Chapter <br/>

Fashioning plastic
Tom Fisher

Barbie is plastic but she knows. And when I need help,

always she's there ... I know she's plastic, I know she's

useless, but she's always there.

(Giovani Madoriia 2014)

A few hours after hearing this radio interview with Giovani Madonia, the owner
of the United Kingdom's biggest Barbie Doll collection, 1 I opened a new tube of
toothpaste, made of plastic. It was not my usual brand and promised special
tooth-whitening power. When I squirted some on my (plastic) toothbrush, I saw

that the toothpaste translucent, light blue, with dark blue flecks. Looking
was

carefully through the plastic lenses of my reading glasses, I wondered if these

might be so-called microbeads. These tiny spheres of polyethylene or other
thermoplastic that are used in beauty products wash down the sink into the sea,
where they absorb chemicals such as PCBs and other persistent organic
pollutants
(Takada 2013 ), and may be consumed by marine life.
These examples indicate something of the range and diversity of current
manifestations
plastics. They of
component personal metaphysics. can be the of a

They are useful in our everyday habits. They can be the focus of environmental
concern. Between these extremes, as illustrated by the toothpaste example, they
are ubiquitous, and consequently often escape our attention. One objective of
this chapter is to acknowledge plastic's disappearance as material and its
simultaneous
'already stuff', indicating something
presence as more than about the
texture of contemporary material ecology. As Webmoor and Whitmore (2008) put
it, 'Things Are Us'. Here the suggestion is that 'Plastics Are Us' materially so if
you happen to swallow some tooth-whitening toothpaste, more abstractly if you
construct your psyche 'round a Barbie collection.
 The Social Life of Materials

The chapter approaches the strange world of plastics 2 from the perspective
of design, which is a practice concerned to resolve the material facts of 'things'
with their 'social life' (Appadurai 1988 ). It sketches in some of the history of the
material: key moments in its developing cultural presence, its double nature as

both useful and dubious. The main objective is to think about how to balance a

necessary acknowledgement of the role of plastics' shifting material forms with a

sense of the meanings that are activated in them. This aligns with the range
clear
of perspectives from which plastics are studied, from engineering to cultural
studies, which in turn matches the range of ways it makes its presence felt in

our contemporary surroundings, as well as its significance in material culture.

Studies of plastics include early commentaries on their potential for design and
manufacture from a technical point of view ( Gloag 1943 1945 : 'Plastes' 1941 ;
Yarsley and Couzens 1941 1956 1968 ) through to culturally informed historical
narratives that sought to confirm them as the materials of progressive modern
innovation (e.g. Katz 1978 ). More recent accounts focus on the history of the

plastics industry and the cultural connotations that the materials gathered in
the period of intense consumerism after World War II, which Meikle (1995) and
others have called the Plastic Age (Thompson et al. 2009 ), as well as their
consequences for consumption experiences ( Fisher 2013b ).

Ubiquitous plasticity
Over time, plastics have become a ubiquitous, inescapable and unremarkable
part of our surroundings and everyday life in the developed world. As a
consequence,
they have become in a sense invisible to us, while, at the same time,
becoming potentially active, 'smart' by design that operates at nano-scale. The

principle of synthesis behind plastics has even transferred from the chemical to
the biological due to recent work in biotechnology ( Ginsberg 2014 ), which like
the example of microbeads, points towards a blurring of the distinction between
animal and material. Alongside the relative invisibility that their ubiquity brings,
concerns about plastics' environmental consequences have seen the
development
of a negative view of them in public discourse ( Frienkel 2011 ), which is
also reflected in the attention garnered from commentators and researchers in
the human sciences ( Gabrys 2013 ; Hawkins 2001 ). These studies pay close
attention to the material facts of plastics, bringing an acute understanding of
the diffusion of these inherently labile materials through human practices and in
multiple relations to human and 'more-than-human' bodies in what Whatmore

calls a 'sticky web of connections' (2013: 604).

