emerged,
including Al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam, and continued the fight against the
government. African
Union forces (AMISOM) were authorized in 2007 to
support the TFG against militant Islamist groups, yet they soon
controlled
most of southern Somalia. In 2009 the TFG formed a coalition with less
militant Islamist groups of the
ICU. In 2012, a new federal government
replaced the transitional government and a new constitution was passed.
However, Al-Shabaab has continued to launch car bombs and other attacks
on the government in Mogadishu and in
neighbouring countries (Schwoebel
and Harper 2013). Al-Shabaab has been accused of engaging in egregious
abuses
against women and girls, including forced marriage and abduction
for sexual slavery to Al-Shabaab members,
stoning for alleged adultery, and
whipping for failure to adhere to Al-Shabaab dress codes, which includes
use of
the niqab (Gettleman 2011). Al-Shabaab and other militant groups
also have a presence in neighbouring
countries, and some women have
taken to wearing niqab in those regions as well (Figure 6.5). Under Hassan
Sheikh Mohamud, the president since 2012,
Islamists have dominated the
government, and during this period some women have begun wearing the
niqab,
even in areas not controlled by Al-Shabaab (Schwoebel and Harper
2013).
Figure 6.5 An abaya, hijab and niqab, as worn by women
in the Gulf, but
also by Somali women.
Note: Among Somalis, only religiously conservative women wear the niqab.
Source: Photograph by Mary Hope Schwoebel.

Conclusion
What was once the Somali state remains a patchwork of semi-autonomous
regions, many of which are internally
unstable, and have unstable relations
with each other and the SFG in
Mogadishu. Since 2012, Somalia has had a
government that is considered by many to be more legitimate than its
predecessors, and is the first since 1991 to be officially recognized by the
international community. However,
more than three years after it came to
power, the authority of the current administration remains to be
consolidated in the regions, security remains problematic in the capital and
much of the optimism surrounding its
formation is wearing thin (Schwoebel
and Harper 2013).
My last trip to the lands of the Somalis was to Mogadishu and Hargeisa
in June
2014. Hargeisa, which had enjoyed ever-increasing peace and
development since it declared independence from
Somalia in 1991, had
returned to pre-war levels of security. While far from secure, Mogadishu
appeared to be
slowly improving, although the security situation for
internally displaced persons, most of whom are women and
children, in the
city was still horrific.
Fashions were changing again. In Hargeisa, women were still wearing
the jilbaab, but now in bright colours
– reds, bright purples, pinks and
blues. In Mogadishu, women were wearing a more eclectic mix of different
styles. The professional women with whom I interacted – many of whom
have
spent considerable time abroad – combined elements of Somali styles
with those from the West (such as
loose-fitting jackets) and/or from Arab
countries. Strikingly, these clothes were made from a diversity of
colours
and fabrics previously not worn in Somalia.
 Women’s physical security in Somalia is tied to a large (albeit not
exclusive) extent to the overarching peace
and security context in Somalia
itself – which, in turn, is related to the international security context. This
is
not the exclusive context because even in peacetime, Somali women
experience threats to their physical
security, including the aforementioned
FGM, child marriage and widespread domestic violence. However, as also
mentioned previously, in recent times these endemic sources of physical
violence have been substantially
augmented by the usage of rape as a
weapon of war and ongoing conflict-related violence (Trustlaw 2011: 13).
The collapse of the Somali state and the subsequent civil war were
fuelled by its role as a Cold War proxy, and
its current role as a front-line
state in the global ‘War on Terror’ has compounded the insecurity
experienced by
women in Somalia. To the extent that Somali women’s
fashions have been influenced by insecurity, affairs of
international security
have influenced Somali women’s fashions.

Notes
1 Based on the author’s
engagement with international organizations operating in Somalia between
1988 and 2014.
2 Somalis use the term
gudniin, which translates as circumcision and is the same term used for
male circumcision.
3 The terms for specific
articles of clothing may vary in different regions of Somalia. In some cases
there are different names for
specific articles of clothing in Swahili and in Arabic, and some
Somalis may use those terms instead of the
Somali terms. I learned Somali in southern Somalia
while living in Baidoa and Mogadishu.
4 Garbasar translates
as ‘put on the shoulder’.
5 Based on personal
recollections and the recollections of others in both interviews and
conversations.
6 During this period I oversaw
UNICEF’s Urban Basic Services Programme in Mogadishu. One of
the programme’s key activities was the provision
of services to internally displaced persons.
7 This rumour was repeated to
me by several women who visited my home in Mogadishu in mid-
1990.
8 A stimulant leaf chewed by
Somali men and Yemeni men and women. Many political and
business deals are negotiated during
khat-chewing sessions.

References
Barnes, V.L. and Boddy, J. (1995) Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl. Vintage, Canada: Random
House of
Canada.
Bradbury, M. (2008) African Issues: Becoming Somaliland, London: James Currey.
Cassanelli, L.V. (1982) The Shaping of Somali Society: Reconstructing the History of a Pastoral
People,
1600–1900, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
El-Saadawi, N. (2007) The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World, London:
Zed Books.
Gettleman, J. (2011) ‘For Somali Women, Pain of Being a Spoil of War’, New York Times, 27
December.
Available online at www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/world/africa/somalia-faces-
alarming-rise-in-rapes-of-women-and-girls.html?_r=0
(accessed 11 April 2016).
Hansen, S.J. (2013) Al-Shabaab in Somalia: The History and Ideology of a Militant Islamist Group,
2005–2015, New York: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, I.M. (1994) Blood and Bones: The call of Kinship in Somali Society, Lawrenceville, NJ: The
Red
Sea Press.
Mukhtar, M. (1995) ‘Islam in Somali History: Fact and Fiction’, in A.J. Ahmed (ed.), The Invention
of
Somalia, London: Red Sea Press, pp. 1–28.
Pickering, S. (2010) Women, Borders and Violence: Current Issues in Asylum, Forced Migration and
Trafficking, New York: Springer.
Schwoebel, M.H. (2007) ‘Nation-building in the Lands of the Somalis’, unpublished PhD thesis,
School for
Conflict Analysis and Resolution. George Mason University. Available online at
http://scar.gmu.edu/doctoral-dissertation/nation-building-lands-of-somalis (accessed 19 November
2007).
Schwoebel, M.H. and Harper, M. (2013) Somalia: Violent Extremism Risk Assessment, Washington,
DC:
USAID.
TrustLaw (2011) ‘Factsheet: The World’s Five Most Dangerous Countries for Women’, London:
Thomson Reuters
Foundation. Available online at www.trust.org/item/?map=factsheet-the-worlds-
most-dangerous-countries-for-women (accessed 15 June
2011).
7 Margaret Thatcher, dress and the politics of
fashion
Daniel Conway

Who do I dress for? I really dress for the occasion and for the job, and it
is very important.
Margaret Thatcher, The Englishwoman’s Wardrobe, BBC TV (Ruth 1986)

Introduction
Through Margaret Thatcher’s private and public performances, the micro-
politics of dress translated into the
macro-politics of power.1 Thatcher’s
changing career can be traced through her dress (see Young 1991: 416–17):
analysis
of her dress leading up to and during her premiership reveals both
her aspirations and increasing power.
Understanding of Thatcher’s agency in
her embodied, dressed performances can be informed and developed through
Butler’s (1999) conceptualization of performativity. Through adaptation,
repetition and divergent dress, Thatcher
constructed different identities,
some of which became iconic symbols of her self and her politics.
Examination
of Thatcher’s dress refines the understanding of the
relationship between constraints and agency experienced by
actors in the
public realm. On becoming party leader, Thatcher’s gender, class and
ideological viewpoints were
incongruent with her unprecedented political
status, and she faced many challenges in attempting to overcome
this. Dress
became a potentially destabilizing focus for her critics and symbolic of her
‘outsider’ status. Yet
in the face of these challenges she recognized and
learned from the expectations of others, adapting and changing
her dress.
However, this was not an instantaneous, complete or permanent
transformation. What Thatcher achieved,
as she crafted her dressed
performances, was agency over a further aspect of her life and her politics.
There was
also an evolving alignment of her dress with her political
ideology and domestic and international roles over
time.
Thatcher performed multiple gendered and classed identities using dress,
drawing from cultural and socio-economic
lessons engendered during her
upbringing, but she also broke free from such constraints and her dressed
performances demonstrate fluidity and multiplicity. Through a detailed
exploration of Thatcher’s changing uses of
dress, this chapter explores the
relationship between dress, identities and agency in the public realm, and
thus
contributes to wider feminist debates about women politicians and the
politics
of dress and gender. It seeks to refine and develop our understanding
of dress and its roles in political life,
and makes problematic the feminist
claim that once women’s appearance and dress is made visible, women’s
agency
is automatically restricted and demeaned. Through performance,
repetition and variance Thatcher shaped and
reshaped her identities to
accentuate her political power. She remains ‘the most famous script of a
woman in
parliament’ (Puwar 2004a: 99), and her cultural status has been
continually recuperated in British political and
social culture (Nunn 2002).
The international release of the Hollywood film The Iron Lady (dir. Phillida
Lloyd) in 2012 and the considerable media frenzy at the time of her death in
2013 have defined Thatcher as an
iconic symbol of female political power.
This chapter begins with a discussion of feminist analyses of the role
of
dress and women politicians in the public realm, then discusses the
importance of dress to identity and as a
performative act. It then focuses on
how Thatcher used dress to define her political image, draw from her
upbringing to adapt and shape her dress, then analyses the different and
shifting performances of dress across
her life and career.

Dress, women and politics

Much feminist analysis of dress in contemporary British politics argues that
media focus on women’s dress is
always damaging and marginalising. There
is considerable evidence to support this claim. However, the analysis of
women’s agency in relation to dress and its roles in defining and
representing politicians’ identities (both male
and female) can be developed
further. Margaret Thatcher was not a passive recipient of hostile media
comment, but
both challenged media focus on her dress and later sought to
encourage and manipulate it. Media focus on dress
was potentially, but not
inevitably, damaging or marginalizing to Thatcher, and she demonstrated
varying levels
of agency over dress and its role in representing her as a
politician.
Much feminist analysis of politics also concludes that the focus on dress
is sexist and damaging to women’s
political agency. For women politicians,

not being the ‘natural’ occupants of the position means there is a burden
of doubt associated with the
co-existence of women in these spaces.
They are not automatically expected to embody the relevant
competencies.
Thus their every gesture, movement and utterance is
observed since they are viewed rather suspiciously.
(Puwar 2004b: 72)

There have been many examples where dress has been a key means by
which women have been both made visible and
judged as unsuitable. Shirley
Williams, a Cabinet minister in the 1970s, often was portrayed as a ‘bag
lady’ by
the British press because her hair and clothing were deemed to be
unkempt (Ross and Sreberny 2000: 87). Margaret
Beckett’s fashion sense
was derided by the tabloid press in the 1995 Labour
Party leadership
elections, likening her physical appearance to that of a ‘gargoyle’ (Childs
2008: 144). The
Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was criticized for
wearing a top in 2007 that revealed ‘too much cleavage’ for
the TV cameras
while making a statement in parliament (Slack 2009). In 2012, Conservative
Member of Parliament
(MP) Louise Mensch was angered by media
questions and speculation about whether or not she had undergone facial
cosmetic surgery (Lewis 2012). In 2015, the Labour leadership candidate,
Liz Kendall, expressed her anger at a
newspaper reporter’s question about
her weight and the description of her by the Mail on Sunday as an
‘elegant
… slinky brunette’ (Perraudin 2015). Ross and Sreberny noted from their
interviews with British women
MPs that many resented the media’s focus on
their appearance and dress, and believed that men as politicians were
not
subject to such comment (2000: 86–7). The categorization of women MPs
using media epithets such as ‘Blair’s
Babes’ and ‘Cameron’s Cuties’
provides further evidence for the demeaning and destabilizing focus on dress
and
appearance that women in British politics continue to face.
Childs writes that ‘representations which focus on women politicians
appearance, clothing and familial
relationships … represent and reinforce,
rather than challenge, widely accepted assumptions about the suitability
of
women and politics’ (2008: 141–2). Such representations perpetuate the
‘norm’ of the male politician and the
‘pretender’ status of women. Puwar
(2004a) defines women politicians as ‘space invaders’ who occupy ‘male’
and
masculine public and/or political spaces. This gendered de-
legitimization resulted in the first women MPs
experiencing considerable
hostility and isolation from their peers in parliament (Nunn 2002: 39;
Lovenduski 2005:
49). Margaret Thatcher experienced sexist attitudes from
some Conservative activists when first applying for
selection as a
parliamentary candidate, misogynist comment from the British media when
a Cabinet minister and, in
her words, was subject to ‘male chauvinist
hilarity’ from Labour MPs when she first became leader of the
Conservative
Party (Thatcher 1995: 96–7, 182, 284). As evidenced above, contemporary
women MPs remain ‘highly
visible’ in relation to their male peers, and thus
are subject to media comment about their dress on an unequal
basis (Puwar
2004a; Childs 2008: 140–165).
Figure 7.1 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher meets President Ronald
Reagan
at the White House, 1988.
Source: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

If women in politics face close and critical scrutiny of their dress, women
in executive office are even more
subject to such potentially destabilizing
focus. Margaret Thatcher claimed that ‘if you are in an executive
position …
your clothes must be the background for you’ (Ruth 1986); see Figure 7.1.
The roles and representations of dress in the media, and the effects these
have on women
as heads of government, remain a key area of debate across
national contexts. Yet as Jalalzai notes, unlike women
in parliamentary
politics, ‘women’s executive representation is seldom the subject of
academic research’ (2008:
207). Carroll (2009: 1) believes this lack of
analysis left US feminists unprepared for the misogyny directed
toward
Hillary Clinton in her unsuccessful campaign for presidential nomination in
2008. Comments on bodily
appearance, clothing, hair, cosmetics and voice
have been repeatedly cited as destabilizing to women’s chances of gaining
and holding executive office. For example, Miller et al.’s (2010:
172)
analysis of women running for US presidential candidate nomination have
faced a disproportionate emphasis on
their appearance compared to men, and
less interest in the political and policy aspects of their candidacy than
men.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign to capture the presidential candidate nomination
in 2008 was not helped by the
media’s interest in her ‘pantsuits, and her
cleavage, and the famous “cackle”’ (Carroll 2009: 13). The longevity
of
Margaret Thatcher’s executive office, her iconic and iconoclastic place in
British history, and the complex
gender and class dynamics that she
represents, make her a significant case study of a woman political executive.
‘Something about Thatcher’s place in the collective imaginary of British
culture’, notes Rose, ‘calls out for an
understanding of what it is she releases
by dint of being a woman and of the forms of phantasmatic scenario which
she brings into play’ (Rose 1993: 44).

