Fashion Theory and

the Visual Semiotics

of the Body
Fashion Theory and
the Visual Semiotics
of the Body
Edited by

Žarko Paić
Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body

Edited by Žarko Paić

This book first published 2022

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2022 by Žarko Paić and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-5275-8582-4

ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8582-9
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. vii

Introduction ............................................................................................. viii

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is primarily a theoretical effort to view the phenomenon of

fashion within fashion theory as establishing a new approach from visual
semiotics that I have tried to elaborate on in my understanding of fashion
and contemporary art. The lectures I have given since 2008 on the MA
course “Theory and Culture of Fashion” at the University of Zagreb’s
Faculty of Textile Technology have been aimed at implementing a
completely different approach to fashion from the typical disciplinary rigour
and habits of the academic framework of humanities. If fashion is a creative
body design as I understand it within the relationship of contemporary
aesthetics, the technosphere and design, then we must face the changing
paradigmatic forms in which fashion appears in the 21st century after
realizing that posthumanism and transhumanism are already in the works of
artists like Stelarc and that fashion designers like Alexander McQueen and
Hussein Chalayan paved the way for radical body deconstruction. Fashion,
therefore, emerges as a visual code of contemporary societies and cultures
in the networked matrices of hyperreality and visions of that coming time
that will determine the combination of cybernetics, fetishism and
transgression.
This book brings together the works of academicians from the University
of Zagreb, the University of Teramo, and the University of Osijek,
comprising art historians, fashion historians, sociologists, philosophers and
theorists of visual studies. At the same time, it is a testament to the dynamic
and interdisciplinary desire for openness in exploring the essentials of
humanities, which necessarily require pluralism in approach, rigour in
scientific elaboration, and the desire to gain insight into the creative
dimension of contemporary fashion. My thanks go to my dear fellow
academics who were eager to enrich this edited collection with their
contributions, as well as to our students, to Anthony Wright for his
proofreading, and finally to the editors of Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Žarko Paiü
Zagreb, March 2022
 INTRODUCTION

What applies to the transformation of three forms of culture—humanistic,

anthropological and semiotic—is reflected in the transformations of
contemporary fashion. We can imagine a continuation of these cognitive-
creative games in the coming period in which the technosphere provides
opportunities for every further development of fashion as a creative body
design. What remains might not be quite reducible anymore to “society” or
“culture.” This was clearly the case for the most radical fashion designer
Alexander McQueen when, in his last performative event called Plato’s
Atlantis, he contemporaneously staged a set of digital technologies, an
experiment with the transformation of the human body (“third skin”), and a
new aesthetic object like women’s shoes with high heels beyond so-called
everyday life. Trauma and shock beyond normally comprehended fashion
as a service for beautifying reality become new signs in the creative research
of contradictions in the making of lifestyles.
In all the research that has been done recently, we may notice the space
of experimental games directed towards the transformations of bodies in
contemporary art and design, with the greatest aesthetic achievements being
found in the works of fashion designers such as Alexander McQueen, John
Galliano, Hussein Chalayan, Martin Margiela and Jean-Paul Gaultier. So,
we would like to develop an analysis of quite a different discipline named
the visual semiotics of the body. If language, according to Roland Barthes’
thought, was the fundamental signifier of fashion change, which is repeated
as fashion returns to its origin in the phenomenon of retro-futurism, then for
contemporary fashion, the sign of the rule of new information-communication
technologies and interactive media transcodes language into an image or a
visual code of social forms of the spectacle. Explaining how the image now
takes “the logic of language” can only be possible when we try to discuss
the definition of visual semiotics. It is a post-discipline beyond the
distinction between semiology and sociology. The potential of visual
semiotics was only created with the introduction of visual studies and visual
culture at the end of the 20th century. The sign implies the meaning of
fashion as visual information. That is why the meaning of fashion thus
becomes the event of interactive communication of networked bodies as
aesthetic objects.
 Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body ix

The fundamental assumptions of the considerations that will be carried

forward in this book are as follows:

(1) Design today signifies the emergence of creative thinking and shaping
the body in the aesthetic and biocybernetic sense of the complexity of
the system.
(2) Fashion has been established in the global perspective as the creative
design of the body through the social, cultural and environmental
worlds. Only from that viewpoint can the entire tradition of dressing
and clothing enter the fashion system. This order has been stably
maintained through a permanent world crisis and societal
transformations.
(3) Therefore, contemporary fashion is going on as a media formation of
life itself through the labyrinth of “styles” and “tendencies” in the area
of development of design, ranging from cultural to creative industries.
All of that bestows a brand new approach to the concept of culture and
the meaning of visual imagery (visual-iconic turn) that is reflected in
the completely new conception of fashion.
(4) Thus, fashion is no longer considered as “applied art,” just as design
is no longer addicted to so-called beauty immersed in an industrial
environment of modern society wherein the aesthetic object (ready-
made) means creation beyond the boundary lines. Instead of that, we
are thrown into the development of the techno-genesis of the new
worlds of creativity. The consumption of time no longer applies to
passive reception but enters into the space of interactive intervention
and creates some new contexts and situations in which the human body
coexists with others in the global and local areas.
(5) The transition from the paradigm of “industry” as a finished product
to “industry” as a system of changing and emerging “smart applications”
leads to the establishment of the order of the creative economy in the
information society. So, the consequences of these changes are far-
reaching. Primarily, they are related to the education system in all
spheres. Thinking that unites “inventiveness” and “creativity” has
become the basis of the new cognitive or creative-emergent global
world order. The technosphere should now be the main force that
impacts the limits of productivity of “work” and the methods of using
surplus value for capital reinvestment.
(6) Fashion design as the construction of the body becomes a creative and
inventive practice that has a deep impact on the aestheticization of the
life-world. Therefore, its essential characteristics are derived from the
very figures that embody the “creative” individuals in the information-
x Introduction

cognitive world of the speed, control and transformation of (a) the

synthesis of ideas, (b) hybrid styles, and (c) the implementation of
eclecticism.
(7) The transformation of the body—ranging from changes in gender/sexual
identity and the figuration lifestyle of managers, entrepreneurs,
entertainers and stars of mass culture to the post-human “creature”
(robots, cyborgs, androids)—that has been introduced to fashion in the
new knowledge economy. Anything can be rearranged once more; all
that has been produced in the new constellations, and the whole was
stirred with a completely different regime. This is reliable evidence that
the meaning of fashion no longer lies in the theatre of social roles or in
the media world of changing cultural identity. Quite the contrary:
“society” as a techno-scientific framework and “culture” as the driving
power of changing life itself are derived from the genesis of techno-
aesthetically produced worlds.
(8) Design is no longer even a “function” or a mere “ornament” in favour
of the fundamentally constructed world made by technoscience. It just
belongs to the logic of contingency and emergency. Therefore, we need
to decisively break all the historically obsolete binary oppositions that
governed and mapped the cognitive architecture of modern sciences
and arts. The era in which we operate is determined by a set of hybrid
concepts and new events. Thus, the event has marked the performativity
of the creative body in society, politics, the economy, and culture.

***

Žarko Paiü, in his contribution dedicated to the explanation of fashion

theory as an assemblage of plural orientations, directions and disciplines,
claims in the opening chapter that we should be aware that the scrutiny and
method in the analysis of fashion as a creative body design require crossing
disciplinary boundaries, often at the cost of loss of solid orientation. Strictly
speaking, regarding the question of the modern scientific methodology of
fashion studies, humanities and social sciences where fashion should be
included, the answer is almost unambiguous: between and on the edge of
the post-disciplinary approach to the very thing of thought. Here, Paiü
applies the division of fashion into analytical-structural and historical-
genealogical senses, followed by the development of scientific paradigms
ranging from modern sociology and anthropology to postmodern cultural
studies and, finally, contemporary visual semiotics. He assumes that three
modes of the paradigm are at the same time the ways to create a theoretical
approach to the topic that is historically articulated as a path towards total
 Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body xi

body design. These are (1) modern fashion, (2) postmodern fashion, and (3)
contemporary fashion.
Tonþi Valentiü next aims to provide a concise and clear critical
overview of the sociological understanding of contemporary fashion
phenomena, starting from the earliest analyses at the beginning of the 20th
century until today, i.e. the globalized era of computer network societies as
the dominant form of social organization, and to critically question whether
sociology today could be a proper discipline of fashion analysis. It is
apparent that fashion nowadays occupies the most important areas of
aesthetic creativity. Valentiü, in his analysis, deals with the legacy of
modern sociological discourse about fashion and pays particular attention
to the most famous of French sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu, who approached
the topic of social differences and the dynamics of separation of social
formations using the example of taste criticism from the perspective of the
sociology of fashion. In that sense, the emergence of new disciplines such
as fashionology or the visual semiotics of fashion could be understood as
both a continuation of the classic sociological approach as well as its
disciplinary opposition, bearing in mind that they operate with different
theoretical vocabularies.
Žarko Paiü, in an extensive and provocative study dedicated to the
problem of contemporary fashion starting from the visual semiotics of the
body, argues in the third chapter that we are entering an age that can be
explained by the assumption of the end of the symbolic construction of the
body. Instead of the logic of representation of fashion in the light of modern
society and postmodern culture, contemporary fashion should be regarded
as a performative-conceptual turn in the very core of body iconograms. The
triad of fashion in the presence of the contemporary age and its superseding
has been shown through (1) syncretism, (2) hybridity, and (3) eclecticism.
Paiü vividly proves how we must abandon all previous essentialist art and
fashion theories and try to think about posthuman fetishism through an
experimental way of deconstructing the “third skin.” Therefore, contemporary
fashion, as the radical “theatre of cruelty” (Artaud) and the “eroticism of
death” in its latest transgression, leads to the apocalypse of the body in the
mythical act of its creation and destruction. The fetishism of contemporary
art and fashion decadence are represented as interactive spectacles of
narcissistic subjects/actors in the lives of iconograms beyond sanctity and
sacrifice. This life is auto-poetically generated by new digital technology,
and it consists of the fragmentation of identity in the networked space of the
media world of art and fashion. Alexander McQueen’s show Plato’s
Atlantis undoubtedly represents, Paiü claims, an attempt at a radical change
in the overall view of the contemporary body as a transgression.
xii Introduction

Katarina Nina Simonþiþ deals in the fourth chapter with an issue

dedicated to utopian visions of fashion in Croatia since the 1960s. She aims
to indicate the diverse approaches of and interests in the production of
Croatian artists dealing with garments as utopian visions of digital reality.
Miroslav Šutej’s fashion design was highly influenced by Space Age
fashion and New Tendencies, while Silvio Vujiþiü is spellbound by artificial
intelligence and its potential for fashion production, which led him to create
a completely new fashion language, a reflection of the digital age. In
contrast, Matija ýop’s primary interest is the body, which, in the digital age,
offers a plethora of possibilities for modifications and re-evaluations. The
produced garment is only one means of the artistic expression of its
coexistence with the body. However, both Vujiþiü’s and ýop’s productions
have a strong futuristic character, much like Šutej’s sketches in the late
1960s. In addition, Simonþiþ aims to emphasise the social, political and
cultural conditions in which the artists work or by which they are moved to
work.
Krešimir Purgar analyses the semiotics of masculinity in fashion
photography and art history in the fifth chapter and argues that we need to
try to see the “trivial” images of fashion advertising from a perspective that
he preliminarily calls a transhistorical image system. Visual studies interpret
visual codes as part of a universal system of representation, Purgar claims,
as he delves most deeply into the field of pictorial hermeneutics that
connects lesser-known areas between the specificity and the generality of
the image. Its methodology starts from the belief that each image frames
one part of reality, but it does so while not being isolated from other images,
as much as their comparison may seem inappropriate and as much as the
proposed semiotic leaps connect temporally, stylistically and thematically
distant pictorial representations. Following Gilles Lipovetski’s thesis,
Purgar concludes that the freedom to choose consumer goods based on
pictorial incentives is the lowest form of democratic participation, but he
also adds that the freedom to interpret these images is a much higher form
of consumerist and civic consciousness.
Marianna Boero aims to explore the communication trends of the
language of fashion in the social universe, with particular reference to
fashion blogs. With the advent of social networks, the language of fashion
has undergone significant changes, which have led it to rethink and redefine
some communication logics. If before fashion was a “closed universe”,
reserved for a small audience, thanks to social media, it becomes a system
based on the interaction between companies and their audience. An example
is the possibility of attending high fashion shows through live coverage on
social channels, or to participate to social communities dedicated to fashion
 Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body xiii

events. In a context of this type, fashion experiences a process of

democratization, while maintaining exclusivity, increasingly entering the
daily life of the public in the social universe. Fashion blogs play a
fundamental role in this sense, allowing users to identify with the proposed
narratives. Precisely with the aim of investigating the way in which the
language of fashion redefines its communication and symbolic methods in
the social universe, this article traces the main studies conducted in the field
of semiotics of fashion and then focuses on fashion blogs, highlighting the
role of the body aesthetics and valorization in the overall communication.
The body changes with changing fashions: both are a sign of the cultural
and identity metamorphosis of society. The body of fashion is always
perennially deformed, it is the mirror of social identity, the eternal return of
the new. In this perspective, social semiotics can play a central role for
understanding the ongoing scenario.
Petra Krpan deals with fashioning the cinematic screen as body
transmediality in the final chapter. She argues that fashion photography and
fashion film have gone a step further in considering the relationship between
fashion, the body and corporeality. The most significant changes in
contemporary fashion have taken place in the context of fashion photography,
fashion film and fashion performance, all under the visible influence of the
media. Therefore, the notion of the media is the basis for understanding the
paradigm shift that fashion experienced at the beginning of the 1990s. The
most significant achievements of contemporary fashion designers such as
Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Hussein Chalayan, Rick Owens and
Iris van Herpen constantly remind us that the magic and power of fashion is
realized in the spectacular performance of the body in the event. For fashion,
in the end, remains a catalogue of fascinating images, a pure visualization
of life as an aesthetic pleasure.
 CHAPTER ONE

FASHION THEORY:
ORIENTATIONS, DIRECTIONS, DISCIPLINES

ŽARKO PAIû

Introduction
The fundamental notion of modern political philosophy and law since
Immanuel Kant is represented by the concept of autonomy. We take this
word extremely seriously because, without its meaning, we cannot
understand why the desire for autonomous fields of research prevails today
in the age of the interdisciplinarity of science. Fashion is like other
phenomena in its constant search for its purpose and aim. Its autonomy is
therefore identical to the desire for emancipation from all obstacles in the
constitution of its own subject. This is nothing strange. For the phenomenon
to be scientifically experienced, it might be necessary that the theory that
gives it credibility reaches a high level of performativity. Autonomy, for us,
should mark the freedom of disposition of our mind in modern times. But
the mind is not outside the body. That body, thus, appears in the context of
contemporary fashion with the reflexive power of realization of the mind
and the desire for the eccentric display of the entire world of human
sensitivity. This position of unfoundedness, because fashion has very lately
become the subject of scientifically relevant research, reflects on the
creation of a unique language and speech. The multitude of expressions for
changing the style of clothing features point to the impossibility of the
uniformity of fashion.
Moreover, unlike other areas of the world of life such as art and
architecture, the only way lacks credibility and autonomy. And without that,
there is no possibility of recognition. We might be able to explain that
phenomenon with the metaphor of bubble foam or of clouds moving in the
sky. Both of them are perpetual and transient, almost at the border of a stable
order of meaning, without their logic of action. Clothes and decorations
2 Chapter One

belong to the body as an aesthetic object. By changing the identity of a

dressed body, due to the speed of modification, it is impossible to
distinguish the “style” from the “trend.” This problem becomes much more
complex when fashion from visual arts and architecture takes the notions of
“style” and “trend” and leads them to aesthetic-commercial visual
communication in the global world of information, services and capital.
Speaking of symbolic, communicative and aesthetic meanings presupposes
the perceived change in what overlays the term itself as its reference
framework. Is it still possible to consider fashion in the categories of linear
progress and development, social dynamics, and the complexity of
modernity? And, in turn, because it inevitably creates several new
conceptual tools with which we will be able to reach multiple changes in
fashion at the same time with uncanny speed, should we have a secure
viewpoint from which we could know how society and culture in the era of
the visual spectacle would transform a networked global communication?
The difficulties faced by the scientific study of fashion in the 20th
century stem from the area in which the term refers to two closely related
meanings. They are “inclusive disjunctive.” The first one historically arose
with the emergence of capitalism towards the end of the Middle Ages in the
14th century in Italy and France. Fashion shows, for example, a way of life
or a high culture of perception in the mutual display of bodies within the
space of aristocratic institutions of government. The word comes from the
Latin modus, the meaning of which is related to habit, culture and lifestyle.
In Italian and French (il modo/la mode), the expression refers to the system
of rules and norms adopted. Without acquiring a symbolic meaning of
differences in social status and cultural choice, fashion is therefore not just
a privilege of an aristocratically shaped society. On the contrary, what also
takes place is the beginning of a process of socially individuating the body.
Moreover, fashion in this sense rises to the throne of social power. The
aesthetic form of communication among people goes beyond political and
cultural boundaries. Secondly, the meaning of fashion arose in England, the
leading country of modern capitalism, under the reign of Queen Elizabeth
I. So, in the 16th century, that concept had its general application in
commercial trade and economics confirmed. Malcolm Barnard, in his
analysis, examines the crucial changes that took place at the beginning of
the modern era in Europe (Barnard 2002, 114) and successfully reveals what
is “new,” what has “changed,” and the reduction of fashion to the economic
value of goods and the financial manner of reproduction. While the first
meaning is oriented towards the norms and ideals of the aesthetic life of a
modern man, the second is entirely realistic concerning the essence of
capitalism as a new social order—the accumulation of capital in the form of
 Fashion Theory 3

the natural and cultural transformation of goods. Fashion as a culture and

fashion as an economic way to gain wealth in a society based on social
inequality, political liberalism and the idea of unconditional progress form
the dynamic structure of Western civilization. Regarding its occurrence, its
tendency is spreading throughout the whole world. In the age of
globalization in the 1990s, one could truly talk about the total rule of the
social form of fashion. With the old historical strength and power of
capitalism, it is reflected in the desire of all to possess designed objects.
The concept of fashion as a “social form” refers explicitly to the
structure and matrix of the essential duplicity of its function: (a) the usable
value of the goods and (b) the market value of the exchange in which the
fetishism of goods has its origin. In principle, this is a revised concept from
Karl Marx’s Capital. For sociological theorists of modernity, ranging from
Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel to Herbert Blumer and Pierre
Bourdieu, this concept is largely binding (Paiü 2007, 64–71). One cannot
omit any of the other meanings of fashion. It would be a shrinking of its
historically established “being.” The ambiguity of fashion, therefore, is not
only evident in the fact that the Italian-French world of high fashion and
style clashes with the English-American anti-fashion world and global
industrial production in both its action and in the sales of clothes. What is
shown in this twofoldness of the “necessity of opportunity” of fashion as a
process of liberation from the laws of nature and tradition, as well as its
cultural differentiation within social integration, as determined by Simmel’s
famous sociological definition (Simmel 1957), might be a paradox and
aporia of fashion in its relationship with modern society and culture. It
cannot be determined by any means whatsoever by reaching out to the
governing reference framework (capitalism-modernity-the social form of
power). Why has that already been formed just like an unchangeable fateful
event? The reason should be sought in the fact that a process of double
emancipation took place during the 20th century: (1) the human body as an
area of freedom for the creative construction of new worlds of coercion,
patriarchal order, and associated dominant ideological-political systems of
meaning, and (2) knowledge about the origin of new areas of research that
combine the ideas of the aesthetic object (ready-mades) and lifestyles.
Fashion should be regarded as a permanent change in the meaning of
clothes depending on the context and the situation in which the body
appears. But the change is not made for the mere “sake” of change or by
anarchic spontaneity without direction. Instead, it might be necessary to
introduce fashion as a creative body design into the debate. What is live,
stable and steady as the flywheel to accelerate in the 21st century gives new
meaning to the circular straightness in the development of something, as
4 Chapter One

“ghosts always return” (Breward 1995, 115–118; Evans 2003, 19–28;

Lehmann 2000, xx). As far as this is impossible, it is inevitable for the true
beginning of a new approach to the phenomenon of fashion. That approach
has opened up whole different horizons. Fashion finally gave legitimate
meaning to the area of autonomous scientific discourse.1 We start from the
assumption that comprehending fashion as a creative body design
designates the beginning of the most significant 20th-century theoretical
book that had far-reaching implications. Of course, this is the book written
by the French semiologist and literary theoretician Roland Barthes titled The
Fashion System (Système de la mode) from 1967. For this reason, for the
first time, there is a thought that fashion is no longer inauthentic and is not
merely the result of the social dynamics of modern capitalism as established
in the sociological theory of modernity known as trickle-down theory.
Instead of such a “traditional” approach starting from the standpoint of
social class interrogative factors, a hierarchically ordered society, like a
pyramid, encounters an inversion of “being” fashion. Well, it must now be
understood as an advanced sign system (signifier-sign-signified). This could
be a change in fashion styles and trends from a stable language system and
its syntax, semantics, and grammar. All this represents a testimony of the
crucial role of the concept of culture in understanding fashion. Culture,
which now has the decisive meaning of the new reference framework, must

1 The concept of discourse is taken from the early philosophical work of Michel
Foucault (1994). Its meaning is multiple. Discourse (Fr. discourse – language,
hearing, communication mode within a given society and culture) always refers to
language and power as a general framework for legalization in the historical work
of man. Hence, “scientific discourse” differs not only from ordinary language in
everyday use, but also from other ways of speech and written communication. Just
as Roland Barthes distinguishes language (langue) from speech (parole) in his
semiotics, and so fashion can encompass the difference in what characterizes the
possibility of speaking (the body) as such in the human world, so Foucault also
articulated that language is always directed to power structures in a particular
historical context. But discourse cannot be nothing “natural” and “invariable,” but
rather a historically formed relationship between language and speech in the context
of socially and culturally coded power. The “scientific discourse” is always a
connection between the language of the fashion and the power of social-cultural
legalization under which communication processes take place. Discourse thus opens
as a field of the constant change of language and speech in institutions and the world
of life. When a historically determined “social form of fashion” disappears, as
occurred with modern fashion (from the 1800s to the 1960s), then the discourse that
gave it its gild and shine also disappears. But that does not mean that terms and
language of the past do not remain. They are still present in fashion as historical
epochs, but they do not have the power of enactment (such as, for example, language
and speech in Renaissance or Baroque fashion).
 Fashion Theory 5

be confirmed as the mass culture of the consumer society and its

fundamental concept of communication. Perhaps we should listen to Barthes
himself when he introduces fashion into the discourse of post-structuralism
as the leading theoretical direction in humanities and social sciences in the
1960s and 1980s. It could be said that this was the way of thinking for the
emergence of all the fundamental ideas within philosophy, sociology, and
anthropology with the concepts that have linked nature and society, man
and God, and history and events in the world. In the place of persistence,
there are changes, and in the place of tradition and continuity come
postmodernity, discontinuity, and a whole set of concepts taken from
cybernetics, informatics, and structural linguistics.

In the Fashion system, the sign, on the contrary, is (relatively) arbitrary: it is

elaborated each year, not by the mass of its users (which would be the
equivalent of the “speaking mass” which produces language), but by an
exclusive authority, i.e., the fashion-group, or perhaps, in the case of written
Fashion, even the editors of the magazine; of course, the Fashion sign, like
all signs produced within what is called mass culture, is situated, one might
say, at the point where a singular (or oligarchical) conception and a
collective image meet, it is simultaneously imposed and demanded. But,
structurally, the Fashion sign is no less arbitrary; it is the result of neither a
gradual evolution (for which no “generation” would in itself be responsible)
not a collective consensus; it is born suddenly and in its entirety, every year,
by decree (This year, prints are winning at the races); what points up the
arbitrariness of the Fashion sign is precisely the fact that it is exempt from
time: Fashion does not evolve, it changes. (Barthes 1983, 215)

Barthes’ main assumption is extremely significant for the further exposure

of all theoretical efforts regarding fashion and, at the same time, for bringing
it into the “open system” (language-sign-communication), but we must not
fall into the temptation to argue that dressing and fashion are just two
different forms of (or the same human tendency for) decoration in all
historical periods. Absolutely not! Dressing is a mark of tradition and
persistence without change. Quite the opposite, fashion is characterized by
a radical cut with the past. In that sense, in a lecture at the Collège de France
on “modernity” in which he mentioned Nietzsche and his analysis, Barthes
used the term for the modern woman in Paris at the end of the 19th century
and appropriated it to the concept of the world: “Elle est contemporaine de
tout le monde” (Agamben 2009, 30–31). The problem with the theoretical
“founding” of fashion as a creative body design might be that fashion
cannot be reduced to the social dynamics of power, nor even to cultural
differentiation in lifestyles. Why? The reason is that its uniqueness and
singularity might be determined as an experiment of the existence of an
6 Chapter One

individual, rather than as a mere dress of a social group, of the objectified

phantom body that Sigmund Freud calls the super-ego area of impacts to all
kinds of things. Although sociology is a positive social science that was the
first to take fashion into serious consideration, the following should be
emphasized. The paradox arises from that matter whereby the sociological
concept of fashion can never be sufficiently deeply rooted in the underlying
problem that lies on the surface of things. And that is the question of the
identity of an individual subject and its autonomous body. In other words,
the social analysis of fashion, as long as it is highly valued because it gives
us an objective view of the state of things, is scheduled in its own way of
saying. Fashion might only be a conditional social phenomenon. It is always
distinctive concerning the common tendencies of a society that prescribes
the norms and rules of clothing for the individual. Nevertheless, contemporary
fashion at the beginning of the 21st century represents a radical
emancipation from this way of understanding the body and wants the body
to place itself at the centre of the question of selfhood as identity.
We can find the real residence of fashion in the space of the bodily
construction of identity beyond “nature” and “culture.” Our research
concerning this space of experimental games with the transformations of
bodies in contemporary art and design—the greatest aesthetic achievements
of which are in the works of fashion designers such as Alexander McQueen,
John Galliano, Hussein Chalayan, Martin Margiela, and Jean-Paul
Gaultier—should call this matter visual semiotics of the body. If language,
for Barthes, was the fundamental signifier of fashion change, which is
repeated as fashion returns to its origin in the phenomenon of retro-futurism,
then for contemporary fashion, the sign of the rule of new information-
communication technologies and interactive media transcodes language
into an image or a visual code of social forms of spectacle (Paiü 2007, 217–
262; Paiü 2011, 367–427). To explain how far the image takes on “the logic
of language” is only possible if we introduce a determination of visual
semiotics into the debate. It should be noted that this is a post-discipline
beyond the distinction between semiology and sociology. Language was
suspended and neutralized with the introduction of visual studies and visual
culture at the end of the 20th century.
However, the sign is shown as fashion information on clothing related
to new fashion trends. We can argue that the meaning of fashion, thus,
becomes an event for the interactive communication-networked body as an
aesthetic object. Just as art, after the movement of the historical avant-garde
of the first half of the 20th century, caused beauty to vanish and “sucked”
in being like in Marcel Duchamp’s famous “Bottle Dryer,” so fashion no
longer finds the archipelago of beauty as the ultimate consolation of a
 Fashion Theory 7

classic aesthetic. Instead, we are dealing with processes of aestheticizing the

world of life.2 That is how fashion “enrols” into the lifestyle of an individual
as his changing identity. Nothing is persistent and perpetual. Everything is
transformed into a multitude of forms. In this consideration of fashion
theory concerning the multitude of orientations, directions and disciplines
that deal with such a fluid phenomenon scientifically, it is necessary to find
a logic of how it could be possible to understand why fashion was so late in
establishing the area of overlapping tendencies in retrieving a complex life-
span and why it is not self-evident today that its autonomy, in conjunction
with science, art and technology, has become a question of the design as the
construction of new worlds, not just a decoration of the existing or long-
obsolete understanding of “applied art.”
The logic of the turn begins, therefore, with Barthes’ semiotic approach
to fashion as a sign of cultural change. Undoubtedly, we are aware that the
very notion of culture is represented by a set of concepts just like media,
communication, and the spectacle. Unlike the modern notion of culture, we
should be immersed in a quite strange context when many interconnected
things become a new assemblage that can be determined by cultural
(in)determination. Among them, fashion stands in the midst of the
“language games.” However, since the question of the unsparingness of
fashion disappeared from the horizons of traditional scientific approaches,
as we have seen, might also be a kind of “lack” that differentiates fashion
from all other areas of human creativity, then it seems reasonable to start no
longer from the simple question of what fashion is but rather from how it is
produced/created as an aesthetic object, practically as a field of performance
in fashion design, and ultimately as a symbolic-communication event of
interaction between the participants of the process of creating a “new”
beyond the traditionally understood society, culture and body. It should
immediately be added that what Barthes’ semiotic approach opened for the

2 “Today, we are living amidst an aestheticization of the real world formerly unheard
of. Embellishment and styling are to be found everywhere. They extend from
individuals’ appearance to the urban and public spheres, and from economy through
to ecology. […] Individuals are engaging themselves in a comprehensive styling of
body, soul and behavior. Homo aestheticus has become the new role-model. In
urban areas just about everything has been subjected to a face-lift in recent years –
at least in the rich western countries. The economy too profits largely from the
consumers’ tendency not actually to acquire an article, but rather to buy themselves,
by its means, into the aesthetic lifestyle with which advertising strategies have linked
the article. Even ecology is on the way to being an embellishment sector favoring a
styling of the environment in the spirit of aesthetic ideals like complexity or natural
beauty. Genetic engineering finally is a kind of genetic cosmetic surgery” (Welsch
1997, 18–37).
8 Chapter One

understanding of fashion seems to have an identical value to the theory of

media and communications of the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan in
his main work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which
highlights that the medium is the message (McLuhan 1994). Both are
introduced into a completely different view of the world, starting from the
idea of a construct of reality, but they are not based on a so-called objective
existence independent of human consciousness and action. Fashion
represents, thus, a media in the embodied structure of life. In all its
transformations, it appears as the subject of its performance in the mirror of
the public. Therefore, it has to be considered in the same way as other
creative imagination products. If the novelty of a new fashion is different
from clothing and custom in everyday life, then the concept of the sign is
the source of all further attempts to dress and decorate the body from the
structure of human communication. None of this, however, is yet sufficient
to inspect the complexity of the theoretical discourse of fashion. It
systematically evolves on the traces of the traditional disciplines of social
sciences, such as sociology in Thorstein Veblen’s and Georges Simmel’s
works and semiology or semiotics in the works of Roland Barthes and
Umberto Eco (Barthes 1983; Eco 1976).
Contributions to the study of fashion in the 20th century were mostly
directed towards the social and cultural function of clothing. It is not
surprising that the concept of functionalism led to the sociological theory of
Talcott Parsons, but also in the theory of architecture and design to the
formation of the linguistic turn. In any case, this is self-explanatory given
that the leading direction of architecture and design in modernity was
influenced by Le Corbusier and Bauhaus with the idea that the form follows
function, so much so that the emergence of scientific contributions to
fashion within social and cultural anthropology, psychology and
psychoanalysis practically focused on how and by which methods the human
body in society and culture is aesthetically shaped to preserve its primary
collective identity. Clothes are necessarily reduced to carriers of meaning in
the binary logic of the modern world with the separation of work and leisure,
town and village, gender/sex differences, generational divisions, and factors
of social integration. Of course, it could not be ignored that within the
psychoanalytic critique of the repression of society over the desires of an
individual, the eroticism and sexuality of the female body is a condition of
the possibility of creating extravagant fashion clothes. With the emergence
of cultural industries and the spectacle—a film by staging the event—new
limits emerge in the relationship between strict prohibitions and the
conquest of free space. It should be recalled that film and television
productions in Europe and America from 1920–1930 created several
 Fashion Theory 9

fashion styles like neo-historicism, decadent glamour and avant-garde with

icons like the femme fatale of The Blue Angel Marlene Dietrich and the
great seducer Rudolph Valentino in the silent film era. Jacques Lacan’s
basic psychoanalysis, which he unconsciously structures as a language in
the theories of the second half of the 20th century, belongs to the continuation
of Barthes’ semiotics by other means. But speaking of a psychoanalytical
theory of fashion as an established scientific discipline would indeed be
wrong. It is better to say that there are traces of attempts to synchronously—
combining new orientations in philosophy and theories of culture—find a
way that approaches fashion in its indeterminacy. In that sense, Lacan’s
psychoanalysis is one of the assumptions that an individual subject is a
meeting of imaginary-symbolic-real traumas in the construction of a new
identity, then the object’s fetishism is inevitably attributed to fashion
clothing that shocks, provocatively and experimentally surpassing the moral
boundaries of the conservative society (Fernbach 2002; Wilson 1985, 91–
116).
The next consideration will offer reasons why the science dealing with
fashion essentially must perform interdisciplinarily and why it cannot exist
without a necessarily open space for the emergence of an autonomous
profession of fashion studies. We should be aware that the scrutiny and the
way in the analysis of fashion as a creative body design require crossing
disciplinary boundaries, often at the cost of the loss of a solid orientation.
Strictly speaking, regarding the question of the modern scientific methodology
of fashion studies, humanities and social sciences where the fashion should
be included, the answer is almost unambiguous: between and on the edge of
the post-disciplinary approach to the very thing of thought. Here, we would
apply a division of fashion into analytical-structural and historical-
genealogical senses, followed by the development of scientific paradigms
ranging from modern sociology and anthropology to postmodern cultural
studies and, finally, contemporary visual semiotics.3 I assume that three
3 We comprehend the term paradigm (Gr. ʌĮȡȐįİȚȖȝĮ, example, pattern, matrix), as
a particular circuit in which assumptions and rules appear to be necessary for a
meaningful notion of reality. This term was developed in the theory of science by
Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962), and it
became generally applicable thereafter. As it relates to the models and frameworks
in which the scientific way of thinking builds up its explanations of the world, it is
obvious that with each change of paradigm, the perception of the world is rapidly
changed. In the case of fashion, what has been paradigmatically determined in the
course of the historical process since its creation in the late 14th century to the
present day is that there exists a mutual relationship of permeation and mutual action
10 Chapter One

modes of the paradigm are at the same time the ways to create a theoretical
approach to the topic that is historically articulated as a path towards the
total body design.4 These are (1) modern fashion, (2) postmodern fashion,
and (3) contemporary fashion (Paiü 2007, 20–36). All theories of fashion
within the first paradigm, except for Simmel and the conditional limit of
validity of his ideas, are related to the social class hierarchy (trickle-down
theory). According to that insight, fashion indicates the function of the
social stability of the capitalist order. Within the framework of the second
paradigm, the realm of the concept of anti-fashion and of all that is what the
most significant postmodern theoretician of fashion, Gilles Lipovetsky,
called the “marginal differentiation” process in his book The Empire of
Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (L’Empire de l’éphémère: La mode
et son destin dans les sociétés modernes) (Lipovetsky 2002, 131). Finally,
the third paradigm form is based on the image shift (iconic turn). Now its
fashionable facility and the network of its meanings can decode an act of
interpretation forms and the methods of construction of the object itself. The
concepts should be applied in visual semiotics, visual anthropology, image
science (Bildwissenschaft) and post-phenomenology. Three levels of this
discussion will prove that fashion theory includes everything that belongs
to the openness of the perspective and facility with which the image might

between the reality and the thinking of the mode. No new fashion paradigms are
created without influencing thoughtful changes in the understanding of the world, as
is the case in art. The framework for the functioning of concepts and the categorical
apparatus belonging to a certain paradigm is not closed to some impenetrable forms
but is about transitions and changes of varying intensity.
4 This term implies something extremely ambivalent and at the same time

contingent. As is well known, the concept of total (totality) belongs to the inheritance
of classical metaphysics and rises to the notion of the entity that controls its parts in
Hegel’s philosophy of the absolute spirit. The historical avant-garde in the first half
of the 20th century, in its demands for changing the status and sense of art, already
sought to bring disunity into the concept of totality. With the emergence of modern
design, architecture and fashion, it moved in the direction of the limited autonomy
of its own action. Why? Precisely because it wanted to serve the external purpose of
its autonomy by taking the concept of function to explain the cause of movement in
the circle of the all-round aesthetics of everyday life. Let us remember that the
struggle between minimalism and the luxurious surrealistic tendency to blend
metamorphic forms of radical art with a consumerist lifestyle, as seen in the case of
the differences between the designs of Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, was at
the same time a struggle between the two faces of the same coin: avant-garde Jesuit
purity and surrealist fantasy about bizarre and extravagant fantasy worlds. The total
body design therefore means the utopia/dystopia of the life itself that aspires to
become an artistic event in which fashion takes the role of the creative design (Paiü
2011).
 Fashion Theory 11

be understood as a presentation (mimesis) and representation (repraesentatio)

of some already existing reality as its description. Fashion within visual
semiotics shows the sign of the new identity of the liberated body without
any reference to society and culture. How must this be understood?
Visuality is not just a feature of the media-constructed reality. The whole
set of cultures that we call visual culture today is based on the conceptual
turn from language and text to image. But the image here might be derived
from the technological way of processing information. The visual culture of
modern fashion determines the social status of the subject and the object of
fashion change. The body image, thus, defines the manner of its meaning-
typing field. It is endless as it is the world that fashion creates as a result of
the absolute freedom of the construction/deconstruction of life. All this has
been witnessed in the fascinating and extravagant works of contemporary
fashion designers.