Fashioning plastic

Concentrating only on plastics' material, sensorial presence, however, risks

leaving behind its role as a component of our imagined 'figural' world. This
chaptertakes this risk
starting point, inspecting 'fashioning'
as one plastic's the of
relational materiality by using sources close to fashion practices, in clothing and
music. It reviews concepts of plasticity that appear in social media related to
fashion, and delineates relationships between the consequences of particular
material formulations and the work they do as signifiers in culture. Culture here is

meant in the sense that Raymond Williams retrieved from the high versus popular
debate a process of artful making from which forms emerge that are significant
for a time and place (Williams 1974 ). Fashion is a form of artful making, a feature
of modernity available to all, that works with 'immaterial materials' that are

infinitelymalleable, infinitely plastic.

The physical materials also are as malleable in their cultural manifestations as

in their physical properties, and the examples of current 'fashionings' of

plasticity
discussed below draw on themes that can be found in the materials' history
since the start of Meikle's Plastic Age. Both their material and their abstract
characteristics
feed into and draw from the 'structure of
feeling' contemporary of
life in ways that are critical of consumer culture and ways that celebrate the

fashioning of the self within it. A critical stance on consumer culture is evident
from the point that the Plastic Age began to wane, and this has an ironic reading
of plasticity as a component. In 1968 the Plastic Ono Band started a theme in
Art Rock that aligns with the use of 'plastic' to indicate inauthentic ana uncool.
It is also possible to find plasticity being invoked to celebrate what it means

to synthesize the self, to be fashionable, fashioned in plastic. This chapter will

return to these contrasting but related examples. First, it is appropriate to think

about the physical properties of the materials that have so extended themselves
into the collective imagination.

Plastic materials
'Plastic' is a misleading name for a material because it identifies a property of
material, theability to be moulded, 3 to
flow, and this ability is not restricted to one
category of useful matter. Glass shares many of the properties of some plastics,
but its high melting point, fused structure and ancient origins give it different
properties and connotations. Nonetheless, the modern materials known as

plastics have come to be characterized by the fact that they processed by

are

moulding. The properties of the materials means that things made of plastic
have moved from one form to another, and if they are heated, they may do so
again. They have moved from indeterminate stuff to a determinate form and

in many cases they are more ready to relinquish that form than are objects of
glass, metal or ceramic.
Although they seem characteristically modern, this ability to move, to be

pushed about, gives plastics strong connections to materials that belong in a

pre-industrial craft setting, naturally occurring thermoplastics including shellac,

gutta percha, rubber, horn, tortoiseshell and whalebone that can be worked when
hot. Homers turned animal product into material for lanterns (or lamp-horns'),
buttons, combs, handles and other objects, with increasing sophistication. Horn
itself was used to make moulds to produce articles in softer material, such as

straw, for votive souvenirs ( Schaverien 2006 ). In its most advanced

application
by the late sixteenth century, it was used to take impressions of detailed
engraved dies, in a process that points towards the moulding processes used
to make objects from thermoplastics from the mid-nineteenth century.
Horn objects soften and change their shape if they are heated just as the
shape of durable plastic objects changes if they are exposed to heat
some

by accident, if their material is recycled, as McKay (this volume) details.

or

Apparently stable plastic objects are only temporarily halted in their flow. They
are things between states, characterized as much by motion as by the stable
forms they have in use. Although it was their 'protean' ability to adopt an infinite
variety of forms that fascinated early commentators on plastic ( Meikle 1995 : 11),
here the focus is on the implications of the fact they do that their plasticity
rather than the forms that result.
Although variety is certainly one of the defining features of plastic things, I
want to think about the ways in which the motion that gives formless matter
determinate shape is temporarily halted. I want to dwell particularly on the
cultural forces at work when their motion is stilled, which work as much on an

immaterial as a material level

the ways in which 'plasticity' works on our ideas
as a consequence of its presence in our physical surroundings. So one focus
here is on design, since designers are among the most significant of the agents
that bring about the flow of this material, and determine the shapes in which it
ends up. But the scope of the chapter is both narrower than 'what designers
have done with plastic' and, at the same time, broader than this since it
considers
plasticity quality that
pervades contemporary
as a culture.
Consumer product designers and engineering designers have different but
overlapping concerns. Both have made use of the fact that plastics engineering
can make possible integrated forms and efficient production. Fixtures
more can

be embedded in complex mouldings that may be formed out of more than one

polymer, with a variety of textures and visual effects. Single mouldings take the
place of assemblies of components integrating structure and surface, reducing
both the number of components and production operations. While design
engineers
physical,
are concerned with
performance, product designers mechanical
think of plastic in terms of consumers' engagement with objects through the