The performativity of dress

As Behnke discusses in this volume, dress and its relationship with political
culture remains an underdeveloped
aspect of political sociology,
international relations and history. Fashion’s ‘feminized’ and therefore
demeaned
cultural status has meant that the relationship of dress with
identity, the
body and power has been neglected by historians and social
scientists (Entwistle 2000: 9–10). Yet dress is a
revealing and important
means to analyse the constructions of identity and locate an actor’s agency in
relation
to social, political and historical context. As Entwistle argues,
‘human bodies are dressed bodies. The
social world is a world of “dressed
bodies”’ (2000: 6). Dress not only traces, but also has defined, changing
modes of social and individual power across history. Elias’s (1994) analysis
of the figurational development of
‘civilized’ manners and habits
demonstrates how concern for bodily appearance, ‘respectable’ and
‘shameful’ forms
of dress, has redefined power relations and the individual’s
role and place in society. Forms of dress traverse
personal (micro) and public
(macro) boundaries of power, framing power as a performative and symbolic
act
embodied and performed at an individual level, yet interweaving with
macro-political processes. Butler (1997,
1999) develops Foucault’s concepts
of identity by arguing that gender is achieved as the result of repeated
performance. This performative construction of identity can shift, change
and be contradictory, and these shifts
and changes can be expressed through
changes in dress. The transgressive potential of these shifting and multiple
performances is visible when someone ‘cross-dresses’ and challenges
accepted gender norms (Butler 1999: xxiv).
Thatcher’s position could be
considered transgressive, as she was a party leader and prime minister in an
arena
that was traditionally male. In addition, she was often perceived to
exhibit supposedly masculine characteristic
traits of resolve and aggression,
yet she dressed in feminine clothing. These gendered tensions were vividly
underscored by the satirical television programme Spitting Image (ITV,
1984–96), which portrayed Thatcher
literally cross dressing in a man’s suit
and tie and smoking a Churchillian cigar.
Dress informs all gendered performances, but women undoubtedly have a
particular, conscious and intimate
relationship with dress. The bodily and
sensuous act of ‘getting dressed’ is the moment when women ‘have to
negotiate their bodies, respectability, style, status, and their self perception’
(Woodward 2007: 2) before
entering the social world. The concept
‘enfashioning’, developed by Shinko in this volume, encapsulates the
fluidity but also the intentionality and constraints on dress as site of
performative self-construction.
Individuals can choose dress as acts of self-
definition and subjectivity, but the reception and interpretation of
these
performative acts is subject to cultural norms and expectations. Therefore,
dress plays a multifaceted role
in defining and deploying individual
identities, but also locates the subject in relation to and part of the
wider
collective:
 [W]‌e can use dress to articulate our sense of ‘uniqueness’, to express
our difference from others, although as
members of particular classes
and cultures, we are equally likely to find styles of dress that connect us
to
others as well.
(Entwistle 2000: 158)

As Butler indicates, it is in the repetition of performative acts that

subjectivity is generated: such repetition of dressed performative acts can
either confirm and include the
subject as part of a broader collective, or it
can subvert cultural norms. It also can indicate the subject’s
exclusion and
marginalization. Individual agency over performative acts of dress, such as
gender, is not
unlimited and is constrained by social expectation, material
factors and the ability to deliver such acts (Salih
2002: 50). Therefore, dress
is a profound expression of forms of identity and situates the individual in
relation
to, and as part of, wider political and social processes.
‘Enfashioning’ enables the individual to take an active
role in this process of
constructing identities using dress, defining their own subjectivity in relation
to
broader societal, political and historical norms.
Fashion and the ability to choose, adapt and define one’s dress is not only
an act of self-construction, but also
the result and a symbol of social
mobility, the growth of the bourgeoisie and related decline of the aristocracy
(who hitherto had an exclusive ability to adapt dress and define fashion)
(Entwistle 2000: 44). Moreover, dress
can symbolize, generate and engender
collective identities, such as political, social and nationalist identities.
Therefore, as Parkins argues, forms of dress ‘can become sites of political
struggle’ (2002a: 2), contesting or
legitimating the state and modes of
citizenship. In the French Revolution, ‘dress was a powerful and
multifarious
index of revolutionary ideas’ and the cut, colour and type of
dress simultaneously symbolized and allowed
individuals to perform
political radicalism (Wrigley 2002: 19). The suffragettes used dress to
symbolize
commitment to their political cause, to define aspects of political
activism and vividly reconfigure and
politically radicalize certain types of
fashion and the femininities associated with it (Parkins 2002b). Indeed,
fashion became a form of women’s agency for the suffragettes: ‘it enabled
and abetted their protest’ (Parkins
2002b: 106). Their dressed performances
of protest challenged the cultural intelligibility of a woman’s body, and
the
docile and ornamental ways that it had been constructed, creating a
‘theatricalized public space’ (Parkins
2002b: 3) where dress was part of the
women’s performance of political radicalism. In these ways, dress is a
means
by which identity is performed and affirmed, and creates a symbiotic
relationship where it both enacts and
reflects aspects of micro and macro
sociopolitical change.

The ‘Iron Lady’ and dress

Margaret Thatcher, like many individuals, had an emotional and sensorial
connection with dress, which developed
in her adolescence. Margaret King,
an executive at Aquascutum who advised the prime minister on clothes,
recalled:

She was a delight to dress. She loved trying on clothes and would twirl
around like a little girl. She loved
material and buttons and told me
about her mother, Beatrice who was a dressmaker. She was very proud
of the
fact that her mother knew how to make clothes.
(cited in Maddox 2003: 188)

Thatcher’s personal interest in dress developed through her childhood and

adolescence, and later became a consciously deployed element of her
political persona. Her vivid
self-dramatization as the ‘Iron Lady’ in 1976
used her dress to invoke the most abiding metaphor as a leader: ‘I
stand
before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly
made up and my fair hair gently
waved, the “Iron Lady” of the Western
world’ (Thatcher 1976). By invoking this imagery at the Finchley
constituency dinner, Thatcher, in Campbell’s words, ‘became the lady and a
warrior’ (1987: 243), but this was not
the first or last time that Thatcher
performatively constituted her personal and political identity through
dress.
She seldom combined verbal and visual metaphors as she did in her ‘red star
chiffon evening gown’ speech,
but she repeatedly styled herself to suit the
political occasion, sending diplomatic and political signals via
her dress
(most obviously on the frequent occasions when she was resplendent in the
Conservative Party’s colour
of blue). Such was the power of her dress that
one element became a universal metaphor for political and
diplomatic
behaviour: ‘to handbag’ or to receive a ‘handbagging’ (Oxford English
Dictionary: 1993).2 This metaphor was defined
particularly by the often
abrasive and uncompromising stances that she deployed at European
Community and
Commonwealth conferences.
The personal, emotional attachment to dress was connected to the
exercise of political power for Thatcher. This
was not a spontaneous or
chance occurrence, as Thatcher was influenced by, and drew from, cultural
influences
from her upbringing in Grantham in the 1930s. Initially Thatcher
was resistant, and occasionally ambivalent, to
focusing on dress in her public
life, but she learned to adapt and master it to suit certain political ends and
help craft a dominant and secure political position. Thus Thatcher was
extending and reinforcing the role of
dress in performing power that she
learned from her childhood. The personal, evocative role of dress, tied to the
performances of power in Thatcher’s political career, was underlined by the
fact that outfits were named
according to where they were worn, such as
‘Washington Pink’, ‘Peking Black’ and ‘Kremlin Silver’ (Thatcher 1993:
576). Thatcher avoided wearing favourite or new outfits to meetings that she
thought could be difficult or
unsuccessful, particularly meetings of the
European Council, for fear they would be sullied by bad memories and
as a
consequence, never worn again (Thatcher 1993: 80). Dress was a tool of the
job for Thatcher, but also as for
many women, an emotional and
psychological means for her to negotiate and cope with the demands
presented by her
many roles (see Woodward 2007). Thatcher’s power
dressing reflected her political status, but also located her in
a wider
collective of women who dressed to signify and perform their material,
social and cultural power.

Dress, Hollywood and glamour

The micro-politics of dress during the interwar years reflected and provoked
broader socio-economic changes in
British society. Women’s ability to
exercise agency over dress and appearance
became considerably
democratized in British society by the 1930s. This became part of a broader
cultural process
in the twentieth century that incorporated women into a
fashion industry, developing a cultural gaze that
valorized certain
femininities, demeaned others and could act to empower, constrain or
discipline women. Through
the popularity of women’s magazines, fashion
trends were brought to a provincial, middle-class and working-class
audience (Buckley and Fawcett 2002: 83). Continuing changes in production
and consumption, including the opening
of new department stores selling
ready-made and reasonably priced fashionable clothes, increased access to
fashion and extended women’s ability to pick and choose their outfits
beyond the confines of the aristocracy.
This new ability allowed dress to
symbolize and provoke social mobility and challenge existing social
hierarchies, as ‘fashion provided women with an accessible cultural
language to contest oppressive
representations and to begin to construct new
versions of their identity’ (Buckley and Fawcett 2002: 85). Even
cosmetic
make-up became an acceptable means for women to present different
‘masks’ to the world, whereas
previously it had been considered only
appropriate for actresses and prostitutes (Woodhead 2005: 8). Above all,
the
cinema, Hollywood films especially, profoundly affected provincial British
women’s social lives, aspirational
goals and understandings of the multiple
performances offered by changes in dress (Gundle 2008: 149). Hollywood
stars presented a range of gendered, glamorous and transgressive images
(Gundle 2008: 188):

The physicality of the cinema, the visual style of the films, and the star
images, although on the one hand
reaffirming stereotypical aspects of
femininity, provided in a context in which women could ‘imagine’
themselves as female in ways which ultimately challenged patriarchy.
(Buckley and Fawcett 2002: 99)
The cinema was one of the few pleasures that the young Margaret Thatcher
was allowed as an adolescent. ‘It was’,
recalls Thatcher, ‘the coming of the
cinema to Grantham which really brightened my life’, and she became
‘entranced with the romantic world of Hollywood’ (Thatcher 1995: 14). In
her autobiography, Thatcher reflected
how ‘on my visits to the cinema I
roamed to the most fabulous realms of the imagination’ (1995: 15) and
recalled
her favourite Hollywood stars. Thatcher, like many British women
in the 1930s and 1940s, experienced
socio-economic changes that
emphasized the power of the adaptation of dress and appearance, and the
performative
ability of women to do so. At the same time, these changes
subjected wider groups of women to a disciplinary gaze
that constituted
fashionable dress and judged appropriate appearance and bodily forms.
Indeed, exacting attention
to appearance, comportment and accent was an
important element of lower-middle-class Englishness in the 1930s,
and
incorporated ‘the fear and anxiety of being watched and uncovered’ (Nunn
2002: 68) if one’s dress was deemed
imperfect or inappropriate.
A clear preoccupation with dress was present in Thatcher’s regular
correspondence with her sister, Muriel, when she was at Oxford, and as a
recent graduate in Dartford (Moore 2013:
36–68). Thatcher regularly
worried about her own appearance and ability to enliven her wardrobe
during wartime
rationing, and subsequently strained financial circumstances
on graduation from university. It is also clear that
Thatcher often judged, or
repeated, other women’s opinions of her peers’ dress sense, describing
friends,
teachers, colleagues and rivals as ‘elegant’, ‘dowdy’ or even ‘tarty’.
Thatcher considered Conservative Party
events as key occasions for her to
display her best clothes. As she wrote about one Conservative weekend
political school held in 1948, in ‘the competition for the best dressed woman
… I think I won the day on both
days’ (cited in Moore 2013: 68). The
interwar period increased women’s agency to choose and change dress
according to the latest fashion, the Hollywood star that one admired, or the
social occasion or mood one felt,
and this created a potentially
transformative process for women. However, the agency that women had to
‘choose’
dress was mediated by material ability, class and attendant
assumptions about femininity.
Thatcher’s social rise from the provincial lower-middle classes to the
metropolitan upper-middle classes is
charted by her changing dress and
aspirations. Lawler writes that such ‘getting out and getting away’ (1999:
14)
across class divides for English women is expressed and enabled by
acquiring cultural capital through education,
marriage and changing modes
of dress. Often, women who have been socially mobile can recall their
conscious
desire for fine clothes, glamour and money, as well as their envy
of other women who had more than them (Lawler
1999: 11). This sense of
social differentiation embodied by dress and other cultural artefacts was
evident in
Thatcher’s narrative of her upbringing. In 1985, Thatcher recalled
her frustration at how her mother would reply,
‘Well, we’re not situated like
that!’ when the young Margaret would ask why some of her peers in
Grantham had
more luxurious furnishings and goods, and how her mother
would insist that all new fabrics had to be
‘serviceable’ (Stoppard 1985).
‘One kicked against it,’ remarked Thatcher, ‘how I longed for the time when
I
could buy things that were not serviceable!’ (Stoppard 1985). In her
autobiography, Thatcher writes:

I used to envy the young Catholic girls, making their first communion,
dressed in white party dresses with
bright ribbons … [Methodists were]
much plainer … if you wore a ribboned dress, an older chapel goer
would
shake his head and warn against ‘the first step to Rome’.
(Thatcher 1995: 8)

Clearly, Thatcher was aware how dress and other cultural artefacts denoted
socio-economic status, and her
lifelong celebration of, and enjoyment in,
dress and design formed a key element of her getting out and getting
away
from the status that her class, gender and provincial location would allow
her.
Thatcher’s background also made her aware of the disciplinary gaze in
which
women could be held and judged, both within class and local
community, and therefore more so if they rise
above and across classes.
Drawing from Bourdieu, Lawler writes that women who have risen ‘above
their station’
(1999: 13) can never fully occupy or effortlessly embody their
new social status. Therefore, constant attention
to dress and repetition of
dressed performances was an important social act. There could be few more
bold
performances of Thatcher’s changing status and her successful social
mobility from a provincial town, via Oxford
to a solidly upper-middle class
and metropolitan life than her choice of wedding dress for her marriage to an
upper-middle-class businessman, Denis Thatcher. The off-the-peg dress, of
blue velvet and an ostrich feather hat,
was based on a Gainsborough painting
of the fashionable eighteenth-century political hostess, Georgiana, Duchess
of Devonshire (Maddox 2003: 55).3 Thatcher’s upward social mobility
across class and geographic location was not without effort
or risk, neither
was it a stable achievement. Challenges to Thatcher’s status and political
aspirations came to
the fore as her political career developed, and
representations of her dress were used in an attempt to
destabilize her hold
on power.