1. Modern society or the function of fashion:

sociology, psychology and anthropology
What encompasses that assemblage that we call a modern fashion? The
answer seems as unambiguous as the definition of the notion of modernity.
It is a way of life in an industrial society where the body serves as a means
of presenting the power of capitalism and its social hierarchy. Fashion
denotes a part of the modernity of the theatre of social roles precisely
because it is not explicitly centred on the problem of the construction of
individual identity as a subject of lifestyle. After all, fashion has only begun
to spread in all directions since the emergence of a massive mode of
commodity production that encompasses the entire social space of control
over human behaviour. It was therefore not unusual for the first scientific
study of “modern fashion” to simultaneously be a criticism of capitalist
modernization to restrain the excessive and resourceful consumption of the
high class. The sociology of fashion at this juncture determined the
fundamental settings of the American anthropologist, economist and
sociologist Thorstein Veblen. We will emphasize some significant remarks
here from his The Theory of the Leisure Class, which was first published in
1899 (Veblen 1961). For Veblen, fashion represents a result of (1)
conspicuous leisure, (2) conspicuous consumption, and (3) conspicuous
waste. It should be particularly interesting that fashion is defined by the
anthropological need of man for the admiration of the symbolic money-
power system in the conditions of the competitive nature of capitalism. At
the centre of Veblen’s criticism is the aristocratic way of life of the ruling
12 Chapter One

elite or bourgeois class and consumption above the morally permitted

measure of wealth (Davis 1992, 110–115).
We must not deny that his analyses of early consumer capitalism were
abundantly served by Lipovetsky in his book. In this way, they show the
kinship and the differences between the two paradigms of fashion and their
theoretical explanations. In the first case, it is obvious that consumption can
only have the exclusive character of the ruling high-class style. But when
the 1960s triumph of consumer culture emerged, and when postmodern
culture was elevated to the cult of spectacle and the passage of fashion, it
became clear how the subject/actor of late capitalism changed radically with
the rule of media and communication. Consumption was then democratized.
In the place of the decadent style of life, there was the elite fashion turn.
Now, the logic of spending in signs of frivolity and the ultimate luxury of
the new aristocracy is no longer important, but there is the possibility that
fashion appears in the availability of the very act of a different cultural
differentiation. Everything that Lipovetsky in his analysis of postmodernism
in the culture of late capitalism that leads to transparency by introducing
categories and concepts of fluid character is revealed in the sociological-
anthropological works of Veblen and Simmel. It should be emphasized, in
particular, that Simmel’s theory of the individualizing lifestyle in the
context of the creation of the landscape of mass culture breaks the boundary
of the so-called trickle-down theory. Simmel was the first theoretician of
fashion who, within the paradigm of modernity as a closed matrix of
stability and change, noticed that the idea of fashion as a social form
transformed itself. Along with Walter Benjamin, a philosopher and theorist
of culture who is extremely important for understanding the new spirit of
capitalism built in the eclectic mix of “arcades” and “boutiques,” the aura
of high art and grand tastes prone to photography and film as new media
(Benjamin 1969), Simmel precisely shows the internal tendencies of the
development of fashion in the core of the construction of a new man as
refined and a subject devoted to the decoration and the aesthetic design of
one’s own life. Perhaps there is not such a sophisticated tendency to balance
the modern man in choosing his cultural preferences, as Simmel represented
in his thinking about the role and being of fashion:

Perhaps Goethe, in his later period, is the most eloquent example of a wholly
great life, for by means of his adaptability in all externals, his strict regard
for form, his willing obedience to the conventions of society, the attained a
maximum of inner freedom, a complete saving of the centres of life from the
touch of the unavoidable quantity of dependence. In this respect, fashion is
also a social form of marvelous expediency, because, like the law, it affects
only the externals of life, only those sides of life which are turned to society.
 Fashion Theory 13

It provides us with a formula by means of which we can unequivocally attest

our dependence upon what is generally adopted, our obedience to the
standards established by our time, our class, and our narrower circle, and
enables us to withdraw the freedom given us in life from externals and
concentrate it more and more in our innermost natures. (Simmel 1957, 554)

The emergence of modern fashion from the spirit of the function corresponds
to the emergence of fashion design as a vocational-disciplinary approach to
the creation of clothing. Of course, this was happening at the same time as
the historical movements of the avant-garde, particularly constructivism,
surrealism and the first school of modern design of Bauhaus, in the 1920s,
when design became a new feature of aestheticizing life in industrial
capitalism in clothing and the practical performance of fashion. Coco
Chanel and her “little black dress” innovation perfectly match the idea of
pure form as a function. This was happening in the context of the
emancipation of a woman’s body from Victorian torture in the name of
“morality” and “virginity.” Fashion cannot be exempted from the “spirit of
the times” of the 1920s–1930s, and it is associated with the logic of
culturally determined progress and the development of the social form of
capitalism in which there are mutually exclusive tendencies. It seems to be
the “destiny” of a fashion as a contingent event. After all, nothing in history
occurs according to the cruel law of linear development. We have seen
Roland Barthes precisely split fashion trends from technological
advancement. Fashion is changing and not developing. It is, therefore, its
“logic” to include a mass reproduction of the new industry in its codes, as
well as the uniqueness and unparalleled news of a uniquely created aesthetic
object tailor-made for a personalized customer’s clothing. However, what
the sociology of modernity with anthropology has undoubtedly opened up
as a problem points to the impossibility of creating fashion by the
autonomous and independent subject of the modern paradigm of science
with its conceptual apparatus of “dynamics” and “movement,” the social
class verticals and the functional order of a society with a series value. The
problem, then, was with the cognition or theoretical rank of the first order.
It had the same trouble as the design theorists had with less difficulty in the
20th century. How can one possibly talk about fashion and design if their
features are passivity and mere phenomena, pure objects, and the aesthetic
form of the world?
Sociologically speaking, it must be recognized that, in this respect, we
still do not know which deviations measure how fashion always appears to
mean something else, serving another purpose, and whereby fashion, as
Simmel would say, becomes a “social form” and not an autonomous field
of insurmountable meanings. In other words, fashion in the classical
14 Chapter One

discourse of modern sociology, anthropology and psychology cannot go

beyond the threshold of entry into the empire of autonomy of its field. This
is attested in an encyclopedic article of 1931 by the American sociologist
and anthropologist Edward Sapir. According to Sapir, a fashion tries to
“expand” into cultural areas as a dynamic category of social development,
and its effects on society appear as well as many other similar social
strengths. Sapir mentioned three such effects: (a) sexual symbolism, (b)
social interaction, and (c) the cultural code of distinction according to socio-
social and gender-sex criteria and the aesthetic principle (Sapir 1931, 141
in Paiü 2007, 42). However, all that is mentioned does not emerge from the
paradigm of functionalism. The reason lies in the fact that fashion is
understood from the reference framework of “modern society.” This means
that it comes from the idea that there are necessary distinctions between
“being” and “appearance” and between “symptoms” and “phenomena” (the
latter being characterized by psychoanalysis), and that something else
determines the status and function of the fashion beyond the autonomous
form of the fashion as such.
And if “purposefulness is worthy of admiration,” as Simmel says
beautifully, what if this is something intrinsic and insensitive to the
metaphysical stories of the interior reception in front of the outside, the
depths in front of the surface? Does this not undermine the entire building
of modern science that finds its cause in causative determinism, that is, in
the idea that everything has its cause and purpose and that anything beyond
that does not happen in reality? All of the established disciplines in the
scientific institutes of universities and research institutes until the 1960s
were based on that assumption. The phenomena remain phenomena, part of
the logic of scientific research. But since some thinkers such as Benjamin
have considered it with extreme seriousness, giving it the hidden place of
the phenomenon of the cultural constellation, that is, the montage and
allegories of modern capitalism with its movement towards the conquest of
an individual’s desire, it has meant that a new way of thinking has been
revealed within the discourse of sociology, anthropology and psychology.
When Benjamin saw contingency and not necessarily a quiver of development
in his “dialectical images” and the idea of “the tiger’s leap” in returning to
the end of the late 19th century would be demonstrated by suggesting a
different approach and ways of thinking. From that perspective, the design
was no longer merely decoration, ornamentation and “applied art”
(Lehmann 2000, 203–206). It should not be at all surprising that a special
place of interpretation is paid to the contributions of Benjamin in many
readers and textbooks concerning fashion today, although it is quite clear
that his style of writing and thought tendencies do not strictly belong to
 Fashion Theory 15

philosophy, sociology, anthropology, or psychology. Writing about ways

presupposes a shift away from the “spirit” of objectivity and the “demon”
of the quantitative methods of the fictional reality description.
Modern fashion, therefore, is framed as an image of a society that in
principle is still closed, despite its aspirations to reach a new space of
freedom. If such fashion is always determined by a strict set of rules and
norms, and if its “social form” matrix moves to different parts of the world
without major difficulties, as shown by the history of global capitalism in
the 20th century (Japan and China), it can be concluded that its purpose and
aim is to create something derived from the logic of goods fetishism, as
Marx did in his critique of the political economy, which is itself the subtitle
of his Capital. The fetishism of goods and aesthetic objects might be a
hidden secret of modern capitalism. Why? Simply because there is the
possibility of an ideology that uses the metaphor of the advertising image
for its symbolic power of rulership over people. Nothing is left beyond this.
Just as in the show by the contemporary fashion designer Martin Margiela
from 2014 (Artisanal collection of autumn-winter garments), in which the
models’ faces and heads were covered with masks and glamorously designed
covers because the true identity of the human lies in the impossibility of
identity, so the end of modern fashion denotes the announcement of the
period in which sexuality, social interaction and gender-sex discrimination
criteria will be summarized as a common denominator in the identity of a
singular individual. This question can no longer answer the paradigm of
modern science with its great narratives of “objectivity,” “function,” and
“social form.” What remains is part of the fragment and openness of the
project, which in the 1960s would have led to the starting point and the logic
of the fashion. The “social form” of fashion as a trademark of modernity has
broken into debris. What is left behind? There is nothing else to do with the
subjects/actors of the fashion, like the dreaded wild grove of Orpheus, for
otherwise the outline has its own identity.

2. Postmodern culture or the purpose of fashion: Cultural

studies, theoretical psychoanalysis and feminism
What is the difference between fashion’s orientation, direction, and the
scientific disciplines that deal with it? We have seen how the paradigm of
modern fashion scientifically belongs to the centre of the set term of society
as a frame of reference without which it is not possible to understand why
the social class stratification becomes a condition of the possibility of the
occurrence of a fashion as a high fashion (haute couture) and the phenomenon
of imitating the lifestyle of the aristocratic elite at lower levels of “social
16 Chapter One

taste.” Let us recall that the artistic view of what is said in Thorstein
Veblen’s Theory of Leisure Class is brilliantly derived in F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The screening of this epic
depiction of the “American Dream” as a film was equally as successful as
the acting of Robert Redford, who played the title role in the 1974 movie.
Without its luxurious costumes, which is to say the fashionable clothes of
the 1920s, it is impossible to spot the traumas and dreams of the aesthetic
shaping of the “new dandy” in the context of capitalism with the art-deco
style and the beginnings of the ingenious consumption of a “parasitic” class.
However, society in the era of modernity cannot “prosper” and “evolve” if,
metaphorically speaking, the watches of economics, politics and culture are
not subtly set and designed. After World War II, and especially in the 1960s,
the big narratives of modernity and fashion as a theatre of social roles were
faced with the question of the end of ideology and the end of history. All
this happened when American and European consumer capitalism faced the
challenge of colonial wars (the Americans in Vietnam and the French in the
Algerian War) and student “revolutions” in the streets of Paris in 1968. The
context of the disintegration of the “social forms of fashion” and the
emergence of the “society of the spectacle,” as highlighted by the neo-
Marxist theoretician and neo-avant-garde artist Guy Debord in his 1967
work La société du spectacle, opened the fundamental question of the
reintegration of society with the concept of multiplicity, creating new
possibilities in the interpretation of a complex reality (Paiü 2007, 243–248).
We cannot particularly highlight that culture as a spectacle and culture as a
struggle for “its” identity (Kulturkampf) proves that the concept of ideology
has to be revisited. But this can no longer be done without influencing the
media image of the world in which fashion has the almost decisive role of
enchanting and fascinating the observer with what is no longer hidden
behind the surface. Everything is so transparent and so visually impressive
that there is no reason to argue for theories that assume that hiding behind a
media event is a somewhat foreign and deep “essence” whose symbolic
meaning needs to be read in the critique of the world of fashion, media and
communication. Nothing is ever behind the scene. Everything might be
immersed in hyperreality without depth and surface too.
Fashion in the abyss of rebellion, counter-cultural movements, anti-
aesthetics, and the search for new meanings designates just anti-fashion
clothing that crushes canons of beauty and tastes imposed by its power in
the construction of human identity with the underlying categories of
contemporary art—shock, provocation and experiment. Instead of the “little
black dress” designed by Coco Chanel in the centre comes a cultural
rebellion, located between anarchy and social protest, which was the main
 Fashion Theory 17

feature of the punk-style designer Vivienne Westwood. A British flag on

the buttocks of a pair of jeans and a printed image-text of a vulgar profanity
on a t-shirt represent the same thing that distinguished the subversive theatre
of the neo-avant-garde or the poetics of pop art known as a ready-made. The
destruction of the canon style of high culture and high fashion (haute
couture) in democratizing culture represents a new way of disseminating
fashion. Jean Baudrillard—one of the most significant postmodernist
theoreticians of society and culture, and the creator of the concepts of
simulation and simulacra—wrote the programmatic text for the new theory
of fashion from the horizon of its “end” in the journal Communication in
1968. It is important to point this out simply because Baudrillard, along with
Lipovetsky, is a thinker who would have a crucial impact on the whole
paradigm of fashion from the 1960s to the 1980s. Its determinants are as
follows:

(1) the prevalence of new information and communication technologies;

(2) the end of ideas about general and unique history and the
establishment of plural forms of the world of life;
(3) consumerism and the spectacle of the media construction of reality;
and
(4) the transformation of the world into a system of objects whose
meaning becomes culturally determined by context and situation
(fluidity, change, transience).

In his text entitled “Fashion, or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code,”

Baudrillard indicates the arrival of a “new” phenomenon that we are still
theoretically discussing in different ways.

Today, every principle of identity is affected by fashion, precisely because

of its potential to revert all forms to non-origin and recurrence. Fashion is
always rétro, but always on the basis of the abolition of the passé (the past):
the spectral death and resurrection of forms. Its proper actuality (its ‘up-to-
dateness’, its ‘relevance’) is not a reference to the present, but an immediate
and total recycling. Paradoxically, fashion is the inactual (the ‘out-of-date’,
the ‘irrelevant’). It always presupposes a dead time of forms, a kind of
abstraction whereby they become, as if safe from time, effective signs
which, as if by a twist of time, will return to haunt the present of their
inactuality with all the charm of ‘returning’ as opposed to ‘becoming’
structures. The aesthetic of renewal: fashion draws triviality from the death
and modernity of the déjà vu. This is the despair that nothing lasts, and the
complementary enjoyment of knowing that, beyond this death, every form
has always the chance of a second existence, which is never innocent since
fashion consumes the world and the real in advance: it is the weight of all
18 Chapter One

the dead labour of signs bearing on living signification – within a

magnificent forgetting, a fantastic ignorance [méconnaissance]. (Baudrillard
2009, 109).

So, Baudrillard has raised the question of the meaning of the fashion trinity,
which inevitably breaks in every “new” theory of fashion with the new
conceptual apparatus. This trinity is orientation, direction and discipline.
By orientation, we mean the cognitive-theoretical framework that always
comes from philosophy and its conceptual games and is accepted and
applied in the discourse of social sciences and humanities. In the case of a
paradigm of postmodernism, there is no doubt that conceptual games are
those that characterize philosophy as the notion of deconstruction in Jacques
Derrida, the notion of difference and repetition in Gilles Deleuze, and the
terms signifier-signified in the semiotics of Roland Barthes. At the same
time, this orientation represents a criticism of the modern paradigm of
knowledge and the establishment of new thought systems that are collectively
referred to as poststructuralism. It would be impossible to approach
postmodernism from the 1960s to the 1980s if we did not theoretically take
this turn from the rule of modern society to culture as a spectacle,
consumerism and communication networks of interaction between the mass
audience or users. It is sufficient to analyze the postmodern theory of
fashion just like how the anti-fashion punk style builds up a new identity of
bodily inscription to see how the concepts of poststructuralism correspond
to something that Baudrillard specifically emphasizes in his text—the
disintegration of tradition and the overlap of “neo” and “retro” tendencies
in fashion discourse at all levels. When it comes to orientation, it might not
be by chance that one of the most significant fashion styles at the end of the
20th century took on the very complex position of the philosophical search
for difference and otherness performed by Derrida. This was, of course, the
style of deconstruction in fashion. In the 1980s, it was connected with the
Japanese designers Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo and Issey Miyake, as
well as the Belgian designer Martin Margiela (Loscialpo 2009, 25–27).
Finally, the transgression and acceptance of a new way of thinking in a
scientific discipline that already exists, such as sociology or the
anthropology or psychology of fashion, signified a complete break with the
previous set of conceptual disciplines and its meaningful overturning into
new forms of scientific discourse. In Vertigo in Fashion: Towards a Visual
Semiotics of the Body (Paiü 2007), it was clearly stated that fashion has to
start thinking only from its autonomy. The paradox is that fashion studies
could only arise when fashion was transformed into an extravagant body.
All disciplinary boundaries once acted “too narrowly.” Perhaps they were
even somewhat dogmatic. And it could be appropriate to develop a
 Fashion Theory 19

conceptual and analytical move to a state that does not require a paradigm
of cultural events with which life becomes stylized, and the
subjects/participants of “open or consummate fashion,” as Lipovetsky
called it (1994, 131–133), become the autonomous producers and consumers
of its amazing objects (clothing, footwear, jewellery, fashion accessories,
perfumes). Transgression must be established as a fundamental principle of
thinking and living in times of complexity and contradiction.5
If the transition from one paradigm of fashion to another occurs within
the relationship of tradition and modernity, which means that it pre-existed
in a different form or is its radical transformation in the manner of
conceptual architecture, then the term “society” is replaced by “culture” in
a cognitive-analytical and methodological sense. This means that culture is
no longer called the area of high humanistic values and the field of the
anthropological lifestyle of a nation, social group and collective identity.
Culture is precisely what semiotics as a “science” or “discipline” of humanism
has identified as a special set of meanings. In other words, culture is no
longer understood by the means or function of social integration. The
autonomy of culture signifies its purposefulness, becoming a factor of the
very “development” of society that we can now call “cultural development.”
Many spheres of life take on the pompous cultural features of the concept
of capital to the industry as shaping awareness with new media. From the
1960s to the 1980s, when theoretical approaches to fashion were
increasingly associated with the rise of cultural studies as well as the
compound of cultural and sociological studies with theoretical psychoanalysis
(Marx and Freud, Gramsci and Lacan), it was not unexpected that this new
criticism of their subject would take the very spread of culture as a new
ideology. The most important books from fashion theory from this
postmodern perspective, in which we are faced with many disciplines and

5 The concept of transgression (Lat. transgressio, transition over, exceeding the

limit) was developed by the French poststructuralist thinker Georges Bataille in his
writings on eroticism, death, the sacred and the obscene. Contemporary fashion
shows it in the fetishistic feature of an aesthetic object, which overwhelms the works
of the designers Jean-Paul Gaultier and Alexander McQueen. In Bataille’s theory,
transgression is not performed as the overturning of an absolute ban such as incest
taboos, but rather the ban is framed in sacrificing the body by knowingly taking over
the risk of overcoming all existing moral-political and socio-cultural boundaries
(Paiü 2011, 391–411 and 429–471). When it comes to fashion, transgression points
to the relationship between the body and the aesthetic object. Fetishism is a mode
that appears as a picture of the world that is no longer oriented towards the other
side and the inside. Instead, it is a crossing of the boundaries between art and fashion
in the idea of a pure object.
20 Chapter One

approaches, are the already mentioned study of the French sociologist Gilles
Lipovetsky and those of the British feminist theorist Elizabeth Wilson.
How could fashion be contemplated within a theory that is not entirely
coherent but which, inevitably, has to take on underlying concepts and
create the new as a synchronic union of a multitude of different circuits? In
the case of Lipovetsky, we can find a criticism of a modern paradigm with
sociology as the main scientific discipline. But to make the paradox larger,
the subject of his criticism regarding the notion of fashion is neither Veblen
nor Simmel, but his contemporary Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most
significant sociologists of culture in the second half of the 20th century and
the author of the cult book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement
of Taste (La distinction: Critique sociale de jugement) from 1979 (Bourdieu
1986). As is well known, Bourdieu was the creator of a whole range of
concepts that are useful for the postmodern paradigm of culture and fashion,
such as “symbolic and cultural capital,” “habitus,” and “distinction.” But
his starting point was, in theory, a neo-Marxist approach, according to
which culture always appears as an ideology that resists the interests of
capital. In the case of fashion, it is quite clear that Lipovetsky holds
Bourdieu to be the most important sociologist to analyze the fashion
complex as such through the concepts of cultural and symbolic capital,
which is also the field of human desires and its world of pleasure and
creativity, above the logic of the ideological mask of so-called real life.
Lipovetsky, therefore, in his analysis, cannot accept any renewal or
replenishment of the social class theory, nor the theory of Bourdieu. Instead,
his main assumption is extremely sharp.

Where does fashion begin and where does it end, in the era of exploding
needs and proliferating media, mass advertising and mass leisure, stars and
“hits”? What is left that fashion does not rule, at least in part, when the
ephemeral governs the world of objects, cultures, and meaningful discourse,
and when the principle of seduction has profoundly reorganized the
everyday environment, news and information, and the political scene? The
fashion explosion no longer has an epicentre; it has ceased to be the privilege
of a social elite. All classes are caught up in the intoxication of change and
fads; the infrastructure and the superstructure alike are subject, although to
different degrees, to fashion’s rule. We have reached the era of consummate
fashion, the extension of the fashion process to broader and broader spheres
of collective life. (…) Everyone is more or less immersed in fashion. More
or less everywhere, and a triple operation that specifically defines fashion is
increasingly implemented: the operation of ephemerality, seduction, and
marginal differentiation. Fashion has to be delocalized. It can no longer be
identified with the luxury of appearances and superfluity; it has to be
 Fashion Theory 21

identified with the trivalent process that is thoroughly overhauling the

profile of our societies. (Lipovetsky 2002, 131)

New cognitive-theoretical and methodological bases should be applied to

this notion of fashion. The criticism of “dialectical methods” introduces at
the same time the game of a variety of disciplines with which to reach the
puzzle of fashion in a new post-industrial society. Lipovetsky, on the other
hand, continues within his sociological discourse with the analysis of
postmodern fashion, but his sources are quite different. These are primarily
Barthes’ semiotics of fashion and the otherwise profiled idea of mass culture
in its closeness to and differences from British cultural studies, an extremely
important paradigm for the notion of scientific progress in the study of
marginal groups and their lifestyles. Lipovetsky’s study is considered one
of the most important books for the postmodern paradigm. Its influence is
still apparent in the fact that newer theories of fashion cannot evolve its
hypotheses without elaborating on the terms “completed fashion” and
“form-fashion” if they want to cross to the other coast and leave behind the
legacy of discourse served by the sociology of fashion as a fundamental
discipline, understood as fashion from Barthes’ semiotics, without questioning
their assumptions. Moreover, instead of the singular theory, there are
fundamentals for accepting the plural theory. This does not mean that it is
an issue of the adoption of “his” theory as the choice of a fashion brand in
the “supermarket of lifestyles” as it is in his concept-metaphor for
postmodern fashion, as was explicitly said by the anthropologist Ted
Polhemus, the main theorist of anti-fashion (Polhemus 2006). To the
question of why the plural theory, not just the singular theory, should be
accepted, the answer might be simple—because fashion in its openness and
autonomy is radically transformed into form and content, appearance and
appearance. Fashion theory assumes its multiplication. But it can not go to
infinity. There is always a limit, even though it is extremely fluid. The
boundary stems from the autonomous area of each discipline that overlaps
with the rest so that their order seems like a spiral coil.
In contrast to this attempt, Wilson approaches fashion in her study by
adopting a critical attitude of feminism and theoretical psychoanalysis,
although it does not reach the level of Lacan as an unquestioning authority
for the critique of ideology in the era of visual culture. What Wilson
exemplifies in her analysis is an attempt to critique fashion from the
complexity of its immanent practices, such as, among other things, the
creation of a new (female) identity by critically deconstructing a whole
series of patriarchal-symbolic practices embodied in the way that fashion
enters life in Western societies. Her criticism of Baudrillard, in turn, means
a departure from the cold indifference of postmodern theory to women’s
22 Chapter One

exploitation in the system of neoliberal capitalism (from the woman as a

fashion to the advertising function of a female body). In this way, the theory
moves from “new positivism” and approaches the critical theories of
postmodern culture, for which fashion is a representative example of
aesthetic appeal and an ideologically transformed matrix of female body
conquest. No doubt, with her preferences, feminist theories of fashion
gained the “spread of the struggle” to approach the most important problem
of the postmodern paradigm as such. And that is how a new identity is
created and why it is fashion since the decoration and aesthetics of the
existing world became the social and cultural constructions of life itself
(Negrin 2008, 33–52; Wilson 1985, 117–133).
Just a few more remarks on the notion of postmodern identity in fashion
are in order. As is well known, identity is created like a construction. It
should already be assumed that the fashion idea in the period of
deconstruction and postmodernism will go hand in hand with the tendencies
of exposing the ambivalent structure of society and culture. Carnevalization
and gender/sex transgression are merely indications that fashion does not
attract bodies in motion, but rather that its meaning lies in creating a new
world as an aesthetic horizon. At the time of total identity fluidity, it
becomes apparent that style cannot be reduced to street revolt, just to anti-
fashion extravagance. To take postmodern fashion as a reason for its
survival, it might be necessary to get a fusion of high fashion and anti-
fashion, even if this seems to be a seemingly impossible project. But let us
remember that Vivienne Westwood’s career should be an indicator of this
aesthetic trend in which paradoxes and aporias rule, not linearity.
Identity, therefore, does not inherit but creates itself by running a
lifestyle. Although it is undeniable that fashion from 1960 to 1980 was a
“masquerade” and “carnival” that went beyond the culturally coded network
of metamorphic bodies, as best seen in the transformations of pop star and
multimedia artist David Bowie, there is still something “persistent” in this
amazing game that transforms all identity signs (gender/sex, race/class,
male/female, travesty/transgression). Lacan, in his analysis, considers the
picture from the horizon of psychoanalysis and comes to the conclusion that
it is a screen and the surface of what has the feature of the spectacle. It is a
phenomenon of sight or observation. And it is no longer in the sense of a
passive looking-to-world but in the sense of an active participant of an event
that changes our understanding of fashion and the human body. The view
always applies to a change in the subject matter. Why, in contemporary
fashion, might it be significant to perform the realization of a
phenomenological epoché or purification of the area that now requires its
own and total purity? We have seen that the issues of visibility and look,
 Fashion Theory 23

narcissism, and fluid identity design are crucial to any further analysis. If,
therefore, identity is something that has to arise and does not fixedly exist,
then fashion apparel is no longer understood as presentation and representation
(mimesis and repraesentatio) but as a performance of identity in the process
of the transformation of society and culture.
Existential phenomenology, as early as the work of Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, began with the criticism of the subject as the bearer of the persistence
and immutability of consciousness. Opening the question about the body
was decisive for all further theories of the eccentricity of the subject from
the position of his radicality of similarity and difference. How does the
theory of fashion respond to these new challenges that set it to move events
from the area of pure reflection to visualization, from the area of text to
image, from the field of aesthetics to works in the aesthetics of events? Just
as is shown in the performative handbook or fashion show that Alexander
McQueen very mysteriously called Voss in 2001. The spectators and public
actors look marvellously at the models on the track behind the mirror where
they see their reflection. With the rise of narcissistic culture, it seems to us
to weirdly urinate into a picture without a world, into scenes of amazement
and an anxious sense of absolute solitude and gaps. Moreover, it could be
shown that between the perversion of the concealed secret of the Other and
the desire to expose one’s own body in the public space, there is a mutually
incentivizing relationship. No one is innocent anymore. Being in the space
of contemporary fashion means being exposed to the view of the Other and
enjoying this act of visual interaction of the naked/dressed body. The naked
body does not mean, however, being naked in the public space but reducing
the body to an object in the aesthetic field of signification that is already
determined by its meaning outside fashion and its circumstances. Speaking
in the true spirit of Barthes’ semiotics, a contemporary fashion becomes a
meta-language of events with which the possibility of opening of meaning
arises or disappears. Why? Simply because the event can be all-and-nothing,
even the political violence of a dictatorship and the final countdown of the
values of civilization.

3. The contemporary body or fashion as an image:

Towards a visual semiotics
If fashion is a creative body design, then the theory of the reference
framework of modern society and postmodern culture has to be abandoned
as a determining factor for any further attempt at an interpretation of fashion
in a timely manner. First of all, this is the age that began symbolically in
1989 with the demolition of the Berlin Wall that separated the Western
24 Chapter One

societies of neoliberal capitalism from the totalitarian order of real socialism

in the world. What might be called globalization in economics, politics, and
culture has its consequences on fashion design and fashion. Nevertheless,
this does not mean that the homogeneity of global fashion should begin to
emerge as there are boundaries in the presentation of seductive and
attractive clothing where fashion has so far not been found due to a
patriarchal culture, religious fundamentalism, or societies and states with
traditional values such as are found in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia
(from Qatar and Indonesia to Nigeria and China). As demonstrated by the
most significant theoretical studies on globalization in the field of socio-
humanities at the beginning of the 21st century, the global capital relocation
processes open up the possibility of redefining the development potential of
small regions and nation-states in the European economic and cultural
space. This also presupposes a radical change in the way that social identity
is presented. The contemporary fashion design approach, therefore,
incorporates into its scientific, artistic, and technological domain and theory
the global identity of a global consumer with specific cultural habits and
different collective lifestyle patterns. Fashion design is nowadays the
structure of (1) cultural capital in the flexible development strategies and
global challenges of an adaptable and innovative economy of supply, (2) a
creative industry based on the interaction of science, art, and new
technologies, and (3) an interdisciplinary area of the permeation of society,
culture, and nature in ecologically sustainable development.
The paradigm of theoretical approaches to contemporary fashion,
therefore, can no longer be the domain solely of sociology, anthropology,
and psychology but also of cultural studies, theoretical psychoanalysis, and
feminism, if you want to include everything that fashion has become in its
radical iconic turn. Current theories of science do not obey the reality of the
existing conceptual system but transform science itself into technological
processes of “new nature.” In that sense, it becomes obvious that fashion
can no longer be excluded from technology in general, aesthetics, and the
design of life. A series of new cognition-theoretical paradigms that contributed
in the late 20th century to a different understanding of the world through
changing its essential manifestations (complexity-emergence-chaos) cannot
be overcome by the influence of cybernetics and visual semiotics on the
development of new anthropology. Moreover, poststructuralism developed
a new set of terms with Barthes, Derrida, and Deleuze that derived from the
flourishing of new information and communication technologies and
aesthetics focused on the question of “virtual reality.” The fashion of
Barthes through Baudrillard and Lipovetsky was defined as a “cultural
code,” the “visual order of meaning,” and “image as information.” In the
 Fashion Theory 25

1990s, everything accelerated when the digital age of the global cybernetic
way of life arose, and when there is no gap between the virtual and the real,
there is no gap between the worlds. The paradigm of contemporary fashion
presupposes the abandonment of “society” and “culture” and the transition
to a state of pure corporeality as a spectacle of images in the form of the
media structure of reality. In a new form, fashion is transformed into (a) a
performative-conceptual event; (b) the design of life itself, for which basic
categories like syncretism, hybridity, and eclecticism are decisive; and (c)
an open event of bodily transgression (fetishism, eroticism, and death) in
the public space of the staging (Paiü 2011, 367–390). Instead of “the form
of a fashion,” the form of a spectacle becomes effective. And it only
accelerates everything visible in the postmodern capitalism of aesthetic
spending. Now, fashions for the contemporary assemblage of cultural
tendencies are becoming pure “aesthetic capitalism,” and that is shown
beyond all existing borders of art and science, technology, and the body. It
seems that the most impressive analyses were performed by the British
fashion theoretician Caroline Evans in her 2003 book Fashion at the Edge:
Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness, in which she says:

The challenge of this book has been to find a way to talk about contemporary
and near-contemporary fashion. The existing frameworks did not make it
easy. I wanted to find a way to discuss 1990s and turn-of-the-century fashion
that offered more than the traditional focus of art and design history of the
past so that I could also accommodate the present meanings and future
possibilities of fashion. (…) I turned not so much to psychoanalytic or post-
structuralist accounts as to historians and writers such as Walter Benjamin
and Karl Marx. But I read Marx, in particular, against the grain, as gothic
fiction rather than political economy. (…) From ‘heroin shock’ to Alexander
McQueen, the distressed body of much 1990s fashion exhibited the
symptoms of trauma, the fashion show mutated into a performance and a
new kind of conceptual fashion designer evolved. These are just three
examples of fashion ‘at the edge,’ fashion which exists at its own margins.
While becoming more vivid in its presentation, many of its themes became
correspondingly darker in the 1990s. Often permeated by death, disease and
dereliction, its imagery articulated the anxieties as well as the pleasures of
identity, alienation and loss against the unstable backdrop of rapid social,
economic and technological change at the end of the twentieth century.
(Evans 2003, 3–4)

Yes, fashion in the paradigm of contemporaneity cannot be simply a

compilation and computation in the accelerated history of social progress
and cultural development of the West and the surrounding worlds. On the
one hand, the theoretical “big narrative” of the body shows that the only
26 Chapter One

meaningful player in the fragmentation of the body is the process of the

emergence of otherness and difference. All this is possible only when there
is no longer a consideration of how fashion protects us from the anxiety of
wandering in the labyrinth of signs. Unlike Evans’ objectives, our research
has the main intention to investigate the figure in the era of the technosphere
with its mimetical and representational framework, and thus, by analogy
with the discipline of art history and its recent upgrades, what Paul Virilio
calls “the aesthetics of disappearance” (Virilio 1991) cannot be fully
comprehended. Indeed, what in this contemporary way gives the unseen and
inexplicable amazement of an interactive observer in the event of the
absolute visibility of the object is no longer its attraction, ephemerality, and
marginality, as Lipovetsky found. Contemporary fashion is a creative
design of life that breaks down into fragments and leads to the existence of
an apocalyptic risk and salvation, end-of-fashion awareness, and at the same
time the attempt to find a new alternative, even at the cost of inevitable
failure. Is that not, after all, a symbolic event of pure aesthetic pleasure and
indifference resulting in image performance as Alexander McQueen created
in 2009 in Plato’s Atlantis, his last fashion show? The problem with
contemporary fashion and its theoretical performance is simply that it enters
the sphere of the inhumane. This concept was already performed in close
connection with posthumanism/transhumanism. It should be known that
postmodern theorists of body transgressions very often used the phrase
about the end of humanity as a “grand narrative,” as Lyotard did. The
inhumane dressing does not seem to be perceived as something extremely
bizarre and extravagant in the sense of extreme alienation. After all,
inhumanity refers to the exploration of the empire of aesthetic objects
without which no contemporary fashion should be possible along the way.
Objects, the inhumane, and mirrors embellish this uncanny power of the
imagination. On the other hand, apart from the torture and hysteria that is
fashioned above other creative practices as the only extravagances of
transience, mortality, and oblivion, there is an exciting adventure of new
theoretical conceptualization. If we keep this in mind, then we should be
able to search the paths that could lead us to the very core of our
investigations.
If those matters are exactly as they have just been described above, then
fashion at the time of the technosphere can only be understood from the
post-disciplines that all came into being in the 1990s from the paradigm of
visual studies, visual culture, and image science (Bildwissenschaft). When
the image determines the body’s manner of action in the world, then we can
talk about the image representation of fashion. Everything is subordinated
to it: from fashion photography to the spectacle of a fashion exhibition as a
 Fashion Theory 27

show. But the most significant consequence of this is that the body becomes
the first and last instance that decides on the identity of the contemporary
man in the world of difference and otherness. Just as fashion now reflects
and expresses something existing in a society like mirroring-picture, but
whose meaning is always expressed in events to create a new context, which
means that the final fashion becomes the creative process of shaping the
body in its unassailability and freedom, so the post-disciplines are in an
uneasy situation in which they constantly have to change their origins and
re-create their conceptual circuits for what is happening here and now. The
reason lies in it the fact that all becomes a system of objects and more
autonomous, such as appliances operated by “artificial intelligence” (AI).
The path to contemporary fashion is also visual semiotics as the post-
disciplinary orientation that the body understands as the images of
movement and time, like the philosophy of the event and cinema of Gilles
Deleuze (1986). Fashion as art and architecture disappears into the logic of
the technosphere. Thus, its key categories become computation, planning,
and construction (Paiü 2016, 121–143). What, therefore, signifies visual
semiotics? First of all, it is not just the transition to Barthes’ semiotics of
fashion with its basic terms of sign-signifier-signified in another context in
which the image has become more important than language. That would be
naive and banal. Instead, the visual-semiotical twist of contemporary
fashion means that fashion and contemporary art have become “self-
sufficient.” This self-perceived selfhood may be a symptom of far-reaching
consequences. The Italian semiotician Ugo Volli has argued that fashion can
no longer be explained by illustrating the dynamics of social and cultural
changes. Instead of that, we must reconsider the conceptual order of things
and terms and be aware that a fashion needs some kind of inventive
approach because the tiny line between clothing and fashion should be
abandoned when clothing becomes a new fashion style and trend in a
contemporary global context (Volli 1990). In any case, searching for a royal
path to comprehending a fashion outside a mainstream approach would be
hard conceptualizing work, in many respects even precarious and with no
guarantee of success in advance.
Moreover, its interpretation is not sufficient to know about its styles and
trends. A much more cognitive effort is needed. Like contemporary art,
fashion requires theoretical research too. It does not relate to any supreme
signifier that gives it the right to life. Instead, signs are now emerging as
visualized concepts. These are the icons with which the body determines its
“real” identity. The freedom of the body in a performative event denotes the
moment when the image precedes language so that the fashion is at all
possible as a “form of life.” But that does not mean that fashion appears
28 Chapter One

only in the material structure of the existence of global capitalism, as a mere

cultural contribution to economic value? Fashion, of course, represents a
true “essence” of what many contemporary theorists of culture seek to find
in 21st-century capitalism when they call it “information,” “cognitive,” and
“aesthetic.” It is about the territory and archipelago of the desire for socio-
cultural recognition and the consumption of aesthetically shaped objects.
The quest for a new human identity corresponds to the unconscious desire
to win in a culture that has lost ground in nature and is thus thrilled to
permanently innovate. The body of contemporary fashion has just been
constructed for the creative emergence of a new one in the constant
transformation of forms and shapes.
Contemporary fashion cannot, thus, be regarded as the possibility of a
planetary “expansion” of the commodity form, but rather as a complete
“implosion of information.” When that happens, we are faced with what
Baudrillard calls the “ecstasy of communication.” Indeed, fashion is at the
end of its historical-epochal walk to the freedom of the body that only occurs
in that ecstatic circle of the renewal and retro-futurism of communication in
all its transformations. In the song “Fashion” from the 1980 album Scary
Monsters (And Super Creeps), David Bowie’s visual event is all too clear
and unambiguous with all its androgynous, transsexual, and transgender
spectacle of desire to be someone else on the stage of narcissistic culture
gaps. That is one way how the durable and widely accepted concept of fixed
identity crashed like towers of dust. All the searches of contemporary
cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnologists for a new notion of
identity cannot overlook the factual situation of things. This is the
disappearance of “rigid” signifiers and their replacement by “current”
metamorphosis without any model in the historical world of tradition,
whether real or imaginative. However, in light of the body’s exposure to
changes that today are studied within the scientific paradigm of
posthumanism/transhumanism, which means analyzing what is inhuman in
the synthetic nature of “artificial life” (AL), we can see that fashion is no
longer just about “clothing” and body dressing. The space of its action might
be established as designing the system and environment of aesthetic objects,
one of which is the human body. This is the obvious paradox that modern
fashion, in its release from the torture and repression of “society” and
“culture,” is once again traumatically inserted into a whole range of victim
sacrifice practices with the ultimate goal of radical eccentricity and
extravagance. In terms of “normal life” in the modern society of everyday
fashion, its needs have become “queer.” Its fate in free bondage reaches out
to the uncanny desiring machine of contemporary man. They show the
performative event of visual culture with which the image of the body
 Fashion Theory 29

becomes more than the symbol of this luminous and dark reality in such a
plastic way that we are exposed to the grace and inefficiency of its
disappearance.