tactility of their surfaces ana the visual effects of their forms aesthetic
relationships
with objects activated by culture. This engagement has both material and
immaterial dimensions. We are touched by the materials and our touch is primed
by our ideas about them ( Fisher 2004 ).
So what is relevant here are some moments in the history of plastics, some

factors in their cultural trajectory, and some characteristics of their properties

that are played out in the production processes that are the course along which
they flow. This focus on motion, on the flow of matter through production and

consumption and over time, implies the forces that move it ( Fisher 2012 ). To say

that 'a material flows', is to ascribe to it a tendency do so, implying endogenous

properties that make this possible, as well as external forces that activate these
properties, akin to gravity without human agency. However, in both the sphere
of consumption and of production, materials are no more than matter impelled
by human forces. But they are matter with properties that are the grounds for
their performance and in the of plastics these properties are both physical
case

and cultural. They allow certain sorts of design, and have accrued an unstable
repertoire of abstract 'components' that can be put to use as cultural elements
in the 'fashioning' of self-hood. As McKay puts it in this volume, plastics are

'co-producers of cultural categories'.

In this fashioning' it is possible to discern both the pre-modem sense of
'to make' and the modem of 'a making' that is socially acceptable and
sense

desired. As a word to describe prevailing socially acceptable ways of doing,

'fashion' coincides with Western modernity. Its use is found from the sixteenth
century, describing changes in what is considered right and acceptable in

manners and accoutrements that are apparently random but temporarily

meaningful.Its
etymology agreement associates it with social and factions. The
associated term 'vogue' derives from an Old French root with maritime
associations,
describing swaying the random movement of the waves. 4
The phenomenon of modem fashion has generated a rich literature that
centres on fashion in clothes and its role in self-presentation (for example,
Entwhistle 2000 ), as well as work that locates this communicative function in a

social setting. In his study of haute couture fashion, for instance, Blumer
identifies
the
relationship between fashion and a shared sense of the times,
calling it a

'collective
groping proximatefor the
(1969: 281), noting future' the role of
particular
people designers in the mechanism of 'collective selection'. For Blumer,
designers catch and give expression to what we may call the direction of
modernity'
(280). As the industrial designer Raymond Loewy put it, design consists of
giving form to that which is the 'most advanced yet acceptable' (Loewy 1951:
277ff). It is possible to think about fashion and design without the assumption
that modernity has direction if we accept that designers simply develop forms
a

that resonate with their times. In the case of plastic, designers stop the material's
motion at forms that are significant, fashioning the material in both the old and

contemporary senses outlined above. Our understanding of plasticity is in itself a

component of this 'fashioning', as designs mesh with their context. It is possible

to see this in plastic's relationship to fashion so it is appropriate to think about

fashionable plastic, through themes that emerge from its history.

Design history and plastic authenticity

The most authoritative account of the entanglement between plastic materials
and contemporary culture is Meikle's (1995) American Plastic: A Cultural History,
which emphasizes the meanings that have accrued to plastics rather than their
technical details. However, as we have seen above, the two cannot be
disaggregated and as the materials were developed, plastics production technology
meant that familiar plastics came in familiar shapes.
production For instance, the

technology behind phenolic thermoset resin moulding in the 1930s favoured

'streamlined' forms, whereas the polystyrene that emerged after the Second
World War can follow sharp angles in the mould ( Meikle 1995 : 187-188). But
what materials are is not simply what they can do.
As well as forms that related to production processes, the materials accrued
meanings that depended their material nature, including their early
on

association
with the imitation of more honorific materials. The properties of cellulose