Margaret Thatcher in the public gaze

Thatcher had a complex relationship with, and shifting attitudes towards,
public and political focus on, and
comment about, her dress. She alternately
resisted and encouraged such attention, and exercised varying levels
and
modes of agency over her fashion choices. In reviewing the otherwise hostile
responses of feminists to
Thatcher, Loach noted that for many women in the
1980s, the prime minister was ‘a woman who can sustain the
conflicting
qualities of drive and femininity and still be part of the world – not loved or
liked as women feel
they need to be, but successful, assured and admired’
(1987: 26). Campbell concurred:

Margaret Thatcher is one of the most seen women in the world. We all
look at her, but in the power of our gaze
we have no control over her –
she does not protest at this mass observation, because she is not an
object. We
have seen how there is in her both a flight from femininity
and from the world of women, and yet an absolute
adherence to its
 appearances. Perhaps it has been through her consciousness of being
watched that she has
rearranged her ‘feminine persona’, putting both
her femininity as well as her power on display.
(Campbell 1987: 242)

Thatcher was certainly ‘conscious of being watched’ and did indeed

‘rearrange’ her appearance because of it.
However, the adaptation of
Thatcher’s performances of dress belie her deeper
unease about being
objectified and occasional resistance to the public gaze in which she was
intensely held.
Speaking on television in 1984 about a forthcoming Downing
Street reception for fashion designers, Thatcher
confided ‘I’m a little bit
nervous about it because they’re all going to look so glamorous’. ‘Why
should you be
nervous?’ asked the interviewer, ‘But of course’, replied
Thatcher, ‘they’re going to be looking at me and I’m
going to be looking at
them!’ (Diamond 1984).
Thatcher was concerned by the prospect of being held in this mutual gaze
at the reception, and its potential to
affect her self-esteem or destabilize her
performance as a powerful women and representative of the UK. As shall
be
discussed below, for Thatcher to be considered by contemporary feminist
writers such as Campbell and Loach as
‘not an object’ subject to the male
gaze, is a considerable cultural achievement, yet this was not a permanent
achievement. There was continual tension, occasional anxiety and resistance
by Thatcher to her potential
objectification.
Thatcher initially resisted conflating her personal performances of dress
with her public performances of power.
She resented, yet later encouraged,
the objectification implied by focus on her appearance. In 1975, days before
becoming party leader, Thatcher challenged a male TV interviewer, asking
‘Why is it that all the young men ask me
about what I look like?’ He replied,
‘Well, it may seem to people who work in a factory or a mill that you don’t
share or even understand their daily concerns’. Thatcher responded ‘Yes, all
you young men ask me what I look
like. I’m forty-eight so I suppose it’s
flattering that you concentrate on my appearance’. The interviewer
replied
‘No, we are not asking what you look like as such, but we are asking about
your political image’.
Margaret Thatcher concluded, ‘Yes, why do you
always ask what I look like?’ (cited in Cockerell 1988: 216).
In this exchange, Thatcher expressed the resentments of many
contemporary women politicians, and challenged the
focus and comment on
her dress by men. Shortly after becoming prime minister, Thatcher’s office
issued guidance
on ‘Mrs Thatcher’s clothes, hair, eating habits etc.’ which
stated: ‘The Prime Minister regards personal matters
of this sort as trivial
and unconnected with her position as Prime Minister. She is insistent that we
should
never volunteer such details to the media’ (Downing Street Press
Office 1979). Thatcher’s reluctance to adapt her
dress was premised at first
on her unease about being held in the public gaze, the potential for her
objectification and her questioning of the link between politics and
appearance.
However, Thatcher rapidly accepted the need for adaptation of dress, and
the opportunities that this afforded her
to play multiple roles and to appeal to
various constituencies by using dress to its full extent. Indeed, openly
discussing dress became a conscious strategy of Thatcher’s during the
1970s, and was designed to appeal to women
voters (Cockerell 1988: 235).
At the outset of the 1983 election campaign, and
in complete contrast to the
guidance that her office issued in 1979, Thatcher’s office released details of
her
dress and shoe sizes, eating habits, favourite shops for clothes (Marks &
Spencer and Peter Jones) so that
Conservative Party officials would have
such details at hand when fielding media enquiries (Sinclair 1983). By
the
mid-1980s, Thatcher revelled in and encouraged the media’s fascination with
her dress and, on occasion, would
insist that appearance mattered and was a
vital consideration in politics, admonishing male colleagues for their
lack of
attention to this area.
Thatcher engaged in multiple performances of dress. These performances
sometimes showed that she was disciplined
by a male gaze, yet on other
occasions she asserted her agency, reworked tropes of gender and sought to
include
men as an object of judgement about dress. In office, Thatcher
adapted her dress to suit the political context.
As she wrote in her
autobiography: ‘I took a close interest in clothes, as most women do, but it
was also
extremely important that the impression I gave was right for the
political occasion’ (1993: 575). Thatcher also
contended that refusing to
change one’s image and dress if you are a politician ‘betrays a lack of
seriousness
about winning power’ (Thatcher 1995: 295). Her style of dress
was not just subject to scrutiny by the popular
press, but was also on public
display in the chamber of the House of Commons and subject to appraisal by
her male
(and female) parliamentary colleagues. In this institutional context,
Thatcher demonstrated the ‘awful lot of
energy’ that women
parliamentarians expend in ‘managing their femininity in a social position
constructed in
masculine terms’ (Puwar 2004a: 93). The visual and
embodied masculinity of the House of Commons was underlined by
the fact
that the Commons has a dress code whereby men must wear a tie, and until
1998, MPs of both sexes had to
wear a top hat when making a point of order
(Lovenduski 2005: 26–7).
The self-narrative in Thatcher’s memoirs shows that she responded
quickly to critique by peers in parliament, and
was willing to change her
appearance in a mode that she seldom demonstrated regarding criticisms of
her domestic
and foreign policies (Thatcher 1993: 516–24). In 1989, after
parliament was televised, she wore a suit with
stripes and checks while
making a statement. A male MP who had been watching the debate on the
television outside
the chamber approached her afterwards and remarked,
‘What you said was all right, but you looked awful!’ In her
memoir,
Thatcher wrote simply ‘I learned my lesson’ (1993: 576). The prime minister
also received letters if she
wore outfits on successive occasions, of which
she also noted as something to be careful (1993: 576). Cynthia
Crawford
(her personal assistant and dresser) kept detailed files on outfits worn, the
occasions at which they
were worn, and comments about their suitability for
future use. In this way, Thatcher could be considered to be
subject to the
discriminatory gaze of the ‘space invader’, and quick to respond to criticism,
because she was eager to conform to stereotypes about women politicians.
In the 1970s, Thatcher had voice coaching lessons to lower the pitch of
her voice, continued to dye her hair
blonde (whereas she had naturally
brown hair), and followed a strict diet in the weeks before the 1979 election
to reduce her weight (Mayo Clinic 1979). However, she also sought to
extend this gaze to male politicians in both
public and private. Asked during
a television interview if she minded comment on her dress when people did
not
notice how male politicians looked, Thatcher replied that ‘They [the
press] do look at them a little … if they’re
not reasonably well tailored or
they shamble around. Oh yes they do!’ (Diamond 1984). Nigel Lawson
recalls that,
on his appointment by Thatcher as Chancellor of the Exchequer,
‘she gave only one piece of advice. This was to
get my hair cut’ (1992: 249).
Thatcher’s adaptation of dress for the public’s gaze was more complex than
conforming to feminine stereotypes, and she used dress with growing self-
confidence to performatively engender
broader political messages. Above
all, rather than rejecting focus on dress as illegitimate or unrepresentative,
she sought to make dress a universal and constitutive element of the public
realm and political life.

Dress and performances of power

Woodward (2007: 15) argues that Thatcher’s dressed performances allowed
her to present multiple ‘masks’, or
perform ‘a masquerade’ of changing
identities (Rose 1993: 66). However, this presupposes that there was an
authentic identity behind such masked performances. As Butler (1999)
contends, there is no authentic identity
behind the performance of gender; it
is the performative act that constitutes identity. For Thatcher, the
fluidity of
these performances and the significant impact that they had on creating her
public persona suggest
that adaptations of dress both mediated and
constituted her identity in office. Indeed, as has been argued above,
during
Thatcher’s upbringing she was exposed to multiple images of Hollywood
femininities, and the cultural and
material power that women could gain by
changing their dress. However, initially she was unaware of the potential
for
exercising agency over dress to be propitious or politically damaging. Her
fashion sense came under scrutiny
and was contested as her career
progressed in the 1970s, and many of the early political challenges that she
faced were represented, refracted through and reinforced by her dress.
 Thatcher gradually learned, adapted and asserted agency to use dress for
her political benefit. For example, the
wearing of hats befitted Thatcher’s
class, generational and social aspirations. However, such hats also
symbolized Thatcher’s pretender and outsider status as party leader, because
they invoked the narrow,
petty-bourgeois prejudices to which her critics
accused her of appealing, and embodying. At the 1970 Conservative
conference, Thatcher wore a much-ridiculed beehive hat. Asked in 1985
about
the hat, Thatcher recalled ‘I wore a rather smart hat. It suited … The
fact was it would have done for an
actress, but it was not quite right for a
politician. I learned that lesson ever since’ (Stoppard 1985).
Thatcher’s
penchant for hats became a political problem when she became party leader.
She was an ‘accidental
leader’ of the Conservatives, and her victory had
shocked supporters of the previous incumbent, Edward Heath
(King 2002:
452). Ian Gilmour spoke for many in the Conservative establishment when
he claimed that her
leadership would result in a ‘retreat behind the privet
hedge into a world of narrow class interests and selfish
concerns’ (cited in
Evans 2004: 14). Webster (1990: 28) writes that hats can symbolize both
respectability but
also a suburban, middle-class Englishness: the frequent
cartoon of images of Thatcher wearing hats signified ‘the
Tory Lady in a
hat’ (Webster 1990: 23). Moreover, Thatcher was reported to be furious
about criticisms of her
fondness for wearing pearl necklaces and earrings,
which was equally considered to symbolize her position as a
suburban,
middle-class ‘Tory Lady’ (Junor 1983: 90). Her advisers successfully
persuaded her to cease wearing
hats for domestic political purposes,
although she continued to wear them for state ceremonies and on foreign
tours. Adapting her dress helped Thatcher to reach out to new constituencies
for support and counter her
Conservative critics. However, through dress the
tense class politics of the 1970s Conservative Party played out,
revealing
wide unease at having a class, gender and ideological ‘outsider’ (King 2002)
as party leader.
As Thatcher consolidated her position as Leader of the Opposition, she
styled herself as a housewife and was
pictured wearing aprons, washing up
gloves and performing the roles of a housewife: making tea, shopping,
cooking
and washing up (Figure 7.2). While Thatcher, by her own
admission, cooked her husband’s breakfast and often made political
colleagues tea and meals when they visited her
(Junor 1983; Parris 2009),
there is no doubt that many of the public housewife performances were
deliberately
stage-managed for the media. Embodying the housewife also
reflected and emphasized a key Conservative
macro-economic policy: that
of responsible management of the nation’s ‘household budget’ and the
negative impact
of inflation on the amount of goods that each family could
buy (Blakeway 1993). Thus Thatcher combined a
gendered, dressed
performance to shore up her leadership as well as emphasize her ability to
manage the national
economy as a ‘responsible housewife’. Webster argues
this was an extraordinary and regressive set of
performances, and in
contradiction to the reality of Thatcher’s post-war life as an Oxford-trained
lawyer and
career woman (1990: 49–51). The ‘housewife’ style has been
considered as typical of how women politicians become
‘domesticated’ by
the media (Ross and Sreberny 2000: 95) and did allow Thatcher to perform
her feminine authority
in accessible terms (Nunn 2002: 47). However, it also
enabled her to visually counter the ‘Tory lady in a hat’
image: emphasizing
her ‘ordinariness’ and present a traditional image of femininity making the
reality of a woman
leader less threatening to men (Nunn 2002: 40).
Figure 7.2 Margaret Thatcher, newly-elected leader of the Conservative
Party, poses in her kitchen for the press, 1975.
Source: J. Wilds/Hulton Archives, Getty Images.