Conclusion
Interdisciplinary cultural studies, and within that, fashion studies, created
for the last decade of the 20th century as a productive link between modern
humanities and social science, techno-science, digital technology, and
contemporary art, is signified by these determinants: (1) the social process,
with its production, distribution, and consumption cycles; (2) the social and
cultural phenomenon that is, admittedly, irreducible to other phenomena of
everyday life, but at the same time cannot be interpreted without a
connection to the social definition of the concepts of taste, lifestyle, arts,
and leisure; (3) the area of the cultural integration and differentiation of
individuals and groups in identity creation; (4) the mechanism of social
competition and the process of choice between rational and irrational life
alternatives for gaining prestige and social status; (5) the field of the social
struggle for domination through the accumulation of symbolic and cultural
capital in social communication; and (6) the cultural capital of an individual,
nation-state, or transnational society of knowledge articulated in the
information economy of culture or creative industries.
Contributions to the interdisciplinary interpretation of fashion and
fashion design by the end of the 20th century show the historical changes in
social structures, ideological powers in the world, and the way of
articulating the relationship between fashion and the social environment. If
fashion at the beginning of the emergence of modern culture was
differentiated by social class at the time of the postmodern cultural shift
with the means/purpose of identity, then what is happening with modern
fashion in the era of the media spectacle with the primacy of information,
communication, and interactive participation of the digital public is coming
out of all social and cultural suits. This act means moving to the living of
fashion itself. So, in its final stage, it becomes a transformation of the digital
body without organs. When a contemporary visual artist and fashion
designer like Hussein Chalayan is arguing today that there is no difference
between architecture and fashion, it seems that the time has come for a new
approach to fashion and fashion design as such. Of course, fashion cannot
be architecture, as it might not be an art in the traditional way of thinking.
Its history has been achieved through many jumps and leaps, and since the
1960s, we can say that it has been through a period of astonishing
acceleration. Contemporary fashion, thus, belongs to design as a synthesis
30 Chapter One

of science, technology, and art. And so, it is necessary to create conceptual

circuits that will explain these subtle connections between truly different
discourses of knowledge, skills, and imagination.
The designer’s statement is by no means a provocative media outline
following the core rules of the media world: to shock, to attract attention to
extremist attitudes, to create excrements. On the contrary, the testimony
only confirms the scale of what is already called a fashionable turn. More
than anything, it is not self-evident that fashion reflects or expresses social
change. Likewise, it is not just a sign of changing cultural paradigms of
human activity. Fashion has transformed into something completely
“uncanny.” Of course, so has the entirety of art and architecture. It has
become a lifelong manifestation of the aesthetics of the world. The social
changes and cultural strategies of the globalized world are oriented towards
this process. The aesthetics of society correspond to the same process of the
aestheticization of the world in contemporary art. Fashion has already
become the design of a metamorphic body. It only needs to condition social
relations and cultural communication with others. The speed of fashion
change goes beyond the changes of modern societies and the whole area of
cultural communication. Therefore, the development of theories of fashion
from the modern and postmodern to the contemporary paradigm (society-
culture-body) shows us how fashion approaches are happening at the same
time as signs of the pictorial and visual age. Instead of language, commonly
applied with its “solid” markers in all cultures, the emphasis is shifted to
“light” and fuzzy features of the body as an image whose identity is no
longer a matter of dressing through habit and custom, but a constant desire
for the fascination with the Other. In this enchanting circle of innovation
and renewal, fashion is “today” becoming a creative body design.

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Benjamin. Walter. 1969. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
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 Fashion Theory 31

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of

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 CHAPTER TWO

CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY OF FASHION

TONýI VALENTIû

Fashion can be briefly defined as a change in the clothing styles and looks
adopted by certain groups of people, and from a sociological perspective, it
is shown as a system of signs, a social pattern of values, and a way of
acquiring collective and individual identity. Since fashion has been one of
the most influential phenomena in Western civilization from the Renaissance
to the present day and given its position, which can be understood in various
economic, ideological, cultural and artistic formations, it is clear that
fashion has become a subject of sociological studies relatively quickly. The
main idea of this essay is to provide a concise and clear critical overview of
the sociological understanding of contemporary fashion phenomena,
starting from the earliest analyses from the beginning of the 20th century
until today, i.e. the globalized era of computer network societies as the
dominant form of social organization, and to critically question whether
modern sociology could be a proper discipline of fashion analysis. It is
apparent that fashion nowadays occupies the most important areas of
aesthetic creativity. From this perspective, it is understandable that the
emphasis will be on social parameters that define fashion equally as a social
production and as an art form, as both play a complex role within the
ideological construction of the fashion phenomenon. This means that
fashion will be viewed not only as a means of identification and
socialization but also as a symbolic communication with the assumption that
fashion was and remains one of the key ways of affirming social power and
creating cultural and symbolic capital. Of course, in modern society, the
boundaries of classes are softening, leading to the democratization of
fashion, and the broad masses of consumers are beginning to dictate fashion
styles. With the development of the industry, i.e. the consumer society,
fashion is constantly accelerating the rhythm of fashion changes. This has
led to the fact that there is no longer one fashion but a plurality of fashion
expressions. Nevertheless, fashion still has “stratification” features; that is,
34 Chapter Two

according to many authors, it maintains and legitimizes the power of the

ruling classes and is one of the key parameters for reproducing ideological
mechanisms of differentiation in social taste. Therefore, one part of this
essay will be devoted to the analysis by which one of the most famous
French sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu, approached the topic of social
differences and the dynamics of the separation of social formations using
the example of taste criticism from the perspective of the sociology of
fashion. In that sense, the emergence of new disciplines such as fashionology
or the visual semiotics of fashion could be understood as both a continuation
of the classical sociological approach as well as its disciplinary opposition,
bearing in mind that they operate within different theoretical vocabularies.
It must be taken into consideration that the sociology of fashion as a
specific area of the social study of fashion phenomena developed as a
scientific discipline a hundred years ago and that traditional interpretive
patterns are not always applicable to modern times. Various authors and
theories have pointed out the differences between classical and modern
interpretations of fashion. This primarily refers to the fact that today, unlike
at the beginnings of this discipline (for example, in the works of Georg
Simmel, Thorstein Veblen or Immanuel Kant), in the interpretations of
contemporary authors such as Gilles Lipovetsky, Gillo Dorfles or Ted
Polhemus, the emphasis is on a paradigm shift in the age of late capitalism.
Namely, as Žarko Paiü (2011) observes, today we can talk about fashion
only within an interdisciplinary context, where social-humanistic sciences,
techno-sciences, digital technologies, and contemporary art understand
fashion in many ways: 1) as a social process with its production, distribution
and consumption cycles; 2) as a social and cultural phenomenon which,
admittedly, is irreducible to other phenomena of everyday life, but at the
same time cannot be interpreted without a connection with the social
definition of the concepts of taste, lifestyle, art and leisure; 3) as the area of
the cultural integration and differentiation of individuals and groups in the
formation of their identity; 4) as the mechanism of social competition and
the process of choosing between rational and irrational life alternatives for
gaining reputation, prestige and social status; 5) as the field of social
struggle for domination through the accumulation of symbolic and cultural
capital in social communication; and 6) as the cultural capital of an
individual, a nation-state or a transnational knowledge society that is
articulated in the information economy of cultural or creative industries
(Paiü 2011, 3–4). In this context, all six of these determinants are common
to both traditional and contemporary sociological analyses but are
distinguished by a different way of articulating the relationship between
fashion and the social environment.
 Contemporary Sociology of Fashion 35

More precisely, if fashion as a mass phenomenon in sociology originally

occurred within the sociology of culture, and if the sociology of fashion is
the study of forms of fashion, the relationship of social groups and masses
with fashion, and the special laws that determine the development and
evolution of fashion, then today, “what happens to modern fashion in the
media spectacle with the primacy of information, communication and the
interactive participation of the digital public influences all social and
cultural outfits” (Paiü 2011, 4). Since fashion is understood here primarily
as a social phenomenon, it is subject to various economic (production,
distribution and consumption), cultural (differentiation of individuals and
groups in identity formation), social stratification (mechanism of social
competition) and artistic (creative industries) parameters and interpretations.
As Lipovetsky (2002) succinctly observed, form as fashion is manifested in
its radicalism in the accelerated rhythm of product change and the instability
of industrial products. Economic logic has simply thrown out every ideal of
permanence, and production and consumption are governed by the rule of
transience. Precisely from the perspective of criticism of the late-capitalist
clothing system and efforts to demystify the fashion industry and its
ideology, many engaging anti-capitalist studies have emerged in recent
years, pointing to the drastic consequences of profit-making and the
consequent exploitation of oppressed workers in Third World countries (e.g.
Hoskins 2014). The discrepancy between the use and the symbolic value of
clothing in such cycles of production, distribution and consumption is
greater now than ever before in history.

1. Classical sociological theories of fashion

Although fashion as a social and historical phenomenon has played and still
plays a very important role in the social definitions of taste, lifestyle, art and
leisure and has been a sign of the differentiation of individuals and groups
in the formation of their identity for centuries, philosophers have hardly
dealt with fashion, considering it as something too trivial, as the realm of
the transient and the insignificant. There are exceptions, for example, in the
reflections of Adam Smith or Immanuel Kant, primarily in the field of
aesthetics, i.e. the issues of taste, beauty and the new as its essential feature
(Svendsen 2006, 23–29). Georg W. F. Hegel, Theodor Adorno and
especially Walter Benjamin intermittently gave it some attention, the latter
laconically establishing that fashion is the “eternal return of the new,” and
thus Benjamin was the first philosopher to connect fashion with the period
of modernity, i.e. to determine its typical feature of breaking with tradition
and its constant desire for something new. The importance of fashion may
36 Chapter Two

have been first understood by Kant, who said: “It is better to be an idiot of
fashion than just an idiot.”
Unlike philosophy, sociology began to take an interest in fashion early
on, starting from the simple assumption that it was a social and cultural
phenomenon that is impossible to ignore in the analysis of modern societies.
The most important sociologists of fashion in that early period were
undoubtedly Simmel and Veblen. In his text “Philosophy of Fashion,”
published in 1905, Simmel distinguished between fashion and clothing,
viewing fashion as a broad social phenomenon that stands out in all fields
of social life, believing that language use and manners are also subject to
fashion. To that extent, it can be said that, in his analysis, Simmel is in a
way a predecessor of Lipovetsky because both authors perceive fashion as
a form of social change independent of a particular object and as a social
mechanism characterized by its short duration. In addition, Simmel was the
first to see the connection between fashion and identity: clothing is a
decisive part of the construction of the self (Svendsen 2006, 137–155),
which means that identity is no longer given by tradition but chosen by
individuals within “lifestyles.”
Classical sociological theories, as expected, focused on fashion as a sign
of class distinction (which marked not only Veblen’s analyses but also
Bourdieu’s reflections on fashion and taste as a social critique of judgement).
It was customary to place the emergence of fashion at the transition from
the late Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, or mercantile capitalism,
which does not mean that there was no fashion in antiquity, but rather there
was style: although there were variations in clothing concerning materials
and details, the shape of the clothing remained essentially unchanged, and
there was no aesthetic autonomy in the choice of clothing either. Here, due
to the frequent identification of concepts, it is necessary to emphasize the
difference between fashion and style: although they have some related
elements, authentic style shows peculiarities in structure and taste and acts
as an inseparable whole, different from those that preceded it. Fashion often
keeps pace with styles, but they are often in disagreement. Sometimes the
fashion of a certain style becomes established only when that style has been
abandoned and replaced by a new style, or also, for example, when some
outdated style goes back into fashion. In general, the notion of style is
primarily associated with art history, while the notion of fashion is
important today in the context of lifestyle, a term that arose with the
emergence of industrial society, and in the analysis of social phenomena,
among others. According to the aforementioned Simmel, fashion is an
imitation of a predetermined pattern; it satisfies the need for social support
while also satisfying the need for differentiation or change, i.e. social
 Contemporary Sociology of Fashion 37

separation. Thus understood, fashion is nothing but a special form of

creativity in which the tendency towards social egalitarianism merges in a
single action with the tendency towards individual diversity and change. In
that regard, the fundamental premise of Simmel’s theory of fashion is still
sociologically relevant, because the individualization of lifestyles today
becomes the sale of the “image” in the world as a lifestyle supermarket.
However, it should be borne in mind that before the process of
individualization, fashion was a product of class division: it meant connecting
with people of the same socio-economic status and thus simultaneously
isolating that group from lower social groups, whose characterization was
that of not belonging to that group. This was extensively analyzed by
Bourdieu. Thus, connecting and differentiating are the two basic functions
of fashion. For Simmel, fashion belongs to the higher strata; as soon as a
particular mode is accepted by the lower layers, the higher layers reject it
and replace it with a new one because it becomes so profane that it no longer
has the function of differentiation. Simmel finds it quite natural that the
lower strata tend to rise and fashion is the most accessible path for external
imitation. The essence of fashion, according to him, is that fashion is
practised by only a part of the group: as soon as what some people initially
wore is taken over by everyone without exception, as is the case with some
elements of clothing and behaviour, it is no longer called fashion. Although
he lived and wrote his books in the early 20th century, Simmel lucidly
sensed the essence of the modern age and anticipated some of its
movements. Likewise, he notes that fashion cannot be called anything new
if it spreads rapidly in society but is only a phenomenon that is believed to
disappear as quickly as it appears (Svendsen 2006, 36–63). Veblen’s
concept of fashion is similar to Simmel’s in some segments and contrasts
with it in others. The basic thesis he presents in his classic study The Theory
of the Leisure Class (1994) is that people value wealth and money, so the
more expensive an object is, the more beautiful and desirable it is
considered. The upper class, by their nature, tend to show their power and
opulence because the need for wealth is based on the creation of
stratification by reputation. Of course, for a person’s wealth and power to
be assessed, they must be socially visible, and this is not possible without
the public sphere as a space to show off wealth. According to Veblen, a
visible indicator of wealth is, for example, how free time or leisure time
(expressed by the ancient Greek scholé) is spent. At that time, people were
engaged in activities that had nothing to do with mere subsistence: art, sport,
or engaging in desirable social behaviour. To acquire certain skills or
appropriate behaviour requires free time, which is an indicator of wealth, a
38 Chapter Two

reflection of the fact that these people do not have to spend their lives
struggling for their existence but can afford to engage in other things.
However, according to Veblen, in modern society, the function of
expressing wealth is taken over by conspicuous consumption, buying and
accumulating goods that arise as a product of monetary competition, and in
this sphere, fashion is a typical form of extravagance, especially in clothing
and other areas. Here, too, we come across a similar formulation as in
Simmel and later in Bourdieu: the lower classes try to imitate and adopt the
manners and the taste of the higher layers, that is, the members of each layer
accept the mode of the next highest layer, the group immediately above
theirs. In other words, two principles are operational: differentiation within
one’s own class and imitation of a higher class. Fashion is about the
interaction of these two different principles of beauty – if fashion only
followed the principles of monetary beauty, objects would become more
expensive and grotesque. On the other hand, if fashion only followed the
principles of aesthetic beauty, people would already find perfection.
Fashion combines these two principles, which means that the natural sense
of taste corrects the fashion exaggerations of what is ultimately called
kitsch. It can be said that although Bourdieu tried to distance himself from
Veblen’s theories, he largely followed the same principle and model: the
driving force in symbolic consumption is not primarily the fact that the
lower strata mimic more strategies of the higher strata (Bourdieu 1996).
Consequently, for Bourdieu, taste is, in a way, a “negative” category, a
“social sense of orientation” that a priori gives us a certain place in that
social space. It is precisely here that Bourdieu is on the same line of
argumentation with Simmel and Veblen: fashion is an invention of the upper
class that aims to make a difference between itself and the lower classes.
But there is one important and significant difference: it favours symbolic
and cultural rather than economic capital (Bourdieu 1996, 11–18, 260–283,
466).

2. Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: Establishing a new field

of research
Bourdieu’s major sociological work is considered to be Distinction,
originally published in French in 1979, and it has since become an
unavoidable reference point not only for sociologists but also for many other
scholars and experts dealing with culture in the broadest sense of the word.
According to some of them, there are at least two important reasons: first,
no one like Bourdieu has treated culture as thoroughly as a social
phenomenon. The work includes an analysis of cultural taste, both of
 Contemporary Sociology of Fashion 39

popular and cultural experts such as art critics, the lifestyles of old and new
ruling social classes, the proverbial bearers of culture in terms of high
culture, the social space in which the results of struggles over cultural values
take place and are structured, as well as their definitions, all the way to
cultural politics as an expression of the merging of class habitus and
political ideology. Another reason for the great importance of this book lies
precisely in the ‘contagious’ concept of distinction. It is so used by many
other authors that it can sometimes be considered synonymous with
Bourdieu’s sociological interpretation of culture. Thus, the strength and
provocativeness of Bourdieu’s main argument, as noted in the previous
section in the comparative review alongside Veblen and Simmel, consists
in the fact that the refined taste and other characteristics of members of high
culture represent almost nothing more than their means of separation from
the lower social classes. In other words, our tastes are ultimately determined
by our social background, and differences in this regard can hardly be
reduced or reversed through (re)socialization, education, and similar forms
of compensation provided by modern democratic societies. The question
Bourdieu addresses in his book is not a question of status dilemmas
(although distinction, according to the author, also represents symbolic
capital) but of the nature, production, basis and dynamics of social differences.
It is important to emphasize here that it is not society that produces
differences but vice versa: social differences produce society, which is very
similar to a famous Marxist argumentation (“the ideas of the ruling class are
in every epoch the ruling ideas”), which means that Bourdieu does not run
off this analysis, although it is not explicitly identified with it. In the eighth
chapter of In Other Words, entitled “Essays on Reflexive Sociology”
(Bourdieu 1990, 123–140), he sets up social taste as a system of classification
models and uses the term “constructivist structuralism” (or “structuralist
constructivism”), seeking to develop a different notion of structure from
Claude Lévi-Strauss, which means that in society (not only in mere
symbolic systems of language, myth, etc.), objective structures appear that
are independent of consciousness, such that subjectivism reduces structures
to interactions and objectivism deduces actions and reactions from
structures, which is a kind of form of “social phenomenology” (Bourdieu
1990). In this sense, as Paiü (2011, 6–7) precisely states, “the articulation of
the process of power struggle in the social field of action of postmodern
subjects/actors of fashion proves to be an extremely important topic.” It is
the subject of a sociological interpretation of new notions of cultural
struggle, habitus, lifestyle, and symbolic and cultural capital. For Bourdieu,
fashion can be understood primarily as a code for social differentiation in
taste, social identity and cultural capital. Thus, the notions of taste, social
40 Chapter Two

identity and cultural capital in Bourdieu’s sociology of the practice of the

subject’s action (which within the field of historical forces seeks to change
social relations and prevailing norms of behaviour) are extremely important
for a different understanding of fashion. Bourdieu finds fashion to be a
universal social form in conditions of constant changes in contemporary
lifestyles. What does this mean in concrete examples from the field of the
sociology of fashion? Fashion as a formal structure of the individualization
of lifestyles here has a completely different function and role than in the
classical sociological interpretations of Veblen and Simmel – it is a specific
cultural production and, as such, participates in the general cultural
production of modern society.
How does Bourdieu define distinction? Primarily through cultural and
artistic production and the attitude towards them, and this reveals not only
taste but also economic and social conditions, thus legitimizing social
differences. Since the introduction in Distinction is recognized as an effort
to construct a “naturally” given taste, Bourdieu sees its foundation as an
ideology that deals not only with the situation of the subject but also with
subjectification, for which social, cultural, political and theoretical relations
must be established. The analysis of distinction structurally includes three
main parts (social critique of the court of taste, economics of practice, and
class tastes and lifestyles). Bourdieu, legitimizing himself primarily as a
sociologist, critically accepts and reinterprets the rich heritage not only of
sociology but also of other social sciences and humanities. Another of
Bourdieu’s merits is that it was he who introduced the concept of cultural
capital into contemporary sociology, trying to explain how social relations
are mediated by economic, political and cultural practice. In short, cultural
capital is any form of knowledge, moral value, and/or artistic preference of
individuals and groups from the local to the national and global levels. It
conditions social differentiation as a new kind of social stratification (see
Paiü 2007, 2011). All actors in the fashion process behave in a way that
respects and accepts the three basic determinants of fashion: novelty,
change and obsolescence. The game in the struggle for the dominance of
differences within a given environment, for example, high fashion, is guided
using symbolic power that legitimizes norms of behaviour. A novelty in
historical distinction is shown in the expanded notion of fashion as a
lifestyle, which arises in the process of individualization. The lifestyle of
the new cultural elite is not, therefore, a separate case of the elite attitude
towards fashion and its contents, but a universal model of creating a lifestyle
of hedonism, consumption and narcissistic pleasure in fulfilling the
liberated body’s own needs.
 Contemporary Sociology of Fashion 41

There are two other “actors” in Bourdieu’s analysis that must be pointed
out: the notions of class and habitus. He uses class in at least two
predominant contexts: in the Marxist sense of social formation and as a
sociological construct of a group with recognizable characteristics. The
sociological analysis thus reveals social divisions grounded in the ideology
of “natural divisions” as ideological complements of status and class
distinction (“class and class division”). Through class as a key form of social
battle, Bourdieu builds a social fabric in which distinction has the main
word, and class is determined primarily relationally and by the amount of
social determination by origin and inevitable legitimacy. However, given
that the social fabric he builds in his analysis mostly revolves around the
strategy of reproduction of dominant classes, i.e. dominant “fields of
production” and capital (symbolic, economic and cultural), a critical question
arises as to what extent his theory is deterministic-Marxist in the sense of
what we might call the “principle of determinism of social battles.”
Bourdieu’s aesthetic critique can therefore be objected to for placing too
much emphasis on competing for power and the relationship of domination
and subordination.
On the other hand, when the distinction between elite and mass in
modern society has been abolished, social class stratification is no longer
decisive for the production of culture and thus of fashion. “Lifestyle and the
field of struggle in Bourdieu’s sociology of culture indicate a new area of
cultural research. In the case of the neo-Marxist social critique of fashion,
as undertaken by Bourdieu, these are concepts that are nothing more than
an extension of his key theory in general – the theory of habitus” (Paiü 2011,
9). There are different definitions of habitus: one of them is that habitus is
a system of embodied schemes that are created during collective history,
acquired during individual history that operates in a practical form and for
a practical purpose. In short, habitus mediates between the social field and
the human body, with each habitus being socially conditioned. However,
the second definition of habitus as a “system of permanent dispositions, i.e.
individual characteristics and preferences through which we perceive, judge
and act in the social space” (Maštruko 2017, 274) is more theoretically
effective here. Fashion, accordingly, emerges as a habitually determined
stability complex of ideas of change in the context of the social reproduction
of life. Being a subject/actor of fashion is not just a lifestyle choice but the
result of the previous historical and social determinants of an individual’s
habitus. However, the problem with Bourdieu’s theory of habitus is not only
that culture is placed at the centre instead of society. Social differences are
also replaced by differences in the power of culture. This determines the
conditions of reproduction in the era of the rule of global capitalism
42 Chapter Two

(postindustrial society and postmodern culture). The main limitation of such

an approach to fashion is not, furthermore, in the fact that it reduces fashion
as a universal social form to a special cultural production of the field in
which the new rules of the game take place. The power of difference stems
from the fundamental power of social development as a scientific and
technological project of transforming the body into an image produced from
artificially constructed reality. Ultimately, fashion no longer represents
social relations but aesthetic-media relations. It is a mirror of social change
and a sign of the construction of new cultural identities. But fashion can be
understood neither as a social phenomenon nor as a cultural one. This leads
to the fact that, with the development and global expansion of the creative
industries, fashion design takes a key place in the new development paradigm
of society.

3. The relevance of classical sociological theories

of fashion today
Almost four decades have passed since the publication of Bourdieu’s
Distinction in French, so it is reasonable to consider the extent to which this
major work – which marked an entire era of the sociological analysis of
taste, the economics of cultural goods, and fashion – is relevant today, in
the third decade of the 21st century, when the processes of the relocation of
global capital in the modern world have opened up opportunities for radical
changes in the method(s) of the social representation of identity. Sociology,
like any other science, is developing rapidly and must always adapt its
categorical apparatus to the time, society and processes with which it deals.
As has already been pointed out, understanding social differences and the
dynamics of separation of social formations (more precisely, classes) is a
feature of the constructed and targeted strategy of social development and
the foundation of its entire battle based on distinction. Therefore, the basis
of the analysis became a distinction – a difference that can be recognized.
Science, like sociology, Bourdieu argues (1996, 1–11, 503–519), should
therefore construct and interpret the foundation of social differentiation and
the ideology that produces, perpetuates and uses it. Thus, a distinction is a
very powerful fuel of social dynamics, and its research requires a great effort
to identify the points of transition of social trajectories and the efforts to
maintain class position in the structure of social dynamics. The author
methodologically explained this procedure in a kind of “postscript” to the
book (Bourdieu 1996, 503–546). Since this text deals with sociological
analyses of fashion, it is reasonable to ask what the contemporary correlation
is between the nature, foundations and production of the dynamics of social
 Contemporary Sociology of Fashion 43

differences on the one hand and the new role and function of fashion design
and contemporary fashion in the age of globalization on the other. If the
contemporary approach to fashion design includes specific cultural habits
and different collective lifestyles in its scientific, artistic and technological
field and theories of the social identity of the globalized consumer (Paiü
2011), then Bourdieu’s theory can be applied today in three structurally
significant fields – the social critique of taste, the economics of practice,
and class tastes and lifestyles – in the context of the emergence of the social
court of taste in the changed circumstances of the development of creative
industries based on the interaction of science, art and new technologies.
As much as Distinction is a capital work that, over time, has become an
unavoidable reference work not only for sociologists but also for many other
cultural scientists and experts, many studies have recently been published
that critically review some of his theses, finding them difficult to apply in
the already mentioned changed circumstances in the ways of the social
representation of identity, i.e. in the modern era, which is a combination of
information and communication technologies, information processing, and
symbolic communication with the processes of globalization, digitalization
and networking. Proponents of Bourdieu will rightly point out that his
fundamental value is that, to this day, no one else like him has so thoroughly
treated culture as a social phenomenon, analyzed cultural taste and the
lifestyles of old and new ruling social classes, and, through the highly
operable notion of “distinction,” showed how our tastes are ultimately
always determined by our social background.1 On the other hand, other
authors2 have focused more on the sociology of cultural production and
consumption in the context of fashion, trying to critically rethink Bourdieu’s
extensive and empirically extremely detailed and vividly substantiated
analyses that can be applied to contemporary fashion and which today
deeply permeate all social and cultural systems and domains of life. There
is no doubt that Bourdieu’s sociology of culture was central to consumption
studies. For example, however, Rocamora (2002) believes that Bourdieu
does not pay enough attention to the “materiality” of material culture, the
meaning of which is analyzed only in the symbolic code. He also does not
think about the meaning (and significance) of mass fashion (be it symbolic
or body-sensual) and the impact it had on the field of haute couture fashion,
therefore ignoring the theoretical implications of such influence. One of the

1 Detailed analyses can be found in works such as Earle 175–192; Margolis 64–84;
or Shusterman 1999, 214–220.
2 For example, Davis 1994, Kawamura 2018, Rocamora 2002, and Svendsen 2006.

We will omit Lipovetsky’s (2002) interdisciplinary analyses as well as Barthes’

(1990) inspirational semiotic interpretations here.
44 Chapter Two

most important objections Rocamora makes is that Bourdieu, in his work,

reduced the discrepancy between empirical reality and its conceptual
framework to a minimum.
Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of fashion, as well as his sociological
theory in general, relies on invaluable conceptual tools such as struggle and
social position/status. However, this is sometimes only a partial analysis that
excludes various situations in which contradictions and complexities arise
that call into question its analytical framework, drawing attention to its
conceptual rigidity and a certain determinism (conditioned by the unorthodox
Marxist approach). For Bourdieu, consumption patterns are precisely
articulated along class lines, and the relationship between the production
and consumption of fashion is relatively unambiguously and easily resolved
through the idea of homology. Transitions, irregularities and dissonances
are minimized or simply left unexplored. Fashion has become a global post-
Fordist industry, making transitions and dissonances even more pronounced.
Players in the social field are more numerous, the market is more
fragmented, products are offered and disappear faster than the fashion
industry can keep up, and there is not enough time or space to express clear
strategies of class differentiation. New patterns of the consumption and
production of fashion have emerged that do not necessarily fit Bourdieu’s
model, including those influenced by mass fashion in contemporary society.
Since the 1970s, the conflict between haute couture and mass fashion has
prevailed, and it has now become dominant. This is a crucial and important
division, not only in the field of fashion but in the field of culture as a whole,
and it is a change that Bourdieu did not seem to have in mind, i.e. the impact
of such changes was not sufficiently reflected in his model of cultural
distinction.
Thus, some aspects of Bourdieu’s aesthetic sociology have lost their
relevance due to the thorough transformation of social patterns, “especially
in terms of cultural and artistic production and rigid class divisions”
(Maštruko 2017). “The transformation of social conditions of cultural
production, consumption and construction of taste, as well as the general
logic of social dynamics, leads to the need for a theory that leaves more
room for subjective agency, i.e. the individual or collective ability to act,
construct and resist social determinants” (Maštruko 2017). It is crucial for
Bourdieu’s analysis that there are objective social relations, that is, social
relations that are real even if the actors in the field of action do not
acknowledge their existence. When Bourdieu speaks of habitus (see the
abovementioned definitions of the term), it is in a way a matter of believing
that we have chosen what is imposed on us. This may seem like a free
choice, but in reality, it is a direct reflection of objective class affiliation.
 Contemporary Sociology of Fashion 45

More precisely, Bourdieu believes that autonomous aesthetic taste is not

autonomous at all, being close to the modern neoliberal dogma of globalizing
capitalism that imposes the “tyranny of choice” under the cunning
assumption: “you have the freedom to choose whatever you want, but only
if it is what we have already given you in advance.” In Distinction, Bourdieu
clearly emphasizes that any socially recognized hierarchy of artistic types
corresponds to a social hierarchy of consumers, so the sociological notion
of taste autonomy is fundamentally illusory – taste is simply an expression
of class affiliation or aspiration. In this sense, the sociologist Bourdieu
opposes the philosopher Kant – for the latter, only free or autonomous taste
is important and worth considering, and for the former, it does not exist
because it is not a matter of free choice. Of course, there are aesthetic
choices, but for Bourdieu, they are, as we have just indicated, imposed.
Taste is not “inborn” but cultivated by social discipline.
Another term that has often been used in this essay – the term “class” –
proves problematic in several respects. Bourdieu operates in many aspects
from a perspective in which taste must be explained starting from a class-
differentiating principle (Svendsen 2006, 111), and it is precisely this
differentiation that drives the whole process. However, all these analyses
are strongly based on the notion of a class that is no longer operative (or at
least is less usable today than forty years ago, not to mention in the 19th
century when it played a very strong role in Marx’s analysis). Moreover,
Bourdieu presupposes a kind of unique, objective space of differentiation in
which cultural capital functions as a means of exchange, questioning
whether there can be an objective principle of organization that can explain
differences in the social field. To be precise, if culture is no longer
understood only as a humanistic horizon of values reduced to high art but
as a way of life and human identity in all its complex social relations, then
identity as an institutional order of traditional and modern values cannot be
attached to the notion of class. The rise of modern individualism in which
taste is increasingly an individual thing and fashion in the age of postmodern
cultural reversal becoming both a means and a purpose of identity do not fit
into Bourdieu’s classical categories, which are dominated by a hierarchy of
tastes written and analyzed in a specific cultural-historical context in the
mid-1970s. The result of all that has been mentioned above is the creation
of a social space in which differences are set, and although they can provide
social and cultural capital, they cannot be included in an objective (i.e.
social) hierarchy. It is not just that social class no longer has the same
meaning today as it once did or that class consciousness is in considerable
decline, but that cultural division is based on lifestyles that are now
becoming indicators of status, and this is no longer a strictly vertical division
46 Chapter Two

but also a horizontal fragmentation of a social group that was once

considered homogeneous. Moreover, due to a kind of democratization of
access to cultural objects characteristic of modern times, objects of
consumption lose the power of attaining status.
Understandably, the growing socioeconomic quality of life and
professional mobility in Western European societies has resulted in the
heterogenization of cultural practices and preferences, and media
globalization has made elite and popular aesthetics (and thus fashion) more
accessible to wider segments of the population. In addition, production is
focused on meeting the demands of the middle class and the broad consumer
masses, rather than on the needs of the upper classes. The members of the
new petty bourgeoisie are the perfect consumers that economic theory has
always dreamed of, and so it is no wonder that Bourdieu sees the new middle
class as representative of almost everything modern in modern society. In
erasing cultural boundaries among social groups, confidence in the power
of the social conditioning of fashion as an original modern social
phenomenon is increasingly losing its justification, and the metamorphoses
of body design coincide with the fundamental determinants of globalization.
Because of the deep connection between symbolic consumption and identity
construction, class affiliation (an argumentative underpinning that is
invariable in Simmel’s, Veblen’s and Bourdieu’s work) becomes less
important, because today’s fashion consumption is not so much directed
towards class as towards personal identity. As we have seen previously in
the analysis of classical sociological theories of fashion, for Veblen, the
showing of class affiliation is almost exclusively a matter of consumption.
In contrast, the postmodern consumer cannot build his identity on this alone
because he will undermine identity formation – ultimately, the symbolic
value of things becomes superficial and changeable like a fluid postmodern
identity. Goods can become a sign only because they are emptied of their
immanent value. The ability to present depends on the inner absence of
meaning. This is not only a reflection of Roland Barthes’s (1990) analysis
of the sign system of fashion, but here we can also recognize the legacy of
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who clearly emphasized in their
Dialectic of Enlightenment that consumers cannot classify anything. Here
we are returning to the above postulate of modern capitalism that choice is
completely free, but on the condition that we choose what someone has
already chosen for us in advance.
This is where the vicious circle emerges: the faster fashion changes, the
cheaper things become; thus, faster fashion changes encourage consumers
and force producers to accelerate the rapidity of the economy and industry.
However, in reality, an imposition from above will continue to prevail, as
 Contemporary Sociology of Fashion 47

the production of goods and their distribution will remain in the hands of
industrialists and traders, not in the hands of numerous consumers. The
transition of fashion canons from the ruling classes to the poor is not so
much a reflection of the democratization of fashion as of the stylistic
alignment of the society in which we live. Hence the notion of ostentatious
consumption was especially emphasized by the sociologist and media
theorist Dick Hebdige. On the other hand, there is Bourdieu’s line of
argument that stems from his definition and understanding of habitus, which
is still an operable term in sociology. Claims about the “reflexive self” as a
result of creating lifestyles contradict Bourdieu’s theory of action, which
emphasizes through habitus that identity can be shaped far less by reflexive
intervention than many modern sociologists would like to show. One’s
habitus is shaped by social structures, and it causes actions that in turn
reproduce social structures. Bourdieu emphasizes this precisely by saying
that habitus schemes are original forms of classification that operate below
the threshold of consciousness and language and are therefore beyond what
can be controlled by the will, so it cannot be changed by a conscious act of
the will. Although this sounds like further proof of the strong social
determinism of Bourdieu’s theory, i.e. socio-material limitations, it should
be pointed out that they are very present in lifestyle choices, choices that
become imposed, with aesthetic choice becoming the centre of identity
formation. And as Bourdieu has meticulously shown in thousands of
examples from French life in the 1970s, the aestheticization of life for
economic reasons is not equally accessible to everyone, so identity does not
become constructed by a self-sufficient (autarkic) self but is always created
based on social relations. In this respect, Bourdieu was right in anticipating
the later thesis that consumer patterns are conformist rather than creative
and dynamic, and Lipovetsky’s thesis that the whole world of objects and
discourse begins to be ruled by the logic of transience.