nitrate meant it was possible to make a passable imitation of a starched linen shirt
collar, or an acceptable approximation of tortoiseshell, indeed such imitation had
been the stimulus for developing early plastic materials. Negative connotations
of inauthentic poor taste were one consequence of this imitation, which persists,
as McKay's chapter in this volume shows. In the Philippines the Tagalog usage
of 'plastik' or 'Tupperware' is to indicate a two-faced, fake person.
However, plastics have also been associated with positive ideas. The
materials have
represented progressive modernity. designs
a plastic The first in
that critics took to be authentic applications of their qualities appeared in the
mid-twentieth century ana did not imitate any other material but played on their
capacity to be light in weight, seamless in construction and, by then, brightly
coloured. In examples such as the phenolic radio cabinets of the 1930s, the
material was taken to be expressive of the modern. Meikle calls this strongly
positive construction on plastics post-1945 a 'plastic utopianism' that invoked
ideas of the mastery of nature through the application of polymer science ( Meikle
1995 : 104-118 and 228-230).
Before Meikle, Sylvia Katz produced several histories of design in plastic
(1978, 1984, 1986). The depth and reach of Meikle's work demonstrates the
richness of the cultural dimensions of plastic, and the seriousness with which
design history has treated it as an object of study. War-time developments in
plastics production methods, and the contact citizens consequently had with the
new materials, brought them to the attention of John Gloag, an early UK design
historian (1943, 1945), as well as industry figures who were keen to promote
the materials, notably Yarsley and Couzens who concluded each edition of their
account of the current plastic industry with a piece that positioned the

technology
in the current times (1941, 1956, 1968; see Fisher 2013b for a more detailed
comparison of the three passages). The 1941 edition proposed a future 'Plastic
Man:, living in a 'plastic age' (1941: 154-158); the 1956 edition identifies a fear
for the future, including its materials, that accompanied anxiety about nuclear
destruction. By the 1968 edition, they were able to note plastics' uptake by
fashion,
quoting Mary Quant: 'We were the first people to use plastic as plastic'
(1968: 358). They might have made the same point by noting the 'high design'
in plastics that emerged from Italy after the Second World War from firms such

as Kartell ( Sparke 1988 ).

This search for authentic plastic as plastic' design that would fix this fluid
material into a repertoire of forms that
authentic to it had been going
were

on since the 1950s. Meikle quotes the editor of Industrial Design, Jane Fiske
Mitarachi, in a 1956 special issue on plastics saying that quality could only be
'designed into plastics by a frank exploitation of the things that make plastics
5
unique' ( Meikle 1995 : 194). The same moment produced an equivalent debate
in the United Kingdom, evident in the February 1958 issue of Ideal Home. This
appeared with a special extra 'practical guide' to plastics, its editorial engaging
directly with plastics' double nature, advanced and at the same time possibly
'counterfeit, rather phoney' (Ideal Homes and Gardens 1958 ). On both sides of
the Atlantic then, commentators were troubled by plastics' lack of an identity and
strove to construct one.
These efforts were linked to the material's imitative origins, imitation that could
be seen as a fraud against those whose social position had previously given
them a 'natural' economic monopoly on the materials that plastics imitated.
The commentary drew on a well-established rhetoric of material authenticity
that derives from the writing of Ruskin, Morris and Pugin, giving imitative
plastics aesthetic association with
physical authenticity.
an a lack of social and
This challenge to an apparently natural social ordering by plastic's inauthentic
dissembling existed in parallel to another established perception of them based
on more metaphysical premises they are unnatural because they are made,
rather than given by nature, impure because of their origin in human reason. This
theme is found up to the present in debates about materials, in which appeals
to the significance of human Interaction with material that is given, rather than

made, have been challenged with reference to plastic.

This debate is evident in a dialogue about the concept of
materiality,
between Tim Ingold and Daniel Miller in 2007. The clearest differences
between Miller's and Ingold's approaches centre on their discussion of
particular
materials, among them the plastics that make up phones. Miller (2007)
criticizes Ingold's discussion of materiality for selecting only apparently
natural
materials
(stone, air) obviously wood, rather than more 'cultural' ones,
such as plastic, which he goes on to discuss in the context of mobile phones.
In this, Miller could be accused of preserving the human/object, mind/matter
distinction that elsewhere (2005) he states he wants to supersede by
invoking
these two categories of material: 'natural' and 'cultural', in his argument,
plastics are ontologically distinct from the type of materials Ingold discusses
because they are 'of us', because they derive from human cognition. Plastics
are made, but they are not 'things'. Plastic objects, like phones, are made
of stuff, but this is stuff made out of precursor material. Plastic's origin
challenges Miller's distinction, but it also breaks down on logical grounds, since
to say 'that is a material' is a human act, which makes a particular relationship
to matter and transforms that matter into material, whether it has acquired
connotations of culture or of nature.
In a later discussion of the ecological relationship between materials and
humans, Ingold stresses the significance of flows of matter the 'leakiness' of
both humans and materials against the idea of the 'imprinting of culture on to