This domesticated version of femininity, which Thatcher adorned and

performed to suit, was
not a passive or subordinated gender construct.
Indeed, Warner argues it embodied the ‘right of prohibition’
(2000: 53) akin
to that of a strict mother, nanny or governess. Often, Thatcher would remark
that women were more
suited to assume responsibility and were more
decisive than men, because it fell to them to manage the home – it
was
women alone who would be left ‘carrying the can’ (cited in Blakeway 1993;
Campbell 1987: 234–7; Webster 1990:
49–70). Dressing as the housewife
enabled Thatcher to dominate, force and bully while drawing on wider
cultural
norms of acceptable femininities. Indeed, this particular trope of
feminine dress and performance connected Thatcher to other women and
invoked British cultural sensibilities about
the hidden, but wryly
acknowledged, power of the wife and mother: ‘part of many women’s
pleasure in Thatcher’s
power is everything to do with her gender. Thatcher is
more powerful than the men around her, she bosses them
around’ (Campbell
1987: 233). Thatcher dressed as housewife made her power intelligible and
less threatening in
gendered (and class) terms, but also enabled her to project
power in starkly different terms to her Conservative
predecessors and
colleagues. By performing the housewife, Thatcher personalized the
Conservative economic and
political critique of the Labour government’s
policies in her image as leader, and emboldened her claim to be the
only
individual capable of addressing and solving Britain’s economic problems.
At the height of her premiership, Thatcher evolved her performance to
accentuate her power as a national
politician and a stateswoman using dress.
Setting aside previous concerns about media focus on dress, she began
to
revel in such attention. In 1986, she invited BBC cameras into Downing
Street to film and personally discuss
her favourite clothes, even revealing
that she bought her underwear from Marks & Spencer (Ruth 1986). Her
Cabinet colleague Nigel Lawson wrote that ‘she was convinced that her
authority … would be diminished if she were
not impeccably turned out at
all times. She was probably right’ (1992: 127). Furthermore, Thatcher
insisted that
dress was a legitimate aspect of the exercise of political power,
and, as mentioned previously, insisted that her
male colleagues pay attention
to their dress. Dress and politics were intertwined in Thatcher’s daily life. In
her memoirs, Thatcher recalled her ‘horror’ at discovering at a late stage that
a suit to be worn for the state
opening of parliament neither fitted nor suited
her. It was a mistake she was determined not to repeat (Thatcher
1993: 164).
For Thatcher, clothes were integral to her job, and successive and rapid
outfit changes were a normal
routine in the prime ministerial day. Margaret
King, fashion executive at Aquascutum, recalled that:

Every suit had skirts in two lengths – one for day, longer for evening.
And the jackets had a variety of
‘bibs’, pleated or embroidered, which
could be poppered into place to create the illusion of a different top
underneath, if she needed a quick change.
(cited in Alexander 2013)

Even Thatcher’s Asprey handbags became important in performing the

various tasks she faced as prime minister:
quotations, statistics and thoughts
were stored in them, and Crawford ensured that a constant supply of
handbags,
ready packed with cosmetics and mirror, were permanently
stocked and stationed at Thatcher’s Downing Street
apartment (Parris 2009).
Writing about the 1987 election campaign, Thatcher recalled: ‘preparation
for the
election involved more than politics. I also had to be dressed for the
occasion’, and Thatcher’s Aquascutum
houndstooth suit was named
‘election 87’ (1993: 575). Thatcher’s transformation from ‘a middle class
mimsy’ (Polen, in Campbell 2003: 475) in the 1970s to a
fashionable, power
dressing international stateswoman, was complete by the mid-1980s
(Webster 1990: 91).

Embodying domestic and international power

Nicola Thomas, writing about Lady Curzon, Vicereine of India, argues that
her clothes ‘constituted power’ in her
role as the public symbol of British
imperial power: in Curzon’s public duties, dress was ‘a form of discipline
and control’ (2007: 394), and ‘part of her armour against critique’ (2007:
387). Thatcher’s dress on the world
stage also can be considered as part of
her desire to represent both her own and her nation’s power, and as a
means
to create and maintain acknowledgement of her legitimacy as a national
leader. Thatcher’s dress reflected
and embodied her growing power in both
domestic and international terms, and defined a particular form of
executive
style for women. As discussed above, Thatcher named outfits after
successful diplomatic visits, and
avoided wearing new outfits for meetings
that she thought would be unpleasant or unsuccessful. She explained that
she
‘always felt safe’ in her combination of business suits and assorted blouses
(Diamond 1984), and these
dominated her wardrobe on most official
diplomatic visits. For example, Thatcher recalled in an interview, ‘when
I
had the great honour of addressing the United States Congress, I decided to
go in a classic [outfit] that you
are comfortable with and so I did. So I did
not have to think about that at all’ (Stoppard 1985). However, for
evening
wear, Thatcher would commission bespoke clothing from British designers
such as Aquascutum, Jean Muir and
Ian Thomas.
Dress was adapted occasionally for local custom, such as in the Middle
East, where women’s calves and arms were
expected to be covered.
However, King emphasized how Thatcher considered it to be important to
also ‘look
British’, and she would never have adapted dress to the extent of
wearing a sari in India (cited in Armstrong
2013). Over time, Thatcher’s
international dress moved beyond performing party political power to
embodying the
nation and tropes of Britishness. Thatcher told Vogue in
1985: ‘The essence of the well-dressed woman
should never be exaggerated.
Appearance is the first impression people get of you. And it does matter. It
matters
tremendously when you represent your country abroad’
(Bleichroeder 1985: 274). In a television interview, the
prime minister said:
‘if anyone represents Britain, with our reputation for tailoring … they ought
to turn out
looking quite good’ (Frost 1985). When in 1988 it was suggested
that national leaders dress down in casual attire
for the Group of 7 (G7)
meeting at Ottawa, Canada, Thatcher was concerned and decided to make
‘almost no
concessions to informal dress’, explaining that she believed the
public ‘really likes its leaders to look
businesslike and well turned out’
(Thatcher 1993: 164). The prime minister was relieved that the request to
dress
down was not repeated at future meetings.
As Thatcher combined gendered and political performances on the world
stage,
her intention to represent Britain in her dress blurred with embodying
Britain: ‘As the Queen grew older and less
glamorous … Margaret Thatcher
became more powerful and wreathed in myth, the very embodiment of
Britannia’
(Campbell 2003: 466). This monarchical tendency became a
source of public fascination, particularly after victory
in the Falklands War.
As Behnke discusses in this volume, sovereignty depends on, and is
generated in bodily form
through, the dress and symbolism of the head of
state, government or First Lady. Thatcher appeared to adopt
similar dressed
performances to the Queen: carefully planning outfits for diplomatic
occasions, incorporating
national symbols in her dress, insisting on dressing
and looking British, and choosing increasingly elaborate and
glamorous
evening wear for state banquets.4 Marina Warner noted that in Thatcher:

Britannia has been brought to life. But she has achieved this singular
hypostasis not because she is a
battle-axe like Boadicea, but because
she is so womanly, combining Britannia’s resoluteness, Boadicea’s
courage
with a proper housewifely demeanour.
(Warner 2000: 51)

As a defiant leader surrounded by men in her Cabinet, and as a successful

war leader, Thatcher became frequently
compared to a previous executive
ruler of England, ‘Gloriana’ – Queen Elizabeth I – and thus ‘the very
personification and embodiment of Britishness’ (Campbell 2003: 155). This
association gave Thatcher an easily
identified femininity, bestowing her with
a ‘dignity, an aura of benevolence, even perhaps, for some, magic and
mystery’ (Webster 1990: 110).
As the 1980s progressed, Thatcher undertook state visits of her own and
took almost as much care in the
diplomatic design of her wardrobe as Queen
Elizabeth II (Conway and Weldes 2009). Thatcher used the same
couturier
as the queen, Ian Thomas, to design evening wear for her diplomatic visits to
the Middle East and
France in the early 1980s, was fond of the same
handbag manufacturer to the Queen, Asprey, and also frequently
used the
royal milliner, Philip Somerville (Armstrong 2013). A journalist
accompanying the prime minister’s
progress through Asia noted: ‘Mrs
Thatcher acted throughout the trip less as Britain’s representative than as its
embodiment’ (Patrick Bishop, cited in Webster 1990: 106). In 1988, Robert
Harris wrote in the Observer ‘on
her housewife/superstar progress around
the world, Margaret Thatcher has steadily become more like the Queen of
England than the real thing’ (cited in Campbell 2003: 466). Campbell added
‘increasingly the Queen appeared to be
the housewife, Mrs Thatcher the
superstar’ (2003: 466). Thatcher was very aware of the implications of dress
and
representing Britain to foreign publics, writing in her autobiography that
she liked to include the colour of the
national flag of the country she was
visiting in her outfit (Thatcher 1993: 575).
Particularly significant in media and public perception were Thatcher’s
outfits for two of her most famous foreign visits. In 1987, weeks before the
election campaign, Thatcher accepted
an invitation to visit the Soviet Union
and discuss with President Mikhail Gorbachev the matter of improving
East–
West relations. In 1988, Thatcher visited Poland and publicly met with the
leaders of the Solidarity
movement. The outfits served domestic and
international purposes by projecting a powerful and accomplished
leader,
while symbolizing cultural sympathy and understanding. Thatcher wrote that
choosing the clothes for the
visit to Moscow was her ‘biggest challenge’
(Thatcher 1993: 575). Cynthia Crawford had warned Thatcher that
Gorbachev’s wife Raisa was fond of wearing high-fashion clothes by
European designers such as Yves Saint Laurent
and, on the advice of
Crawford and King, Thatcher chose an entire range of outfits from
Aquascutum. Thatcher
dressed specifically to make a dramatic impact on
Soviet political leaders and the public, both in the Soviet
Union and the UK.
Thatcher planned carefully the outfit to be worn on her arrival, stepping
from the aircraft in
a Philip Somerville Russian-style black fur hat, black
coat with wide shoulder pads, and a statement diamond
brooch. Thatcher
had even repeatedly practised her descent
from the aircraft by wearing the
outfit on the staircase at Downing Street, in order that her arrival would
make
maximum impact (King 2013). This conscious rehearsal underscores
the importance of repetition to the success, or
failure, of performative acts
(Butler 1999). Maddox writes that the pictures of Thatcher in her clothes in
Moscow
turned her into ‘a superstar’ (2003: 191). Thatcher’s dress
dominated UK and Russian media reports of the prime
minister’s visit, and
attracted considerable attention from the US and European media.5 Yet far
from belittling her status or power
by focus on her appearance, press reports
emphasized Thatcher’s international status and political acumen
(Cockerell
1988: 319–20). ‘Moscow Maggie’, ran a headline in The Sun, ‘Super Mag’
was coined by the
Daily Express, ‘Mrs Thatcher looked marvellous in those
fur hats’ The Times editorialized (cited in
Cockerell 1988: 319); see Figure
7.3. Thatcher’s aides credited the Moscow visit and the imagery generated
by
Thatcher’s dress as significant in increasing popular support for the
Conservatives in the subsequent general
election (Cockerell 1988: 320;
Blakeway 1993).
Figure 7.3 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wears an Aquascutum fur
hat and
coat while meeting with the Russian public in Moscow,
1987.
Source: Peter Turnley/Corbis Images.

Thatcher specifically wore green Aquascutum outfits when meeting the

leaders of Solidarity during her visit to
Poland in 1988, as she had been told
by a Polish sales assistant at Aquascutum that this colour symbolized hope
in
Polish culture (Thatcher 1993: 779). Thatcher met not only with the Polish
government, but arrived by boat to
the Gdansk shipyards adorned in a green
coat and black fur hat to meet with the anti-Communist leaders of
Solidarity
and representatives of the Catholic Church. By her choice of colour,
Thatcher performatively created a
symbol for her anti-Communist political
stance, magnifying her status and political impact on these occasions. In
both visits, Thatcher’s use of fashion, glamour and specific fabrics and
colours, which resonated with cultural
and political reference points, was not
unlike the Hollywood stars of her
youth, and it generated exceptional focus
and fascination with her personality and abilities as leader.
Thatcher’s agency over dress was not limitless. Not least, it was
contingent on how her performances were
received by audiences, and in
relation to other political factors. Although Thatcher’s regal embodiment of
Britain may have excited the press on the visit to Moscow in 1987, it could
appear inappropriate and hubristic
for a democratically elected head of
government on other occasions. Ultimately, Thatcher was not head of state,
or the legal embodiment of British sovereignty, and the dramatization of her
power to foreign and domestic
audiences could evoke contrasting and
sometimes hostile responses. Thatcher’s embodiment of Britain and her
seemingly unassailable position in office was accompanied by what was
perceived to be increasingly regal
behaviour.6 Indeed,
Thatcher’s increasing
isolation, indifference to criticism and paranoia about threats to her
leadership, were
likened to that of a ‘medieval monarch’ by one of her
colleagues (Blakeway 1993). By 1990, the style of her
fashion seemed to
goad her critics, symbolizing her imperious and detached style of leadership
and heralding her
imminent political demise.
Thatcher wrote that she reserved her ‘most exciting outfits’ for the annual
Lord Mayor’s banquet in the City of
London (Thatcher 1993: 575). The
banquet in 1990 took place after a Summer of protest and rioting against her
flagship policy, the Community Charge (or ‘Poll Tax’ as it was dubbed), and
the day after the resignation of her long-serving Cabinet colleague, Geoffrey
Howe, over disputes about
Thatcher’s European policy. According to
Campbell:

She turned up dressed like Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury in a black

velvet gown with a high collar, cloak and
pearls. Never in all her years
 of power dressing had she worn anything so ostentatiously regal: at the
very
moment when she needed to show some humility her dress
positively screamed hubris.
(2003: 718)

Whereas in Moscow the prime minister’s dress had symbolized and

accentuated her power, and excited media and
popular opinion, Thatcher’s
televised grand entrance was a dressed performance that took place in less
favourable
political circumstances, and reflected and reinforced the
perception that she had lost touch and become
politically careless: ignoring
public opinion and disregarding her Cabinet colleagues’ advice. Thatcher’s
carefully crafted performances of fashion were now perceived as
inappropriately regal and reckless in a changed
domestic political context.
The failure of this performance was not the result of carelessness about dress
on
Thatcher’s part, or in a significant shift in style from previous clothing
worn at the Lord Mayor’s banquets, but
rather a change in political
circumstance and Thatcher’s lack of adaptation to these circumstances. As
Butler
(1997, 1999) argues, identity is constituted through repetition, but its
political and social impact is mediated
by its social reception and context.
Apparently, Thatcher had not recognized this shift and had not adapted her
dress accordingly.
The day after the Lord Mayor’s banquet, Geoffrey Howe delivered an
eloquent, and for many a surprisingly hostile,
resignation speech in the
House of Commons that sharply criticized Thatcher’s European policy and
her style of
leadership. This triggered a leadership challenge and, although
Thatcher won enough votes from her parliamentary
colleagues to survive the
first round, it was not enough to stave off a second round. On the evening of
21
November, the majority of Thatcher’s Cabinet colleagues withdrew their
support for her premiership, and she
resigned the following morning.
Thatcher’s emotional attachment to clothes and the significance of dress to
political events and experiences across her career was reflected in her
recollection of the high drama of her
political downfall. In her memoirs,
Thatcher writes of the moment after she heard by telephone that she had not
secured enough votes in the first leadership ballot:
 I changed out of the black wool suit with its tan and black collar which
I was wearing when the bad news came
through. Although somewhat
stunned, I was perhaps less distressed than I might have expected. The
evidence is
that whereas other outfits which evoke sad memories never
see the light of day again, I still wear that black
wool suit with the tan
and black collar.
(Thatcher 1993: 845)

It is apt that Thatcher uses clothing to express her mental state at the
moment
her premiership was fatally weakened: dress had been integral to her
personal and professional self her
entire life. Just as Thatcher’s political rise
can be traced through her wardrobe, her own recollections of her
political
fortunes are embodied and conveyed using her dress.