Conclusion
In the previous passages, I tried to outline the basic tenets of the sociology
of fashion, focusing on a brief overview of some important theories and
basic creeds of the discipline, especially on Bourdieu’s analysis in this field
as a kind of case study, showing the connection between theoretical study
and fashion practice. In a sense, this essay is a succinct (and therefore
necessarily reduced) analysis, not an exhaustive problem interpretation: it is
a “foreword” to this scientific field both from the perspective of fashion
studies in a narrower sense and within a broader humanistic disciplinary
framework. How should the possibilities, achievements and limitations of
48 Chapter Two

the sociology of fashion and the impact of fashion design on the specific
problem setting that was discussed here be assessed? At the very beginning,
I emphasized that fashion, from a sociological perspective, is understood as
a system of signs, a social pattern of values, and a way of acquiring
collective and individual identity. In this sense, the sociology of fashion
necessarily overlaps with other disciplines in interpretation and accordingly
includes various semiotic, philosophical, anthropological and cultural
aspects. The example of Distinction clearly shows the extent to which
lifestyle and the field of struggle in Bourdieu’s sociology indicated a new
area of cultural research. But it should be borne in mind that at the time of
the emergence of the theory of distinction some forty years ago, one could
still speak of the difference between mass-produced and luxury products:
standardized products regularly had a technological and stylistic deficit in
comparison to luxury products. In the period of mass culture, and thus the
period of mass and cheap reproduction, more attention is paid to the
democratic aspect of fashion and its independence from the class hierarchy,
as stated by the American sociologist Herbert Blumer, who, unlike
Bourdieu, did not emphasize fashion as a mechanism of differentiation. In
mass fashion, products are intended for mass consumption, and it expresses
the need for conformism more than the need for the manifestation of
stratification. However, as Paiü accurately observes, it is a great merit of
Bourdieu that he presented the basic models of the changed social behaviour
of new classes and strata in modern society. By introducing explicitly new
notions of lifestyle, habitus, symbolic and cultural capital into sociology, he
contributed to the study of culture in the works of recent advocates of
cultural studies, feminist social critique (gender studies) and literary
theories of modernism, paying more attention to another dimension of
individualization and societies in terms of their social stratification in the
conditions of consumer capitalism, which puts culture at the centre of its
mechanism of reproduction (Paiü 2011, 10). Thus, the social class dimension
has not disappeared but has been differentiated: social differences have been
replaced by differences in power culture because, in the era of the rule of
global capitalism (postindustrial society and postmodern culture), fashion
determines the conditions of reproduction.
In addition, the opposite process occurs from that described in detail by
Simmel and Veblen: today, the ruling classes must also consider the
clothing of the broad masses. There are professional designers working in
the mass fashion industry who take their ideas and models directly from the
street, which, in a kind of ironic way, is a reversal for the upper classes to
copy the fashion of the lower social strata. This transformation, often
described by fashion process theorists, does not make the role of designers
 Contemporary Sociology of Fashion 49

obsolete – quite the opposite: to meet the mass demand for ever-new
products, their creations still have to be styled and offered to customers at
an accelerated pace. Accordingly, an industrial society transformed into a
postindustrial or mass consumption society has led to a hastened rate of
economic production, which means that haute couture no longer has to be
as expensive as before. However, it has also led to a massive expansion of
sweatshops, which has shifted industrial production to Third World
countries, creating a huge imbalance between the production and selling
prices of products, and at the same time producing a new class of extremely
poor and disenfranchised workers (Hoskins 2014). In this sense, class
differentiation has shifted from the consumer to the production segment: in
developed countries, quality clothing is available to most people, but a new
textile proletariat has been created, hidden away from the eyes of
Westerners. Given that modern society is constantly encouraging people to
consume, and they exceed their needs to do so, an artificial need or a
demand for unnecessary luxury is created: people are persuaded to spend
more than they need. The ideal and extreme example of extravagance is
fashion, and as such, it promotes sales and speeds up capital turnover.
Moreover, all modern industries tend to imitate the method of fashion
designers and fashion trends, and since it is a self-dynamic social process
because fashion does not seem to follow objective criteria and reasons,
reducing the realm of contingency, the result is a complex system on the
edge of deterministic chaos. But in this chaos in the foreground is the desire
of the individual for social differentiation and identification, and these are
the characteristics that have been a constant of sociological discourse from
Simmel and Bourdieu to the present day. Lipovetsky summed it up
suggestively, saying that fashion is a “vector of narcissistic individualization,”
that is, the first essential mechanism for the constant social production of
personality, thus aestheticizing and individualizing human vanity. He calls
it the “empire of the ephemeral” in which everyone can participate and
create their lifestyle and personality, and this is in stark contrast to Veblen’s
privileged class.
The sociology of fashion has a significant place in the comprehensive
understanding of the phenomena of taste, aesthetics and culture, and it is
quite certain that it will have to develop more and more as an
interdisciplinary field. At the same time, fashion will play an increasing role
as a creative industry and less as a means of class differentiation. Namely,
fashion no longer represents social relations but aesthetic-media relations
with oneself. Fashion takes place in a society without a hard line of
demarcation of classes and strata. It is a mirror of social change and a sign
of the construction/deconstruction of new cultural identities. But fashion
50 Chapter Two

can be understood neither as a social nor as a cultural phenomenon, although

its form of action is the social and aesthetic code of modernity. Beyond its
marking of the ‘spirit of the time’ of modernity and its continuation in the
postmodern world that loses the boundaries of distinguishing between elite
and mass culture, high and mass fashion, there is an open area of fashion
that metamorphoses into the very life of the designed body. “What remains
in modern fashion in the context of globalization is primarily a symbolic
and real struggle for the authenticity of one’s own cultural identity” (Paiü
2011, 11). Given that the development and global expansion of the creative
industries of fashion design are becoming a key place in society’s new
development paradigm, that there is a simultaneous and interactive
permeation of body design with new technology and lifestyles, and that
fashion design can no longer be considered a mere decoration of the human
body and a superficial aestheticization of the society of the spectacle, a
different understanding of fashion beyond strictly defined sociological
frameworks is needed to analyze the emergence of a symbolic and real
struggle for the authenticity of one’s own cultural identity. It is no longer a
social class-structured struggle but the birth of a new form of cultural capital
as a new kind of social stratification. One of the main tasks of the 21st
century’s sociology of fashion is to detect and accurately analyze the
various transformations of fashion design and view contemporary fashion
in the age of information and communication technologies within the scope
of new theoretical vocabulary.

References
Barthes, Roland. 1990. The Fashion System. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive
Sociology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
—. 1996. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Davis, Fred. 1994. Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Hoskins, Tansy E. 2014. Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion.
London: Pluto Press.
Kawamura, Yuniya. 2018. Fashionology: An Introduction to Fashion
Studies. London: Bloomsbury.
Lipovetsky, Gilles. 2002. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern
Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
 Contemporary Sociology of Fashion 51

Maštruko, Nina. 2017. Distinctive Taste in the Field of Fashion. Zagreb:

Tvrÿa.
Paiü, Žarko. 2007. Vertigo in Fashion: Towards Visual Semiotics of the
Body. Zagreb: Altagama
—. 2011. Fashion Design in the Age of Globalization. Zagreb: TTF.
Rocamora, Agnes. 2002. “Fields of Fashion.” Journal of Consumer Culture
2, no. 3: 341–362.
Shusterman, Richard. ed. 1999. Bourdieu: A Critical Reader. Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Simmel, Georg. 1905. Philosophie der Mode. Berlin: Pan-Verlag.
Svendsen, Lars H. 2006. Fashion: A Philosophy. London: Reaktion Books.
Veblen, Thorstein. 1994. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York:
Dover Publications.
 CHAPTER THREE

BODY ICONOGRAMS:
THE END OF THE SYMBOLIC
CONSTRUCTION OF FASHION

ŽARKO PAIû

Long live the new flesh!

David Cronenberg, Videodrome

1. Beyond a fashion?
“Elle est contemporaine de tout le monde”
In a world without the metaphysical foundation of beauty and reign of the
sublime, the categories of contingency and chaos have long since lost the
meaning of modern aesthetic values. Instead, technically-scientifically
shaped forms of life take on the task of decorating the surrounding world.
The process of aestheticization covers all areas of life. However, in that gap
between the worlds—one that strives to preserve by collecting objects and
traces of the past and another of integral reality that, like a soap bubble,
bursts in the air—there is going to be something disturbing and, at first
glance, uncannily spirited. This event signified the experience of German
literary romanticism and psychoanalytic-philosophical insights from E.T.A.
Hoffmann to Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger. We should here call to
mind the uncanny experience of the world (Unheimlichkeit). The fantasy of
an unusual object of the universe, which is at the same time close and
strange like a puppet or a cyborg in a virtual space, as assumed in the movie
The Matrix, belongs to one of the iconographic foundations of fetishism in
modern culture. To even think of the loss of beauty and the transition to the
world of decoration as a world of fashion, it might be necessary to find out
what is going on in the world and in time that is disturbing and uncanny as
conditions of the possibility of the reign of the fetishism of objects. Is it a
unique and universal world and a unique and universal time?
 Body Iconograms 53

The answer to this question seems to be an insight into the disputes

between the postmodern deconstruction of truth and the new cognitive
realism. It seems just like a dispute between those who deny the universal
truth of reality and its existence outside of the context and situation and
those who depart from the idea of transcending the long conditionality of
our knowledge of the world. If it is about a unique world of things, what can
the identity of contemporary art and fashion be? If, however, a multitude of
worlds and different perceptions and experiences of time proves the primacy
of that “ontology of things,” then the question of the essence of contemporary
art and fashion and the question about the status of the contemporary
metamorphosed body as a visual matrix of the machine and the cyborg has
to be found in the new concept of life. What if it is about the other world
and the disappearance of time? If, therefore, a homogeneous area and
heterogeneous bodies lie in it, and its deployment of immigration-
emigration constitutes an entirely new situation at the end of history, how is
it possible to access that hiatus, namely, one in multiplicity? This could be
the exact situation of all things, just as nomadism, loss of homeland and
transgression have been successfully represented in the installations and
critical reflections concerning fashion of the designer Hussein Chalayan
(Evans 2005, 8–15; Quinn 2005, 46–51; Steele 2001).
In his aesthetics, Immanuel Kant assumed that ideas of beauty as
disinterested spectators belong to the field of court taste. Such a judgement
cannot be objectively legalized. The reason is that it should be not a category
of mind, irrespective of whether they are antinomically defined, such as, for
example, the case of the idea of God. However, the idea of beauty may have
a general scope that should take the place of aesthetic judgement. So, it is
always culturally determined or customarily arbitrary. This assumption has
undergone a new interpretation in semiology or semiotics of Saussure and
Barthes. For them, the signifier is a cultural order, not the natural condition
of communication. Is not that something that we can add to contemporary
fashion? It cannot be otherwise thought of as an essential cultural and
decentralized order of meaning—as an apparatus and whether it is an
enabler1—at the time of the transition of social relations to the network of
visual communications. If there exists a universal language of fashion (la
langue), then the multitude of speeches of fashion (la parole) might be
equivalent to a multitude of cultural orders. We should note, in advance,

1 The concept of the apparatus or the device of power is taken from the late ideas of
Michel Foucault. It is a term that replaces discourse and marks a set of rules, codes,
language norms, socially structured structures, scientific and religious discussions,
economic contracts, and collections of straight rules in structuring the power of life
by itself (Agamben 2009b).
54 Chapter Three

that the ideal speech situation in the postmodern context encompasses the
assemblage of ready-mades and designed fashion objects. The multitude is
reflected in one. Instead of the autonomy of the discourse of fashion, the
apparatus of fashion still has to be in the operation of the heteronomy of
fashion. This could be the attitude of Gilles Lipovetsky in his famous book
The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. The concept of open
fashion determines our fluid and very complex age.

Fashionable clothing is less and less a means for social distancing, more and
more an instrument for individual and aesthetic distinction, an instrument of
seduction, youthfulness, and emblematic modernity. Ever since it began,
fashion has blended conformity with individualism. For all its openness,
contemporary fashion still has not escaped that basic structure. But there is
a difference: individualism has become by and large less competitive, less
concerned with what others think, less exhibitionist. (Lipovetsky 2002, 127)

Contemporary fashion, thus, stems from an uncanny blurry aesthetic and a

transgressive encounter. In all manner of manifestations of transgression,
the transition to the norms limits the fields of autonomy. The peak of
transgression is represented by the taboo of eroticism. Although the notion
of transgression was developed by Michel Foucault in his analysis of the
will, knowledge and biopolitics of the modern age (Foucault 1977, 29–52),
it was undoubtedly Georges Bataille who gave this concept the power of
reflection for the upcoming era. Transgression is, namely, directed towards
eroticism, exile, taboo, sacrifice, violence, divine, sacred, ritual, craving,
and exclusion. While Foucault describes transgression as a boundless
boundary and the emptiness of excess after the death of God and the
establishment of new frontiers towards infinity, Bataille, in the victim’s
economy determined by crossing the limits of the allowable excess,
searches for quite different features of the same order of things (Bataille
1985).
In his analysis of the differences between Foucault’s and Bataille’s
concepts of transgression, Chris Jenks shows that the term may refer to:

(1) the negative

(2) the scandalous
(3) the subversive

In order to understand transgression, it is necessary to break the idea of a

cause, to establish what is decentralized from the covenant that announces
the end of the idea of man, and, last but most significantly, the end of the
idea of representation (Jenks 2003, 91). Life becomes a torture of self-
 Body Iconograms 55

affirmation in the cruelty of life’s power. Within this, sexual urge forms the
structure of all social structures of kinship. Of course, the boundary between
all possible beauty and the deadly zone of decadent fetishism arises and
leads to the uncanny nature of eroticism (Fernbach 2002).

Whereas Baudrillard would view fetishism in terms of the desire to inhabit

self-contained formal codes that overcome all internal ambiguity and
external materiality, Derridian post-Marxists would locate the fetish in
semantic indeterminacy and the ambivalent oscillation (hence dialectical
resolution) between contrary determinations, a “space” where codes and
their logic break down in a materiality that is conceived in terms of pure
difference, contingency, and chance. (Apter and Pietz 1993, 125)

The scandal of the body in fashion suggests that unspeakable situation. It is

the only way to stop the communication between body-like objects. The
body can appear as a subject of desire only by transforming itself into a
thing. This thing is exchanged for the whole thing in a real and symbolic
market. However, all this is happening beyond the instrumental function of
the language. Starting from the fetishism that objectified desire in the
language of the appropriation of changes observed by the object, we might
be aware that this has directly impacted the notion of contemporary fashion.
Thus, language assumes mastery over things that matter due to strengthening
the thing itself. The power of that order represents the symbolic condition
of the actual subjugation of the desires of the Other (Lacan 1996). But
without oral experiment in the world of the touching object of worship, there
is no kind of fetishism regarding the desiring object. Surely, things are
revived only due to the magical power of language. They are appropriated
by oral communication. That is why the taboo of cannibalism denotes a real-
symbolic order of the law, which is the act of the cruelty of nature punished
by the ban on swallowing, chewing, and eating the Other in the form of the
human body. It is a paradox of Christianity that it is in the Eucharistic act
of the mystical bonds between Jesus Christ and the community of believers
where the ban is experienced together with the desire for them to generalize
another symbolic act of swallowing the Other. Without this, it is not possible
to understand the thought of transgression as contingent on the connection
between the body and the soul in the encounter with death. It becomes a
strange fact that this experience is at the same time the meaning of
philosophy from Plato to Arthur Schopenhauer (thanatón méleté) and the
taboo of eroticism as a cosmic-anthropological sacrifice from the Marquis
de Sade to Georges Bataille. Transgression might be defined as the inner
logic of the aesthetic overcoming of body boundaries in contemporary art
and fashion. It is nothing external to the time of fashion but rather to its
56 Chapter Three

“essence.” That is a reason why we cannot designate fetishism as a scandal.

Quite the contrary, it could be necessary for the excessive creative freedom
of the body in the event of its universal symbolic and actual sacrifice.
As Amanda Fernbach argues, fetishism changed the very heart of
contemporary fashion during the 1990s due to the transformation of bodies
from the representation of subculture styles to the personalized identity of
the media-constructed reality. But what should be noted when we speak
about such a thing as fetishism? No doubt that subcultures try to perceive
fetishism as a celebration of difference. So, all that set of beliefs about
gender, sexuality and the body might be transgressed in the theatre of
contemporary spectacle, where we can find these features articulated in film
but also in feminist and postcolonial criticism. For many theorists, fetishism
has a very complex meaning due much to Freud’s interpretation. As we
know, for him, the fetish could be interpreted as a supplement for the
mother’s missing phallus and a disavowal of her sexual difference. But, with
a little help from current critical theory, fetishism might be regarded as
being almost the same as the production of posthuman “Otherness.”
Fernbach, thus, claims that the mainstream interpretation of old fetishism is
not and never has been acceptable for analyzing the phenomenon of cultural
fetishism. We can see that all the different forms of fetishism—decadent
fetishism, magical fetishism, matrix fetishism and immortality fetishism—
have strong impacts on realizing a strange and uncanny potential for
contemporary fashion regarding the mixture of styles and tendencies. In any
case, Fernbach argues that fetishism—which we should describe as making
a difference, unlike the old concept familiar to modern fashion and art—
cannot have the function of representing the subculture, but rather the new
fetishism emerging from “inside” wants to determine a fetishism as a
bodily-designed adventure without any kind of previous limits and
borderlines (Fernbach 2000; Fernbach 2002)
The freedom without body transgression denotes an illusionary activity
of the mere decoration of the world. In doing so, it always comes to fight
against the subjecting freedom of body institutions of social control. The
freedom of the body designates a pretence of the law to the event of its
sacrifice. However, the sacrifice always takes place in the name of the
metaphysical reduction of the body in its holiness of freedom. Being free
means having and holding on to its “own” body. It is projecting-protecting
the existence in all kinds of events and situations. This is called the existence
of the body. Having a body and being a body are not quite different things,
although it does seem so at first glance. The existential experience of
freedom means truly having the ability to dispose of your body without
compromise. But the notion of possession is always determined by the will
 Body Iconograms 57

of the Other, and this forms the structure of the capitalist economy of the
exchange of objects on the market. In the case of fetishism concerning
contemporary fashion, the existential experience of freedom becomes a
search for a different form of identity and the construction of a lifestyle. It
goes so far that the question of the life and death of a man is a question of
the physical existence of his freedom to lead his life decisively, even to
make sacrifices in the context of social deviations. Fashion today has more
kinship with the ethical-political turn of aesthetics than ever before. It is
sufficient to take the example of what Karl Lagerfeld did when designing a
dress for his muse and mannequin Claudia Schiffer by incorporating text
from the Quran into a lascivious design and thus provoking that part of the
world where fashion is still considered as a decadent Western eccentricity
and the sign of total power as such.
Death and suicide give the body what is unkempt, scandalous and
subversive. In the first case, it is the ultimate limit of finiteness to infinity,
and second, the negative freedom of sacrifice in the name of something
“higher” or a nameless name of nullity. Socrates’ death seems to be the most
tragic case in the history of Western metaphysics. The victim is unreasonable,
and the punishment, of course, seems quite unforgivable. Finally, the
congregation of death by suicide represents the last act of encounter with
that overcoming in the universe—the soul in immortality as an illusion and
as the truth of human existence. Both the illusion and the truth make that
encounter tragic. The illusion of truth shows the truth of illusion in the
absence of the metaphysical justification of life, more than anything other
than the unavoidable power of the life of the body itself. The performed
actions of contemporary artists with the intervention and participation of
their bodies in a pre-ideological-political and culturally predetermined
social history—such as the works of Marina Abramoviü and Tomislav
Gotovac—overlap the issue of the status of artistic work at the time of the
new media as well as the issue of the singularity of the body in the live event
without representativity (Fischer-Lichte 2004).
Art cannot be a mere imitation of life. It is always reproductive in
creating life in an artistic work as an event. The documentation of
contemporary art and fashion is, therefore, a question of the limitations of
the endless repeatability of the event in the virtual space and the actual time
of the actuality of the digital image. What is truly the uncannily indefensible
and inexpensive in modern art and fashion? Fernando Pessoa, in his unique
The Book of Disquietude, written under his alternate writing name of
Bernardo Soares, synthesized the modern world in his reflexive mythopoetical
experience into three essential characters of the foregoing of the coming
time:
58 Chapter Three

(1) the fantasy of the immortality of the body-soul in the labyrinth of

interwoven texts of tradition and contemporaneity;
(2) a vision of the multiplicity of being as the metamorphic identity of
a man whose dreams live in the dreams of the cruelty of passing
reality; and
(3) the paradoxical logic of the coexistence of the avant-garde and
decadence with the idea of fetish facility beyond the apparatus of
desire as a transgression of love and death into the pure complicity
of death (eros and psyché).

What is the point of The Book of Disquietude? Undoubtedly, the most

memorable statement that should be noted is that we are faced with the
psycho-drama (writing the soul in the text) of the modern age. Psycho-
drama is concurrent, thus, with the confession of a modern subject about the
history of one’s own world experience as a language. Who speaks
profoundly inside The Book of Disquietude? No one else but the subjective
language of modern man’s experience. But what does the language of The
Book of Disquietude say about the world and human existence? Precisely
that the language reveals the inner history of the modern human psyché.
Pessoa’s idea of the book signified the world as a concept and performance
from the experience of the language itself as a concept and a performance.
It is already apparent that contemporary art might be understood by way of
being in the process of play. We can assume that the open work is always a
conceptual-performing act in the process of the event. So, in it, the
relationship between the author and the public audience acts as an
interactive meeting of the subject/actor and the object of the same
performance. Unlike the avant-garde scope of the destruction of language
in futurism and dadaism, Pessoa attempted to make public the non-
ideological idea of the purity and perfection of the language beyond the
present of Being and beings. It is the crystallized saying and the fantastic
interpretation of the world, not the sign or the symbol of something sublime
and unreachable. This language is addressed to anyone and everyone. In
addition, the identity of a modern man might be identical to the
multiplication of beings. Pessoa himself was the best example of the
metamorphic identity of the Other in himself. The beginning of endless
identity bias as bodysuits of the Other begins with the endless process of
marking the bits as the eccentric and de-centred network of meanings. What
is valid for the “writing scene” of Pessoa is valid for the entire manner of
postmodern identity from the body as a language. In this case, language here
appears to be identical to the soul (psyché). Language has a soul. It shows
the meaning of the world in creative chaos and construction. Every word is
 Body Iconograms 59

spoken and written (grammé) on the surface of the earth like a trail. The
Book of Disquietude shows Lisbon and its objects through dreamlike
landscapes of language reflection. Mirrors and shadows, twilight and
sunrise, the infinite escapes of the soul, and the perception of the subjectness
of a modern man require another life outside of the current fury. Language,
therefore, does not strike at the phenomenon of the world but rather the
world of repeatability and traces of speech. All of that can be said in the
traces of the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida (1967).
Without language, the soul cannot travel through the labyrinths of
fantasy, water, and the compressed networks of everything that is. Strangely,
it seems that this corresponds to the media concept of the implosion of the
meanings of the message. Bernardo Soares represents the true, fictitious,
and imaginary state of the soul in the transformations of the subject/author.
It is a constant state of flux figures and masks in a chaotic order of changing
their essence on epochal occasions. It considers the late Heidegger, and his
postulate “stability in change” describes the way of fighting the scientific-
technical system to boost the consumption of objects (Heidegger 2005).
All three features of the coming era are already like new symptoms in
this “time.” In the language of psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, the
symptom repressed the hermeneutic notion of a sign and the process of
identifying and revealing something that is concealed in signs and symbols.
This suppression, however, is the result of the temporary state of the triumph
of the logic of the scientific spirit of psychoanalysis over the archaeological
combination of original thinking. Like any suppression, like that of Freud
himself, one can contribute to the traumatic conflict of the subject with one’s
own identity. Symptoms are not stacked and secret signs. Here we are faced
with the question of the process of marking a subject as a traumatic field of
the psyché in the modern age. The difference between symptoms and the
marked difference is a difference between the text of psychoanalysis as the
world and the hermeneutics of the world as text. Indeed, it should only be
the sign of modern times that satisfies the definition of the modern
assemblage of stability in constant change. Actuality, hence, corresponds to
the “true” ecstasy of modernity.2 Without immodesty in the present, there

2 Agamben’s contemplation of the relationship between “modernity” and

“contemporaneity” on the traces of Nietzsche and Barthes shows that the true
contemporariness of our age is nothing but the “non-modern,” that is, the spirit of
our time is at the same time radically beyond the actuality and is paradoxically
within itself. Agamben, in his analysis of the “spirit of the time” of contemporaneity,
places the concept of fashion at the centre. Contemporaneity denotes paradoxically
60 Chapter Three

is no rootedness in the stable soil. In immense fashion, there are

astonishingly dizzy styles. Everything works perfectly in the circle of its
profane features. But we could not find its oppositions in a scale dress of
some imaginary tradition without the entirety of history. Of course, it seems
to be naive today if we seek to interpret the study of the anthropology of
culture concerning the question of the idea of nature and culture in the un-
Western history of the world. We could only speak about transgression
within the modern world as a progression of the stable system of things. Just
from the idea of a straight line, the development of societies in history may
have binary oppositions of fashion as progress/development and dress as a
bounty on the continuity of tradition (Lévy-Strauss 2001; Loschek 1991).
The puzzle of the emergence of fashion derives from the emergence of
a social form of capitalism. Therefore, the very idea of the new is realized
when this becomes a pure form of the scientific-technical production of
things and objects in the form of the social organization of life. This form
also belongs to the structural matrix of contemporary capitalism. As Ezra
Pound once said—Make it new!—nothing can be left untouched by this
marvellous desire for change, nothing at all. We should not forget that
fashion and capitalism arose at the end of the Middle Ages. From that point
of view, fashion historians have argued that this happened in Italy at the end
of the 14th century. The emergence of fashion, thus, corresponds to the
origin of the symbolic value of abstracted work as the condition of
possibilities in this world (Blau 1999). Without the abstractions of all social
relationships in the form of goods fetishism, as Karl Marx determined the
essence of the ideological-political system of liberal capitalism to be, the
idea of newness cannot arise without the slightest transformation of man
into the market. The end of the new might be cracking in the very mode of
presenting a fetishism of commodities when fashion as goods goes beyond
the use of ready-to-wear and exchange values (the symbolic function of
fetishism). What about confirming this upcoming time beyond the
paradoxical act of visuality regarding the three forms of presence in a
contemporary era and all its effects? Among them, fashion has become the

the presence/absence of anachronism and modernity because actuality means to be

“à la mode” by being out of fashion. So, the fashion is synonymous with “now,” the
moment, and the style of timelessness. In order for fashion to establish its power as
a system, although Agamben does not use this key Barthesian notion of the semiotics
of fashion in his analyses, it could be necessary to establish a transition between
“still” and “no more.” That is a reason why the testimony in Paris of a modern
woman at the end of the 19th century decisively emphasized her figure for the
modern situation of fashion or the contemporary world as such, based on the logic
of self-production and newness as the inner driver of global capitalism: “Elle est
contemporaine de tout le monde” (Agamben 2009b, 30–31).
 Body Iconograms 61

emergence of all phenomena. But in contemporary fashion, it is not only its

sultry form from the modern industrial society to liberal globalization and
capitalism but rather its simpler form that determines that every fashion
object itself possesses the fetishistic character of the commodity as a prey
of the desire. If, at the end of society, no form of fashion disappears, the sort
of mode of presentation in the sense of the role of the social theatre and the
cultural stage of the struggle for the creation of a new identity, then it might
be the right time to approach the attempt to deconstruct fashion as the fetish
body of the posthuman “nature.” The entire set of metaphysical symbols has
disappeared from it. Fashion has, thus, been moved to the media world of
communication. In any case, we should note that the linguistic messages
lost their meaning and received a multitude of new significations
(Baudrillard 1998). The assumption for this radical deconstruction of the
deconstruction of fashion itself is to move from one side to all theories of
symbols and signs, all theories of the representation of fashion, and all the
theories that define fashion as this or that phenomenon (social or cultural,
ideological or otherwise). But what if contemporary fashion does not appear
anymore? If, then, the fashion that determines the techno-scientific image
of the world and the visual creation of identity takes over all of the
decomposed forms of art and all that stumbles upon them, and by re-joining
their “genetic code” is revived in the project of creative body design, can
we still hold the eye to its fundamental initiator, which is at the same time
the fundamental driver of the contemporary age (society, culture, history)—
the very idea of the new? This question in modern times could be a quest
for autopoietic strategies producing the life of the spirit and might be
determined by current information-communication technologies. In the
meantime, the only remaining field of action for fashion reflected as the
total design of the world in the spatial implosion of information and the time
of the ecstasy of communication might be the total aesthetics of the world
and its transformation into the fetish archipelago of things.
The only thing it has left now is to be a “symptom” of the disappearance
of what has so far been considered a phenomenon. How can we understand
and interpret it? In any case, it will not be strange if we assert that this has
already happened in the thinking of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and
Søren Kierkegaard. A turn from consciousness to language or from the spirit
to the body occurred throughout the 20th century in the phenomenology of
Edmund Husserl, the philosophy of language of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and
the criticism of Western metaphysics as the destruction of traditional
ontology performed by Martin Heidegger. The appearance is never present
in its purity. The use of a sign as a substitute for or addition to the original
phenomenon of consciousness determines the possibilities and limits of
62 Chapter Three

semiology and semiotics. In short, the path to the very occurrence assumes
a critique of the path of each phenomenology, which is based on the
separation of the system world and the world of life. This thought of late
Husserl was and remains active in the theories of postmodernity by Jean-
François Lyotard and the theory of communicative action by Jürgen
Habermas (Paiü 2008). The question of how to rid the world of the irreducible
life of subjugation is certainly a formed instrumental activity, and the order of
the mind and discursive rationality still remains a challenge for understanding
the theory of contemporary fashion (Evans 2003; Sawchuck 1987).
If we were to go only to items of Derrida’s deconstruction, or even
Deleuze’s philosophy of the immanence of the body without organs, we
would see some extremely “scandalous” things: namely, the body can no
longer be determined by any other stuff outside the body itself. This media
project in the context of the current situation and its conceptual performativity
remains the only real territory of contemporary arts and fashion as such. In
the second turn, thus, the only remaining territory of contemporary art and
fashion has been deterritorialized. It could be everywhere and nowhere. So,
deterritorialization denotes the process of deploying art and fashion from
previous aesthetics to the aesthetics of the occult transgression of the body.
The act of deployment itself also carries the possibility of a new placement.
It seems very interesting to note that contemporary art in its spatializing
space is derived from being merely the setting of a subject as a thing/object
in space. The installation of the object in space supports the work and the
event of just placing the space on the side of the subject and the object. But
space opens a way to modern times before the work of deterritorialization
liquidates the same direction. Undoubtedly, the only remaining territory
might be the interactive communication of the body as moving towards that
spectacle in the body’s iconograms. How should this assemblage be
understood? First of all, the body is no longer perceived as a place of
decoration and a space for entering features from the social theatre of
different roles as it was in the era of modernity. Instead, we are witnessing
a cultural modification aimed at strengthening the position of the body
beyond gender/sex differences. Consequently, we find ourselves in an
occasion of constant transformation of identity, as was evident in David
Bowie’s fashion travesty.
Almost all theories of contemporary fashion still speak of it as a
phenomenon that refers to the rule of something else. So, fashion has always
been frivolous and superficial. It was understood only as a function of social
adaptability to order or, in turn, the liberated identity of a person, constituted
by the movement of creating an autonomous lifestyle (Polhemus 1996;
Polhemus 2006). The phenomenology of the world is always a sign or
 Body Iconograms 63

symbol of something else. The problem is understanding fashion as a

phenomenon that the object/thing over nothing means nothing represents.
That is why contemporary fashion can be perceived as a rebellion against
what has remained of the appearance of its long-standing rulers. But that
was possible only when the body as a creative design of life had to be taught
by the current language of such a rebellion against the system of fashion.
The ideological rule of fashion, however, is today established by a visual
code of surveillance (Emberley 1987).
Thus, the order is established by the media formation of reality as:

(a) the image of fashion,

(b) the language of fashion, and
(c) the world of fashion.