brute material' ( Ingold 2012 : 438). With plastics this imprinting seems
impossible
since they are always already of culture. Their 'brutish' origins in oil, or

latterly in biopolymers, are distant both conceptually and geographically and

therefore do not signify in their identity. Plastics seem a rather good example of
the 'historical' idea of materials that Ingold proposes in which 'matter is always
an ongoing historicity' (ibid: 435), against the idea that there are fixed
material
properties humanly and
qualities. plasticity understood material However,
as conceived in this chapter perhaps adds a dimension to Ingold's resolution of
material relations into the idea of ecology. Thinking about plasticity rather than
plastics suggests that even in physical terms the materials are never a material',

but a property or a set of potentials. As physical entities, they either pretend to

be, or are taken for, other things when we encounter them in everyday settings,
and they afford metaphorical plasticity, which can be mixed with or fashioned
into the sense of self.

However, through their history, their identification with an inauthentic synthetic'

origin has meant that plastics have gained a negative image. Consequently,
from the 1930s, the American plastics industry made organized efforts to ensure

a positive image for the materials, some of which have had a lasting
engagement with
design history, Hagley Library original such as the Museum and at the
DuPont site in Wilmington, Delaware. 6 By 1978 the marketing section of the trade
magazine Plastics World was describing a concerted public relations campaign
by the plastics industry in the United States to rescue the reputation of

'chemicals',
which had been 'the subject of attack by a generally misinformed public'.
The campaign, by a consortium of manufacturers with the Society for the Plastics
7
industry (SPi) was organized round the slogan, 'Without chemicals life would
be impossible'. Its intention was to counter what Monsanto, one of the leading
elements in the consortium, called 'chemophobia' ( Fountas 1978 ).
Concerns about plastic's consequences for the environment and human
health have seen the development of a negative view of it in public discourse,
especially when plastic objects become visible waste ( Frienkel 2011 ). This is
identified at the extreme as 'plastiphobia' (Roberts 2010). As palpable
materials,
plastics have the capacity to both delight and disgust. The delight of
modern consumption derives partly from the consumption of newness
( Campbell 1992 ), and new plastics are new like no other material. The
production
process means that the
significant investment of time and skill, and
therefore money, required to make the peerless surfaces of mould tooling is
reproduced perfectly on the surfaces of even cheap plastic objects. When
they are old and worn, however, plastics have the capacity to disquiet us, and
people may take steps to protect their plastic possessions through protective
layers of more plastic ( Fisher 2013a). This private concern for the ugliness that
old plastics may bring to people's private spaces mirrors worries about their
impact on the environment and, in particular, awareness of the plastic that
8
ends up in the oceans. This ranges from the identifiable detritus that is visible
on beaches, smaller pieces of which are eaten by fish and birds and may kill

them by blocking their gut, to tiny plastic beads that wash into the seas from
plastic feed-stock spills and can be found in beaches all over the world along
with the plastic microbeads from cosmetics that start in our bathrooms and
end up in the ocean ( Gabrys 2013 ; Takada 2013 ).
Cultural plasticity
Plastics now reach far beyond their use in settings where people have
encountered
past them
palpable the
surroundings
in large as elements of our

non-consumer markets exist for the materials. Although 39.4 per cent of the
47 million tons used in 2011 went into packaging, 8.3 per cent into automotive
and 5.4 per cent into electrical and electronic goods, the remainding 20.5 per
cent was used in construction and 26.4 per cent in other applications, including
agriculture ( Plastics Europe et al. 2012 ). Nearly 50 per cent of plastics used in
the EU therefore are either actually invisible part of buildings or buried in the
ground the sphere of production rather than consumption. Aiong
or remain in

with plastics' relative lack of visibility in engineering, building and agriculture,