Conclusion
Crawford claimed that Thatcher ‘made her own style decisions at all times’.7
Yet Thatcher’s agency as a woman and a
politician was both enabled and
constrained by dress and constructions of dress. As mentioned previously,
Thatcher faced a political struggle to ‘get out and get away’ from her lower-
middle-class, provincial background,
and even more so when she became the
ultimate ‘space invader’ (Puwar 2004a) in the British political elite. In
this
struggle, Thatcher’s dress threatened to become a destabilizing, classed and
gendered symbol of her outsider
status and inappropriateness for office.
Thatcher’s initial responses to these threats were to ignore and dismiss
dress
as a public political concern. However, she self-consciously learned from
mistakes, asserted agency and
adapted her dressed political performances to
consolidate her power, craft her identity and project images to
multiple
audiences at home and abroad. This adaptation drew from the socio-
economic milieu she grew up in, but it
is noteworthy that it crossed from a
private enjoyment and interest in dress to a very public and self-confident
one. Indeed, Thatcher became insistent that dress was a legitimate and
important political concern for all actors
in political life. Therefore,
Thatcher’s use of dress can be interpreted as part of her background and
emotional
self, but not entirely defined by this. Thatcher’s enfashioning was
not totally constrained by her context, or
the dominant cultural and political
attitude that privileged masculinity and men in British politics. Her
performances of class and femininity, such as that of the housewife, were
themselves shifting fabrications to
suit political ends.
Dress, as Buckley and Fawcett (2002) argue, ‘is highly effective in
endlessly constituting but never fixing
identities, and it is performative, in
that it ceaselessly rehearses and exacts the “lines” of femininity’ (2002:
9).
Thatcher’s crafting of dressed performances – particularly the repetition of
aspects of dress – created
recognizable and long-lasting images of her
identity and her politics in the popular culture, and can be situated
alongside
other politically transgressive and transformational uses of dress, such as
those invoked by the
suffragettes. Whereas Thatcher’s politics may not have
been socially and politically radical in the same terms as
the suffragettes –
and indeed she frequently repudiated feminism – she occupied and
dominated the public sphere,
appropriating and repeating particular dress
styles, colours (such as blue) and even accessories (such as
handbags) as
powerful symbols of both herself and her politics.
The importance of this dressed symbolism has been demonstrated by the
repeated references to Thatcher’s style in
the years following her departure
from office, and in the extensive media
commentary on her dress and
politics following her death in 2013. Thatcher’s shifting and mutable
performances:
dressing as a housewife, stateswoman, monarch and
fashionable power-dressing 1980s woman, demonstrate how dress
performatively constituted identity and had political significance. Thatcher
was not bound by an essential
identity in these performances and she
exercised agency, but she had less agency over the reception and popular
perception of these performances. The reception depended on changing
political circumstances and the area in
which the performance was made,
Thatcher’s skill in discerning and adapting to these contexts was variable,
and
faltered at the end of her premiership. Her use of dress and its roles in
defining, enabling and constraining her
political career is significant, not
least because contemporary women in British public life have yet to reach
her high office, or resolve the tensions around agency and the destabilizing
representation of women politicians.

Notes
1 Dress is defined as ‘all the
modifications made to the human body and supplements to the body.
Dress includes a long list of changes to the
body which can be either permanent or temporary’
(Johnson and Lennon 1999: 11).
2 It was for this reason that
in the later 1980s, Margaret King at Aquascutum, suggested the prime
minister use smaller clutch handbags at
diplomatic occasions. rather than the more bulky, black
‘handbagging’ Asprey bags (King 2013).
3 Personal communication with
Cynthia Crawford, 8 September 2010.
4 There was also media
speculation about tensions and rivalries between the Queen and Margaret
Thatcher. In the early 1980s Margaret
Thatcher had requested for Buckingham Palace to
coordinate with Downing Street so that the two women would
never attend a state event in the
same, or similar outfits. The request was met with a simple reply of ‘Her
Majesty does not notice
what other people are wearing’ (Madgwick 1991: 410).
5 Margaret King commented
about the impact of images from the Moscow visit: ‘The Americans
were mad about her, saying how she truly
looked the part of a Prime Minister’ (2013: 176).
6 In 1989, Thatcher used the
Royal pronoun ‘we’ when announcing to the media: ‘We have become
a grandmother.’ Although a possible slip of
the tongue and because she had initially planned for
her husband to be at her side, the comments were widely
interpreted as inappropriately regal and
hubristic.
7 Personal communication with
Cynthia Crawford, 8 September 2010.

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8 Fashion studies takes on politics
Hazel Clark and Molly Rottman

Introduction
The establishment of fashion studies as a relatively new field in the
academy has coincided with an almost
unbounded interest in fashion in the
public arena. Unsurprisingly, this broader attention coincides with the
escalating role of media and social media in particular in the everyday lives
of people around the globe,
enabling fashion to enter the realm of mass
entertainment. Here, its more extravagant aspects have gained great
attention, not least through the association with a burgeoning celebrity
culture, where the famous promote
fashion and some fashion designers
have gained celebrity status (Church Gibson 2012). Fashion has become a
contemporary spectacle which can be shared by anyone with access to
visual media, without the viewer leaving the
comfort of their homes or even
putting on clothes. Yet it is clothes that are the stuff of fashion, material
items that are worn on bodies that display the identities of individuals
relative to chosen groups. Their form
and appearance are conditioned by
time and space, their selection influenced by place and occasion. Location
is a
key factor in thinking about contemporary fashion, not least in
highlighting how the locus of production is
centred in certain geographies,
where fashionable clothes are made and then shipped worldwide.
‘Fashion’ conventionally signifies whether or not garments are of their
time, which nowadays can mean
increasingly shorter durations of wear.
Half-yearly fashion seasons have been reduced to a matter of weeks, with
a
huge market sector described as ‘fast fashion’, creating clothes that are not
meant to last and are usually
thrown away before they show any signs of
wear. All of this constitutes the fashion system, which is recognizably
more
complex than when Roland Barthes used the term for his now classic text
(Barthes 1990[1967]). Therefore,
fashion does not just denote the aesthetic
aspects of clothing, but references the lives of people on many
levels, what
they produce, consume and wear, how, when and why. Fashion is both a
product and a signifier of how
we identify ourselves, how we live our lives
and engage with others, what we value, both at a local and a global
scale –
and thus by its very nature is political. The political dimensions can be
manifest in the manufacture and
trade of garments, or as individual and
social body politics. Whatever the perspective, the making, representing
and wearing of fashionable clothes and bodies involves the exercise of
power
and the shaping of human lives and identities, be it at the level of the
nation or the individual citizen or
subject. Fashion studies reveals how
practices of fashion and dress do not ‘directly or simplistically reflect
the
times’, but rather how fashion is ‘always and everywhere situated within a
society and culture’ (Entwistle
2000b: 80). As a manufacturing industry and
a culture industry, it has been recognized that fashion ‘shapes the
identities
of nations and cities … within a global framework’ (Paulicelli and Clark
2009: 2).

Situating fashion studies

Fashion studies examines the nature and condition of fashion in the
contemporary moment, as well as historically
and cross-culturally. The field
examines fashion as an embodied practice, with its related industry,
production,
consumption and performativity. To quote from the graduate
programme with which we as the authors are most
closely associated,
fashion studies enables the exploration of ‘fashion as object, image, text,
practice, theory,
and concept and develops a critical understanding of
fashion and its complex global intersections with
identities, histories, and
cultures in the contemporary world’ (Parsons School of Design 2014).
Despite the
newness of fashion studies programmes, there is a substantial
body of scholarship, dating back 20 years, which
has broadened and
deepened an academic understanding of fashion. While much of this work
was not originally
identified as fashion studies, we can embrace it based on
its subject matter, and by its interdisciplinary and
critical approaches.
One of the earliest publications to tackle fashion from a critical and
interdisciplinary perspective is Jennifer
Craik’s, The Face of Fashion:
Cultural Studies in Fashion (1994), which in particular considers
embodiment, image, identity, gender and exoticism. Published prior to the
identification of the field of fashion
studies, Craik’s book remains valuable
for its substantial referencing of the work of scholars from a range of
disciplines including cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, art history
and social history (Craik 1994:
xii). Today, the more complex nature and
greater reach of fashion continues to demand this wider approach. Over
the
last two decades, the most articulate and rigorous academic mouthpiece for
fashion has been Fashion
Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture,
first published in March 1997, which has remained under the
editorship of
Valerie Steele. In creating an Index of the first ten years of Fashion Theory
articles,
Clark determined that:

Fashion studies is the comprehensive term for the field that includes
theoretical, historical, methodological,
and historiographical
approaches, and subjects, from gender, identity and the body, to the
review of
exhibitions … Fashion Theory introduces fashion as word
and image, as sign, as material object, relative
to dress and the body.
(Clark 2006: 486)

While, if asked, many of the contributors to Fashion Theory might

declare
themselves as fashion studies specialists, the journal publishes papers from
writers from a variety of
subject disciplines who bring their scholarly
backgrounds and critical eyes to fashion. As already noted, to
uncover the
complexities of the subject, much of its scholarship is interdisciplinary. In a
recent issue, for
example, Stephanie Saunders, a specialist in the literature
and culture of Latin America, writes of ‘Fashioning
Female Identities and
Political Resistance in Contemporary Chile’ (Saunders 2014). Drawing on
fashion theory,
including Roland Barthes, The Fashion System
(1990[1967]) and writing on the body, Saunders’ article is
particularly
informed by a popular novel, Marcela Serrano’s Nosotras que nos queremos
tanto (1991;
see Saunders 2014). Nevertheless, the politics of fashion has
not been addressed directly in Fashion
Theory. Its index of 2006 classified
articles according to themes, which included a modest number of entries
for
‘Cross-dressing’, ‘Nationalism’, ‘Race’, ‘Religion’ and ‘Social Class’ and a
greater number under ‘Gender’.
‘Politics’ was not a theme that could be
identified from what had been published. While the scope of the journal
has
widened since then, as evidenced for example by special issues on
ecofashion (12(4), 2008) and Latin American
fashion (18(5), 2014), the
political dimensions of fashion have not been an overt focus. This is but one
indication of work to be done by fashion studies scholars and by academics
in political science and international
studies; this work may best be
collaborative.
While fashion studies has developed its own scholarship over the last 20
years, in order to address the many
factors that concern, impinge on and
impact fashion, the field must continue to embrace an almost infinite range
of material and approaches from disciplines across, but not exclusive to, the
humanities and social sciences. The
study of fashion as a practice, process,
product or system also can demand a multi-methodological approach
(Granata 2012: 75). Our view is that we must engage with both
interdisciplinarity and multi-methodological
approaches in order to engage
critically with fashion in all its cultural, economic, historical and political
contexts, as well as to reclaim a subject once regarded by some scholars as
frivolous and ephemeral (Steele
1991). Embracing the intersections of
fashion and fashion studies with many aspects of human life asserts the
important, and often overlooked, relationship to politics. In this chapter we
address some of the main concerns
that are forming part of the broader
political discourse within fashion studies, as our contribution to this
original
volume that opens up that discourse. In doing so, we are reminded that ‘the
field of fashion is one
where the appearance of the body is absolutely
critical’ (Entwistle and Rocamora 2006: 746). This statement
derives from a
study by fashion studies scholars of London Fashion Week in 2002.
Drawing on the work of Bourdieu,
they situate the professional fashion
week (originally occurring biannually) as the materialization of the field
of
fashion. That materialization also relies on the visual as the vehicle of
dissemination and promotion of
fashion, which functions simultaneously in
the aesthetic and commercial realms.