In this three-form pattern, Barthes’ structure is represented as a rational

theory of text and fashion. But the emphasis is not only on the text but also
on the pictorial language of the object (Barnard 2001; Paiü 2007). In the
semiotic theory of fashion performed by thinkers from Barthes and Eco up
to contemporary theorists such as Volli, Calefatto, Barnard, Davis, Evans,
Steele, and Wilson who apply interdisciplinary methods of visual studies, it
should be common to talk about image aspects of fashion that have primacy
over language (Barthes 1964, 32–51; Barthes 1983). We cannot forget that
the metaphor of the image (of fashion) includes the third symbolic element
of excess meaning that forms the meaning of the image in the process of
transforming the entire assemblage. The relationship between language and
image is often sought to be clarified through the traditional logic of science
based on the concept of cause and effect. However, we cannot understand
how the visual language of fashion at the same time assumes the reign of
the sign and the signification process with which the subject becomes a
complex system of references. The fashion object, though not as it works in
the assemblage of traditional dressing customs (Indian sarees, for example),
has taken on the very changeable nature of the image. Put in other words, in
the context of contemporary fashion, it might be anything under the
condition that fluid cultural values determine the body as a master-signifier
of the spectacle as such.
The triad of fashion in the presence of the contemporary age and its
superseding has been shown through:

(1) syncretism,
(2) hybridity, and
(3) eclecticism.
64 Chapter Three

All that is happening is in the spectacle in the integral reality of syncretism

(ideas), hybridity (identity) and eclecticism (performance). The radical
concept of ideas, identity, and performance point to the fundamental
determinants of the Hellenistic period in the history of art after the classical
period of Greece. Symbolic historical decadence marked the cosmopolitan
city of the encounter of different religions, spiritual worldviews, artistic
styles, and cultural orders of meanings—Alexandria. Modern decadence,
however, primarily has its direction in the ambivalence of the term. And this
is in the very notion of the relationship between modernity and tradition. It
may be paradoxical that decadence no longer marks the awareness of the
crisis and the rift of classic ideals. The concept of decadence now points to
the symptoms of the alienation of the post-historical world. It is a modern
appearance resulting from the autopoietic apparatus of the capitalist power
structure. The fetishism of goods and artefacts, as a rule, and symbolic
power facilities represent a new form of modern decadence.
In the 501st fragment of The Book of Disquietude, Pessoa writes:

Modern things include:

(1) The evolution of mirrors;
(2) Wardrobes.
We advanced to being clothed creatures possessing body and soul.
And since the soul always conforms to the body, it developed an intangible
suit. We advanced to having largely clothed souls. In the same way that we
advanced – as humans, as bodies – to the category of clothed animals.
It’s not just the fact of our suit becoming a part of us; There’s also the
complexity of this suit and its curious quality of having virtually no relations
to the elements of natural elegance found in the body and its movements.
Where I asked to characterize my soul’s condition, explaining it with the
senses, I would speechlessly point to a mirror, to a hanger and to a fountain
pen. (Pessoa 1991, 294)

Pessoa’s turn towards the living body of objects (of fashion) conceals in
itself a response to the overall effort of the fall of the avant-garde of the first
half of the 20th century to overcome the split between spirit/soul and body
in the image and the language of “primitive and archaeological modernism”
(Agamben 2009a, 29–30). The disembodiment of language by Russian
futurist poets, dadaists who turn language to the performativity of the body
to the public area, expressionists’ nature of the world as a scream and
experience of trauma, the surreal dismemberment of the body in the
assemblage, procedures of the radical deconstruction of the body as an
object of aesthetics of perceptual shock as a condition of the possibility of
all forms of shock and provocation (e.g., Antonin Artaud’s film The
Seashell and the Clergyman and Salvator Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s An
 Body Iconograms 65

Andalusian Dog), and, finally, the division of the artwork into the event of
an interactive spectacle are the gifts of the subject/actor of artistic practice
to open the media art of today as a matrix of complex methods of
objectifying the body as a language and an image (Mersch 2002; Paiü 2021).
A quite common interpretation assumes that even insightful theorists
should articulate how fashion was creative in designing the body’s
appearance still only assimilates the tendencies and styles in visual arts that
spearheaded the 20th century but is not the right companion with its
discursive games, science, art and design (Evans 1999, 3–32). Such a
position might be present even in the theoretical introduction to the
multidisciplinary field of fashion studies. Thus, it is not uncommon that the
relationship between art and fashion in modern times is considered further
in the same tone as pure “illustrations” and “determination” in fashion
(Barnard 2007). Another form of the same old story shows that fashion has
always represented only the occurrence of a super-determination of the
structure of social or cultural order with ideological-political significance.
Never considered autonomously, as a rule, there should never be a
consideration of the sovereignty of its unobtrusive appearance. Hence, the
exceptions form the semiotics of fashion in the works of Barthes, Eco,
Lipovetsky, and contemporary approaches from visual semiotics to the
deconstruction of language and images. But turning around the body in
modern art and fashion, of course, has quite another face. If one person
confirms this idea of the “empty transcendence” of language in modern
literature, especially in the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, then the other
person should note that something that occurs as a flaw in the very concept
of modernity, in general, conceals the entire assemblage of consequences.
That face denotes a metamorphic face under the mask.
The first novel in the history of Western culture, Petronius’ Satyricon,
in which the writer reveals the dark glory of the decadence and transgressions
of the Roman Empire under Nero and consists of a series of fragments and
can thus be regarded as a far-reaching historical predecessor of postmodern
literature, was the inspiration for Federico Fellini’s film Satyricon, which
deals with the impossibility of identity outside the fragmentation of the
multitude of faces. Fellini, thus, interprets Petronius starting from the
labyrinth of images as an allegory for the contemporary decadence of
Western culture. We know very well that this carnivalesque has a deep
impact on our postmodern crash of values and styles. But this decadence is
not only the utmost aesthetic pleasure, it is also possible. Life beyond the
pleasures of aesthetic appearance would be deserted and empty. Therefore,
the allegory in the era of image culture instead of text culture—as the
paradigm shift of culture in the contemporary era was determined by
66 Chapter Three

Foucault—shows how artists might be able to think reflexively in the

images. Their images are conceptual views and presentations of the disturbing
reality. In any case, the theatricalization of life corresponds to the
theatricalization of death in the endless series of masks. The original Roman
or Latin expression for the mask is persona. Hiding behind the masks is not
the real face. Indeed, the new weight below that is not in niches other than
what Pessoa prophetically signified as forthcoming in the 399th fragment
of The Book of Disquietude:

My destiny is decadence. (Pessoa 1991, 230)

Breaks within the basic line of modernity introduce the experience of

contemporaneity that encompasses the entire set of discursive practices and
exercises. Therefore, the reflective thinking of eccentric and de-centred
subjects can no longer be measured in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Lacan’s main thesis is that the unconscious is structured like a language. Put
differently, it applies to all other structuralist and poststructuralist interpretations
of the world in the game of the signifier, the signified, and the sign from
Barthes to Derrida. In contrast, it has openness in the immanent structure of
the events of the body itself as a language and a picture that interprets the
world in general. The body prevails in the world as technology precedes
fashion. The point is that the body is now visible in its pure immanence and
the depths of the fetish object visualized before any possible interpretation.
The figure of the body as an event in motion precedes the general language
of the body’s interpretation. The visual semiotics of the body no longer uses
any of the traditional semiotic meanings such as the sign, the signifier and
the labelled. On the traces of Eco’s concept of iconograms from his semiotic
interpretation of the open work, we shall try to prove the setting for image
dividing language as a distance communication instrument. Instead of the
semiotic concepts of language experience, it should be noted that we are
now faced with a corporeal complexity that is otherwise structured.
Contemporary fashion as a total creative lifestyle design takes over the
language of the deconstruction of the body and the image of life. What is it?
Total creativity? Since the beginning of the historical avant-garde, it has
been self-explanatory: the idea of functional design by Bauhaus corresponds
to the idea of the modern world as the formation of the aesthetic object. The
prohibition of beauty, decoration and narratives is related to the historical
canon of beauty in decorative and ornamental decadent art of the late 19th
century. If we keep that in mind, we have chosen the path of interpretation
in close connection with some strange and uncanny event. What is at the
core of that matter?
 Body Iconograms 67

The avant-garde fashion in the works and concepts of futurism in Italy

in the 1920s and the suprematistic ideas of Kazimir Malevich’s radical
unpredictability of the world were established in the concept of the total
design of life as a social and aesthetic transgression of the figurative art of
decadence. Like Adolf Loos’s notion of “an ornament as a crime,”
Malevich’s total design was primarily directed at the radical aesthetics of a
new socialist society. Since the very beginning, fashion has been the avant-
garde deconstruction of the surrounding world and the entire world of life.
This is indirectly witnessed by the fact that fashion design, with the
appearance of Coco Chanel, was at the same time a child of the avant-garde
because, in the 1920s, clothes began to be released from the beauty and
exaltation of the previous Victorian era. Fashion became, according to the
ideas of functionality and minimalism, a new style of body styling that
almost resembled the architecture and design of Bauhaus.
Finally, that is a reason why Walter Benjamin’s allegorical image of
Paul Klee entitled Angelus Novus has been interpreted from the apocalyptic
perspective as a catastrophe of the coming future. Guy Debord, on the
contrary, in The Society of the Spectacle, termed this strategy détournament
(Jappe 1999). Therefore, decadence cannot be perceived without a more
radical contrast with the concept of the historical avant-garde and its
destructive logic and the destruction of the entire ancient world. Avant-
garde and decadence are not hostile binary oppositions. This was due to the
ideological-political establishment of the historical avant-garde as the
aesthetic-political (totalitarian) order of the world from 1917 to 1989 (Groys
2008).
Since it is only the body seam between the strength of radical modernity
and the ecstasy of radical decadence, it might be clear that the whole order
of contemporary fashion, which occurs after the end of the aesthetic-
political (totalitarian) system, can be considered as a facility in the posthuman
condition. That matter denotes a state of a new mythical consciousness and
retro-futuristic vision of the upcoming era as the end of humans and the
world. At the same time, this leads to a change in the point of view of the
notion of the body and hence of fashion as a total body design in the context
of contemporary art. That would develop the setting of the end of the
symbolic formation of fashion and the disappearance of fashion as a
phenomenon in the contemporary era of a radical form of the world as
techno-scientific environmental logic of new media. The next consideration
will try to determine the concept of the open event of a transgression of the
body in analogy with Eco’s concept of open work. What is the body as an
open transgression event? Can any kind of body in its posthuman
(in)completeness, which today is genuinely determined by biomedical
68 Chapter Three

interventions and cosmetic surgery, be understood outside the horizons of

historical metaphysics? In all its variants, the metaphysical conception
implies that the body of a human is understood dualistically:

(1) as a body or apparatus of a body in the mechanical paradigm of life,

and
(2) as a spiritual machine or unity of life with the definition of a human
as an animal rationale.

In both cases, we must keep in mind the essentialist concept of the body,
either as a matter or as a spiritual substance. Only in Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology, Lacan’s psychoanalysis, Derrida’s deconstruction, and
Deleuze’s nomadology did the body become an immanent event of life itself
as a synthetic unity of spirit and matter. The turn to the body of fashion is
primarily seen in the openness of the events of the bodily inscription of
identity (Grosz 1994). In any case, with a new notion of identity concerning
the globalized tendencies in art and fashion, we have to emphasize the
overlapping relationships between nature and culture, dressing and fashion,
and the adorned and the designed body without any reference to previous
metaphysical signifiers.
The beginning of postmodern fashion denotes, thus, the deconstruction
of the body’s surface and screen. It looks like an open-hearted skin on the
drama of the idiot. It is about the political-cultural strategy of forming the
Other as queer identity. Vivienne Westwood and her anti-fashion subversion
politics of high order lead into the world of the metamorphic identity of the
Other. Street fashion at the same time destroys the decadent fetishism of
high society, taking on its figures of eroticism and death in the new mantle
of anarchic techno-freak fetishism (Fernbach 2002, 135–181). Only with the
turn of ecstatic bodiliness does true dignity return to the metaphysical
understanding of being human. If one thinks that the body indeed begins to
exist only within the contemporary age of digital production of fashion, then
that statement is about the possibilities of the body in the posthuman
condition or about the possibilities of living based only on realized odds of
non-living in the cybernetical order of network and rhizomes. Technology
now precedes the life of fashion, not vice versa. The appearance and body
posture of the fashioned fictional feature of contemporary fashion cannot
exist. So, the fundamental assumption of new media is that, unlike the old
media, they operate synthetically. It means that the existence of the past is
technically and technologically allowed in the form of the virtual presence
of the body. The synthetic “nature” of new media allows the body in the
posthuman state to orient itself towards the past. Due to the digital picture
 Body Iconograms 69

body in its immersion, what “real” object has been determined no longer
applies. Namely, the digital image does not appear and does not have a place
in any external or internal objects. Starting from that perspective, it
generates and synthesizes reality as a reference system, referring to other
media. In this way, within the meanings of fashion, it has the features of the
transmedial Matrix. Its reference system derives from the media’s creation
of the body. The existence of the body in the assemblage of the posthuman
condition as a robot-android-cyborg condition now proves that real odds of
the existence of the living body are realized in contemporary fashion and its
associated world of globally networked identities. That is a reason why the
problem of contemporary fashion is lacking in the symbolic code of
fetishism. When we are faced with that matter whereby it is completely
penetrated with fantasies about the fetishism of objects, then something
“scandalous” exists in that synthetic fetish. This is Baudrillard’s answer to
the question about the end of the representation and coming to the integral
reality of hyperreality. Namely, the sign does not represent the subject
because the subject is a sign itself. In the vicious cycle of the disappearance
of the signification reference, the idea of the sign of the signifier disappears
altogether. Fetishism, thus, refers to the opacity of objects without the desire
for the subversion of obscurity. The coldness of the techno-futuristic object
of transgression in the state of the “perverse” cyborg can no longer preserve
the essence of fetishism at all. If there are no taboos or scandals in the very
nature of that which is elevated as inexpressible and inexhaustible, then in
the convention remains only a new interpretation of the past like the
upcoming delays of another, more uncanny “nature” than a so-called
“natural nature.” That is a reason why contemporary fashion in the age of
the world as image-fetishism tends to be the scandal. If it reflects
Baudrillard in his analysis of another version of “joyful nihilism,” then it is
not about travelling through time in the past. On the contrary, the past is
staged in a virtual presence in the form of neo-style, and its assemblage
designates a combination of past and future. Retro-futurist fashion, hence,
could be somewhat uncannily stable in its term. We can say that it should
be called a myth in the more distant sense, as for dystopian movies like A
Clockwork Orange directed by Stanley Kubrick and Alexander McQueen’s
fashion show Plato’s Atlantis. However, the return of myth to contemporary
fashion occurs in a double operation:

(a) the gender/sexual equilibrium of desire for a fetish object, and

(b) the technological-scientific creation of the decadent fetishism of the
object as a synthetic material (“third skin”) and as a synthetic form
of posthuman beings dressing in the “costume” of current fashion.
70 Chapter Three

In contemporary art performances, Stelarc goes far away from the issues of
the posthuman body. Orlan is also famous due to her experiments with the
transplantation of skin, and fashion performances like McQueen’s indicate
the disappearance of the biological body in a techno-cybernetically structured
laboratory (Fortunati, Katz and Riccini 2003). Although we still distinguish
between art and fashion in the contemporary era of the rule of the
technosphere, it is obvious that this distinction is beyond any action of
metaphysical rank and assemblage of being. Art and fashion belong to the
sphere of the posthuman body in the event of a total design of life.
Fundamental concepts that link the synthetic unity of the network and
rhizomes in the open process of constructing art and fashion are:

(1) the fetishism of objects,

(2) the transgression of the body, and
(3) the conceptual-performative design of a body as an object in a virtual
space and real-time.

The end of the symbolic representation of fashion, therefore, is nothing

more than the beginning of the body’s staging as an open event of the visual
script of fashion in its presence in the distance. Everywhere and nowhere,
fashion is taking place in the media environment of dialogue and discourse
about its assemblage. What does that mean? Namely, fashion becomes a
complex relationship system that can only be decoded if we know how its
bio-cybernetic code works. We do not need to go far. We could just look at
the design of a posthuman body that has been found in TV series like Star
Trek since the end of the 1980s. Contemporary fashion, hence, is not a
fashion that refers to something as fixed as society, culture, ideology, or
politics. Its reality encompasses the media event of dialogue and discourse
about fashion. This is only the case in the constant staging of scandals and
the subversion of the body in transgression, and the dialogue and discourse
about the mode of action present a blend of banality and gnostic extraction,
as well as “specialist” hermetic knowledge about the things and its blow-up
along the way. How this could happen and with what terms and modes of
the subject’s performance will be the topic of our next considerations.

2. Fashion as an open transgression event:

Corpus hermeticum, eroticism and death
If any of the famous 20th-century writers belonged to the lineage of Jorge
Luis Borges as an emblematic figure of new mannerism and postmodernism
at the end of the modern era, then it was surely Umberto Eco in all his
 Body Iconograms 71

fictitious and also theoretical works. His books dates back from the idea of
beauty in Thomas Aquinas and medieval life and through the aesthetics of
the open work with the experimental works of Stéphane Mallarmé, James
Joyce, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage up to semiotic theory, which
seeks to establish a conceptual framework in the “search for the perfect
language.” And it is not by chance that Eco turned their ideas into text and
interpreted the text. So, entering into the post-historic times of the realm of
networks and rhizomes, the global world of information-communication,
new media and transgressive identities correspond to the concept of
contemporary fashion (Evans 2003). But what kind of relationship might
there be in his sophisticated notion of the world as a text with the
ambivalences and paradoxes of contemporary fashion? For Eco, the
primacy of the interpretation of the text derives from Charles Sanders
Peirce’s semiotic set of unlimited processes that are being labelled in
modern times. It is determined by a multitude of different interpretations of
the same text in its multiplication. This does not mean that unlimited
semiosis can conclude that the interpretation does not have criteria.
Paradoxically fresh and powerful, Eco’s semiotic interpretation of the text
and Bataille’s economy victims in the eroticism of death are seen in
something that at the same time entirely belongs to the aesthetics of the open
event of transgression and what goes beyond the starting of a symbolic end
of fashion. This was the case with the last event of an interactive show by
British fashion designer Alexander McQueen before his suicide—Plato’s
Atlantis—in the spring of 2010. The iconogrammatic structure of
interpreting the body as an open-ended event of transcendence goes beyond
the very concept of transgression and its allegorical figures, which appear
as the key literary figures of the interpretation of the text.
Eco’s semiotics is directed at advancing the concept of interpretation.
This is true for all three phases of its development: from the early concept
of aesthetics of the 1960s (open-concept work), general semiotics with its
emphasis on the concept of a reader in the process of signifying the text of
the 1970s, up to the age of the text in the interpretation of works from the
1990s (Eco 1976; Eco 1989: Eco 1990). If we apply it in fashion as a cultural
communication system and as a text of interpretation in an author-user-work
triad, we encounter the language of contemporary fashion in all its ways.
Visual semiotics can be understood as a complex theory of communication
or as a theory of culture. It consists of the language-speaking competencies
of subjects/actors of discourse and dialogue in networked texts. Semiotics
designates the theory of interpretation, which does not pose the question of
what the sign signifies to some object of consideration. On the contrary, it
is fundamental to understand the signs in art, literature, medicine, design,
72 Chapter Three

and ultimacy in general linguistics. Every single communication should be

comprehended as a matter of interpretation. In another, pragmatic-
interpretative spirit, Eco’s theory encompasses a critique and extension of
the concept of Derrida’s deconstruction in the following aspects. If Derrida
argues that it is all just a matter of deconstructing the text in its difference
(différance) in the production and reproduction of texts’ differences, then
Eco’s attempt is all just a question of interpretation of the text. In both cases,
there are different approaches and different insights into the features of text
as such. While for Derrida, in the traces of de Saussure, Barthes and Lacan,
the signifier determined the process of signifying in the text, Eco’s
assumption is included in the semiotics of culture as communicating the
aesthetics of reception, namely in a pragmatic horizon of the exploration of
the other feature of the sign. Each sign is read by the symbolic code of
interpretation of culture. It has its place (space) and the power of the
signifier (time). The word is always made utilizing the interpretation of
codifying communication. That is a reason why the concept of open work
can be understood from the horizons of subjects/actors of interpretation.
What should be noted about Eco’s determination of artwork? The
semiotic definition is that it is a work that is understood by a plurality of
messages, and it consists of many signifiers contained in one single meaning
bearer. The open work, therefore, inevitably reveals itself in multiplicity. It
is well known that the concept of polytheism in Barthes and Derrida is key
to the interpretation of the text. But in Eco, the theory of interpretation
recognizes two degrees of openness:

(1) limited openness to which the observer or user (viewer, listener,

reader) gives meaning, and
(2) a free space of interpretation, which is limited only by the structure
of the work itself in the movement of its form and the indefinite sense
of final meaning.

Thus, Eco’s concept of open work can be linked to an open body as the
horizon of writing without a transcendental signifier. This body is open to
all possible interpretations of its inscription. If they come from the
interactivity of author and audience as subjects/actors of the communication
of work that is completed only by its interpretation, then the fate of
contemporary art and fashion is an incomplete event of interpretation of the
event itself, which leaves a trace of actual controversy in the picture as a
visual facility. Due to the interactive nature of new media, contemporary
fashion determines the body’s iconograms, not a linguistic coding text (Eco
1976). The theory of interpreting works from the immanent structure of the
 Body Iconograms 73

work itself is, first of all, challenging for understanding contemporary art
and fashion. The point is that the concept of the openness of the work now
shows the openness of body events in transgression. The interactivity of a
performance event, whether it is a conceptual career in a new media or a
physical act of provocation of a beast in the public space in real-time
(Marina Abramoviü versus Plato’s Atlantis), at the same time leads to the
mingling of art and life and their new frontier. All that should be significant
here is achieved in the lust for corporeal self-presence and the presence of
distance as a transgression of the event itself.
Since human language is multifaceted, loaded with culturally coded
symbols and metaphors, it is obvious that the universality of truth cannot be
attained, but it is always the work of infinite interpretations of the same in
differences. Each object has its secret, and each secret is revealed by hiding
another secret. The idea that each medium is related to the other medium,
which is at the centre of Marshall McLuhan’s theory of media from Vilém
Flusser to Jean Baudrillard, results in the corpus hermeticum developing in
the dream and the visions of the coming as opaque and inadmissible. The
Hermetic doctrine must take place within the world as a stage. The world
should be regarded as a linguistic phenomenon in theatres without speech
because communication is possible only beyond language. This is, however,
the essence of Barthes’ semiology and his theory of fashion. The meaning
of what is shown through a linguistic, iconic, and symbolic message lies
beyond that of language. That is a reason why Eco rightly says that
Hermeticism in the heart of the decadence of the West at the same time
makes it impossible to dream of mingling the same things of art and life
through

(1) mysticism and alchemy, and

(2) poetry and philosophy.

Impossibility cannot be understood as the inability to realize the concept.

Quite the contrary. Impossibility can only be understood virtually as an
opportunity to imagine something different from reality and what precedes
it. So, the open transgression of the body in contemporary fashion is
necessarily a virtual impossibility of the only actual reality. Put in other
words, if it is the essence of contemporary fashion in its visual creation and
if the body iconogram is already a predefined image mode as a condition of
real fashion in the image of the object in the real world, then the dream
visionary project of modernizing contemporary fashion in the metamorphic
body is without any other attributes than the infinite right of the subject to
“have” and to “carry” his body as an experience of absolute freedom.
74 Chapter Three

Mysticism and alchemy point to the gnostic secret of creation. In

Hermeticism, this corresponds to the idea of an ur-matter known as nigredo.
It is about darkness before distinguishing between light and darkness. In
contemporary visual arts, however, a series of paintings by Anselm Kiefer
entitled Nigredo, part of the Saturn and Melancholy cycle of the 1990s, is
directly related to the ambivalent order of the avant-garde and decadence,
Gnosticism, matter, and Hermeticism in modern re-interpretation experiences
of the human body. What is transgressive here is nothing more than the
experience of overcoming and the difference between the historically
devoted body experience of corpus mysticum and corpus hermeticum.
Nowhere is all that has been mentioned so transparent, shocking, provocative,
radically transgressive or so intense in its paradoxical reaction to the
experience of open art/fashion as the event than the conceptual embodiments
of McQueen in his fashion shows, from Highland Rape (1993) and Dante
(1996) to Plato’s Atlantis (2010).
Contemporary fashion is a creative body design. It rests on freedom and
contingency. Freedom has no other “purpose” except in the metaphysical
justification of the sanctity of life in the gloomy body. Its fate might be
placed in the transgression of everything that has been established as a
natural order, but also the transgression of everything that has been
established as a standardized cultural order of power control over the body.
The ambivalence of contemporary fashion combines two things: the
aesthetical nature and the naturalization of culture as taboos and scandals.
Claude Lévy-Strauss called it the universality of incest as the order of the
primitive figure of kinship and the particularity of culture as a universal ban.
Without the transgression of incest taboos in contemporary fashion, it
cannot be a scandalous-subversive theatre. Therefore, contemporary fashion
as the radical “theatre of cruelty” (Artaud) and the radical “eroticism of
death” in the latest transgression leads to the apocalypse of the body in the
mythical act of the creation and destruction of the body. We have seen that
Eco, in his semiotics of a text’s interpretation, opened up the issue of the
visual art of modern art and fashion as an act/event. In it, the author-work-
audience communicate with each other due to the experience of the pre-
ontological notion of the body as the openness of the world at large. But
despite the semiotic or, indeed, the Gnostic reading of the text and the
interpretation of the body’s history as a corpus (mysticism and hermeticism),
in its labyrinth, like Borges in the world of text, it remained too pure, with
almost virginal innocence, and that means that the imaginary is unfinished
in his historical drama of embodiment. The naked body in contemporary art
and fashion is by no means Eco’s or Borges’ body of mysticism and
alchemy, poetry and philosophy. On the contrary, it could be a radically
 Body Iconograms 75

transgressive body of the eroticism of death, as in Bataille’s thoughtful

attempt to sacrifice and sanctify the thought beyond the historically
established discourse of polytheistic and monotheistic religions. In
contemporary art and fashion, there is no transgression without scandal and
subversion. And what could be still more scandalous and subversive
nowadays in the uncanny vehemence of holding a candle to the objects of
the mythical apocalypse of the body and the decadent fetishism of objects
of perversion as an apparatus of fashion at its ultimate stage of
transformation from an inanimate object into posthuman technology—from
puppet to cyborg (Paiü 2011)?
What is the meaning of the transgression of the body as an event in the
eroticism of death? It is not necessary to point out the evidence that the
actions, performances, and conceptions of contemporary art and fashion in
their most radical and, at the same time, most aesthetic and transgressive
events are directed at the first and last mystery of the mythical and historical
destiny of man in the face of his existence. The body points to the end of
the being in time. Eroticism is obviously not just a life-giving confirmation
of the power of the body in its primordial instinct of existence. It is far more
than the impetus for death. The eroticism of the pre-Socratic metaphysics to
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis might be at the centre of
considerations of governing oneself and others. The question of the power
of mastery over the self and others is nothing but the question of the new
definition of a subject in his bodily extravagance at the edge of life and
death. Foucault’s and Bataille’s notions of transgression are not just an
alternative order of the life-power of nature, which in parallel also exists as
a kind of “cannibalism” at the heart of the dominant discourse of the
suppressive impulse and its repressive sublimation in the setting of Western
culture from the early Middle Ages to the late modern era. Similarly, neither
transgression is identical to violence or the ritual sexual perversions of
psychopathological forms. Limits are necessary to exceed, scandalize and
subvert the body in contemporary art and fashion to have the possibility of
marking a radical eccentricity. Without the ban, there are no metaphors or
scandals of the allegorical designation of excessive events in the world of
art and fashion. There is no doubt that the whole of the 20th century has
determined a sign of a radical critique of this mode of suppression of the
devastating nature. The body, therefore, might appear under the signs of
surveillance and control. This is carried out in the various institutional forms
of torture and self-punishment of the second phase of its negative
narcissistic liberation in Western culture (Pitts 2003).
The self-victimized body might not just be the way to the masochistic
body but also to the discovery of the subject of the body’s freedom. It passes
76 Chapter Three

down the path of self-identification through the pain and suffering of its
decentralization. That should be a reason why contemporary fashion, in its
decadent scenes of the transgression of the body, no longer deals with the
naked body as a function of releasing the drives and dignity of persons. It is
obsessively preoccupied with inter-medial inscriptions of pain, suffering,
torture, and self-torture; the whole imagery of abjection and monstrosity
represents that the sublime in the act of perversion is already right there
(Steele 1985). Like a dark shadow, the history of the body in the West is
determined by the position of its ambivalence. What does this mean? It is at
the same time a sign of emancipation in the sense of rationalism and a trace
of self-sacrifice as an internal duty and command that comes from the
referential framework of the patriarchal society. All that Foucault analyzed
as the history of knowledge/power over the body is also related to the
practice of typing traces of submission and emancipation. Hence, fetishism
has to be reinterpreted, beginning with its subversive side, destroying the
order of the power/knowledge of the body, which, as Baruch Spinoza said,
we still do not know about either. That is an additional reason why the fetish
object of a decadent and avant-garde modern fashion is an abject or ultimate
point of the perceived negative sublimation. Liquids and metamorphic
bodies, blood and sperm, dread and monstrosity are no longer figures of the
negative aesthetics of ugliness. Eroticism transcends the instinctive
structure of sexuality and life’s excesses beyond the distinction between
“nature” (incestuous and cruel) and “normal” (culture’s sublimation in the
techniques of disciplining and controlling the body).
In his writings, especially in Eroticism and Theory of Religion, Bataille
established a new profane discourse of holiness (Bataille 1957; Bataille
1989). The body appears to him in the total openness of death as the “inner
experience” of the world. With that, we should go beyond any definition of
discipline, society, control, morality, and aesthetics. It should not be so
surprising, therefore, that his thinking is drawn to the ideas of contemporary
art and fashion as the most important areas of the overlapping discourse of
post-metaphysical philosophy and literature. As Derrida’s way of thinking
and writing seems quite synonymous with the practice of the deconstruction
of texts, writing on the edges, palimpsests, marks and dissemination, so
Bataille’s thinking and writing might just be good practice for transgression
in the text itself. In other words, eroticism is not just a taboo in Western
culture. Through eroticism, the scandal is a scandal and subversive to the
negativity of the text itself as an experience of overcoming the metaphysics
of the body. The writing method simultaneously shows the epistemology of
reading the text as a transgression of the “sense” of what is historically-
metaphysically determined by the sacrifice of the body and the sacredness
 Body Iconograms 77

of the soul. For resignation on contemporary art and fashion as the radical
transgression of the body in the fetishistic facility of post-human beings,
which transcends the binary oppositions of inanimate-live, it is sufficient
here to point out the following ideas of Bataille on eroticism, death,
transgression, taboo, and violence. First of all, his general economy of
expenditure indicates criticism of the rationality of capitalist production and
spending on objects as matter. The exchange between bodies and objects is
the exchange of life and death in the form of an unconditional life gift.
Sexuality in the form of desire has the form of the appropriation of the
Other. But this is at the same time the desire to acknowledge the subject in
the very self. The sexual act in itself has the power of life and death, and the
body is ecstatic, completed in orgasmic death, which, like the apocalypse,
in itself affects repeatability. Bataille says the following about that paradox
and the aporia of economy and sacrifice:

…the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of

economic principles—the overturning of the ethics that grounds them.
Changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general
economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of
thinking—and of ethics. If a part of wealth (subject to a rough estimate) is
doomed to destruction or at least to unproductive use without any possible
profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without
return. Henceforth, leaving aside pure and simple dissipation, analogous to
the construction of the Pyramids, the possibility of pursuing growth is itself
subordinated to giving: The industrial development of the entire world
demands of Americans that they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy
such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations. An immense
industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a
tire… It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it
cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences.
(Bataille 1991, 25–26)

The fundamentals of Bataille’s writings, the continuation of Nietzsche’s

thinking of life as being in the eternal return of equal, is nothing but the
experience of the border. Being and nothing cannot be understood
dialectically. Anyway, we can argue that these are the same thing.
Transgression, thus, represents the point of difference between the two in
the process of affirming their differences. But without the knowledge of the
first and last border, there is no possibility of experiencing the temporality
of the body. The sacrifice of the body and holiness in contemporary art and
fashion is necessarily articulated in rituals of violent and excessive
approaches to the body. Eroticism cannot have its subversive power of
transgression if a set of prohibitions founded by religions does not legally
78 Chapter Three

exist. In this case, the difference between polytheistic and monotheistic

religions is a question of distinguishing between traditional and modern
societies. The secular holiness of the body does not exclude the
archaeological power of sacrifice by other means in modern times. The
question of tragic victims in contemporary art and fashion sets starts from
the distinction between myth and the science of the body. Transgressive
situations such as conflicts between cultures and different conflicts around
identity in the globalized world of today mean that sacrificing the body
becomes inevitable. Bataille says that the first metaphor of faith belongs to
the knowledge of death. The next assumption seems decisive. It makes the
credo of any further consideration of the idea of the transgression of the
body open to the event of contemporary art and fashion. This is Bataille’s
claim that transgression does not signify the extinction of incest or the taboo
of all civilizations from “exiled” to “contemporary.” On the contrary,
transgression designates the overcoming of the taboo and its completion in
the conscious sacrifice of the body. Since sexuality and eroticism form
principles that break up order based on the rational exchange of
objects/things on the symbolic and the real market in human societies, the
inevitable consequence of a transgression in the self-affirmation of life
forces eroticism as such. This is the same as how it creates the world
altogether and destroys it. The ambivalence of contemporary art and fashion
represents just that, and it should be defined as a transgression of lively
corporeal exchange facilities with something from the other side of living.
What is beyond the very heart of the art goes beyond contemporary art to
go away. In this way, a total design of the body transforms it into a decadent
fetishism abject without an object. Eroticism now crosses its boundaries. It
thus becomes the perversion of the object itself as an abyss, as is evident in
the cultural fetishisms and techno-fetishisms of contemporary art and
fashion, as was excellently described by Fernbach (2002, 182–226). What
can we conclude concerning that matter?
Abject without a facility means that eroticism goes beyond the limits of
the sacred in the negative sublimation of the body. The most radical act of
cosmic-anthropological transgression might be a kind of opposite to the
resumption of the logic of symbolic and real exchange facilities on the
market within capitalist-organized social production. Instead of Marx’s
critique of the political economy, which puts forward the idea of a liberal
idea of the freedom of the individual as a private owner of his workforce,
Bataille talks about the victim’s economy. In that context, it should be noted
that the body is in its unconditional facticity and always realizes the only
facility of the thing as such. The sacrifice of the body goes beyond any
utilitarian logic of the subject. In any case, the body has no use or sacrifice.
 Body Iconograms 79

It is always just that the means are dedicated to the purpose. In this way, the
“naturalness” of the capitalist economy functions in the way in which
fashion determines the occurrence of value. However, Bataille’s “solar
economy” has a metaphysical aura and goes beyond the idea of using or
utilizing the value of objects/objects. This means that fashion in modern
times can no longer be understood by the symbolic act of presenting
something beyond its uselessness and total controversy. Once the usable
value of the fashion as the object/thing serves, at the same time, as a
metaphysical or symbolic representation of the fashion (sign-signifier-
signified), it is lost. The body is the absolute sacred sacrifice in the name of
the unconditional “solar economy.” Therefore, the last truth of eroticism
derives from extinguishing the usefulness and working of the body as an
object/thing. When it no longer exists, it is the most sacred of all holiness—
the sacrifice of the body as the “solar body,” an astral-stellar gift returning
to its origin. An apparent feature of this is the eroticism of death for us in
spending the object as an object. Hence, the apocalypse of the body itself,
which happens in the contemporary era of visual communication in the
information society.
The fetishism of contemporary art and fashion decadence is represented
as an interactive spectacle of narcissistic subject/actors in the life of
iconograms beyond sanctity and sacrifice. This life is auto-poetically
generated by new digital technology, and it consists of the fragmentation of
identity in the networked space of the media world of art and fashion. The
victim, of course, was a narcissist banalized as a victim of the subject in the
cruelty of the world of culture and fashion. The reality show remains the
only space of this banal-sublime neutralization of fashion, which ironically
perceives its senselessness in stylizing the anonymous factory of “glorious
empty gags.” The abject becomes an object of monstrousness in the form of
stickiness and disgust. Everything that belonged to the imaginary aesthetics
of ugliness now appears unhuman initially for fetishized features of the
body itself in a posthuman condition. The difference between the main
feature of literary decadence, as found in Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo, and
the main prototype of the monstrous corpse of posthumanism, as seen in
Alien, is that Quasimodo belongs to the other side of the humanistic idea of
beauty and sublime, while the alien as “holy monster” is beyond good and
evil, a pure posthuman machine living-life of the contemporary age.
Winning the abject over the object of the fine arts finally appears to be a
true transgression in general—in the pure negative jouissance of the body in
its physiological-aesthetic modes of being-to-death. Eroticism represents a
transgression of death itself, which needs a form of the body for its sacrifice,
80 Chapter Three

reaching the state of pure mimesis—an imitation of the spiritual sacrifice of

the body by repeating the ritual sacrifice to infinity (Nancy 1991, 20–38).
This is based on the contemporary economy of fashion as a spectacular
event of body transgression. Nancy, in his interpretation of Bataille’s
problem of metaphysical victimization and erotism, indicates that the
victim’s body is always a mimetic act of repetition of what is naturally
“predestined.” Thus fashion, in its representational-communication function
of body transgression events, returns to its starting point with that virginal
“natural” has a mythical structure of violence against nature as such. There
is no significant difference between films such as Ingmar Bergman’s The
Virgin Spring or James Cameron’s Avatar and Alexander McQueen’s
Highland Rape fashion show. Nature can exist in the form of a virgin or
primordial body in rape or violence against it. The paradox is, therefore,
scandalous: without violence or rape, nature does not exist per se. We have
seen that Lacan’s primacy of the symbolic order or culture serves as a taboo
that reigns over nature. But McQueen’s Highland Rape should be noted
simply as a paradigmatic event of a monstrous surge because it speaks
directly of blood and sperm as the violence of the institutional patriarchal
order against the Other—a woman as a mythically exalted virgin (Evans
2004).
If the victim is “an institution of the absolute economy of absolute
subjectivity,” as Nancy argues in his interpretation of Bataille, then the
endless repetition of the sacrificial rites in contemporary art and fashion
events of the transgression of the body as abject go on further without its
symbolic object of desire. Fetishism inevitably becomes a consequence of
the order of cultural decadence in the synthetic, hybrid and eclectic form of
the new identity of the body. It is not, therefore, the fetish and the character
of contemporary art and fashion that “objects perceive me” in observation
right now, as Paul Klee wrote in his diaries. The rebellion of objects belongs
to the fictional character of the worldliness of the contemporary world.
There goes everything that is ready-made or body-to-wear (ready for use or
carrying). They do not notice objects; instead, the entire world of objects is
transformed into an abstraction of art as an addendum or a substitute for the
primary path of body sacrifice. What is happening in contemporary art and
fashion might be the choice between simulacra and the nothingness of
objects in the form of visual communication, the iconograms of the very
body of life. No one can foresee the final boundary of this deadly sacrificial
body dance in virtual and actual life. But what is in the process of
transforming the body identically into differences in the true transgression
of body events in the space of life and death? The self-destruction of the
body as an object/thing takes on the ancient ritual techniques of crucifixion,
 Body Iconograms 81

stretching, tattooing and engraving of signs on the body, dissolving its

“black holes” and opening wounds to the limits of pain and suffering. In this
unhappy sacrifice of the body, contemporary art and fashion transcend the
boundaries of art and life by paradoxically setting a new frontier. That new
frontier between art and life becomes the technosphere itself. A technically
engineered body changes the biological nature of the living body of plants,
animals and humans. This represents the disappearance of nature in the
immortality of the posthuman body. The absolute subjectivity of this body
at the same time designates its deepest perversion and opacity. That body,
ultimately, cannot be naked. Furthermore, there is nothing in the universe
that is anything but human-all-to-human. Stelarc’s performances, Orlan’s
experiments with transplanting the skin, and McQueen’s theatricalization of
cruelty in the transgression of gender/sex fashion labels point to the same
common denominator—extreme horror as the ultimate truth of eroticism
and death. We should note that our daily experiences in designing the
surrounding world in globally networked societies confirm this extreme and
exaggerated condition. Whatever the sovereignty, it represents the mode of
the transgression of the body beyond a fashion—the death of the fashion
and its unique symbolic form.3 We have to know in advance how this
happens and what really stands behind it if any kind of matter should still
be a supplement for the lost innocence of the world.