9
they have become mobile in two senses. They make up the 'plastic soup'
circulating
in the biosphere ( Davison and Asch 2011 ; Foekema et al. 2013 ; Marks
2008 ), and some polymers have 'smart' properties that mean they react
can now

to their setting they respond to stimuli from their environment. An everyday

example of this is packaging that decomposes, but there are also many
applications
of this
principle in medicine, for instance,
targeting drug delivery ( Galaev
and Mattaesson 1999 ).
This diffusion and mobility coincides with the immaterial presence outlined
above; a sense of plasticity that plays on the meanings the materials have accrued
in the past and takes them in new directions. The 'sticky web of connections'
that the materials have to us, to the environment, to our ideas about nature and
culture leave a particularly curious imprint in contemporary plastic pop-culture
manifestations. Here, plastics' identity is unruly, drawing from the chemophobic
suspicion about the materials that has accompanied their ubiquity as well our

dependence on them in everyday life. Embracing this identity has become a

marker with which to fashion cultural opposition or at least critique.

Views of plastics that were built on an assumption of their lack of authenticity
began to appear in public discourse in the late 1960s. Meikle notes that they
cluster 'round the obscure reference to plastics in the film The Graduate (1997:
3, 259). The materials have appeared in everyday discourse and commentary
ever since, but now often seem to be related to somewhat ironic critique, which
in turn serves to construct an equivocal view of them that mirrors the love-hate

relationship plastics that is familiar in many aspects of contemporary life.

with

Collective demonization of the plastic bag does not affect the desire for new
goods. This ironic and critical stance is evident in social media.
A 2014 search of Facebook groups turns up 122 musician pages with titles

that include the word 'plastic', all the way from A Plastic Rose to Wrapped in
Plastic, via Plastic Babies, Plastic Noise Experience, The Plastic People of the
Universe and, of course, the Plastic Ono Band. It is hard to be certain precisely
how 'plastic' is being used in each of these examples, but extending from their

genealogical relationship to the Plastic Ono Band, it seems safe to assume that

in all cases the word indicates a connection to the texture and aesthetics of

contemporary consumption experiences. This was an explicit part of the rhetoric

of the Plastic Ono Band in 1968 and in some cases is suggested through an

association with a particular plastic object:

A Plastic Rose, Plastic Animals, Plastic Bag Boyz, Plastic Dinosaurs, Plastic

Flowers, Plastic Garden, Plastic Glasses, Plastic Handles, Plastic Harmonicas

Plastic Horse, Plastic Kasket, Plastic Mermaids, Plastic Panda, Plastic Rhino,
Plastic Soldiers, Plastic Teeth, Plastic Toys, Plastic Tree

Plastic toys are particularly telling in this connection, given the materials strong

association with childhood from early In its history. Yarsley and Couzens
emphasized an association between plastics' qualities and childish delight in
the life of 'plastic man' (1941: 154), and toys have become a defining element in

contemporary 'plastic culture'. Indeed, Plastic Culture is the title of a recent book

that reviews the genre of (mostly plastic) post-Second World War Japanese
character toys that generates avid interest among collectors ( Phoenix 2006 ). The
impact of globalized production and consumption on the environment seems to
hit the news particularly forcefully when the detritus at issue has recognizable
form, particularly so if it is in the form of toys. The cargo load of plastic bath
ducks that circumnavigated the earth is one example. Another is the container

load of Lego that spilled off Cornwall decade ago and is still found on the
over a
10
beaches there. Toys were famously the subject of some of Roland Barthes'
musings on plastics the problem of authenticity seemed to him particularly
acute when the formative experiences of childhood were overlain with the
associations
of
artificiality ( 54). that he read out of the material Barthes 1972 :

The immaterial plasticity that has resulted from the dissociation of the idea
of plastic from its material foundation has a particular inflection in relation to

fashion. Things have moved a long way from the 60s 'wet-look' fashion that Mary
Quant called 'plastic as plastic' (Yarsley and Couzens 1968 ) and that depended
on the material properties of PVC for that disturbingly skin-like but impossibly
glossy surface. Alongside the use of 'plastic' as a signifier of an ironic stance
on consumption that is evident in the names of the groups identified above, and

which implies some critical detachment, it can also frequently be found used in
an almost celebratory way, with perhaps an element of innocent mistranslation
at times. Facebook contains a page called 'La Vie en Plastique', which has been
made since 2012 by Ma" a Jose Ossandon, a Chilean woman, to accompany
11
her blog of the same name.