Uncovering fashion
In February 2014, the popular British tabloid newspaper The Sun carried a
report on London Fashion Week
that declared: ‘Fashion week is the most
anticipated event in every fashionista’s diary’ (The Sun 2014).
Known more
for offering the best and latest news on ‘sports, showbiz, and celebrities’ or
the latest gambits of
the British royal family, The Sun is hardly a predictable
source of fashion authority. Yet the fact that
the paper was covering London
Fashion Week (albeit in The Sun ‘Woman’s’ section) served to
demonstrate
how fashion had entered the public realm, as visual spectacle as well as
through its consumables.
London Fashion Week was no longer the
professional trade event that it had been at the outset; now, according to
The
Sun, its readers were being given access to fashion knowledge at the same
time as they were being
encouraged to buy the clothes and accessories
featured in the article. Titled ‘Wear in the World’, the piece
featured the
four world cities most closely associated with the fashion system, which
stage biannual fashion
weeks in sequence every Autumn and Spring:
London, Paris, New York and Milan. The choice of clothes and
accessories
to represent each city, accompanied by pictures and information on where
they could be purchased, was
both predictable and odd. A baseball cap and
trainers were recommended for pounding the pavements of London, a
striped Breton-style sweater (of course) and sensible brogues were
considered de rigueur for Paris, while
teetering stilettos were the
recommended footwear for New York and Milan. The article emphasized
the
aestheticization and globalization of fashion while avoiding any of the
political dimensions of the
mass-production of fashionable clothes.
 The clothes featured in The Sun were available to shoppers on the British
high street and largely featured
so-called ‘fast fashion’ brands such as the
UK’s Topshop and Primark, the USA’s Forever 21, the Swedish-based
H&M or Spanish Zara – the last two having both achieved a high level of
market saturation on a global scale.
Fast fashion has been a source of recent
debate for scholars (Moon 2014). It can be argued that its lower prices
give
it a democratic role in providing more agency for people across a wider
income range to make individual
choices about how they look. However,
opposing views prevail of fashion’s democratic role. French social
philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky makes a compelling case for fashion as
offering democratic choices through
consumption (Lipovetsky 2002). Yet
consumption can serve as a convenient smokescreen to the political reality
of
a lack of democracy, as for example in mainland China.
Ackbar Abbas wrote of Hong Kong in 1997, the year of the handover of
its sovereignty to China, how the British
colonial administration had proved
very efficient in providing almost no outlet for political idealism; rather,
directing most of its energy toward the economic sphere. He observed how
historical imagination – that is, the
belief by citizens that they might have a
hand in shaping their own history – ‘gets replaced by speculation on
the
property or stock markets, or by an obsession with fashion or consumerism’
(Abbas 1997: 5). In the almost two decades since Abbas wrote these words,
Hong Kong has continued to develop as a
retail centre for expensive
designer label fashion in particular, attracting many consumers from
mainland China.
Major cities on the mainland also have developed as
centres of fashion retail. The Chinese situation reinforces
Abbas’s
perspective, and the view that ‘the democratic discourse [in fashion]
promotes a decrease in creativity
and production’ while actually creating
merely an illusion of endless choices which are dictated by fashion
retailers
(Choufan 2013). An added complexity to the politics of fashion
consumption in mainland China is the
fact that many well-off, middle-aged
consumers are unfamiliar with fashion decision-making, having grown up
under
the Cultural Revolution. While contemporary fashion consumption
apparently offers them choices, the reality is
not of fashion as a democratic
means towards individual agency, but as a demonstration of the power of
market
forces within a totalitarian state. Thus, the tensions and politics of
fashion are highlighted in the realm of
consumption, and are enhanced in
particular by the increasing global ambitions of fashion brands. Yet that
power
is not without challenges.
In 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled a case of employment
discrimination against the fashion retailer Abercrombie
& Fitch in favour of
a Muslim woman who had been fired for wearing a headscarf to work as
part of her
religious practice (Barnes 2015; Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission v. Abercrombie &
Fitch, 575 US _ 2015). Such contravening
of company dress code was particularly marked in the case of this
retailer
who, since the 1990s, had become renowned for featuring scantily clad and
toned male and female bodies
as part of its advertising campaigns. The
image was also promulgated in its stores, where salespeople were
originally
called ‘models’ and hired based on physiques that resembled those shown
in the advertisements. Male
employees worked shirtless, and often were
stationed at the entrance to stores to attract customers inside. At
the
company’s Hollister retail brand, they were known as ‘lifeguards’ (Kaplan
2015). So while choices may appear
to have been available to the consumer,
the brand was actually enforcing very strict sartorial and corporeal
strictures
on its employees as an apparent representation of the brand’s imaginary. Yet
the breadth and diversity
of contemporary fashion is also such that it can
generate from within a variety of antidotes to the worst
excesses of the
fashion industry. For example, the emergence of what is referred to as ‘slow
fashion’ denotes a
marked political agenda, which turns away from
fashion’s reification of image. ‘Slow’ promotes greater
relationships
between wearers and clothes, while supporting local production, transparent
systems and sustainable
products (Clark 2008; Cronberg 2014). This leads
us to a consideration of place relative to the contemporary
global fashion
system.
Place is key to fashion on many levels, not least in its aesthetic
dimensions. Fashion knowledge is informed by
the incorporation of
Otherness into designs, notably by Western designers, referencing non-
Western sources as a form of exoticism (see Ling’s chapter in this volume).
Yet it is unusual for
any aspect of the material production processes of
fashion, especially its transnational nature, to be featured
as part of fashion
journalism. The politics surrounding the mass manufacture of fashionable
clothing – typically
by anonymous women workers and children, often paid
minimally and residing in East Asia, Eastern Europe and the
global South –
comes to light only in the face of disaster. The Rana Plaza clothing factory
collapse in
Bangladesh in April 2013 that killed more than 1,100 workers is
the most recent example. This event received
widespread international press
coverage and drew attention to the poor working and economic conditions
of garment
factory workers around the world. It even resulted in action, by
causing major fashion retailers including
Walmart, Gap, Target and Macy’s
in North America, to speak out about labour practices in clothing
manufacture,
and to commit with other Western retailers to widespread
inspections of Bangladesh’s thousands of apparel
factories. While any
longer-term impact of these inspections would need greater investigation,
Rana Plaza has
remained in the news. In June 2015 the Bangladesh police
charged 41 people involved in the collapse with murder
(Manik and Najar
2015). The mediatization of fashion impacted the widespread knowledge of,
and reaction to, the
event and perhaps even the sentencing. The images of
demolished buildings and corpses provided a chilling and
lasting contrast to
the perfect models’ bodies that appear seasonally in fashion advertisements
and on runways.

Bodies
The body is formed and shaped by fashion, which assumes the power to
reveal, conceal or enhance unclothed flesh.
Fashionable dress practices
make human bodies legible as long as the prevailing codes are familiar to
the given
audience (see also Shinko’s chapter in this volume). This
relationship between fashion and the body adheres to
expectations and
largely remains unexamined; we take for granted the sexing power of the
suit to give men a
V-taper, or the effect of a smooth, flat stomach achieved
by a pair of Spanx, because these garments are
enforcing ‘natural’ ideals.
Here the role of the fashion designer comes into play, providing authority
and
credibility to new looks, even when crossing previously accepted social
or gender norms. Some ideas succeed as
fashionable clothes, while others
serve to demonstrate how fashion can be as a marker of its times. The
topless
monokini swimsuit introduced by French designer Rudi Gernreich
in 1964 never became a fashion hit, but remains as
a metaphor for the
greater personal and bodily freedoms that began to occur in the lives and
appearance of
Western women. While many fashion designers choose to
produce clothes that aim to be acceptable to the consumer
market and
reinforce social, cultural and gender stereotypes, other designers such as
American Rick Owens in his
Autumn/Winter 2015/16 menswear line, have
chosen more conceptual approaches, where fashion serves to critique
itself.
At Paris Fashion Week in February 2015, Owens debuted a startling
reversal of
clothing conventions by literally turning garments upside-down.
His show reimagined familiar, slouchy black
jackets, tunics and other tops
into strange pieces that clung to the male models in unexpected places. As
neck
holes became flies, openings were created through which the flaccid
penises of the male models bobbed visibly as
they strutted down the
runway. Although the sight of a breast or nipple through a sheer or mesh
shirt has become
fashionably acceptable, or even seductive at a Paris
Fashion Week event, the appearance of male genitalia in a
high fashion
realm, as well as outside of the runway, proved to be a shocking sight. The
questions provoked by
Owens’ designs remain pertinent to any
consideration of the relationship between fashion and gender, and dress
and
decorum. The first expectation we have of clothing is that it covers the
naked body. Even a loincloth
achieves this basic goal, and so most people
assume that our bodies’ private regions will remain hidden by any
garment
intended for wear beyond the confines of the bedroom. As Joanne Entwistle
writes: ‘Conventions of dress
transform flesh into something recognizable
and meaningful to a culture and are also the means by which bodies
are
made “decent,” appropriate and acceptable within specific contexts’
(Entwistle 2000a: 324). The visibility of
inappropriate parts of the body,
either through total exposure or merely through the suggestive drape of
fabric,
continues to be a fraught subject which extends to the form and
shape of the body itself.
Fashion designers can and do claim the space of the runway to draw
attention to the conventions of the fashion
system. Fashion’s proclivity for
thin and toned bodies was a focus of Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo’s
Spring/Summer 1997 collection for her Comme des Garçons label, entitled
‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body’.
Models wore dresses that featured
feather down padding to make large, somewhat random bumps appear and
protrude
from the body, particularly on their stomachs and backs, which
gave the illusion of a larger, distorted figure.
The model bodies were
obscured inside these sculptural forms, at once liberated from the norms of
fashion, but
confined by dresses that were made from checked gingham,
adding a confusingly homespun effect to the pieces.
Owens’ and
Kawakubo’s designs are not created to be commercial; rather, they operate
as a critical and
self-reflexive gesture, questioning basic assumptions at the
heart of the industry. Fashion is by its nature
performative. For example,
Kawakubo’s pieces have can be compared to the work of the late Australian
performance
artist Leigh Bowery, active in London in the 1980s and 1990s.
Both challenge conventions of beauty and gender,
and further ask how
fashion defines the human. Bowery’s provocative art and design utilized the
abject to create
scenes of bodily horror, such as staging a fake birth or
featuring grotesque facial piercings. These visions of
the body seem to
violate every basic principle of adornment, and instead of seeking to
beautify, the garments
often disfigure and fracture it. Strange protrusions
recall hunchbacks, lepers and alien forms for which there
are no names.
However, such references also help to focus attention on the reality of non-
normative bodies, and ways of bringing them into a fashion discourse as a
political statement.
Offering the abject and the ugly to the attention of the
gaze serves to challenge established notions of
‘beauty’, and conventions of
manliness or femininity. Doing so calls into question standard notions of
subjectivity and the established body politics of (Westernized) societies.
 The establishment of fashion studies as an academic field is of value to
the study of fashion, in providing data
on the actual bodies of real women
who want to engage with fashion, but who typically are excluded by the
fashion
system (Downing Peters 2014). This reinforces how the visibility of
inappropriate parts of the body or expanses
of flesh – either through total
exposure, or merely through the suggestive drape of fabric – is a fraught
subject, certainly in many Western cultures. From the Muskegon school
board in Michigan to the Parliament of
Uganda, both governing forces bred
anxieties surrounding dress and the body, resulting in rules outlining the
display of the body. Specifically, these rules were created to punish those
whose dress pracrices were believed
to be indecent, such as the teenage girl
in Muskegon, Michigan, who was penalized for wearing a prom dress with
a
small cut-out on the back (Moore 2015).
While punishment often stems from display of the naked body in public
(e.g. indecent exposure laws), the vast
majority of rules governing fashion
and the body are unwritten. Yet body politics can and must be considered
literally relative to fashion, and similarly so must gender politics – both of
which are propagated, often quite
covertly, by apparel companies, media
outlets and consumers. They are enforced by communities in person, online
and through the random collisions of people interacting in the street.

Gender trouble
As one walks through a city and examines a sexually ambiguous passer-by,
a subliminal response is to ask oneself:
man or woman? Why then, must we
identify the bodies of those around us, and how can we begin to understand
the gender of a stranger? Joanne Entwistle touches on this need to
understand one another’s sex, and how ‘clothes
draw attention to the sex of
the wearer so that one can tell, usually at first glance, whether they are a
man or
a woman’ (2000b: 140). This is why from birth to death, clothing,
be it a pink ribbon atop a baby’s head or a
blue football placed prominently
on a sweater, can proclaim to the world and enable individuals to reference
which gender box they tick at the doctor’s office.
 Fashion has the power to confirm and emphasize gender, and to hide
parts of the body that fail to cohere with
gendered and aesthetic ideals of
the body: the suit jacket that slims a plump man and hides his muffin-top;
the
shawl that a woman might use to cover her brawny shoulders. However,
just as fashion has the ability to
accentuate and reinforce gender, it also can
confuse or violate its terms. If, as Entwistle asserts, fashion
serves to make
the body legible at a glance, it just as easily makes the body illegible:
people in drag who have temporarily misaligned their genders and sex
through fashion. Even
more disruptive can be genderqueer persons, who
may choose to mix and match garments that ultimately fail to
cohere into a
unified whole, and whose instability threatens to undermine the gender
binary as buttressed by
fashion. For many, the lack of a clearly defined
gender is a source of anxiety further compounded by a confusion
of the
terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’. It is necessary to reassert that the sex of a person
is biologically assigned at
birth, based on reproductive anatomy; while
gender is an identity that one can construct. Gender and sex do not
always
align, and this misalignment has the power to provoke disgust and even
hatred in onlookers. Encounters
with those who dress against gender norms
often put people on edge; these non-conformists are not only illegible
in
their appearance, but also serve to indict the terms of their illegibility by
their very presence.
Beginning in the neonatal ward, societies and cultures enforce the lines
of gender: for example, by dividing
infants with pink and blue beanie hats.
While this process is taken for granted, when parents violate it, as in
the
classic 1970s parable, X: A Fabulous Child’s Story (Gould 1978), relatives
can react with a mixture of
horror and embarrassment to the unnamed infant
in gender-neutral overalls. First published in Ms. magazine
in 1972, the
story on which the book is based questioned the construction of gender
through clothing in ways that
many readers had not yet encountered. For
refusing to dress child X in gendered clothing, the parents are
ridiculed and
subject to accusations of bad parenting. As Joanne Eicher and Mary Ellen
Roach-Higgins explain:
 Adult caretakers … act as purveyors of culture. [They are supposed to
provide] gender-symbolic dress that
encourages others to attribute
masculine or feminine gender and to act on the basis of these
attributions when
interacting with the child.
(Eicher and Roach-Higgins 1995: 101)