3. Mythical regression of the future: Allegory without text

Let us go back to another explanation of fetishism. The differentiation of
so-called classical fetishism and all its postmodern forms can be
summarized by distinguishing imaginary fantasies about prosthetic bodies
of women as castrating man in Freud’s key psychoanalytic interpretation of
the perversion of facilities and generalized fantasies on the entire world of
3 “It is in this tradition, of spectacle, excess and showmanship, that one can locate
the London shows of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen in the 1990s, and their
respective shows in Paris for Dior and Givenchy. McQueen’s models walked on
water (apparently), and were drenched by ‘golden showers’ or smeared in blood and
dirt. Galliano’s narratives were loosely based on a series of spectacular women from
the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. For each show he created a
fictional character around whom the narrative edifice was built. Each model in any
one show had only one outfit—there were no quick changes here—and was
encouraged really to play the part. These shows moved into the realm of pure
entertainment. Generally the collection had been sold beforehand, and the show thus
became a kind of showcase of the designer’s mind. The ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin
ascribed to the artwork had become detached from the goods and associated with the
designer’s ‘vision’” (Evans 2001, 301–303).
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objects as perverse facilities’ desire to possess the sublime structure of

objects/things. In classical cases, fetishism is the worship of pseudo-
dominant objects (dominatrix-type women as cruel rulers in skin, latex and
gum). It is a symbolic replacement for the cruelty of the natural power of
the patriarchal order. In the second case, the above-mentioned rule applies
techno-morbid abstractions without objects. The more man is not in the
function of the reflexive self-object of the masochistic desire for the
vengeance of the Big Other, the less men and women are lying in the
posthuman body of the uncanny perversion of objects/things themselves.
This is a distinction of the “ontological” as such. This can be set as the
typological distinction between “politically conservative” fetishism, which
serves as a mere theatricalization of the current order of cultural power in
which the perverse worship of women’s shoes, leather goods and various
forms of bondage only establishes the order of the normalization of violence
in a liberal, permissive society, and the radical fetishism of the world of
global corporate capitalism. Classic fetishism produces the icon of perverse
women’s beauty. She is uncanny and monstrous. After all, it must cut up the
“normal” assemblage of body and culture like a Medusa’s head. Postmodern
fetishism is, therefore, basically transgressive, and it is structurally based on
the decadent separation of the binary oppositions of male-female and
nature-culture from the established order of worshipping clean and
indifferent abjection facilities (Fernbach 2002, 72). Put in other words, the
criticism of nature as a meta-language of ideology makes postmodern
fetishism active in the path of negative freedom. This assumption shows that
contemporary visual culture and its related art and fashion are self-reflective
narcissism: “We know that faith in nature is a lie and that’s why we believe
in its radical opposition—the fictional objects of culture as a lie of lies.” The
body that appears as abject/object cravings in a posthuman machine or body
without organs is seductive. It depicts objects as objects/things of deep
trauma and jouissance experiences. Now pleasure appears as a visual
fascination of objects. And they are in the interactive network of the
relationship of the perversion of life itself.
The fetish of the subject, therefore, appears in the classical model as a
function of normalizing the original perversion of heterosexual relationships
in civil society. Freud’s psychoanalytic criticism of the history of Western
civilization is almost identical to the sociological analysis of Norbert Elias.
The sociologist of the civilization process speaks of the power to rationalize
social institutions and the traumatic suppression of physicality in the public
domain, which raises all forms of violence of the patriarchal order in the
private and intimate space of the development of civil marriage (Elias
1989). This ambivalent process of public virtues and private sins establishes
 Body Iconograms 83

a model of fetish fantasy. We can see here the dominant form of “blowing
out” or catharsis, but not a radical transgression, as the obsession with fetal
objects is kept within a strictly public-private divide in civil society. All of
this can be perfectly seen in the conceptual-performative actions of
Alexander McQueen. The reason is that contemporary fashion as a radical
open event of the body itself on the stage of the “society of the spectacle”
embodies the experience of radical fetishism as an experience of the
transgression concerning the eroticism of death. We can use the term
embodiment for the act of forming the lofty-human body as androgen-
cyborg-angel from the incarnation of the abjection of all the innate
insurgents of the traumatic existence of humans (women and men) in a
globally networked society. We may say here that dispelling the speech
about the symbolic creation of the identity of the contemporary body in
fashion derives from the inner need for confirmation and confession of the
facts of emotional determination in permissive culture. Instead of any
symbolic representation of identity, it should be the return of allegories in
the pure mythical-visual form of the image beyond the text. This is a reason
why all conceptual-performative project designs might be an interactive
spectacle of body iconograms.. For contemporary fashion to exist, it might
be necessary to finally “bring forth” the body that, in its absolute freedom,
lives by “carrying” life as the work and the event of a radical artistic project
of transgression.
In Plato’s Atlantis in the spring of 2010, McQueen not only reached “the
greatest depth of impersonality,” as James Joyce wrote in 1905 from Pula
to his brother in Dublin, but also touched the deadly area between art as life
and fashion as a show or illusion of the same life. Conceptually speaking,
he completed his artistic work. Is not it strange that this is precisely what is
more about the contemporary era of media production and the absolute
staging of the “experience society” than the entire industry of contemporary
minds in its boring reinterpretations that were already seen in the avant-
garde and the early 20th century? Is it even possible that a fashion show in
its visual event, the iconograms of the body, speaks more of dogmatic
contemporary art as a reflexive subversion of the world itself, which has
been signified as global, post-historic, digital, information-communicative,
post-ideological, heterotopic, and the dystopia of the deep notion of time?
The answer is confirmed in advance. Moreover, not only is it possible, but
it might also be necessary and inevitable that the allegorical event of the
body as a mythical feast of contemporaneity is represented as a radically
reversed metaphysical feature of contemporary art. So, this just means that
fashion can no longer pass by the appearance and banality of life. From the
rhizomatic structures of the world’s worldliness which is beyond
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spirituality, and is therefore symbolic, nothing in the air, that is to say, in

the future, lies in the imagination of the experiment of the world as the total
design of the posthuman body and its life. In any case, fashion and art meet
the experience of the body design in artificial life (AL). Authenticity
bestows the resurrection of neo-Platonistic or Hellenistic concepts—
syncretism, hybridity and eclecticism. The blending of differences in one—
creating a new one from a plurality of different compounds and relating to
reality as a relationship to the system reference based on understanding the
world of fashion as an interpretation—might be the structural unity of this
triad in the concept and practice of the contemporary body (art-fashion).
The design has its origins in the aesthetics of the surrounding and inner
world, and fashion as a total body design no longer adorns the clothing of a
stable body, but the metamorphic body constructs identities with its
inscriptions, such as the absolute whiteness of Mallarmé’s The Book or the
absolute sound of Stockhausen’s and Cage’s musical compositions—the
absolute point of the condensation and compression of the body itself, the
thought acoustics in anything that exists in space and time.
McQueen has an exceptional place in the theory of contemporary
fashion. A New York Times journalist wrote that his fashion show is not just
a vision of tomorrow’s future, but a vision of the future as a future at least
30 years in advance. The future of fashion in contemporary fashion is no
longer considered from the point of view of the utopian imagination of some
“naive” anti-fashion Barbarella or Solaris in the starry space of the night.
Rather than the SF-speculation of fashion, in the contemporary era of the
reign of new media and digital images, it acts as a virtual transgression of
reality. The term “iconograms” started to introduce considerations that
would show how euphoria no longer has the essence of contemporary
fashion. We cannot confirm the continuity of styles or the removal of
provocation and shock in the discontinuity of history. The overwhelming
tendencies of neo-historicism, neo-avantgardism, and inadequate decadence
with the tendencies of futuristic vision and dreams lead to the fact that
contemporary fashion can only be understood from the perspective of the
body as an image-creation or, following the contemporary concept of
reality, the pictorial trace of the event of the interactive spectacle. All
boundaries are accepted and destroyed. And the question of the identity of
the body in the age of transgression in contemporary fashion is precisely a
question of the limits of the living body. In the metamorphic process of
emergence, the posthuman body of the androids and cyborgs of the
boundaries of the living and inactive become fictitious. Jean-Paul Gaultier,
in his vision of the upcoming fashion of the techno-futuristic environment
 Body Iconograms 85

of digital architecture and networks of the world ahead of him, dreamed of

creating a collection of clothing at the end of all imaginative collections.
In that dream, which resembled a faint body apocalypse and a
mysterious state of instability of fashion, his fashion always indicated its
signs of crossing gender/sex boundaries, religious bans, racial differentiation,
and everything else that history has labelled with the lines of the symbolic
rule of fixed differences and more homogenous identities (Evans 2003).
Cultural history is the history of clothing in the sense of developing cultural
hegemony. Gaultier’s visions coincide partly with McQueen’s radical triad.
But the difference exists in the fact that McQueen starts from the assumption
that the social form of fashion has broken up. The fragments belong to the
visual representation of the spectacle of the body itself. This is a reason why
fashion trends are faced with the spectacle of a performance event. Behind
that, there is nothing more. Furthermore, there is no secret of the symbolic
stone or the sublime object of desire. The abject without an object represents
the centre of the “big narrative” (the show). Without it, fashion no longer
has its visual signifier. When nothing is left behind, then fashion becomes
the design of the body in a techno-futuristic disguise of fetishism. In other
words, the lifestyle of transgression becomes a new body of the fatal
deconstruction of fashion. McQueen’s “fashion,” in addition, represents the
allegory of the future as the upcoming mythical apocalypse of the body. In
it, sacrifice, eroticism, nihilism, death, and transgression are the fundamental
figures of the reflexive interpretation of the end of a symbolic form of
creation. Fashion is dead—long live the new body!
We cannot forget the fact that Walter Benjamin used the concept of
allegory in the meaning of the substitute sign. In it, the image structure of
the message assumes the task of interpreting the narrative structure of the
event. Benjamin alleges that “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what
ruins are in the realm of things” (Benjamin 2009, 78). The allegory is not
merely a substitute mother of cultures towards metaphors and symbols as
the “biological” father of marking things. The figure of allegories always
appears as what goes beyond the marking process. It is a true iconic turn in
contemporary culture that visual identity codes precede every possible
reality of the object as a body. And although one of the founders of the
“pictorial turn,” Gottfried Boehm, rightly refers to the function of the
metaphor as a concept and figure of thought beyond the representation of
“things,” pointing to the traces of the phenomenology of Husserl and
Merleau-Ponty, the philosophical fundamentals of Wittgenstein and Austin,
and the deconstruction of Derrida, it is undeniable that the allegory of
postmodern criticism of the representation of the referent of reality is
decisive in the figure of the artistic subversion of the very unity of life and
86 Chapter Three

art (Boehm 2007, 34–53; Jameson 2009). We should remember how, in

postmodern architecture, ornament overcame its position as a “crime,” as
Adolf Loos condemned every form of decoration in modern architecture
and art, and became the second nature of the narrative structure of the new
image—so much so that we became modern in architecture with the code
of the digital age of new media, based on the logic of transcoding the
message, rising above the devastating ideological and aesthetic advance of
the avant-garde and decadence in the 20th century on the obsolescence of
ornaments and the progress of function, that is, the relation between the
narrative and the event in conceptual-performing art. This connection
should be transgressive. It goes beyond binary oppositions like nice-ugly,
good-evil, male-female, or nature-culture. So, the allegory of contemporary
fashion as a transgression of the body in the event of the eroticism of death
could be precisely the transgression of “meaningful” visuality in general.
Now, we shall see that visual media are not at all an inherent feature of the
digital age. After all, this has been stated in self-criticisms of visual studies
and the pictorial turn, as the founder of this theoretical paradigm, W.J.T.
Mitchell, already did in his late works (Mitchell 2005, 257–266). If the
media of our digital age are not visual, then what does the word mean? Do
we have to talk only about turning back to the deconstruction of Derrida
with the premise that everything should be just a text?
The problem of triggering a symbolic form of creation cannot be defined
just as the problem of a new and contemporary interpretation. This would
be the most important issue of the contemporary body as a condition for the
possibility of being a subject and object of contemporary art and fashion.
For this condition of opportunity to be fulfilled, it must hit the third end of
the idea of man. It is no longer the end of the metaphysical idea of a man
(Heidegger) or the post-metaphysical deconstruction of the essence of the
human (Derrida), but the idea of the human as the bodily-synthetic unity of
nature and culture in the form of a posthuman machine (androids, cyborgs,
monstrous objects of abject). This event also denotes the beginning of true
fashion experimentation with what precedes it as well as the idea of
civilization as such. The foregoing can be nothing but a myth of bliss and
the virgin source of civilization before civilization, the astral-starry body
before the corpus mysticum-hermeticum and before modern embodiment
and embodiment in a mechanically organized body. Before making the final
stroke of the idea of fashion as a spectacular banality and frivolity of
decadent Western civilization, McQueen came out of the body’s perception
as a concept for use and consumption, which is evident in his Plato’s
Atlantis show. In the 1990s, two aesthetic and cultural-political shows
concealed the idea of nature and beauty through the systematic action of the
 Body Iconograms 87

“natural” and “cultural” logic of the late (the fetishist) sublime object of
global capitalism. The first show was named Highland Rape (1993) and the
second Dante (1996). The first allusively represented the aggression of men
and the rape of women. These are the emerging aspects of cruelty and the
feminine culture of the adoration of virginity and motherhood. Although the
politico-cultural allegory of the show, according to McQueen, is that,
historically, England “raped” Scotland with hegemonic rule and the war
between England and Scotland was a genocide of the Scottish people, the
problem of interpretation cannot be simply reduced to the historical and
political aspect of the allegory. McQueen reveals that, with the contemporary
fashion within the conceptual-performative turn, the show is referring to the
horror and the uncanny thing in the world. The uncanny and the sublime
determine the spectacle of extreme frivolity whereby genocide and ethnic
cleansing in the global age are understood in the media representation of
social reality. The form of presentation has become like a postmodern soap
opera. Laughter and the banality of life are becoming the media
environment for the tragic experience of the present, which has deep roots
in the past. The best example of this aesthetic of a soap opera in the odour
of a political issue is represented by Roberto Benigni’s film about the
Holocaust titled Life is Beautiful (Žižek 2000).
And there is no doubt that the problem that McQueen put on the scene
was greater than it was visually witnessed by the cruelty of the scenes of
raped girls in torn clothes, brutally beaten with broken limbs. Rape in the
permissive culture of the narcissistic West, paradoxically, attempts to be
justified by the uncanny beauty and guilt of the object/thing of man’s desire.
In addition, the sublime backdrop of this aggressive crime against nature
appears in the idea of the subject of redemption—the Mother as a holy virgin
and a donor of life. So, Lacan’s two deaths, real and symbolic, can be
applied here by alleging that the allegorical death of a sign in the narrative
of the relationship between England and Scotland goes beyond the symbolic
death of culture and the real death of nature in the birth of the posthuman
body. This body, of course, is still gender/sexually distinct and is characterized
by a figure of a doll that, as in Artaud’s surrealist dramas of the 1920s,
appears with the scattered body of the object itself. The feminine body in
contemporary art and fashion is necessarily something superficial, perfectly
aestheticized, sculpturally determined by a seduction function and an
aesthetic object as a fantasy of a fictional character. In this double figure of
the beauty of a woman’s fashionable body as a colonized space, the
corporate economy of fashion is written as a global sign of the structural
perversion of the meaning of primordial nature and decadent culture.
Fashion and postmodern advertising strategies have a visual function of the
88 Chapter Three

ideological-political signifier and are marked when it comes to the

colonization of the cultural means of the postcolonial subject as Other (e.g.
Christian Dior’s concept of “Les Coloniales” in the 1980s). The body of
women in the posthuman body of androids and cyborgs remains the body
of an endless field of skin instinct, facial interventions, cosmetic surgery,
and transgressive S/M aesthetics. McQueen does not model a new “look”
for a new woman in contemporary fashion but radically deconstructs the
idea of female beauty as a natural and cultural fact in the world of consumer
signage. We might comprehend cruelty as the basic notion of these neo-
avant-garde and decadent aesthetics beyond that of beauty (Evans 2003,
141–161). It looks like McQueen was no longer dealing with the beauty of
an idealized female body but with the transgression of the idea of divinity
as a display of inadvertence in the monstrously cruel thing that belongs to
the outer and inner worlds of the global media age of narcissism, apathy and
dystopia. It is rare that we have such a case that goes beyond the boundaries
of so-called frivolity and triviality in a fashion design. Moving across the
borderlines and leaving a sign of authenticity belongs to transgression in the
very concept of freedom. The body is a medium of freedom, and McQueen
knows perfectly well what the point of it is.
In the Dante show in 1996, we are faced with experiencing the decadent
beauty of a woman as a femme fatale. The figure is appropriated from fin-
de-siècle literature and painting. Let us make a few more clarifications here.
When we introduce the figure of a femme fatale to this discursive game, we
do not think only of the problem of female emancipation and the deafening
beauty that radiates and brings discomfort into the existing order. On the
contrary, with this figure, we want to emphasize the supremacy and bodily
contingency in the understanding of contemporary fashion. Like contemporary
art, fashion at the end of history is determined by its sovereignty to no longer
takes account of anything other than itself. In this way, decadent beauty lies
in the position of transgression in all directions. The paradox is that the
concept of beauty from modern aesthetics under the auspices of the
aestheticization of the world of life takes on the task of emancipating the
subject, starting from the inscription of pure physicality as a provocation of
the social tastes of modernity. The body, therefore, becomes subject to a
double emancipation, both from the rule of the male principle of
permissibility and from the dominant performances of the female body as
something predetermined by the affective and sensual features of “nature.”
This completes the history of the body as submissive and subjected. The
freedom of the human body starts in the decadent beauty that is the direction
of death, which marks the moment of the emergence of contemporary
fashion. Therefore, fetishism has liberated apostasy nowadays, no matter
 Body Iconograms 89

how we should interpret this kind of cultural turn. Still, we could note that
there is not something undeniable here. Namely, fetishism is denoted as
expanding in all areas of design in contemporary fashion simply because
the body is a territory of the “libidinal economy,” which also denotes the
space of realizing everything that a great spectacle has to give to its
enchanting participants in its appeal to aesthetic objects (goods in the form
of excess desire). We are talking about fetishism that no longer has any
external or internal resistance to the ideas of society, culture, or politics.
This fetishism lies in itself as a spectacle of the narcissistic adventure of a
subject who strives to become what he adores and works on his discipline
of obedience to the object’s self. To determine the difference between the
fashion object and the performance of a body that does not wear clothes as
a burden of historical elegance but as a lifestyle chosen from the multitude
of opportunities of today’s consumer society, one needs to perceive what
we call a semiotic difference.4 And it is a sign of the symbolization of a body

4 The term semiotic difference assumes what is derived from Barthes’ notion of
meta-language. As is well-known from his study entitled “The Rhetoric of the
Image,” Barthes introduces this term that is extremely important for understanding
the relationship between society, politics, ideology, and culture in shaping messages
in the advertising image of a consumer lifestyle. The object becomes the bearer of
meaning, and this also means the place of mediation between the structures of social
production of myths that now no longer have a narrative perception of the world but
are primarily determined visually as a coded message. The ideology of a fashion
object works directly in the transparency of the sign, the signifier, and the signified.
So, the semiotic difference might be regarded as the key feature in the media-
constructed assemblage of photographic and filmic reproduction in contemporary
fashion. Barthes says: “We will only study the advertising image. Why? Because in
advertising the signification of the image is undoubtedly intentional; the signifieds
of the advertising message are formed a priori by certain attributes of the product
and these signifieds have to be transmitted as clearly as possible. If the image
contains signs, we can be sure that in advertising these signs are full, formed with a
view to the optimum reading: the advertising image is frank, or at least emphatic.
(…) It can thus be seen that in the total system of the image the structural functions
are polarized: on the one hand there is a sort of paradigmatic condensation at the
level of the connotators (that is, broadly speaking, of the symbols), which are strong
signs, scattered, ‘reified’; on the other a syntagmatic ‘flow’ at the level of the
denotation – it will not be forgotten that the syntagm is always very close to speech,
and it is indeed the iconic ‘discourse’ which naturalizes its symbols. Without
wishing to infer too quickly from the image to semiology in general, one can
nevertheless venture that the world of total meaning is torn internally (structurally)
between the system as culture and the syntagm as nature: the works of mass
90 Chapter Three

that is no longer a result of society and culture. Instead, the fashion object
and body as an event create new social relationships and cultural orders of
meaning.
The sexual impulsivity of the woman gains new symbolic meanings,
such as aggressive and dangerous beauty, cruelty, and the eroticism of
death. But what is new is that McQueen introduces the elements of lesbian
decadence, so it breaks the classic model of beauty and the elevation of the
fetish object of desire. But what is most interesting in this performance event
is the radical deconstruction of the historical-symbolic concept of decadence.
Instead of the deadly beauty remaining in the romantic vision of
inexperience in the unrestrained encounter with the object of the sublime,
now cracks enter the idea of decadent beauty. It is an intervention in itself
at the centre of the object-oriented transformation of women’s fashion from
the period before the aristocratic order of haute couture and the French
Revolution. McQueen deconstructs a woman’s body with inscriptions of
sexuality and eroticism as perversion and cruelty, fetishism, and death: a
plastic skeleton in a corset in photographic footage of a woman’s body
reverses a self-taught order. Fashion is a form of the socio-cultural
perversion or fetishism of goods in the spectacular visual order of signs.
When the form of decomposition works in the logic of an image without a
sign, as shown by Baudrillard, instead of the visual semiotics of fashion, it
is the transgression of the body itself as an image. The only thing left in
contemporary fashion, and this is shown in Dante, is a shocking and
provocative performance on the scene of the body as a subject and fashion
as an object of shyness and the sublime.
At the turn of the 20th century, the idea of deadly feminine beauty
deconstructed the very idea of fashion as a natural bond of the dress with
the transformations of the idea of beauty. But that is the real problem. Fear
of illness that appears with the paranoid fear of the contemporary age is at
the same time a real sign of the decadence of the global age. In the 1990s,
disease-to-death took the form of a planetary disease such as AIDS, and in
the social meaning of this disease is first a disease characterized by
decadence because minority groups of sexually different and racially
oppressed in the Third World were vulnerable to it (gay populations and
African peoples). Second, in this way, it is not just the other side of Western
Eurocentrism but the eccentric and hybrid identity of the Other as an unreal
threat to the stable order of modern body politics in the fashion apparatus or

communications all combine, through diverse and diversely successful dialectics,

the fascination of a nature, that of story, diegesis, syntagm, and the intelligibility of
a culture, withdrawn into a few discontinuous symbols which men ‘decline’ in the
shelter of their living speech” (Barthes 1980, 270, 283).
 Body Iconograms 91

dispositif. McQueen’s politics of transgression entered into a discussion of

the character of the ambivalence of the inadequate style of the late 20th
century in fashion. It is simultaneously a craving for perfect beauty and an
act of the destruction of beauty, a fascination with the object of beauty as a
sublime and strange reaction to the unfinished event of the meeting—the
terrorist act of breaking organs in the public space. What remains is the
ultimate stage of social apathy and sexual liberalism, as in Michel
Houellebecq’s novel The Elementary Particles—loneliness and autism,
apathy and narcissism in search of the lost idea of love. It is only apparent
by allegory that the fashion spectacle of the transgression of the body is
placed at the centre of the decomposed social system of the body (as
fashion).
Symbols are no longer “symbols” because they lack a metaphysical
reference of reality, whether it is an aristocratic order of high taste, which
persists in the performances of John Galliano, or of the libertine civic
society in which the body functions in the context of the total openness of
so-called marginal or aesthetic differentiation, which is a keyword of the
theoretical attempt of Lipovetsky. Simply stated, this means that lifestyle
allows an individual to be the subject of his/her own body and when he/she
stands on the edge of social survival. Anti-fashion clothing allows, thus, the
kingdom of the illusion of a narcissistic postmodern subject. Its body is
represented as a tabula rasa on which signs of affiliation are entered. In
addition, its body signifies a totem without taboos and taboos without a
totem, the perfect emptiness of all the definitions, punctum and surface,
screen and stage. Finally, we are talking about a body with the same
assemblage as a template for the architecture of deconstruction of the
modern body as a fixed and stable identity. Architecture and fashion, thus,
are the only areas of entry into the body of the metamorphic obsession and
the sublime of the contemporary age. Both are happening in the digital scape
of the object as the process of objectifying the body in the world as a ready-
made of post-industrial civilization. Chalayan’s metamorphic architecture
corresponds to the nomadic destiny of man in temporary cities and
networked societies of virtual schizophrenia of identity. On this, Caroline
Evans says that:

Chalayan’s design motifs of technological progress were shadowed by the

darker motifs of displacement, exile and uprootedness. This shadow
generated a bleak beauty that haunted the modernist purity of his
installation-like shows. (Evans 2003, 288–289)

But the body has not come out of being-to-death ever since. It did not come
out of a genetic brand without a name and did not deny the subjection of the
92 Chapter Three

digital social control machine in the global age. In contemporary fashion,

everything is bizarre and extravagant: from the structure’s fetishism to the
transparency of the body as a desiring machine. So, what seems most
significant comes from the technosphere as the way the body works in the
situation and in the context of its obsolescence. The eternal youth of fashion
stands in opposition to the traumatic destiny of ageing and the amnesia of
the living body. It might therefore all be so artificial and so replaceable as
implants and appliances in the flesh that we are faced with an experience
that reminds us of the liquidity and fluidity of cultural strings.
The last show of Plato’s Atlantis (2009) brought McQueen to the
pinnacle of his notion of body history as the history of sacrifice and the
transgression of nature and culture. Sacrifice should be understood
symbolically and ontologically. If fashion is due to the discovery of the
unconscious and desire (Freud’s psychoanalysis) and the steps in the
transgression of all social and cultural boundaries (Bataille’s theory of
religion) relative to the body as to its incarnation into the world of events,
then its destiny might be on the verge of avant-garde and decadence. In other
words, fashion denotes transgression in the very language as an unconscious
production of desire. Many theorists of design and fashion explain the
concept of the history of the body by the absence of any reference to
pastoralism and the divine innocence of nature in the age of romanticism,
although it should be apparent that the idea of transgression is the
uncanniness of nature and the sublime drifts directly into romanticism. In
addition, we have a lot of proof that the concept, just like Unheimlichkeit,
was born in the very heart of that revival of ancient history as a myth. Of
course, it is a distinctive feature of the German programme of a rebirth of
the Greek paradigm in art and philosophy in the 1800s. But, unlike the
reversion of Galliano’s neo-historical interpretation of history as a bricolage
of styles and criticism of the historical exclusion of Other—racially diverse,
gender/sexually eccentric, extravagant bodies of European decadence—
McQueen perceives history as a traumatic experience of the pain and
suffering of the body. Let us remember that this is very similar to how we
comprehend the birth of the subject in Lacan’s psychoanalysis. The trauma
precedes consciousness just as freedom in its contingency precedes the
modern notion of existence. In Plato’s Atlantis, the body was exposed in
contemporary fashion as a concept of liberty in opposition to the tyranny of
society, politics, and ideology. The alliance with Sade’s criticism of civil
society as a rationalist theatre of cruelty and perversion in the “heart of
darkness” is evident in all the allusive procedures of the great presentation
of the traumatic body of a contemporary subject. As for Lacan, he says he
is no longer a master in his home. What does McQueen point to in this
 Body Iconograms 93

ambiguity of history as traumatic allegories from Highland Rape to Plato’s

Atlantis? Nothing but the paradoxical self-referral of eroticism and terror,
horror and beauty. In the 1990s, this was underlined by the increased
morbidity and aestheticization of the narcissistic society of the spectacle.
Debord himself spoke of three stages of the spectacle:

(1) concentrated,
(2) diffused, and
(3) integrated (Debord 1994).

The last stage represents the realization of the universal perversion of the
world as the fetishism of goods/objects in the form of a digital image. The
decadence of the contemporary era is that the whole of the enlightening
social life became aesthetic in all aspects of that concept. A man emerges,
thus, as an illusory entity in the figuration of a lifestyle, not as an authentic
individual in all kinds of skills and attributes. This manner of perverted
identity transformation, in which fashion becomes an open event of an
interactive spectacle of body transgression, occurs in the likeness of a global
reality show. This is not just a shocking exaggeration in the media world.
Plato’s Atlantis undoubtedly represents an attempt at a radical change in the
overall view of the contemporary body as a transgression. Sometimes it
seems to us that this uncanny thing—contemporary fashion—has come to
the final border of the impossible and that there is no longer anywhere
further to go. Everything has already been seen in neo-avant-garde art as
shock and provocation strategies, and supposedly this would have to end
with the repetition of events that was a core of the aesthetics of Romanticism
when it propagated the idea of the ugly as a counterweight to the beautiful.
But we should not detect a problem in causing monstrous feelings and
experiences of negative catharsis. Instead, one needs to see why there is a
permanent need for the fascination with the sublime object of desire to come
to the fullness of cruelty and abjectness. Let us see how that matter evolves.
The show begins with the mythical scenes of the blue of the water, the
sky, and the archaeological power of being born out of the darkness. The
snakes and the human body in the torment of birth put the body in an event of
mystery to the sound of new age music. But the event should be perceived as
allegory, and the performance has a feature of the unrepresentable/sublime.
McQueen uses the neo-avant-garde poetry of writing the body as a picture in
the interplay of interacting bodies in the play itself. Cinematic references to
this fashion show are obvious in SF films such as Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979),
James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989), and John McTiernan’s Predator (1987).
McQueen’s main intention was to reveal some inner links with Charles
94 Chapter Three

Darwin’s theory of biological evolution and posthumanism/transhumanism,

where we can find the set of ideas that try to operate in our assemblage of
visions through the mediation of biological and technological features
concerning human advancement. The first cause and final purpose of
evolution might be realized in fashion as our dreams and hyper-reality. No
matter how deep it goes under the first, second, and third “human skin,”
these fascinating image-effects produce strange and uncanny effects in the
spectator’s attention long after he/she has watched that spectacular
inscenation of bizarre and extravagant images. Plato’s Atlantis is perfect
proof that the “iconic turn” encompasses bodies, brains, eyes, and emotions
in the synaesthetic adventure of contemporary fashion.
We cannot deny that, in this case, different strategies fascinate spectators
with the aestheticization of life, starting with the creation of the body as
experimentation. In this respect, it should be an attempt to think of the
beginning and end of the body concerning the indivisible world of objects
that surpass us. The visual achievements of contemporary technology are
mobile cameras, which, on both sides of the stage as monstrously elevated
Aliens, have no limit in every moment of life in the show on two moving
platforms that screen what is going on. What transparency and what a
sublime experience of the mixture created by the technosphere! The choice
of the title of the show undoubtedly signifies the provocation of the theory
and the overall postmodern interpretation of the world as a text. Not
coincidentally, it is the allusion to a myth that incorporates ideas of the
collapse of civilization (decadence) after its golden age and the idea of the
restoration of civilization on just another element. Water has the esoteric
meaning of ancient elements and new features of the world and humans as
a whole.
Atlantis is mentioned by Plato in dark mythical designation in two of his
dialogues—Timaeus and Critias. But McQueen does not use postmodern
irony, bricolage, pastiche and carnival figures to point out the dimensions
of the inexpressible. When models come out onto the scene, everything is
established as a mythical regression of history. The future as an upcoming
time of uncertainty and unexpectedness is no longer traumatic and full of
anxiety. It is a self-sacrificing body in a retro-futuristic display of
inadmissibility. Women’s bodies glide on the runway like the hybrid
posthuman bodies on the set of the TV show Star Trek. So, what remains of
all that is mythically constructed for the body is not clothing for cyborgs
and androids but the extravagance, like so many bodies, of the snake shoe
design, which figure the female body up to the living/dead new-age
fetishism. We can say that the body is no longer a body. It is (not) the
birthplace of the posthuman era of myth regression, which is nowhere
 Body Iconograms 95

beyond this civilization, nowhere beyond this world, beyond Baudelaire’s

empty transcendence from Paris Spleen—anywhere out of the world. The
iconograms of contemporary fashion are “here” and nowhere else. They are
in the virtual things of the apocalypse and the sacrifice of the world as a
mythical Atlantis, which is always born again in the moment of the radical
nihilism of forever secluded history. McQueen came to the threshold of the
impossible body project—the death of fashion in the decadent vision of the
mythical regression of history. There is nothing left behind the body. The
event has already happened when fashion has become the body design of
life itself. The threat of fashion does not come from the techno-fetishism of
objects that become more and more clumsy forms of cold indifference. On
the contrary, the danger is that there is no longer a free body with its own
autonomy that is searching for its right to enjoyment and liberation from all
the repressive actions of society, politics, and ideology in the global order
of capitalism. Instead, we encounter a vacant space spotted by new
alienation. Now it is feared that inside is pure anxiety and nothingness.
Looking at it from another perspective, the body’s transgression has its
profound meaning only when we are faced with uncanny circumstances in
our comprehension of the culture in which we might be witnesses and
guardians of collective memories. And fashion as a creative body design
holds that issue in all aspects of life, from youth to old age.
The paradoxical conjunction of avant-garde and decadence begins and
ends with the mythic regression of history. Fashion has been avant-garde
since its inception because it is the most visible phenomenon and symbol of
modernity. In its final stage of integral fetishism, the body became an image
without a world, an abject without objects, a mirror and a wardrobe of the
modern age, to rule things as objects and things as things. In the process of
purifying fashion from all external references, we witness the emergence of
a total fashion that is now not only exempt from the tyranny of society and
politics-ideology but has also become the liberating power of writing
differences into the body of one’s disobedience. Fashion has become a
creative design and visualization of life as such. But when design escapes
the aesthetic life and bestows it with its metamorphic appearance in an
endless series of lifestyles, then all that remains exists in a different and
radical way in this world outside the ecstasy of communication and the
tyranny of the new.
Returning to the mythical in the allegory of contemporary fashion is the
only way the body exacerbates its nullness of disease-to-death until its last
breath. However, does the body in all its metamorphic conditions not
become obsolete? Without the idea of the new Atlantis and the unborn world
of “things,” it could necessarily all be becoming just a new body celebration
96 Chapter Three

as the object of the enjoyment of energy. Creatures, animals, humans,

machines—everything just disappears into the endless archipelago of
dreams and nightmares. The disappearance of fashion designates the
beginning of a new body history. But what if the event of this new history
is just a glimpse at the upcoming darkness of the world in visions and
images of dreams? And there is nothing more than this endless space of the
uncanny and fascinating—a deep blue.