In her blog, she shares her impressions of life as a fashionable young woman,
particularly tips on where to get cosmetics, as well as recipes and there are the
pictures of foods and travel that are a conventional feature of this genre of social
media. However, La Vie en Plastique is distinctive in its clear connection between

the concept of plastic and the richly sensual aspects of life that go along with
cosmetics, clothes, travel and food as Maria experiences them. She is 'in plastic'
in these decorative and sensual artefacts and the experiences through which she
constructs herself as a fashionable person. 'La Vie en Plastique' is part of the
fashion blogging phenomenon that Rocamora (2011) describes as a
'technology
of the self' and 'a privileged space of identity construction' (p. 410) through
which individuals can both reflect as in a mirror and project their sense of style
to the world. Crucially for this discussion, this phenomenon is played out in a

strongly visual medium, mediated by the type of ubiquitous screen that 'shows
the present', as Manovich put it (2001: 99-103).
The blogs that Rocamora discusses are in the fashion system, but they
disturb the production/ consumption distinction they contradict the collective
selection that Blumer (1969) identified in the process through which fashions
have emerged in the past. They can be a way for nobodies to become renowned
characters on the fashion stage, so they fall perhaps on the side of production.
But they have strong relationships to consumption blogs too, ones like 'La Vie en

Plastique', which are not just about clothes but serve to fashion the self through
the fluid, plastic resources available. However, out-and-out fashion blogs, filled
with images of clothes and accessories, are also not immune from the power
of the metaphor of plasticity. One of the more famous fashion bloggers who
Rocamora discusses, 'Susie Bubble', put up a page in May 2011 that she titled
'Plastic Candy'. 12 This is ostensibly to show off a pink plastic coat but her
reflections
suggeston the
qualities plasticity
page it relates as much to the of as to

particular objects:

For the past few weeks, whilst travelling around, I've been on a plastic candy
wave. It's basically pastels coated in a glycerine-sticky shiny sheen. It's a result
of consuming too many unnatural food dyes in Japanese candy and American
cereal.

Although the blog pictures are of sets of objects, not all of them clothes,
which share the same sort of'plasticky' colours, this narrative associates them
unequivocally with the whole range of material properties that are characteristic
of plastics. Here is the association of the materials with 'un-nature' in their origins
and the sense that this compromises our bodies, though we desire them and
consume them willingly. Here is the association of tasteless tackiness with the

impossibly perfect gloss of new plastics seductive, but slimy and viscous, so

potentially disgusting ( Sartre 1957 ). Recent research has shown that it is not

just fashionistas who associate these qualities with plasticity. Marie Hebrok and
Ingun Klepp (2014) have shown these colours to be generally associated with

synthetic fabrics, and therefore with plastic.

It seems clear that what Susie Bubble and Maria Jose Ossandon are doing
with this immaterial plasticity, what they are the fashioning with It, relates closely
to their being in the world, to their self-concept and to the fashioned self that they
project through their
blogs. tempting It is to draw a
parallel between the move
from indeterminate to determinate form in the production of plastic goods, and
this construction of modern subjectivities relevant to the material texture of the
times (Berman 1982; Giddens 1991 ). Susie Bubble and Maria Jose Ossandon
are self-consciously making themselves and the 'made' character of plastics

underlines that self-consciousness.

These fashion biogs, which are not isolated examples of manifestations of
13
fashion that refer to plastics, resonate with the strong historical association
that plastic materials have had to modernity. Just as the consumer culture of
the period after the Second World War embraced plastic materials as signifiers
of progressive modernity, the wide-eyed (perhaps false?) innocence projected
in fashion blogs suggests a new strategy for being 'of the times' by being 'of
plastic', embracing plasticity. There is a sense that plasticity affords more than
a

simply being a signifier of modernity. This is plasticity as production, plasticity as

synthesis these are individuals making, fashioning themselves with the
(plastic-like)
materials that are at hand making themselves plastic. Their fashioning
goes in two directions: they both fashion themselves and, in the process, help
to extend the idea of plasticity beyond plastic materials, into all the materials of

consumption available to them.