In the absence of these gendered markers, child X’s family members are
compelled to provide their own markers in
the form of tiny dresses or
baseball mitts.
Like the relatives of child X, many ordinary people use fashion to
emphasize and enhance the scrutinized,
gendered body. The gaze placed
upon bodies, in the public space or nowadays on the likes of Instagram, has
become
all but omnipresent – and this constant assessment has produced in
wearers of clothing a host of reactions,
pushing some towards conformity
and others into heterodoxy. On catwalks and in magazine spreads the world
over,
we see dress used to promote ideals of a naturally slender body: long
coats accentuating even longer, lean limbs
and crop tops highlighting flat
stomachs. Yet at other moments such as in the 1980s, fashion has preferred
an
athletic figure, leading for example to a situation where ‘[t]‌he bodies of
female body-builders, for instance,
became the site of increased fascination
and scrutiny’ (Granata 2010: 94). Such cyclical fashion corporeal
preference persists to this day.
More muscular models dressed in athletic tape and sports bras circled
the
runways, when American fashion designer Alexander Wang introduced
sportswear-inspired looks for fast fashion
brand H&M in Autumn/Winter
2014/15. Yet, whether the body en vogue has been fit or flat, the fashion
system promotes it as an ideal, particular to a given moment in time. A
notion of the appropriate body rests at
the centre of mainstream fashion,
from haute couture to 1960s Carnaby Street in London. In the face of
normative
pressures and the occasional threat of violence, some people flee
from fashion’s somatic constraints into the
flowing skirts of androgyny.
These individuals may opt for an adolescent or even childlike asexual
appearance,
hiding hips and muscles to produce an often waif-like, yet
gender-neutral figure. Minor subversions, such as
tight trousers for men, or
boxy jackets for women, have become commonplace both on the runways
and in the
streets, apparently illustrating just how normal and apolitical this
practice has become. However, at its
extremes, androgynous fashion design
retains the power to disturb entrenched gender and social stereotypes.
In the newborn we find gender at its most fluid, but it is solidified with
clothing as quickly as possible, so
that by the time a child is toddling down
the aisles of Baby Gap, they know instinctively which garment to grab.
Fashion scholar Christopher Breward builds on this sentiment, stating:
‘Masculinity is not a “given”, it too is
created and manipulated through
film, magazines, advertising, and, of course, clothing’ (Breward 1995: 216).
Through early inculcation and constant enforcement, gender is given the
illusion of essence, when it is in fact a
series of performances. In this
regard, it becomes increasingly evident that the repeated acts witnessed
through
film, magazines and other visual media are those that people
replicate when performing gender. As Judith Butler
outlines in her seminal
text, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity:

Gender ought not to be constructed as a stable identity or locus of

agency from which various acts follow;
rather, gender is an identity
tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a
stylized
repetition of acts.
(Butler 1999: 179)

For Butler and other scholars, this notion of gender highlights the
importance of quotidian acts, such as the
choice to wear high heels or
lipstick which, taken individually, seem to have little substance but when
accumulated over time, come to in fact make up a person’s gendered
identity.
Butler’s notion of performativity suggests a life imagined on a filmstrip,
in which no single frame constitutes
the movie. When these individual
frames are run through a projector, 24 per second, the illusion is produced
of a
stable reality and gender. Transgender people rely heavily on dress to
enhance their bodies: especially those who
do not undergo sexual
reassignment surgery, who perhaps best embody this complicated nexus of
gender, fashion and
performativity in which clothing becomes their primary
method of
identification. Through dress, trans people can conform to
gendered norms, modifying their bodies to achieve this
goal, and yet
because of the limitations of this method, many of them fail to pass. Even
for those who are
fashion-confirming, if their ‘unnatural’ bodies are
discovered beneath their clothing, trans people can be
subject to the threat
of harm and eruptions of violence. This is a significant example of how
fashion can work
within a social register as a mask and a cloak, fixed in its
appearance by time, but with the potential to serve
as a political agent for
changing social power structures on various levels and in complex ways.

Conclusion
Whether or not they are cognisant of fashion and its political implications,
so many people around the world are
active participants in the fashion
system. By simply wearing clothes, various statements and decisions are
being
made such as: ‘What is your gender?’, ‘What is your desired or
implied socioeconomic status?’, ‘Are you going to
hide or emphasize parts
of your body?’, ‘How was the clothing you are wearing made, and under
what conditions was
it produced?’
A few people are aware of these sorts of questions and internal
dilemmas, but others would strongly believe, or
even insist, that they are
not participating in the fashion system at all. These detractors may disdain
the
glossy magazines and hubbub around Fashion Week, and position
themselves as anti-fashion, as beyond or outside
the concerns of seasonal
trends and the latest ‘it’ bags. However, since we all must get dressed each
and every
day, presumably in clothing we have selected and purchased, we
participate in this network of economic
interactions and social signifiers.
Whether we like it or not, in the global fashion system there is no way to
opt out – no way to escape.
 Some consumers, seeking not so much to escape the aesthetic fatigue of
fashion as much as its political
implications, have turned away from fast
fashion retailers, especially after the tragedy of the Rana Plaza
clothing
factory collapse. Such catastrophes have drawn attention to the potential
labour consequences of the
cheap products that Westerners have come to
take for granted. In light of these concerns, many consumers in the
USA
have begun purchasing so-called ‘heritage’ and union-made clothing from
brands such as Schott NYC, Red Wings
and Carhartt. ‘Ethical’ e-commerce
companies such as Everlane have ridden this same wave of consumer
demand,
developing their mission around fairly sourced materials and
marketing their transparent pricing and production
methods as a way to lure
in those seeking more responsible production and fair trade. Brands such as
Schott NYC
and Everlane are selling an ethos as much a product to a very
small segment of the market, yet they remain
interesting examples of how
companies within the global fashion system have the potential to subvert
that system
from within its boundaries. On the runways in London, Paris,
New York and Milan, men in skirts and women in plastic bags continue to
offer some kind of strange, if unlikely, alternative
to current gender and
bodily norms. Whether these small rebellions enter closets the world over
remains to be
seen.
So where do we go from here? The world of fashion is rife with
contradictions. It produces global commodities
with the capacity to destroy
the environment and the health of millions of people. Yet it is also a
politically
subversive tool with the power to challenge sexual and gendered
dictums. It can be the basis on which many people
form their identities.
Sometimes it is merely the advent of a new stylistic trend. Fashion
functions on many
levels, encompassing as it does a churning mass of
political relations and semiotics – all of which matter much
more than many
would care to admit.

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Index

abaya 14,
102, 151,
158
Abbas, Ackbar 190–1
Abe, Shinzo 87–8, 135
Abercrombie & Fitch 191
absurdism 81n20
Abu Ghraib prisoners 6–7, 30, 32, 37n5
adornment 3, 6, 7, 23, 112, 193
African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights 109
Agamben, Giorgio 7
ahimsa (non-violence) 31
Ahlia University 109
Aideed, Mohamed Farrah 153
Alexeev, Leonid 2, 3
aliindi 149, 150
al-Qaeda 72, 90n8
Al-Shabaab 156
Ang Lee 76
anti-colonialism 46;
see also colonialism
anti-veil dressing laws 41, 43, 45–7, 61, 63; see also ‘burqa ban’ legislation
anti-Western hostility 72
Aquascutum 166, 176, 177, 179–80, 183n2
Arab Spring 11, 44, 56
artists’ perspectives 52–5
Asprey 176, 178, 183n2
al-Assad, Asma 133–4, 141n13
‘Aura/Burqa’ (Lady Gaga) 62

Bangladesh, Rana plaza factory 192,

197
Ban Ki Moon 99
Barre, Mohamed Siad 149, 151, 153
Bartelson, Jens 117
Barthes, Roland 7, 187, 189
al-Bashir, Omar 101
Baudrillard, Jean 8–9, 16n7
Beckett, Margaret 162–3
Belasescu, Alexandru 44, 59
Belgium: veil dressing in 46; anti-veil
dressing laws in 41, 47, 55, 110
Bertin, Rose 127
Bertolucci, Bernardo 76
bin Laden, Osama 72
Blair, Tony 130
Bleiker, Roland 2–3
bodies: as absorptive, reflective surfaces of power 23; as body-site tropes
23; enfashioning of 29–30, 32; and fashion 192–4; female 11, 78–9; as
mannequins 22, 25–6, 28; as sites of embodied resistance 23; social
24;
of women 23;
in world politics 58–62; see also nakedness
bodies of resistance 9–10
Boko Haram 72
Bourdieu, Pierre 59, 189
Bowery, Leigh 193
Breward, Christopher 196
bridal attire 107
Brighenti, Andrea 117
British East India Company 79
Bruni-Sarkozy, Carla 118, 131–2
Buddhist koans 13, 70, 80–1
burkini 50
‘burqa ban’ legislation 11, 41, 43, 47–8, 49, 64n1; see also anti-veil
dressing laws
burqas 10, 12, 64n1; see also
veil dressing
Burton, Sarah 137
Bush, Jeb 140n8
Butler, Judith 4, 19, 21, 37, 165–6, 173, 181, 196

cambuur 155
Cameron, David 135
Campbell, B. 167, 170, 171
Campbell, J. 178, 181
Canada, Muslim identity in 55
Carhartt 197
Catherine II (Russia) 127
Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe (This Is Not A Pipe; Magritte) 10
chador 64n1; see also burqa; veil dressing
Chan, Stephen 86
Chanel, Coco 12–13, 81, 82
Chapman, Georgina 135
Chen, Ching-Chang 83
Chiang Kai-Shek, Madame 79
China: Buddhist koans in 13, 70, 80–1; Diaoyutai–Senkaku Islands dispute
69, 83–5; fashion in 75–82; and the fashion industry 13, 139–40, 190–1;
national costume
in 8, 74; opium in
79; as threat 73–4
‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ (Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit)
13, 69, 75–80, 82, 90n3
clash of civilizations 72
Clinton, Hillary 163
clothing: hypersexual 48, 62, 69, 77, 86, 120, 130; Russian
2–3; Western
108, 197
clothing manufacturers 192, 197–8
cocarde nationale 125–6
colonialism 70, 149; see also anti-colonialism
colonization 71
Confucian civilization 72–3
Cotton, Tom 72
Craik, Jennifer 188
Crawford, Cynthia 172, 182
critical scholarship 42
cross-dressing 5, 165
Curzon (Lady; Vicereine of India) 177
‘Cut Piece’ (Yoko Ono) 36

designers 48, 50, 61, 139, 187, 191, 192–3; American 131nn15–16; Asian
16; British/English 135,
177; Chinese 50,
76, 137,
141n16; European
 137, 141n15, 179; French 131, 192; Indian-American 131, 135;
Japanese-American 135; Korean-American 135, 196; other country-
American 137; Russian 2; Western 75–6; see also individual designers by
name
dhoti (loincloth) 31
Diaoyutai–Senkaku Islands dispute 69,
83–5
Dior 50
dirac 151, 152
Dogen (zen master) 80–1
Doo-ri Chung 135
drag 4, 22
drag queens 5
dress: and gender identification 194–7; and Hollywood cinema 168, 173;
hybrid forms
of 30; and identity 161–2, 165–6, 182; and the performance
of power 173–7; performativity of 164–6, 183; social implications of
197; and social
mobility 168–9;
and social power structures 197; as tie-
signs 34; see also fashion
dress codes: anti-Western 12; of the body
politic 116, 120, 128, 129; in
China 8; corporate 191; in France 8,
125, 128; high
school 194; House of
Commons 172; of Marie Antoinette 122, 124, 126; Muslim
11–12, 49,
50, 54; in Somalia 156; in
Sudan 11–12,
99, 101,
102, 104,
106–8, 110,
111–12; Western 12; for
women 43, 47

Eicher, Joanne 195

electronic hijab 112
Elizabeth I (England) 178
Elizabeth II (England) 178, 183n4
Elmahdy, Aliaa 56–7
embodiment 22, 30, 41–7, 52, 61, 117, 188
Entwistle, Joanne 6, 29, 109–10, 111, 165, 193, 194
European Union, anti-veil dressing laws in 45–7
Everlane 197

The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (Craik) 188

Falklands War 178
fashion: as ambiguous semiotic system 7–9; androgynous 196; and the
athletic body 196; for babies 195–6; and bodies
192–4; and body
image
 43; defined 3; ethical implications of 52; female 5, 7; geopolitics of
45;
male 5,
128–30,
140n9; Parisian 44; and the performance of gender 4–5,
21; performativity of
9, 193; Western
50; and place 191–2; politicization
of 11–12, 30, 116; see also
dress; Muslim fashion
fashion code, defining features of 8,
10
fashion diplomacy 134–9
fashion photography 50–1
fashion studies: and politics 187–8; situating 188–9; uncovering fashion
190–1
The Fashion System 189
Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (ed. Steele) 188–9
Fashion Week 197
female circumcision 148
female genital mutilation (FGM) 148
female politicians 5, 15, 129
Femen activism 44, 56, 64n4
feminism 23, 44, 55, 57, 86; postcolonial 59; Second Wave 59
feminist politics 4–5, 9, 47, 56
feminist scholarship 48, 60
Fiorina, Carly 73
First Ladies, political influence of 133–4
‘First Ladies at the Smithsonian’ exhibition 115
First Lady fashion 13–14, 115–17, 129, 139
flogging 98, 99, 109, 112
Flugel, J.C. 128
Ford, Tom 50
Foucault, Michel 9, 19, 20, 24, 25, 29, 38n11, 139, 165
France: anti-veil dressing laws in 41,
47, 110; and the
cocarde nationale
125–6; dress code in 8; as
fashion capital 132; fashion for simplicity in
124; Islamic attacks in 72; and Marie Antoinette’s couture 121–4, 126–7,
129; portrait of
Louis XIV 120–1; ritual dressing of the king 119–20;
sumptuary laws in 119–20, 125; Third Estate 125; traditional formal
dress
124–5
Frederick II (Prussia) 127
French Revolution 125–8