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 CHAPTER FOUR

BODY AND LANGUAGE:

UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FASHION
IN CROATIA SINCE THE 1960S

KATARINA NINA SIMONýIý

TRANSLATED BY IVANA LUKICA

Full creative freedom present in the process of clothing design since the
1960s has influenced the intensive theoretical questioning of the relationship
between fashion and art, their synergy, sameness and opposition, prevalent
during the 1990s (Kim 1998; Martin 1999; Miller 2007). Garment forms
and surface manipulation techniques were observed as expressions of
artistic production indivisible from the body as the medium. The emphasis
on the body in this action of fashion and art is responsible for establishing
new paradigms, especially that of deepening knowledge of the performative
character of fashion. However, Ingrid Loschek concludes that theoretical
orientations toward the connections between art and fashion are the fruits of
new class identities formed by political, intellectual, and cultural interventions
resulting in art expanding into fashion (Loschek 2009, 167). Their fusion
especially intensified with the development of computer technologies and
science. In a contemporary society of digital culture based on the legacy of
late twentieth-century transhumanism, new technologies penetrate art at the
expense of traditional, conventional and conservative production techniques,
especially in fashion design. In such a way, the garment takes on the
character of utopian visions in the real and virtual worlds while the body is
subject to imaginative manipulation thanks to digital progress. It is a
substantial step back from a century of playing the game of body affirmation
or negation by means of a garment. The contemporary age abandoned this
established pattern; clothing no longer has such an important role in
achieving the ideal body, and interventions now occur on the body itself.
We live in the era of body culture. As a result, the observation of the body
100 Chapter Four

as an iconic allegory of the spirit of the time is not surprising. The key role
the body plays in the formation of society’s taste was emphasized by
Bourdieu’s term habitus in 1984. On the other hand, Entwistle states the
crucial role time and space play in our relationships with our own body and
those of others (Entwistle 2015). Loschek, too, emphasizes the body as a
crucial element of fashion expression that can don objects or surfaces, not
just clothes. It is these terms that follow Jennifer Craik’s anthropological
line of thinking (Craik 1993). She analyzes the phenomenon of fashion as a
general expression of acculturation, and the body as an essential part of
cultural re-examination makes its presence in twentieth-century conceptual
art unsurprising. If we look briefly at the key moments of art and fashion
permeation during the twentieth century in order to better understand the
climate in which Miroslav Šutej’s utopian research of clothing and body
synergy took place in 1960s Croatia, it is necessary to emphasize the
contribution of the great clothing reformer Sonia Delaunay. Avant-garde
artists of the early twentieth century laid the foundation for the inclusion of
clothing items into new expressions of art concepts. Delaunay’s anti-fashion
dress was called the robe simultanée (1913) and was a reflection of
Orphistic principles based on simultaneous contrast. Delaunay used them to
achieve a stronger synthesis of body and clothes.1 At the same time, Italian
futurists considered fashion evil (Stern 2004, 29). Their ambition regarding
totality could not ignore clothing that naturally belonged to the realm of art.
However, their interest in clothing was not primarily motivated by the desire
to promote minor art but to expand art into every aspect of human life.
Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) de-structured clothing by visually destroying
the wearer’s anatomy. The goal of systematically using asymmetric cuts and
permeating colours was to achieve a general, dynamic effect similar to his
paintings. By trying to avoid a depressive approach to clothing, Balla
wanted to completely eliminate the traditional shape of clothing and the
process of sewing. He included the wearer as an active participant (modifier)
by allowing them to change their form depending on their current mood.2
This meant that the wearer was no longer subject to clothing, that dressing
oneself no longer depended on fashion, and that fashion had lost its purpose.

1 According to her own words, Delaunay was not interested in contemporary fashion.

She did not attempt to innovate the cut but to revive the art of clothing by using new
fabrics in a wide variety of colours (Stern 2004, 64–65).
2 Alternative materials and innovative shapes were advised for construction:

aluminium, wooden or metal ties, asymmetric shoes, trapeze handbags, hats with
built-in details, shiny materials, body painting, etc. However, traditional decorations
such as geometric and floral embroidered motifs were advised as well (Buxbaum
2005).
 Body and Language 101

The user was given control over changes in dressing and had to enter the
aesthetic sphere and co-operate with the designer. Within these limitations
(in contact with the designer), the clothing user was able to express their
own creativity, and the clothing became an open work of art presented on
their body. Conceptualism and Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades (1916)
changed art’s attitude towards wearable clothing products. Artists such as
Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau and Méret Oppenheim were focused on the
symbolic character of clothing. The body was left out of the presentation of
clothing, but the dematerialized presence of a human being was still
physically and spiritually imprinted onto the garment (Loschek 2009, 167).
The 1960s were revolutionary in the social, technological, geopolitical,
and scientific sense as well as in providing a wide spectrum of artistic forms
of expression. Consumer habits diversified. The younger hippie generation
opposed social norms, especially the political ideology that justified war as
the protection of the oppressed. They supported the universal idea of
freedom, which was reflected in their attitudes towards body autonomy,
rejected the stereotype of typically male or female clothing items, and
promoted unisex clothing. Moreover, young musicians defied gender
identity through clothes. For example, David Bowie wore a Michael Fish
dress on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World (1970/1971). His
androgynous body and specific taste in clothing and performance enabled
fashion and the media to toy with gender identity. In the twenty-first
century, Lady Gaga generated enormous media interest by flirting with
gender identity when introducing herself to the world dressed as a man on
the cover of Vogue Hommes Japan (2010).
In addition, the 1960s were revolutionary in conquering space that
influenced new ideas of bodies’ and clothes’ abilities by declaring a new
language of fashion. New synthetic fabrics in intense colours were presented
that affirmed and exposed the body like a second skin. This was especially
visible in American sportswear and space-age fashion. The American
company DuPont (1802) and the British company Imperial Chemical
Industries (ICI) (1926) manufactured polyamide-, polyester-, and
polyurethane-based fibres as well as polyvinyl derivatives. Synthetic fabrics
made of such fibres offered a new perspective on the possibilities of
garments and contributed to the undoing of the traditional distinction
between daywear and eveningwear. The elastic garment offered freedom of
movement and a new understanding of comfort. In addition to these textile
innovations, futuristic or space-age fashion was influenced by the Space
102 Chapter Four

Race between the Soviet Union3 and the United States of America, which
was closely followed in Croatia as well. Through their themes and costumes,
television shows such as Star Trek (1966) or films such as Barbarella
(1968) contributed to the spectacle of uncertain expectations and media
coverage of conquering new space frontiers and promoting human presence
in new worlds. The Parisian designer Paco Rabanne, the costume designer
on Barbarella, was the main representative of futuristic fashion alongside
Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges. Their body of work and the artistic
atmosphere in Paris were paramount for the turn towards the fashion of the
Croatian artist Miroslav Šutej, one of the representatives of the New
Tendencies movement, which foreshadowed the beginning of the digital era
in Yugoslavia (Bousfield 2021).

1. The new wave in 1960s Croatia

After World War II, Croatia became a part of the Socialist Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia (1945–1992), colloquially called Tito’s Yugoslavia. The new
government did not swear an oath to the king and nation as the governments
of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had but only to the nation. In his 1946 Iron
Curtain speech delivered in the United States, Winston Churchill warned of
the Soviet influence on Europe and colourfully described the division of the
world into two blocs: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,
an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent” (Turner Vuþetiü 2008).
The new social and political system in Croatia, one of the republics in
Yugoslavia, strongly influenced all spheres of culture. Women were
encouraged to be equal to men in the building of a socialist society and dress
in simple, comfortable, practical, and functional clothing. Individualism in
fashion and emphasizing the body were not widely accepted. Moreover, the
time and money spent on superficial matters that did not contribute to
socialist progress and the wider good, such as excessive body care or
fashion, were not considered beneficial to society (Simonþiþ 2019).
However, the unwritten social rules in fashion and dressing were not
imposed on art. Quite the opposite. The development of visual arts,
architecture, and technology was strongly encouraged. The modernism in
the design of real and imaginary objects stood out, especially that of the
Experimental Atelier (abbreviated to Exat 51), which was established in

3The race began with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 into space in 1957,
continued with Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space in 1961, and ended with Neil
Armstrong’s landing on the Moon in 1969.
 Body and Language 103

1951 in Zagreb and remained active until 1956.4 The split between
Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union as well as Tito’s rejection of the
Informbiro resolution certainly benefited the group. This act contributed to
the atmosphere of artistic freedom that was until then dominated by socialist
realism. The Exat 51 group produced sophisticated modernist art, tried to
revive the spirit and principles of the avant-garde with their manifesto, and
supported abstract art, contemporary visual communication, and the desire
to join together all the disciplines of fine arts.
Their efforts laid strong foundations for modern art to flourish in
socialist Yugoslavia, as was made evident in the Cold War Modern: Design
1945–70 exhibition held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in
2008 (Turner Vuþetiü 2008). Croatia was in a specific situation during the
period of Exat 51’s activity: it was a socialist republic under a strong
influence of western consumerist habits (Duda 2005, 6). During the 1960s,
several factors influenced the public’s fashion taste: for example, fairs,
fashion shows, and television broadcasts of music festivals such as
Sanremo. The primary influence, however, was the fashion magazine Svijet
(from 1953) and fashion segments in daily newspapers such as Globus,
Slobodna Dalmacija, Plavi vjesnik, Veþernji list, and others. Yugoslavia,
situated between the two blocs, increasingly turned its gaze towards the
west, which was especially visible in the productions of Exat 51 as well as
the constructivist ideas of the international art movement New Tendencies
in the 1960s. Alongside a somewhat older generation of Croatian artists,5
one of its members was Miroslav Šutej (1936–2005), whose op-art was
freed of any type of narration (Denegri 2003; Denegri 2007; Makoviü 1975).
The work of New Tendencies, characterized by new technologies in
communication with the audience and which leaned towards op-art and
introduced video art, bio-art and robotics, was presented in international
exhibitions from 1961 until 1973. The social role of artists as promotors of
the idea of collective work as opposed to that of the lonely genius was
especially important to them. Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, was the
unofficial cultural capital of Yugoslavia, whose political and economic
power was concentrated in Belgrade. All the important festivals such as the
Music Biennale Zagreb, the Genre Experimental Film Festival (GEFF), and
the animated film festival Animafest Zagreb, founded in 1961, 1963, and
1972 respectively, were held in Zagreb (Fritz n.d.). The Tendencies 4

4 Its members included the painters Ivan Picelj, Vlado Kristl, and Aleksandar Srnec
and the architects Bernardo Bernardi, Zdravko Bregovac, Zvonimir Radiü, Božidar
Rašica, Vjenceslav Richter, and Vladimir Zarahoviü.
5 Vjenceslav Richter, Julije Knifer, Vladimir Bonaþiü, Ivan Picelj, and Aleksandar

Srnec.
104 Chapter Four

exhibition held in Zagreb in 1968 focused the audience’s attention on

computer art. It was symbolic of a society on the verge of great change and
a world ready to enter a new future in which scientists would take primacy
over traditional artists, collective production would supersede individual
production, and reason would have a privileged position over intuition in
art.

2. Miroslav Šutej and the utopian vision of surface

Miroslav Šutej’s 1963 drawing Bombardiranje oþnog živca (Bombardment
of the Optic Nerve) was presented with the works of other New Tendencies
members at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1965 op-art
exhibition The Responsive Eye. Šutej’s work at the time included research
into optical, dynamic structures and abstract surfaces on which certain
forms want to conquer the space of new media by forming image-object and
sculpture-object.6 These objects were exhibited in the Yugoslav pavilion at
the Venice Biennale in 1968 (Makoviü 1996). However, Šutej’s name is
recognizable not only for his op-art work but also for his interest in fashion
and clothing objects, which was influenced by New Tendencies’
constructivism. Artists of Russian constructivism were expected to
contribute to the destruction of the old world by creating objects in line with
revolutionary values. Among the many everyday objects, clothing was
especially important because it reflected class distinctions more than any
other. As classes no longer existed in the new revolutionary world, they had
to be eliminated by new forms of clothing as well. The focus was on a new
type of clothing as a symbolic reflection of social cohesion and the
communist system. Vladimir Tatlin’s constructivist clothing is an example
of an anti-fashion idea in which the author regards clothing as a machine
(Buxbaum 2005; Stern 2004, 48). The anti-fashion principle guided the
artist Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958) as well. Her clothing (1917) was
constructed out of basic geometrical shapes: squares, circles, and triangles
(Buxbaum 2005). When presenting clothing, the focus lay on form and
colour, while the body as the medium of the presentation was of secondary
importance. In the totalitarian Soviet Union, the crucial element of the
design was not its aesthetics but its social impact, which was particularly
visible in the glorification of sports and stadiums, where the uniform and
the body in service of the country were celebrated. Šutej designed the
Croatian football team jerseys with their iconic red and white squares in the
6 Šutej’s work, outside of op-art, consists of creating the Croatian coat of arms and
flag, political posters, and the opening credits of the prime-time news show Dnevnik
in the 1990s (Kiš 2013).
 Body and Language 105

1990s when Croatia became an independent country. In his own words

taken from the daily newspaper at the time, “If we think of football matches
as a great spectacle, not only of sport, which they actually are, then I see a
lot of opportunities for imaginative creators” (Kiš 2013).
The constructivist principle of clothing that nullifies class distinction can
be found in Šutej’s fashion sketches. However, Šutej’s interest in clothing
surfaces in the 1960s was especially close to the ideas of the suprematist
artist Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), who promoted the introduction of
clothing products into the world of art as opposed to the constructivists, who
transposed them from art into industrial production (Stern 2004, 60).
Malevich’s 1923 watercolour of suprematist clothes of the future points to
a strong interest in the functionality of clothing and the need for the synergy
of white, black, red, and gold geometric shapes and the surface, i.e., the
garment. He developed his sketches until the 1930s, but the garments were
never realized. The sketches show the body in a subordinate position to the
clothing or as an extension of the clothing’s surface (Sportsmen, 1931). The
1930s sketches of clothing compositions (Suprematist Figure, 1931–1932)
in which the author plays with and manipulates the body are particularly
interesting. For instance, certain figures are missing arms or are physically
separated from the ground while their heads are projected onto the infinite
sky.
Šutej’s anti-fashion sketches from the late 1960s were similar to the
utopian character of Malevich’s never-realized sketches of clothing of the
future. Šutej’s sketches are the result of his stay in Paris and his contact with
trends inspired by futuristic space-age fashion as well as by the dominance
of New Tendencies.
After receiving a French government scholarship in 1964, Šutej left for
Paris, where he came into contact with a very versatile Parisian art scene
that included kinetic art, geometric abstraction, art informel, art brut, and
new realism, as well as American pop art. However, he also contemplated
fashion and clothing, which is not surprising as this interest went back to
his school days and university studies (Pintariü 2013, 22). Parisian fashion
at the time was imbued with futuristic trends, visible in the work of Paco
Rabanne, Pierre Cardin, and André Courrèges. In 1964, Courrèges presented
a new look, the so-called Moon Girl look, inspired by the omnipresent
mania for the conquest and exploration of space. He based the collection on
synthetic materials, silver miniskirts with geometric patterns, headdresses
shaped like space helmets, glasses with eye slits, and high, white PVC boots
with low stacked heels, the so-called Courrèges boot. The material of the
future was plastic in intense colours. Courrèges built his collections, much
like the avant-garde artists Stepanova and Malevich before him, on
106 Chapter Four

geometric shapes: squares, trapezoids, circles, and triangles. Šutej followed

Courrèges’ body of work, as evidenced by his 1964 collage that included a
photograph of Courrèges’ model obtained from a Parisian fashion magazine
(Pintariü 2013, 22).
However, unlike Stepanova and Malevich, Courrèges, Rabanne, and
Cardin were focused on new materials and technologies in textile
production and created their collections in collaboration with the textile
industries. Innovative construction and unconventional materials as well as
a sense of experimentation became features of the avant-garde fashion of
the decade (Kamitsis 1999). Cardin presented his signature look consisting
of geometric shapes and motifs as early as 1954 by negating the female
silhouette with his bubble dresses. Four years later, he presented a unisex
collection and laid the historic foundation for questioning gender identity in
a fashion that would peak at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In
1968, Cardin presented his new, ultralight, waterproof, three-dimensional
material called Cardine (dynel), which was crease-, fire-, and acid-resistant.
Rabanne shaped mini dresses out of metal discs. He presented Twelve
Experimental Dresses in 1964 and Twelve Unwearable Dresses in 1966.
The dresses were highly sculptural, constructed of plastic squares and
triangles connected with metal rings. In this Parisian, futuristic fashion
atmosphere, Šutej started a series of fashion sketches in intense colours that
evoked the appearance of new synthetic materials as well as alternative
plastic or metal accessories in various geometric shapes. The sketches were
presented in 1971 in a graphics portfolio symbolically entitled Antifashion.7
However, the first sketches were made in 1965, and he continued creating
them until 1974.
In the preface of Antifashion (Horvat Pintariü 1971), Croatian art
historian Vera Horvat Pintariü points out Rabanne’s attitude towards
women’s clothing that goes through a phase of destruction as the key to
understanding Šutej’s sketches. She defines destruction as a process of
ending all established traditional methods of clothes production. Clothing
created by new production techniques required new terminology, which
Horvat Pintariü took from Rabanne and called anti-clothing. Clothing
became a critical instrument and a tool of a specific social group. Women
no longer dress but disguise themselves, Rabanne said. His insight into the
historical role of clothing and its relationship with the body was especially
important to Horvat Pintariü. The vehement repression of the body that was
entirely accepted by civilization is based on forced Church authority and the
sinful body present in western culture since the Middle Ages. On the other

7The album contained five original serigraphs by Šutej and was published in sixty
copies, signed and enumerated by the author himself.
 Body and Language 107

hand, the nude look and body affirmation through fashion that Horvat
Pintariü recognized in the hippie generation marked the end of conservative
civic absolutism. The new generation, whose visual appearance has been
inspired by different cultures, build garments by freely choosing old and
new materials. This created ready-made pieces that define a new concept of
the clothing object. In order to describe the new principle of dressing which
was also present in Šutej’s sketches, Horvat Pintariü used terminology
borrowed from the fine arts. She treated the design of a clothing composition
as conceptual work and called the product an object rather than clothes. She
continued by saying that Courrèges’ geometry and Rabanne’s metal mobiles
were disintegrated by the new “wild” culture she called anti-fashion. It
created a different iconosphere and a new psychosociology, annulled the
difference between male and female clothing items, between useful and
useless, moral and immoral, unique and serial, salon and the street, flea
market and boutique, folk handicraft and the synthetics of the technological
era, and the western and the distant eastern civilizations (Horvat Pintariü
1971). Therefore, it was not anti-fashion as defined by J. C. Flügel in 19318
or Ted Polhemus in 1978,9 but a completely new, wild culture reflected in
clothing objects with a futuristic-utopian character in Šutej’s fashion
sketches. By creating imaginary models, he treated clothes like a second
skin that sometimes opens in forbidden places or intertwines and stretches
around the body like a gossamer membrane. The membrane plays a game
of spatial covering and uncovering. Šutej’s vision of clothing was not
merely that of thermal protection but an extension of functions possible for
the human body. Namely, it was a machine that enables taking off and
landing, a lattice-structured signalling device with flexible antennae, a
protective armour with magnetic plates and electrodes, or simply a pressure
suit for outer-space excursions. This clothing fiction was never realized and
consequently never used. This, however, is insignificant if we think of the
role of utopian projects in the history of human creation, change, and
discovery. The graphics of the clothing from the future utilized intense
colours and curved shapes similar to mobiles and suggested the use of
8 In The Psychology of Clothes (1931), Flügel differentiates between the fixed
costume and modish costume. These two types have opposite attitudes towards
space and time. The first type changes slowly, takes up less space, and is different
for each social entity. It matches traditional clothing. The second type changes
rapidly but is quite similar in all areas of the world that share a culture and
communicate in appropriate forms.
9 In 1978, Polhemus called the fixed costume anti-fashion, and the modish costume

fashion. His aim was to point out the form of expression that connected fashion and
anti-fashion as a reflection of social and political circumstances, the ways they
adapted to each other, and the places of their presentation (Polhemus 1978).
108 Chapter Four

industrial materials. The two-dimensional shape formed by a structural

black line had a pronounced gender identity with the representation of
female breasts. The fascination with emphasizing gender identity by its
discovery through garments was especially present in the series of black and
white sketches. The figures are static, arms and legs spread, and the body is
reduced to being a carrier of clothing objects. Nonetheless, even though the
body was not of primary interest, the clothing objects cannot exist without
it. With his monumental garments, Šutej hid the bodies’ characteristics from
the observers, thus encouraging them to create their own interpretations.
However, clothing objects similar to mobiles contributed to the creation of
new silhouettes with added physical value (three heads, four arms). It was a
vision or a premonition of a digital age in which humankind is a reflection
of a hybrid being woven from human characteristics and new shapes and
materials. Artistic visions encouraged questions about the function of
clothing in the future, its influence on forming collective and personal
identities, and particularly the role of the body trapped in the clothing object
of the future.
The focus on science and new technologies as the starting point of
artistic reflections present in Šutej’s sketches was characteristic of the New
Tendencies movement. However, the idea that intuitive artistic production
would be replaced by science, technology, and industrial production, in
other words, the rational approach, never came to be. This was already
evident in the Tendencies 5 exhibition showcasing Victor Vasarely that took
place in Zagreb in 1973. It was replaced by new types of art and production
that again stemmed from the performance of one artist and their intuitive
questioning instead of the collective, rational, and scientific approach. Body
art, performance art, land art, and conceptual art became dominant forms.
Nonetheless, Šutej continued to share his ideas and experiences of clothes
and fashion with the students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where
he taught from 1978 until he died in 2005.
 Body and Language 109

Figure 1. Two graphic sheets from Miroslav Šutej’s Antifashion, 1971. Held in the
National and University Library in Zagreb. Print collection. Reference number:
GZGM 111 šut 3.

3. Miroslav Šutej’s anti-fashion influence on students

of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb
In the 1990s, Miroslav Šutej nurtured a sensibility towards op-art in students
of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb as well as conducting research into
fashion and clothing. A group of female artists called Daklelososi,10 several
being Šutej’s students at the Academy, tested the garments’ performative
character and the role of the body in their work. According to Anÿelkoviü
Džambiü and Bitanga (2021), the group was part of an alternative culture
that formed in the post-war years of the 1990s that were marked by
uncertainty, trauma, and the imposition of new ideologies. The name
Daklelososi was created by the well-tried Dada method of random choice
and the merging of that which cannot be merged: choosing words by closing
10 These were Ivana Franke, Gordana Košþec, Jasminka Konþiü, Ana Kadoiü, Ida

Mati, Ksenija Domanþiü, Ljubinka Grujin, Danijela Stankoviü, Mia Krkaþ, and Iva-
Matija Bitanga. Koraljka Kovaþ joined the group later on. The group was further
expanded with associate members.
110 Chapter Four

the eyes and pointing a finger at a randomly chosen page of a book that
happened to be on the table (a monograph of the painter and Academy
professor Nives Kavuriü Kurtoviü). The two words chosen by the index
finger were dakle (Eng. therefore) and lososi (Eng. salmon, plural). They
held their first anti-fashion performance as students in 1996 at Gjuro II, a
nightclub in Zagreb. The fashion collections were extremely anti-fashion in
character. The clothing objects were made of paper, batting, cellophane,
wood, wire, canvas, nylon, carpeting, cardboard, and textiles, and the
presentation was highly performative. Anti-models whose bodies were not
in line with the runway beauty standards of the time were hired (Anÿelkoviü
Džambiü and Bitanga 2021). The group introduced humour and intense
colours into fashion but did not have a manifesto of social activism or
criticism like the Dada performances at the beginning of the twentieth
century. It was a group of young women who, at a time of transition and an
oppressive political atmosphere, entertained themselves and the audience
with humour and silliness, exploring the artistic elements of clothing
surfaces and the role of the body. Unlike Šutej’s utopian visions of fashion
that were never realized and did not focus on the body, Daklelososi’s
starting point was always the dialectical role of the body concerning the
costume, the audience, the artist, and the wearer. What came out as the result
of this goofy stage play was the liberation of the body as well as the
liberation from the socially imposed behavioural boundaries embedded in
the individual. Liberation encompassed the collective and the personal
artistic spirit. In this process, the presented clothes made of alternative
materials primarily served as costumes and the reason for the public display
of the body that would become liberated through this ritual. Daklelososi’s
primary goal was a performance as an artistic act and not the development
of clothes as a vision of future fashion, which was true of Šutej. Another of
Šutej’s students who was especially engaged in fashion, fabrics, garments,
and the body followed in his footsteps in the medium of graphic art. His
name is Silvio Vujiþiü (born in 1978).

4. Silvio Vujiþiü: The new language of fashion

New Tendencies’ influence on art and even fashion is present to this day.
Enthusiasm for the group has continued since the 1980s due to new
technologies and computer art. An increasing number of media artists and
fashion designers revitalize the principles of New Tendencies and discuss
the relationship between art, technology, and social change.
Silvio Vujiþiü has emphasized the importance Šutej and his attitudes to
fashion have had on his own work in fashion and art. In doing so, he
 Body and Language 111

describes Šutej as an admirer of the American photographer Richard

Avedon and fashion as a phenomenon of innovative artistic expression. He
states that Šutej was interested in inventive processes in fashion such as
exploring screen printing on textiles, applying printing on hair, or making
tattoos based on his own unique drawings as fashion accessories. Vujiþiü
adds that Šutej primarily wanted to be a fashion innovator, a pioneer of new
ideas, views, and approaches. His interest was not focused on the realization
of garments but utopian ideas recorded exclusively in art templates of
clothing silhouettes. Šutej’s artistic fashion ideas, especially during
mentorship, served as road signs for Vujiþiü’s creative development during his
studies. In addition, Vujiþiü was very much influenced by deconstructivism,
archiving clothing items or clothing-based forensics, concepts noticeable in
the work of Martin Margiela and Hussein Chalayan. He continuously
analyzed the language of fashion, questioning the meaning of terms and
exploring the boundaries of and the interplay between art and fashion.
Combining graphic art with textile and clothing production research, he
dealt with the topics of current political and social events in addition to
transience, death, and transformation. He is the author of several fashion
brands: the E.A. 1/1 S.V.11 ready-to-wear collection for men and women,
Label 1/1, which consists of pop-up projects and streetwear, and E.A. 1/1
S.V. UNIQUE PIECE, which offers made-to-measure fashion and is
characterized by an experimental approach to fashion, materials, printing,
and production processes. His 2006 Exposed to Virus and Fashion
collection has been singled out from his rich body of work as the first
example of the synergy of new technologies, programming, and the role of
the body in fashion (Golub and Mrduljaš 2013). It is important to notice that
Vujiþiü devises and single-handedly carries out all the phases of production,
from fabric to garment. In the aforementioned collection, he used digital
technology in fabric production by first creating an algorithm for weaving
that the computer later used to produce the fabric. However, he added an
HIV-like virus to the algorithm, which changed the final appearance of the
fabric by deforming parts of the motifs. Namely, pixels were replaced by
squares in different tones of grey. Each tone was recognized as a new type
of weave not compatible with the next weave at all points of connection,
which led to the dissolution of the surface and yarn breakage. The result was
a mistake in weaving that would be interpreted as waste material in

11 E.A. stands for Épreuves d’Artiste (Eng. artist’s proof): an impression of a print

taken during the printmaking process in order to see the state of a plate (or stone, or
woodblock). A proof may show an incomplete image, a trial impression, that in
modern practice describes an impression of the finished work identical to the
numbered copies.
112 Chapter Four

production. Nevertheless, considering that Vujiþiü’s concept was directed

at pointing out the devastating consequences HIV had had since the 1980s,
a fabric with a flaw was the expected result. He presented the collection
made of wearable virus-infected fabric in 2006 on the premises of the
textiles factory Tkz in Zagreb, hiring Berlin porn stars, whose profession is
at most risk from HIV, as models.
As the pinnacle of the utopian vision of the digital and information age
and the synergy of human art and science, the focus is directed on his recent
work Soll, a programme made in cooperation with the architect Miro Roman
in 2020. Soll is a fashion designer, artificial intelligence, search engine, and
an image cloud, and it develops to become something more. He lives on the
internet but manifests physically in his fashion brand E.A. 1/1 A.I. His
intelligence stems from various places – his database contains the entire
E.A. 1/1 S.V. visual body of work spanning 20 years, his textual brain
originates from written archives of Vujiþiü’s work, and his inspiration
comes from theoretical texts and films. Soll uses a generative adversarial
network (GAN) to articulate new concepts of clothes and the faces of the
wearers. In order to self-organize images (such can be found on
www.ea11sv.com), he uses self-organizing maps (SOMs), i.e., an artificial
neuron network (Joka 2021).

Figure 2. Soll fashion design: Look 1_Soll SS21 and Look 2_Soll SS21. © Silvio
Vujiþiü. Retrieved from https://ea11sv.com/product-category/ea11ai/.

When Vujiþiü and Roman conceptualized the designer, they wanted to give
him a mythological background. According to Soll’s made up genealogy,
his biological mother is the personalized search engine Alice_ch3n81
(https://ask.alice-ch3n81.net/), which was devised and created by Roman,
 Body and Language 113

and his three biological fathers are the Greek gods Chronos and Apollo and
the human Silvio Vujiþiü. His name was created by combining individual
letters from the names Chronos, Apollo, and Silvio (E.A. 1/1 S.V n.d.b).
Soll is artificial intelligence. He acts independently. His work can be
reinterpreted, i.e., it can be influenced in the sense of production. He is an
instrument of sorts that can be used to communicate by text and images, and
anyone who accesses the ThinkSoll search engine on the new website can
experience such communication.
Soll designs atmospheres, concepts, clothing silhouettes, and
clothing/textile textures, as well as anticipates new faces of models. He
mirrors images, folds them, identifies objects in them, and anticipates new
designs, which he generates by producing visual material. He does not
create cuts for garments; they are made by programmes that download them
from 3D models. Soll designed a collection that is sold on the website in the
form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and is traded with cryptocurrencies. In
the visual presentation of new garments based on Vujiþiü’s photo archive of
models and garments in his collections (E.A. 1/1 S.V n.d.a), new
constructions of clothing and body are designed. The borders between
human tissue and garment do not exist in image formations that merge the
body and the clothing object. Hybrid shapes are created, visions of fashion
trends and bodies of the near future. Presented in partially blurred outlines,
they contribute to the effect of synergy between two entities (human and
material) that become one in the performative sense. Their descriptive
ambiguity opens a lot of space for the creation of new paradigms concerning
their reciprocity, functionality, production, and final appearance.
In addition to the collection of fashion images, Soll started producing
physical garments, the first of which was presented at the Device_art 7.021
festival of art, robotics, and new technologies at the Museum of
Contemporary Art-Zagreb on December 3, 2021. Soll exhibited a coded
jacket entitled Your image is my weave and all I want is a racing coat. It is
a garment materialized by combining machine intelligence, data from the
digital archive of images, and a repertoire of cuts and colours from the biker
culture. The jacket was exhibited with the documents detailing its creation.
Soll started the design process by collecting images from the Device_art
7.021 catalogue, which is considered theft. By appropriating all accessible
data, Soll manipulated the exhibition to highlight the racing coat. In his
design process, he sorted and classified objects, colours, concepts, and
people in all the images of artistic work. By playing with machine
intelligence, the recognition of objects, artworks, and their energies, Soll
synthesized his newest fetish – a rare, luxurious garment woven from artists’
works. He did not design the jacket in the usual way: he wrote it. Soll coded
114 Chapter Four

ten songs into his fantasy of 168 jacquard weaving patterns. After he wrote
the jacket, he translated its visual code into twelve colours characteristic of
modern biker equipment that were included in his library of fetish. Woven
in new colours and indexed by the means with which Device_art speaks of
the world, the racing coat became a uniquely coded garment of the moment
without the possibility of reproduction (Vizkultura 2021). Soll does not
design garments for specific bodies. The identity, appearance, and abilities
of the body are of secondary importance to him. He focuses his interest on
the clothing object, which he tries to enrich with the ease, fastness and
freshness of the race, the softness, the instability and abstract nature of data,
and the ingenuity and technical virtuosity of the artist. Added functions of
the body by means of a garment—which were areas of interest for different
designers and artists such as the members of the Dada movement and
futurism, space age designers, Hussein Chalayan, Kosuke Tsumura,
Alexander McQueen, or Iris von Herpen—are abandoned by Soll in favour
of the new computer language (script) of fashion production. A new script,
a new fashion language, and a new form of clothing and textile production
are at the centre of his interest, and they bring us back to the 1960s principles
of New Tendencies in which art and computer science intertwine. In order
to better explain Soll’s affiliation with the new, fashion-artistic expression
characterized by new technologies and the importance of the execution
technique in the understanding of the artistic process, Roman wove the
Greek word techne (IJȑȤȞȘ, tékhnƝ, ‘craft, art’; ancient Greek: [ték‫ހ‬n‫)]ޝܭ‬
(Online Etymology Dictionary n.d.), which he linked to a philosophical
term relating to fabrication which comes from the Proto-Indo-European root
teks- meaning to weave and to fabricate. If the Old Greek root of the word
art contains a synonym for production and weaving, it is quite logical to
deepen contemporary production with new technologies in fashion and
textile production. The new fashion language of production requires the
studying of new reading and writing skills in order to better understand
Soll’s fashion-artistic objects. It is as if we are at the turning point of a new
age, much like the man at the end of the fifteenth century who was caught
off guard by the discovery of a printing machine. Readily available written
words and books demanded a new literacy, unlike the reading of frescoes
and paintings of the early Middle Ages. In order to understand Soll, we find
ourselves at the beginning of a new age in which technologically advanced
production created a new fashion vocabulary. The need to study the digital
language enables the understanding, monitoring, and guiding of artificial
intelligence, and Soll intends to keep the human presence in his production
process. In contrast, a garment from the sixteenth century once more
 Body and Language 115

becomes a priceless status symbol whose worth is hard to determine given

its demanding production process.

Figure 3. Soll: Your image is my weave and all I want is a racing coat and Soll coat
elements. Device_art 7.021. Photo: Damir Žižiü © Silvio Vujiþiü.

Figure 4. Soll coat patterns. © Silvio Vujiþiü, 2021.

116 Chapter Four

5. Matija ýop: The new body in art and fashion

While the prophetic vision of Silvio Vujiþiü’s contemporary fashion is
directed towards a hybrid production of man and artificial intelligence, it is
important to note the work of Matija ýop as well. Coming from Croatia,
ýop understands the artistic heritage of New Tendencies and the
representatives of performance art. He is educated in humanities, technical
sciences, and art.12 In addition, he developed his creativity and research
interests extensively during his studies at the Royal College of Art in
London. He identifies as an artist, although his work includes fashion design
as well as costume design. He has stated in conversation13 that he is
somewhere in between two fields that are very close to him: art and fashion.
He believes that a brand-new field is being formed in contemporary creative
expression (a synergy of art and fashion, especially its performative nature)
in which he acts as only one of the triertempters (a translation of the
invented Croatian word pokušaþ, meaning someone who tries the public,
tries their hand at forming and defining a new field, and attempts to create
the foundations of a new field14). Fashion is becoming a form of artistic
expression regarded as equally valuable as traditional art, which is evident
in the inclusion of garments in the permanent exhibition of the Pompidou
Centre in Paris. This holds France’s national collection of modern and
contemporary art, mostly world masterpieces, and has just recently started
to view fashion as part of contemporary art practices. ýop’s clothing
products were chosen as the first exhibits in the medium of fashion design
in 2021.15 ýop returns to the principles of New Tendencies in his work and
involves various associates from the fields of science and art in the idea of
collective production. The majority of his work was created in cooperation
with architects, computer scientists, and scientists in other natural and
technical fields. As part of his education in London, he devoted himself to
studying digital language, which led to his employment at the fashion
houses of Vivienne Westwood (2019) and Alexander McQueen (2020). His
exploration of digital language deepened in different mediums while always
12 He studied Croatian language and literature at the Josip Juraj Strossmayer
University of Osijek and graduated at the Faculty of Textile Technology in Zagreb.
13 Stated during his guest lecture at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering,

University of Ljubljana, on December 2, 2021.