The sense of the fashioning of worlds through the material and immaterial
qualities of plasticity borrowed from plastics that is evident in these examples
seem to give credence to Ezio Manzini's stress in the 1980s on the malleability of
the materials' image, its physical reality deferred by the presence of technosci-
entific images of their structure (1989). However, the examples introduced above
do not imply technical knowledge of plastic, but processes of living through
plasticity. They also imply the materials' disappearance through their
simultaneous
invisibility and
ubiquity, and their return in this diffuse but active sense of
plasticity. For all the immateriality of this sense, it is clear that its material referent
will persist far into the future, and we suspect that as Jody Roberts puts it about
the materials: Their future is as much unwritten as our own. Together we are

becoming plastic.' (2013: 130).

Conclusion
The circulation of both meaning and material in the more than human' relations
of plastic outlined above seem a long way from the pragmatics and practicalities
of polymer engineering, or the origins of the materials in craft practice. It blurs
the distinction between production and consumption in the ironic play with the
cultural dimensions of the materials that this immaterial plasticity supports. At
the same time, this play supercedes the dualities that have grown up in ideas
about the materials. Plastics are not either glossy or drossy, cool or schlocky,
delightful or disgusting, but they provide the material ground for a plasticity out
of which individuals may fashion themselves, articulated with and perhaps
critical
of consumer culture. In this, they seem to be an example of material with
which people think, along the lines that Ingold proposes (2012: 438).

Notes
1. Saturday Live, BBC Radio 4, 11 September 2014.
2. The chapter refers to a class of materials with quite different properties, 'plastics', as well
as to the concept of 'plasticity', which is implied by the idea of a single material, 'plastic'

a convenient name for all those materials that have plasticity. The chapter draws out the

relationship between the physical and cultural dimensions of that plasticity, concentrating
on the latter.
3. The word also indicates a property of metals that can undergo 'plastic deformation', where
their matter is pushed from one shape to another when cold, as well as all materials that

can be formed by casting in a liquid state.

4. < http://www.etymonline.com/index >.

5. Meikle quotes from Jane Fiske Mitarachi, 'Plastics and the Question of Quality', Industrial

Design (June 1956): 64-67.

6. The Hagley Museum and Library was endowed by the DuPont company in 1972, holding
the DuPont archive. It is now a centre for the study of American business history.
7. The Society for the Plastics Industry (SPI) is an industry wide association that was set up in
1937 to represent the interests of the American plastics industry (Meikle 1995 : 102).
8. A Google search for 'plastic in the ocean' in June 2014 produced 74,400,000 results.
9. http://plasticsoupfoundation.org/eng/ (accessed 25 April 2014).
10. < http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2699930/Lego-washed-Cornish-beach-17-

years-container-filled-plastic-bricks-fell-sea-ship-hit-freak-wave.html#ixzz38Yt48A6X >.
11. Maria Jose Ossandon has given permission to refer in detail to her web presence in this

chapter.
12. http://www.stylebubble.co.uk/style_bubble/2014/05/plastic-candy.html
13. Maria's and Susie's pages are not the only social networking manifestation of this plastic

fashioning. The global context revealed by Facebook shows that the concept of plasticity
 resonates strongly in fashion-culture. 'Plastic Tinkerbell' is a page put up by a Hungarian
woman, also sharing make-up and fashion tips. 'Plastic People', as well as being a night club
in fashionable Shoreditch, is a song from 2008 by Le Peuple de L'herbe, which is a critique
of consumer capitalism along the same lines as Malvina Reynolds' 1962 'Little Boxes'. This
milieu is the contemporary equivalent of the cultural background against which the fashion

designers that Blumer studied worked, and it has a strong connection to clothes fashion.
Plastic People is also a vintage clothes shop in Tenerife and a range of t-shirts hand printed
in New York. Plastic Passion is a rather arty shoe shop in Genoa. Although there seems to
be nothing particularly plastic-y about its merchandise, the name reinforces the sense that

plasticity is a relevant element in European fashion culture. As with Maria Jose Ossanddn's
web presence, there is a sense that an element of mis-translation may be present, or

perhaps these slightly puzzling inflections on 'plastic' are evidence of new dimensions to
the fashioning that it can afford. This may be the case with another Italian fashion retail

shop called Plastic Pordenone in an unremarkable shopping mall in Pordenone, a small

town near Venice. The shop sign actually reads 'Virus + Plastic', adding the idea of viral
fashion to the sense of antiseptic, but cultured, alchemy that comes along with 'plasticity',
both material and immaterial.

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