Gandhi, Mahatma 30–1

garbasar 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 159n4
gaulle 123–4
Gaultier, Jean-Paul 76, 77, 78
gender 4; performative aspects of 4–5, 21; and sex 195
gender-bending 4
gendered inequality 58
gender geopolitics 42, 44
gender identification 194–7
gender norms 16, 165, 192, 195
gender power relations 42, 61
genderqueer persons 195
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Butler) 196
geopolitics 41, 44–5, 52, 62
Georgi, Johann Gottlieb 119
Germany, veil dressing in 46
Gernreich, Rudi 192
Gilmour, Ian 174
Givhan, Robin 132–3, 137
global fashion industry 61–2
globalization 6, 136–9, 190
gold jewellery, in Somalia 151, 153
Gorbachev, Mikhail 179
Gorbacheva, Raisa 141n13, 179
gorgoro 151, 152
Grant, Sheila Lyall 133
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere 74,
89
Guantánamo Bay 7
Guillaume, Xavier 7
guntiino 149, 150, 154
Guo Pei 76, 78

handbagging 167
hats, symbolism of 173–4, 178
haute couture, and the mannequin 28
headscarves 10, 147, 151, 191; see also hijab; veil
dressing
Heath, Edward 174
hierarchies, structural 58
hijab 10, 46, 50, 64n1, 103, 107, 158; controversy
over 41; electronic 112;
see also headscarves; veil dressing
Hollywood, influence on dress 168,
173
Hong Kong, designer fashion in 190–1
House of Commons, dress code in 172
Howe, Geoffrey 181
Hu Jintao 137, 138
human rights 41, 47, 73, 97, 99, 100, 109, 149, 151
Huntington, Samuel P. 72
Hussein Chalayan 50
Hussein, Lubna Ahmed 11–12, 97–9

identity: Arab-Islamic 101; cultural

25; and dress 161–2, 165–6, 182; and
fashion 4, 16n2, 30, 35; female 27; gender 194–7; gendered 196; Indian
21; Muslim 55; national 19;
political 5–6,
7, 9, 19, 22, 167; social 116;
Sudanese 101
ilyar 151
imperial sovereignty 134–7
imperialism 70, 71, 85
In the Mood for Love (film; 2000) 76
indecent exposure laws 194
infibulation 148
international human rights 41, 47, 73, 97, 99, 100, 109, 149, 151
international relations 59, 164–5
The Iron Lady (film; 2012) 162
Isis 72
Islam see Muslims; Muslim women
Islamic Courts Union (ICU) 156
Islamic fashion see Muslim
fashion
Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion (Moors et al.) 50
Islamicism 46
Islamism 14
Islamophobia 62
iterability 19

Japan: Diaoyutai–Senkaku Islands dispute 69, 83–5

jeans, as political statement 22
jewellery: gold 151, 153; on Michelle Obama 131; on Margaret Thatcher
181
jilbaab 14, 156, 157, 158–9

kanga 154
Kendall, Liz 163
Khan, Naeem 135, 136
khat 155, 159n8
King, Margaret 166–7, 176, 183n2
koans 13, 70, 80–1
Köhler, Caral 119
Ku Klux Klan 10, 34
kurta 21

La Reine en Gaulle (Vigée-Lebrun) 123, 124

Lady Gaga 62
Lagerfeld, Karl 12, 70, 81–3
The Last Emperor (film; 1987) 76
Lauren, Ralph 75–6
Lawson, Nigel 173, 176
Lee Myung-bak 135
Lehmann, Ulrich 63
Lévy, Bernard-Henri 72
Li Hongzhang 84–5
Lipovetsky, Gilles 118–19, 190
Li Xiaofeng 76
Loach, L. 170, 171
London Fashion Week 190
Louboutin, Christian 120, 134
Louis XIII (France) 119
Louis XIV (France) 120–1
Louis XVI (France) 119, 121, 125–6, 129
Lust/Caution (film; 2007) 76
lynching 10, 32–3

Madame Butterfly syndrome 79

Magritte, René 10, 19, 25–6, 28
makeover TV shows 47–8
malgabad 151
mannequins 10; bodies as 22, 25–6; as contrapuntal/juxtapositional figures
26–9; of resistance 31–6
Mansel, Philip 124, 128
Mao suits 73–4, 88
Mao Zedong 74
Maple, Sarah 11, 52–5, 57
Marie Antoinette (France) 119, 121–4, 126–7, 129, 133–4, 140n2
materiality 23, 29, 36
Mayan women, indigenous 25
McQueen, Alexander 137, 138–9, 141n16
Mensch, Louise 163
Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) 13,
69, 75
military uniforms see uniforms,
military
modest dressing 11, 44–5, 50, 127–9
Modi, Narendra 21, 130–1
Mohapatra, Bibhu 131
monokini 192
Moors, Annalies 50
Morrison, Toni 108
Mrs. O (blog) 129
Muir, Jean 177
Muñoz, Luis 30, 37n4
Muslim fashion 10–11, 43, 44–5, 50, 62–3
Muslims: radicalization of 59; in Somalia 148–9
Muslim women 41–3, 44; attitudes on veil
dressing 49; dressed and
undressed 58–9; objectification of 62; veiled 52–3

nakedness 16, 43–4; in fashion shows

193; as protest 56–8, 61; public 56–7,
63; punishment for 194; topless pictures 56
nationalism: ethnic 59; Indian 30–1; Russian 2, 3
Neshat, Shirin 11, 53–4, 57
Netherlands, anti-veil dressing laws in 47
9/11 terrorist attacks 72
niqabs 10, 12, 14, 64n1, 100, 102 see also hijab; veil
dressing
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Islamic 154–5
Nosotras que nos queremos tanto (Serrano) 189
nude art 56
nudity see nakedness
Nussbaum, Nancy 54

Obama, Barack 130

Obama, Michelle 14, 118, 129–32; fashion diplomacy of 135–40
Once Upon a Time in America (film; 1984) 79
Ono, Yoko 36
opium (drug) 79
Opium (perfume) 79
Opium Wars 84, 87
orientalism 12–13, 51–2, 70–1; negative 71–3, 81, 88; positive 75–80, 87
Orientalism (Said) 70–1, 90n7
Osman, Amira 110–11
Owens, Rick 192–3

Palumbo-Liu, David 86
Paris Fashion Week 193
Paris–Shangahi: A Fantasy (Lagerfeld) 70, 81–2
Parkins, Wendy 116
patriarchal oppression 42, 48
performativity 3, 4, 5, 9, 19, 20–2, 161, 164, 188, 196–7
Peter III (Russia) 127
Pettman, Jindy 60
place, and fashion 191–2
political identity 5–6, 7, 9, 19, 22, 167
political sociology 116, 164–5
politicians: fashion and 5; female 5, 15, 129, 162–3, 171–4, 176, 182–3;
identity of
162; Indian 21;
male 5, 116,
128, 140n8,
163, 173; and
the
veil issue 41
politics: and fashion 15–16; feminist 4–5, 9, 47, 56; gender-inflected
60;
post-9/11 58–62
postcolonialism 86
postmodernism 63
power: and fashion 21, 165; hierarchies of 43;
masking of 139; symbols of
117–18
prison uniforms 6–7, 9
prisoners: at Abu Ghraib 6–7, 9, 30, 32, 37n5; at Guantánamo Bay 7;
in
Sudan 99; in Tunisia 56
public order laws (Sudan) 12, 99, 102, 103, 109, 111
Punday, D. 23–4
Putin, Vladimir 130
qipao 79, 81

rahat 103
Rajchman, John 139
Rana plaza clothing factory collapse 192,
197
Reagan, Ronald 164
Red Wings 197
Rei Kawakubo 16, 22, 193
religious freedom 41
religious intolerance 54, 59, 63
Rigaud, Hyacinthe 120–1
Roach-Higgins, Mary Ellen 195

safaletti 151
Said, Edward 69, 70–1, 77
Saint Laurent, Yves 79
Santayana, George 87
Sarkozy, Nicolas 130
Satsuma Rebellion 84, 85, 91n25
satyagraha (struggle for truth) 31
Saunders, Stephanie 189
Sboui-Tyler, Amina 56–7
Schott NYC 197
Schumann, Scott 50
self-construction 21, 165–6
self-making 23, 32, 36
Selim, Degla 50
Serrano, Marcela 189
sexual assault, as weapon of war 153,
154, 159
shaash 151
Shanghai Express (film; 1932) 79
shari’a courts, in Somalia 156
Shepherd, Laura 60
Shoji, Tadashi 135
Silk Roads 91n22
Singh, Manmohan 135, 136
Sino–Japanese relations, Koanizing 85–8, 89
slut walks 5, 9
Smith, Jacqui 163
social media 44, 56–7, 108
Somalia: civil war and first international intervention 152–4; colonial
society and independence in
149–52;
headscarf wearing in 147, 151;
political Islam and War on Terror 154–9; precolonial 147–9; shari’a
courts in 156; study of fashion changes in 14, 146–7; women’s equality
in 150–1
Somali diaspora 147
Somali Federal Government (SFG) 156,
157
Somali women: examples of dress conventions 150, 152, 155, 157, 158; and
female genital mutilation 148; and gold jewellery 151, 153; physical
security of 159; professional modes of dress 159; traditional dress of
149–52; traditional duties of 148; victimization of 154
Somali women’s clothing and cloth: abaya 151, 158; aliindi 149, 150;
cambuur 155; dirac 151, 152; garbasar 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155,
159n4; gorgoro 151, 152; guntiino 149, 150, 154; hijab 158;
ilyar 151;
jilbaab 156, 157, 158–9; kanga 154; malgabad 151; niqab 156, 157, 158;
safaletti 151; shaash 151; thobe 103,
107, 112
Somerville, Philip 178, 179
Southgate, Michael 27
sovereignty: and fashion 118–20; and the military uniform 127–8; as
symbolic form 117–18
Spitting Image (TV programme) 165
Steele, Valerie 188
subjectivity 7, 9, 12, 19–21, 24, 49, 137, 165–6, 194; female 27; inter- 83;
liberal 59; neoliberal 45; political 5, 116; trans- 83
Sudan: dress code in 11–12, 99, 101, 102, 104, 106–8, 110, 111–12;
identity,
dress, and society in 109–13; politicization of dress in 100–4,
106–9; public order laws 12,
99, 102,
103, 109,
111; role of military in
108; television dress codes in 112; traditional
dress in 103–5;
trial of
 Hussein 99–100; wedding attire in 107, 108; women wearing trousers
97–9, 112–13
Sudanese women, clothing restrictions on 97, 101–3, 110–13
Sui, Anna 76
suits: grey flannel 73–4; men’s 10, 16n3, 33–5, 116, 170, 182, 194; Mao 8,
73–4, 88; worn by Margaret Thatcher 172, 176–7, 181
sumptuary laws 119–20, 125
Sun Yatsen 87
The Sun 190
surveillance 59, 60, 63, 108

Taliban 72
Tam, Vivienne 76
Taoism 80
Tarlo, Emma 49–50
technology of the self 20
Thatcher, Denis 170
Thatcher, Margaret: using dress for the performance of power 15, 173–7;
dressing for local customs 177; embodying
domestic and international
power 177–82; as example of a woman political executive 163–4;
handbags of
176–7, 178, 182; at the Lord
Mayor’s banquet 180–1; and
the politics of power 161–2; in the public gaze 170–3; role and image as
housewife 174–6; and the
significance of dress 166–70, 172, 181–3; visit
to Poland 179; visit to Russia 179–81; taking voice coaching lessons 173;
and the wearing of hats 173–4, 178
Thich Nhat 83
thobe 103, 107, 112
Thomas, Ian 177
Thomas, Nicola 177
Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (Lehmann) 63
Till, Emmett 10, 33–4, 35, 38n9
Till, Mamie 10, 33
Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal 86
transgender people 4, 196–7
Transitional Federal Government (TFG), Somalia 156
transsexuals 5
trousers, banning in Sudan 97–9, 112–13
T-shirts 10, 32, 34

uniforms, military 7,
8, 108, 118, 127–9
United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM I and II) 154
United States, imperial sovereignty in 136–7
University of Khartoum, dress code at 104–6

Valentino 76, 78
veil dressing 64n1; as
embodiment 45; and/as fashion 42–3; feminist view
of 42; as religious act of defiance 41; as religiously fundamentalist 42;
satirization
of 52
veil fashionistas 48–52
Victoria (queen of England) 140n6
Vigée-Lebrun, Louise Élisabeth 123
von Voss-Wittig, Huberta 133

Wang, Alexander 196

Wang, Vera 137, 141n16
War on Terror 46, 62
Warner, Marina 178
Weber, Caroline 121, 122
Westphalia 69, 70, 83, 85–90, 93n4
Westwood, Vivienne 50
Williams, Shirley 162
Without Sanctuary (Allen) 33,
37n6
women: abuses of by Al-Shabaab 156; agency
over dress and appearance
168–9; and body image 28; body politics of
47–8; control
over the
clothing of 109–11; defamiliarization of 28; marginalization of
45;
Mayan 25; as
politicians 162–4; and regimes of violence 60–1; rights of
56, 59; victimization of 154; wearing trousers 97–9, 112–13; see also
Muslim women; Somali women; Sudanese women
Women of Allah (Neshat) 53
Wong Kar-Wai 75, 76
Wong, Anna May 76, 79
The World of Suzy Wong (film; 1960) 79
Wu, Butterfly 79
Wu, Jason 76, 137
X: A Fabulous Child’s Story (Gould) 195
Xi Jinping 88
Yamamoto, Yohji 16
Zhou Enlai 87