14 ýop used this term on the Izvan formata TV show on December 2, 2021.
15 Two clothing products, Type 1 and Type 2, belong to the Object 12-1 series and

were designed in 2012. The collection won the Grand Prix Habitus Baltija in Riga
in 2013. The third dress, Recollection, Type M1 negative, is part of the Recollection
collection created in 2017. According to ýop, all three dresses are the result of
specific pursuits of the modular system of building in the medium of fashion.
 Body and Language 117

focusing on the body, which he abstracts or gives additional value. He is

particularly engaged in the exploration of the female body. By investigating
the body’s performative character, clothing becomes just one of the
segments of the design process. He is more inclined to the concept of an
exhibition than that of a fashion show or a fashion performance. The recent
exhibition entitled Proces (2021), curated by Tamara Christo at the Croatian
Designers Association, was focused on the phases of the exploration of the
role of clothing’s surface and its relationship with the body in various
mediums. The author does not linger on the garment; it is merely a means
of pointing out all the body’s possibilities, which he explores in the digital
medium as well. Much like Vujiþiü, he uses a new fashion metalanguage in
his research process, a laser cutter in the manufacturing of clothing objects,
3D printing, and hand assembling similar to the puzzle technique. With
these procedures, he replaces the traditional cutting and sewing techniques
of using scissors, needles, and thread, as space age fashion designers did in
the 1960s. However, his work particularly focuses on the body. If one thinks
about the term deconstruction in the 1980s and the 1990s, which primarily
meant deconstructing the garment and the surface as well as the body, one
thinks of the reconsideration of the clothing silhouette in Rei Kawakubo’s
Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body collection (1997, widely remembered
as the Lumps and Bumps show) or the works of the French artist Orlan and
her modifications of the body. ýop thinks of the modification of the body
and the body itself as

a composition formed by the montage of text, image, sound, and movement.

The integral reality of the body is the result of its digitalization and the loss
of its foothold in the new media environment. Such a body no longer
represents anything, mimics anything, nor presents anything. Converting the
body through different mediums negates the very matter of the body. The
author’s act is an experimental game with the body’s shape stripped of all
meaning. (Christo 2020)

In his digital presentation, the body floats, separated from its natural habitat,
evoking its esoteric, transcendental character. It is reminiscent of Šutej’s
anti-fashion utopian forms drawn separated from the ground or of
McQueen’s 2006 hologram of Kate Moss. ýop’s affinity for the body’s
fluidity is evident in the series of photographs gradually stripping the model
and leaving her in her natural garment.
In addition, ýop examines the procedure of the extraction and destruction
of the common fashion language in the form of a book by referring to Plato’s
texts. He writes it artistically: by graphically remodelling the words, reminiscent
118 Chapter Four

of the Dada process, he creates a new imaginary language entitled Plato out
of Context.

Matija’s Plato out of Context follows in the footsteps of the avant-garde

reimagining of language by the methods of Dadaist typopoetry, i.e., a new
graphic organization of the text in which avant-garde artists reinterpreted
poetic texts as visual sheet music. Matija’s process of deconstructing the
language of fashion is precisely that – a revival of the avant-garde
destruction of language on the body in the environments of new media.
(Christo 2020)

Figure 5. Matija ýop: Digital Body, Type 3 and Morana Type A. Photography:
Matija ýop. Performer: Morana Radoþaj. © Matija ýop, 2017.

Figure 6. Matija ýop: Laser cut scan Mask 1 © Matija ýop, 2017.
 Body and Language 119

Figure 7. Slika. Matija ýop: Recollection, Type M2, 20-1 and Type M2, 20-2.
Photography: Vanja Šolin. Performer: Morana Radoþaj © Matija ýop, 2020.

Conclusion
This chapter aimed to indicate the diverse approaches and interests in the
productions of Croatian artists dealing with garments as utopian visions of
digital reality. Šutej’s fashion design was highly influenced by space age
fashion and the New Tendencies movement, while Vujiþiü is spellbound by
artificial intelligence and its potential for fashion production, which led him
to create a completely new fashion language, a reflection of the digital age.
In contrast, ýop’s primary interest is the body which, in the digital age,
offers a plethora of possibilities for modifications and re-evaluations. The
120 Chapter Four

produced garment is only one means of the artistic expression of its

coexistence with the body. However, in both Vujiþiü and ýop, the production
has a strong futuristic character, much like Šutej’s sketches in the late 1960s.
In addition, the chapter aimed to emphasize the social, political, and cultural
conditions in which the artists worked or were moved to work.
Found on the borderline between fashion and artistic exploration,
Vujiþiü’s and ýop’s interests focus on the body, the role of clothing, and
new technologies as means of realizing clothing products or presenting
one’s own concepts. Their primary interest is not the body as a carrier of
cultural identities but how the body can be manipulated through different
mediums and creative stimuli. As a result, this chapter has presented fashion
as a synergy of the artistic and scientific fields, the ideas of which have been
present since as far back as the avant-garde artists of the first half of the
twentieth century. Musing about fashion as art and the clothing object as an
artistic form of expression offered the acquisition of new terminology
originating from the field of art. However, since the 1960s, and especially
since the appearance of unisex fashion, interest in the role of the garment
has moved towards the role of the body as a reflection or construction of
identity.
In addition, anti-fashion is the topic of writings emphasizing traditional
clothing and garments not conditioned by fashion phenomena. This precise
term experienced a revolution in the new millennium in the form of Lidewij
Edelkoort’s Anti_Fashion, A Manifesto for the Next Decade (2015), who
uses the term anti-fashion as a synonym for a new fashion movement that
rejects the common patterns of behaviour and production within the well-
known fashion system. The Croatian art historian Vera Horvat Pintariü was
of a similar opinion in the 1970s. She used the term anti-fashion to define
something completely new in fashion (a new wild culture) that severs the
ties with the known concept of fashion.
The works of Vujiþiü and ýop were analyzed as visionary ideas of
performative clothing concepts of the digital age, similar to the
aforementioned meaning of anti-fashion. Vujiþiü’s artificial intelligence, as
a hybrid body of a man and a machine, designs, manufactures and presents
fashion collections and clothing objects. ýop’s digital reflections focus on
the possibilities and new values of the body presented as a frail metaphysical
structure in clothing similar to a materialized fragile border. As observers
and participants of the digital age, we are faced with the need to learn about
the new body and a new fashion language.
 Body and Language 121

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 CHAPTER FIVE

ICONIC BODIES:
SEMIOTICS OF MASCULINITY IN FASHION
PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART HISTORY

KREŠIMIR PURGAR

In The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, dedicated to the

influence of the fashion system on political, economic, and social processes
in modern globalized societies, Gilles Lipovetsky devotes a chapter to the
postmodern phase of advertising in which its role is equated with the fashion
system in general. In his view, modern advertising introduces
communication processes into a radically new state marked by a break with
the monocentric belief that the media meet only the frivolous needs of the
people in order for those same media to serve a system of totalitarian
political control. It is the fashion logic of advertising that introduces into
communication processes a kind of dialectical principle according to which
resistance to totalitarianism is established by enjoying superficial pleasures
and fantasies, and it is the principle of personal pleasure and freedom that
embodies a fundamentally new role in fashion and advertising. However,
the principle of freedom is not necessarily or automatically correlated with
the advanced civilizational achievements that are supposed to make
freedom possible by definition. Lipovetsky says that in advertising as a
paradigm of modern communication, depth has disappeared and everything
takes place on the surface; mere plays on words took over the struggle for
the meaning of those words. The creative intelligence of the advertising and
fashion industry is looking for great ideas that do not live longer than one
season: if fashion is a fairytale land of illusions, advertising is undoubtedly
a fairytale land of communication (Lipovetsky 1994, 156–168). In a
radically postmodernist vein, Lipovetsky acknowledges the democratic
potential of fashion and advertising, as well as their impact on the freedom
of individuals, but acknowledges that this freedom is limited by pre-set –
albeit numerous – choices:
 Iconic Bodies 125

the power of advertising is paradoxical: crucial for businesses but without

major consequences for individuals, it acts effectively only in the sphere
of the inessential and the irrelevant. Conforming to the superficiality of its
own messages, advertising itself is only a surface power, a sort of zero-
degree power as measured by the standard of individual existence. It
undoubtedly carries some weight in individual decisions, but only in the
state of relative indifference that tends to be generated by the expanding
universe of industrial hyperchoice. Things have to be put back into
perspective. The influence of advertising does not abolish the reign of
human freedom. Rather, its action is exercised at the lowest level of that
freedom , the level where a state of indifference reigns, where there is an
excess of choice among scarcely differentiated options. (Lipovetsky 1994,
165)

Lipovetsky, therefore, does not consider the function of the media and their
frivolous content to be totalitarian, acknowledging that the freedom of
choice of irrelevant subjects is only the lowest form of consumerist
democracy and demanding that we look at this problem from a different
perspective. In the wake of his media dialectic is what Julia Emberley calls
the “fashion apparatus” within which the freedom to create one’s own
identity codes is limited by the key problem that these codes are always pre-
created thanks to the media and that the concept of fashion and fashion
advertising is based on the insoluble internal contradiction of fashion as a
system:

Inscribed in the fashion ethic is the insistence that fashion does not want to
restrict individual imagination or imperialize the body for its own interest.
What the fashion apparatus offers, then, is not fashion per se, but the
opportunity for the individual to create a fashion, to liberate oneself from the
fetters of a mundane daily existence that denies pleasure, joy, a sense of self
and an experience of being. And yet, in order to produce the space of desire
for that “liberation” the fashion apparatus must ensure that sufficient
alienation, self-loathing, boredom and sterility exist. In the necessary
production of its own contradictions, the fashion apparatus holds the subject
within a spectrum of choices which close at the extreme ends of total
freedom, on the one hand, and absolute control, on the other. (Emberley
1987, 48)

In my opinion, the perspective that will not bring us back to the vicious
circle of media and capital on the one hand and identity as a consequence
of capital on the other is the one through which the concepts of fashion and
advertising and their creative effects are rarely observed: it is the historical-
artistic connection of the semiotics of the body; more precisely, it is the
representation of masculinity through a diachronic perspective that includes
126 Chapter Five

both the artefacts of Old Masters and the “frivolous” sphere of fashion and
advertising. In order to embark on this endeavour, we must agree in advance
on some of the theses by which visual studies establish their theoretical and
social relevance. Firstly, we must agree that canonized works of art can be
used for “non-artistic” purposes, that is, to use them for this study not only
as art objects but also, and above all, as a kind of forensic evidence in the
process of diagnosing image phenomena. Secondly, we need to try to see
the “trivial” images of fashion advertising from a perspective that I would
preliminarily call a transhistorical image system. The unquestionable value
and cognitive power of art objects as the dominance of selectively chosen
items would thus enter into a dialogue with trivial images of “irrelevant”
fashion photography and thus pave the way for a comprehensive model of
reception that is more appropriate to the epoch of digital images.
One of the earliest systematic scientific reflections on the semiotic
aspects of advertising, after the first insights of Roland Barthes, certainly
belongs to Judith Williamson and her book Decoding Advertisements
(1994), originally published in 1977. Her analyses of a wide range of
examples from the advertising practices of the 1970s may seem somewhat
outdated today, but this is only because advertising practices have changed
significantly over the last four decades, not because her examples have lost
their paradigmatic validity. What remains unchanged in the universal
hermeneutics of commercial images, which makes the author’s interpretation
of singular advertising campaigns convincing, is the functionality and
fundamental logic of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic theory based on
structural linguistics, which Williamson consistently pursued. In order to
explain her own method of criticizing the content of forms and the reasons
for applying semiotics to advertising artefacts, she claims in the book that
we can only reach a much more interesting level of meaning of advertising
texts, as well as a completely new meaning, if we uncover the mechanism
by which they produce meaning and if we dare analyze the very paradigm
by which their inner “language of form” works. Williamson contends that
what the advertisement “says” is only what it claims to say: it is part of the
“deceptive mythology of advertising” close to Lipovetsky’s thesis, which,
as we have seen, leads us to believe that advertising is frivolous, easy to
understand, and above all a transparent means of “message” in its
background. Unlike the French philosopher, who focused on the socio-
consumerist aspect of advertising, the American theorist enters the issue of
the relationship between text and image (visual discursiveness) in a
specifically semiotic way and compares concepts such as form and content
(advertising messages) with the classical terms signifier and signified,
which is a method we will use systematically here as well.
 Iconic Bodies 127

Now we have to consider what kind of images we want or can talk about,
i.e. whether the image artefacts from which we commence our analysis, both
art pictures and magazine ads, can remain in the same categorical status as
they were as “raw” material. In other words, do they irreversibly lose their
intrinsic qualities in the non-ideological method of visual studies, the
qualities that led us to include them in this diachronic analysis in the first
place? I think semiotics can help us here to overcome both historical and
categorical differences. Charles Levin argues that people think of images
primarily as memories from the domain of their own experience, as an
ensuing effect of what is seen or experienced, as something that is
subsequently created – as an “afterimage.” Images as a subsequent experience
are a disciplinary field of semiotics, and everything we can experience as an
image fact (words, dreams or pictures themselves) can be imagined to be
composed of individual signifying elements – signifiers – that form systems
of re-presentation (Levin 1987, 99–111). Levin argues that Jean
Baudrillard’s political economy of sign, i.e. the simulacrum as its last stage,
is a logical extension of Jacques Lacan’s “sociologized unconscious,” which
in Baudrillard’s case turns into a subject as “the signifier of another
signifier.” In this way, the whole culture is reduced to a system, that is, to a
“pure unadulterated code,” and is then inevitably subjected to the action of
unpredictable effects and intersemiotic leaps (Levin 1987, 101). In the
structuralist and especially poststructuralist opposition between nature and
culture, the latter is always perceived as a formalistic game of codes,
conventions and laws. The essence of the problem of interpreting the world
and culture as signs, according to Levin, is the concept and practice of
deconstructing the semiotic trinity of signifiers, signified and referents,
which always prevents the completion of any process of signification and
creates an unbroken chain of ever new meanings – semiosis.
Visual studies, then, tries to insert itself into the process of semiosis and,
like magnetic resonance imaging, give a synchronic picture of the system
as a current cross-section of different processes, but one we can actually and
fully comprehend, not only as a value judgement or diagnosis of historical
course. In this sense, visual studies appropriates both semiotic and
deconstructive tactics: it does so by assuming, first, that “the signifier is the
formal starting point of rationalist thought” and, second, that it is “the
discrete manipulable segment which makes analysis, abstraction, and
substitution possible” (Levin 1987, 103–104). However, as Levin suggests,
“deconstruction merely plays with such potentialities, without really
questioning the concealment of the signifier’s origin in an operational
reduction” (104), and it considers that we must begin with “writing” in order
to be “properly directed toward the formal and formalizable status of the
128 Chapter Five

word, and not toward the body which speaks and writes it” (Levin 1987,
103–104, emphasis added). I will try here to find a way between the semiotic
unrestrainable production of meaning on the one hand and the
deconstructionist questioning of the sense we make of sign production on
the other.

1. The naked and the nude: overcoming the oppositions

Art and fashion intersect much more often than we may notice in everyday
situations. We encounter concepts such as minimalist, retro or baroque
styles relatively often and connect them equally to individual artistic epochs
from recent or distant history as well as to contemporary aesthetic
paradigms. Of course, we do not recognize social or artistic conventions
only through style, although when we talk about fashion, style is the most
recognizable distinguishing category. However, if we add narrative,
iconographic or symbolic aspects to style attributes and use them in a radical
diachronic leap, we can come up with very interesting insights. In the
photograph by Jürgen Teller made for the Marc Jacobs perfume Bang, we
see an almost mythical version of a man who possesses all the
characteristics of an ideal male, from regular facial features adorned with a
short beard to perfectly developed musculature (Fig. 1). The only “problem”
is that we do not see the ideal male in a dominant position that complements
his strength but instead find him in a position, as Gianni Vattimo would say,
of a “weak subject” – in fact, in this case, a sexual object. It is not so
important whether we feel lust for the character portrayed as a man who
offers himself to the gaze of someone of the same or opposite sex; more
important is the fact that he is offered to everyone equally. His musculature
here is not a symbol of power but an aesthetic element in the service of
desire.
 Iconic Bodies 129

Fig. 1. Jürgen Teller for Marc Jacobs Bang perfume, 2010

But are we sure that this is a consequence of sexual liberation, which

only recently gave men the opportunity to feel, act, and perform like women
without the condemnation of the dominant streams in society, or have we
already seen something similar before, for instance, two thousand years
ago? The ancient Roman sculpture known as the Barberini Faun dating
back to 220 BC (Fig. 2) was a symbol of homoerotically expressed beauty,
an ideal that, centuries later, inspired artists such as Caravaggio and
Michelangelo, that is, all those who were convinced that male beauty should
not be equated with strength and domination but rather should be combined
with iconographic narratives of the female body that typically surrenders or
is being surrendered – to gaze, desire or physical contat. The Barberini
Faun, as well as Marc Jacobs’ Bang, represents the male body as a
contingent site of beauty. In order to do so, both representations must first
deal with deconstructing the myth of man as a source of superior power,
thus releasing the male body from the obligation to symbolize a priori
domination. If it wants to draw attention to his beauty, the perfect male body
must take on the elements of depicting a female body that has been adapted
and shaped according to the canons of beauty for millennia of art history –
both iconographically and stylistically.
130 Chapter Five

Fig. 2. Barberini Faun, ca. 220 BC. Marble copy by a Hellenistic school of the
Pergamene school, or a Roman sculptor of a bronze original

In her seminal book Seeing Through Clothes, Anne Hollander points us

to one aspect of the erotic portrayal of the female body through art history
that could give this discussion of the male body a broader perspective.
Hollander notes that undressing, taking off clothes, or revealing only certain
parts of the body are clear authorial tactics of sexualizing the body and
adapting it to the heterosexual taste of the observer (Hollander 1993,
according to Clark 1956). She builds on Kenneth Clark’s well-known theses
about the difference between nakedness and nudity, where the former word
“implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition” and
the latter “carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague
image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but
of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed” (Clark
1956, 3). Although Hollander notes that this sharp distinction can hardly be
applied to all examples of naked body representation in practice, she
considers it a useful operative thesis because
 Iconic Bodies 131

it serves very well in dealing with the relation of any unclothed image to its
absent clothing. If one follows Clark’s rule, the naked figure always appears
to have some connection with actual garments, usually contemporary; the
nude implies drapery. The blurring of the distinction, however, can itself
become a dynamic element in nude art, deliberately used to intensify the
effect of the image. Artists have made capital out of the possibility of
portraying neutral-looking, Classicized bodies emerging from real clothes or
idealized drapery accompanying very realistic naked bodies. (Hollander
1993, 157)

In other words, it was in the interstice of the idealization and profanation of

the body without clothes that the path to timeless beauty actually lay:
between the nude body as an aesthetic concept of value on the one hand and
the naked, sensual body of flesh and blood on the other. By approaching
reality and moving away from it, artists controlled the degree of
transgressiveness of their own works by programmatically guiding the
erotic imagination of the observer beyond the limits of moral acceptability.
In the TV commercial for Paco Rabanne’s Invictus directed by
Alexandre Courtes, we see postmodernist camp-pastiche in which the visual
aesthetics of the Champions League as a metaphor for the gladiatorial arena
are combined with visual elements of ancient mythology (Fig. 3). In our
case, the main role is played by the “supreme god Zeus,” embodied in the
footballer as absolute divination, and a seemingly important role is played
by female figures, friends of the gods – and also the goddesses themselves
of beauty, creativity, nature and fertility – Aglaea, Euphrosyne and Thalia.
Admittedly, in the less antiquating vision of this video, female characters
can be interpreted simply as cheerleaders and Zeus as Gareth Bale, but this
in no way diminishes the relevance of the example offered. We are
interested here, first of all, in the visualization of the male body and the
conditions under which it symbolizes the general and specific characteristics
of masculinity. We must pay attention to Hollander’s thesis that the most
creative space of artistic activity is the one between two variants of
representation: a classicized body covered with real clothes and idealized
drapery from under which a realistically naked body emerges. Let us first
look at whether female characters fit the aforementioned dialectics: the
goddess girls are covered in light white fabrics that do not seem to be
specifically tailored to fit only the female body or belong to a particular
fashion style era. These are simple, timeless pieces of fabric that serve the
universalistic or transhistorical vision of the entire video. Female bodies,
which can be described as completely in line with the classical ideal of
beauty, also contribute to this. Thus, the representation of the female body
here remains in the domain of the Western Christian model of beauty,
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which, in its historical and artistic development, is related to classical

aesthetic ideals, and therefore, according to Hollander’s thesis, female
characters should not be particularly artistically interesting for our case.

Fig. 3. Paco Rabanne Invictus (movie still), directed by Alexandre Courtes, 2013

The counterpoint to this is, of course, the male character of “Zeus” (or
“Gareth Bale”), whose idealized body is consciously profaned by neo-
Gothic tattoos and underwear like a tracksuit or other casual piece of attire.
In this way, Zeus as a mythical deity or untouchable football superstar gets
surprisingly close to us and de-spectacularizes the star system and media
glamour. Here, we are in the field of a typical advertising strategy of getting
closer to distant worlds and realizing dreams in the mass media world of
illusions. But if we look back four centuries, we will see that a very similar
dialectic of nudity and divination was applied by the Italian Baroque master
Caravaggio in his John the Baptist of 1604 (Fig. 4). Caravaggio’s handsome
adolescent does not, in his bodily constitution, reveal the symbolic
significance his character has in the biblical New Testament narratives;
immersed in his own world, with a cross so turned that it is barely visible,
devoid of any holiness or hint of the space in which he finds himself, John
the Baptist would seem entirely like a “boy next door” were it not for that
sumptuous crimson drapery that gives the scene a surreal theatrical
impression. In the same way that the divine body of “Zeus” from Paco
Rabanne approached ordinary mortals with the lower part of his tracksuit,
so Caravaggio’s frail body of John the Baptist approached the divine
spheres thanks to his heavy red drapery.
 Iconic Bodies 133

Fig. 4. Caravaggio, St John the Baptist in the wilderness, 1604; oil on canvas

Mieke Bal also draws our attention to the iconic sexuality of

Caravaggio’s John the Baptist, but she explains that the visual power of the
represented body depends on the crucial role of the observer. The Dutch
theorist first refers to the many interpretations of this painting in terms of
the artist’s alleged same-sex orientation, acknowledging its homoerotic
potential that stems from the figure’s characteristic spread legs, the parts of
the drapery and knees as phallic symbols, or the painter’s illusionist skills;
all this makes John the Baptist a real and accessible person. However, what,
in her opinion, completely breaks the barrier between representation and
reality in this painting is the “second-person narrative,” the impression that
the painting addresses the viewer by including him in his own narrative
world. Unlike most images that tell the story of something that happened to
someone else – that is, they represent “in the third person” – in the case of
134 Chapter Five

the second-person narrative, John the Baptist becomes you, and the observer
of the image becomes me. Bal explains it further as follows:

As tyrannical as love itself, the painted surface dictates how the “second
person” must confirm the first person’s subjectivity, the kind of subjectivity
it wishes to be produced and hence how the viewer must be engaged: not as
a bare, abstract, theoretical, disembodied retina, but as a full participant in a
visual event in which the body takes effect. The second-personhood I am
elaborating here, then, is qualified as erotic so as to insure this bodily
participation. (Bal 1999, 189)

Although Bal adds elements of narrative theory and Lacanian theory of the
gaze to the functions of the body and clothing in the Italian Baroque master,
the dialectical principle that drives the processes of the cognition of
masculinity has the same effect on identifying the observer with the main
protagonist in both Paco Rabanne’s advert and Caravaggio; the observer
imagines that the strong body of the “deity” can at least for a moment
become his own, just as a weak body can become a symbol of the power of
the observer’s faith.

2. Bodies without clothes: playing on toughness

and vulnerability
Let us now turn our attention to the painting Susanna and the Elders by
Jacopo Tintoretto of 1556 (Fig. 5). The constitution of the erotic dimension
of this representation takes place outside the domain of the body in the
narrow sense, i.e. outside the body as an object. Although the main character
is present in the full element of her own femininity, the painting achieves
its erotic effect by repeatedly focusing the viewer’s gaze around the body
and next to the body. Anne Hollander draws our attention to pieces of
clothing, a robe, a towel and a corset, which Susanna took off herself by
recklessly throwing them to the ground (Hollander 1993, 160). Although
the rejection of clothing necessarily leads to the revelation of the body, what
crucially contributes to the erotic effect is not the de-idealized nakedness of
the female character but the intention to expose her body to a view of the
other. Since this mannerist painting retains the concept of idealizing the Old
Testament motif, the realism in it is achieved first by the actual clothes that
Susanna took off, and then by the implied act of undressing that preceded
the represented scene. In this way, Tintoretto’s painting combines the
idealization of a body shaped according to the canons of late Cinquecento
beauty with the de-idealized, profane effect of sexual stimulation, very close
 Iconic Bodies 135

to the contemporary depictions of readily available perfection that Gilles

Lipovetsky speaks of.

Fig. 5 Jacopo Tintoretto, Susanna and the Elders, 1556; oil on canvas

One possible example of this is a Dolce & Gabbana advertisement in

which we see the male sex symbol Matthew McConaughey dressed in
unbuttoned shirt, like a modern, shaved version of the ancient Roman faun
sitting reclining in an armchair with soft, oversized pillows in, we can easily
assume, the lobby of a five-star hotel (Fig. 6). What further eroticizes
McConaughey’s idealized body in this ad is the same thing that de-idealizes
and makes available Susanna’s beauty, and that is the preceding context of
the body offered for visual consumption: in Tintoretto’s case, it is the strip-
tease Susanna performed in front of lustful old men, and in McConaughey’s
case, it is his implicit role as a high-class male prostitute that anyone can
own for certain financial compensation. We could define the preceding
context as something that we do not physically see in the picture itself, but
we recognize it as a potential consequence of the events that preceded the
presented motif, like the reason or motivation for which we see the
characters in exactly the position in which we find them, and not in some
other. The preceding context is, on the one hand, highly speculative in
nature – for we can never really know what preceded the scene; the reality
136 Chapter Five

of the image encompasses only one infinitesimal moment, like two

photographs that can never be completely identical. On the other hand, the
represented scene can uncover a lot of details that can significantly reduce
the unknowns about “what really happened.” This is especially true of
historical events for which there is a well-established cause-and-effect
sequence of why and how something happened (see more in Purgar 2013,
116–126). In both cases, the body is the visual focus of the image, but the
beauty of the body does not derive primarily from its aesthetic appeal but
the illusion of democratic enjoyment of the body of perfect beauty.

Fig. 6. Matthew McConaughey in a Jean Baptiste Mondino advertisement for The

One perfume by Dolce & Gabbana, 2008

Let us stay a little longer in the interstice marked by nakedness and

nudity, reality and myth, exposing our own and other people’s bodies.
Hollander claims that the sexual charge of the image is much greater when
the naked or nude body is present together with the clothed one, and one of
the traditional places of the exposure of the male body to the eyes of clothed
persons is the motif of mourning Jesus in the Pietà. The Gospel of John in the
New Testament describes the moment when the soldiers took off Jesus’ clothes:

When the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his clothes, dividing them into
four shares, one for each of them, with the undergarment remaining. This
garment was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom. “Let’s not
 Iconic Bodies 137

tear it,” they said to one another. “Let’s decide by lot who will get it.” This
happened that the scripture might be fulfilled that said, “They divided my
clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.” So this is what the
soldiers did. (John 23–24)

According to what we have established so far, as well as according to

Clark’s definition, the body of Christ is nude because it is an idealization of
the body as a symbol of sacrifice, but it is also naked because it testifies to
the embodiment of the divine ideal: “God became man.” In contrast to this
undeniable erotic component of the nude/naked body prompted by the
inevitable views of others, Hollander believes that conventions have been
adopted that de-eroticize Christ’s body, such as his characteristic beard,
long hair and the iconic depiction of his head. We never experience “holy
nudity” as trivial nakedness. This principle becomes clear only when it is
absent in a painting, for example, as in Sandro Botticelli’s Lamentation over
the Dead Christ (Fig. 7). “In the Botticelli, the beautiful and beardless Christ
is draped nakedly and dramatically across the Virgin’s knees, and the
attendant clothed company seems overcome, not by his death but by his
obvious attractions—especially the women in the foreground” (Hollander
1993, 179).

Fig. 7. Sandro Botticelli, Lamentation over the dead Christ, 1490–1492; oil on panel
138 Chapter Five

The motif of the Lamentation, of course, has been portrayed in art

history in its rudimentary form of pure suffering and deep grief as well.
Therefore, depending on the viewer’s interest in the motif of the body, the
ensuing meaning will shift from a mimetic interest in narrativizing the scene
to an interest in structuring the image itself, to what Max Imdahl calls the
Ikonik (Imdahl 1996). The two examples that follow, one classical Renaissance
and the other contemporary, show well the iconic power of recognizable
symbols or, in the semiotic terms of Barthes’ mythology, how the signified
becomes the signifier of the second degree – the myth. The Pietà of Andrea
Mantegna is best known for the radical perspective distortion used in it (Fig.
8). Although it does not fully correspond to the Renaissance central
perspective, the prevailing impression is that in this painting, the very
structuring of reality according to the fifteenth century ideal of representation
has become its most important element, that which the contemporary
observer, and especially the trained art historian, will first see in it.
Mantegna’s “extreme perspectivism” in this painting points very well to the
duality of the most famous modern theory of perspective, that of Erwin
Panofsky (see more in Holly 1985; Panofsky 1996; Somaini 2005). The
German art historian warns of the fundamental contradiction of the system
of pictorial representation based on precise mathematical-geometric
projections, calling “symbolic form” what Leon Battista Alberti, in his
treatise De Pictura of 1435, believed was a “finestra aperta,” that is, more
than just a trope – a window into the real world. Panofsky explains the
contradiction of the central perspective by acting to be the most objective
method of representing the subjective position of the artist. Namely, each
point of view in paintings with a central perspective represents a unique and,
for each painting, different physical (but also creative) position of the
painter/observer. At the same time, uniqueness is related to the
mathematical universality of the principles of representing what only the
observer, from their unique position in space, can see.
 Iconic Bodies 139

Fig. 8. Andrea Mantegna, The Lamentation, 1480; tempera on canvas

The radical perspective shortening of the figure of Christ in Mantegna

possesses a mathematical error because in the existing view, the legs in the
foreground would have to be significantly larger and the head in the
background smaller. Mantegna, therefore, subjectively emphasized the
priorities of his own “point of view” at the expense of objective presentation.
Diverting attention to the way of articulating three-dimensional space on a
two-dimensional picture plane can be called a kind of metapictorial strategy
of the author in which the elements from which something is made (the
painting, in this case) are more important than what the painting represents
thematically. The dramatic and deeply emotional act of mourning the dead
Jesus, as the presumed primary meaning of this image, gave way to the very
act of representation as an utterly unusual and all the more specific
meaning. When the specificity of the mode of representation itself is used
as a theme in another picture, even many centuries later, then we can say
that the authentic or primary meaning became a signifier of the second
degree and took on the status of a myth.
This is exactly what happened in the historical parallel between
Mantegna’s Dead Christ and Benetton’s advertisement depicting a crushed
family gathered by the sickbed of their dying son. Of course, the context of
140 Chapter Five

the son’s imminent death in Benetton’s ad is completely different from the

Gospel motif, and it is, as we know, a 1990 photograph by Therese Frare
depicting David Kirby, a terminally ill AIDS patient (Fig. 9). Although it
was published in the high-circulation Life magazine and later won the
highest acclaim of photographic criticism, this picture probably would never
have become so famous if it had not been republished as part of Benetton’s
advertising campaign, which allegedly had the noble goal of raising
awareness of AIDS, but which was eventually remembered, like the
photograph itself, as just another weapon in Benetton’s strategy of shock.
To the theorist of visual studies, this ad is less interesting as a contribution
to the discussion of the moral implications of using the diseased individual
to increase the profits and social prestige of a world-renowned corporation
and more as a confirmation of the transhistorical importance of the
signification game of semiotics in the unbroken chain of semiosis. I would
like to speculate here that Frare’s photograph would not be so significant if
it had not been published in the context of Benetton’s ad, nor would
Benetton’s ad be included in so many moral debates if there were no direct
connection – a semiotic leap – between the iconic aspect of Mantegna’s
dead Christ and the image of the dying David Kirby. This connection,
however, cannot be theological either – it is a symbol of the Christian faith
on the one hand and an ordinary man on the other; we cannot establish it
even according to the degree of credibility of the event – on the one hand, it
is an allegorical depiction of death as the atonement for the sins of all
mankind, and on the other, it is an individual death as it happens every day.
What connects these two depictions, however, is the visual semiotics of the
sick/helpless/dead body: due to its recognizability, the dead Christ in a very
shortened perspective has become a metonymic sign or epitome of the
suffering of the male body, which eventually turned into another iconic
body – this time in the form of the spectacular de-epitomizing of suffering
in the cynical exploitation of the agony of David Kirby.
 Iconic Bodies 141

Fig. 9. Theresa Frare for Benetton; art director: Oliviero Toscani, 1990

Benetton’s advertisement used Mantegna’s meaning of male suffering

through a similar visual representation (perspective shortening, the family
gathered) as a starting point in the function of advertising and its message,
which is significantly different from the original religious motif; thus, the
meaning of Mantegna’s dead Christ became in Benetton, in the person of
David Kirby, a signifier of the second degree, something that in a
completely new constellation of the late twentieth century would create
entirely new meanings unique to its own time. But did we get closer to the
“final” meaning of the ad with this insight, or did we just get into a problem
we did not intend to get into, accepting the methodology of the signifying
chains and leaving the realm of meaning empty again? In other words, the
question arises as to whether we can approach Benetton’s ad as a
semiotically explicable phenomenon of metapictorial commentary on
Renaissance painting as the first point in the chain of semiosis or whether it
is, for example, a compassionless postmodernist commentary on the society
of the spectacle about which other humanistic disciplines, those more
morally “sensitive” than semiotics, could have much more to say. I believe
that this is a process in which ethical issues of the role of images cannot be
left aside, and the role of image theory will be fulfilled only if it starts
systematically uncovering the problems arising from the encounters of
historical images with their contemporary “avatars.”
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3. Ambivalent bodies: Between scopophilic power

and endangered masculinity
In one of his articles dealing with French painting in the transition period
between classicism and romanticism, Norman Bryson, one of the founders
of visual studies and a representative of so-called new or critical art history,
discusses Laura Mulvey’s theses from her world-famous essay “Visual
pleasure and narrative cinema” (Mulvey 1975) and calls into question her
basic thesis set out in that text. In the context of Bryson’s polemical claims,
I think two of his statements are most important to our discussion. Firstly,
he says that Mulvey’s thesis that, in the scopophilic and voyeuristic urge,
the male gaze is automatically and by definition directed towards the
woman as a visual and consequently sexual object cannot be correct.
Secondly, he believes that the identification with the characters on the
canvas is not due to scopophilia and voyeurism, that is, the Freudian
unconscious, but due to visual-cultural reasons, i.e. the conventions of
representation (Bryson 1994, 230). Let us first deal with Mulvey’s first
statement by recalling her basic theses.
Due to the specifics of the cinematographic apparatus, observers
experience film diegesis as an extension of reality and completely surrender
to the reality of the film image. Starting from the male character as the
default, the male viewer always identifies with the male character in the
film, and identification with events on the film screen always takes place
along these predefined parallel axes: a man with a man, a woman with a
woman. Because, according to Mulvey, classic Hollywood narrative films
favoured normative heterosexuality and the fundamentally subordinate role
of women as objects of male scopophilic enjoyment, so well-established
gender-taking processes within film reality could only produce identical
normative roles in the real world.

Mulvey suggests that this process is easy for the male spectator, especially
in those cases where such filmic codes as the view-pointing of shot/reverse
shot establish the camera as seeing from the point of view of the male
character or intra-diegetic hero. But the ease with which such codes invite
the male spectator into the space and landscape within the film should not, I
think, be taken at face value. Rather, ease of identification here might be
thought of as portraying an “enchanted” relationship between male spectator
and male character […]. One might suggest here that the streamlined ease of
projection that invites the male spectator to align himself with the
perspective of the male hero in fact exists to simplify and to pacify the
mechanism of intermale identification—which I suggest is a much thornier
business than the enchanted fiction of identificatory ease proposes. (Bryson
1994, 230–231)
 Iconic Bodies 143

The problem, then, is not in the mechanism of identification itself but in

what is truly seen in an image (film, television, or painting on canvas). The
problem is, first of all, in the historical dimension of the visual construction
of masculinity, which brings us to Bryson’s second thesis. Namely, he
believes that if men can learn anything from feminism, then it is the
realization that gender is a cultural construction, both for men and women.
If they accept this realization, men become much more sensitive to how they
are portrayed in different contexts of commercial and artistic representations
and become aware that any visual representation can testify to their hetero,
homo, trans or androgynous gender role.
Berkeley Kaite advocates a psychoanalytic approach to this problem,
arguing, for example, that when viewing pornographic material, identification
takes place through the observed body as a new form of discursiveness, not
just through the body as a medium of narration (i.e. nakedness) in the narrow
sense. In this process of visual imagining (because pornographic imagination
creates powerful mental images), “specular identification” is key; it can no
longer be explained by traditional dichotomies of watching/being watched
and male/female because pornography allows for many unexpected
identifications in “oscillating looks”: “The look is possessed by both the
reader and the subject of the representation; thus subject positions of
male/female are only as good as their discourses: i.e. when talking of the
power of the gaze, designations of masculine/feminine do not represent a
picture of unity but are themselves unstable” (Kaite 1987, 152). Kaite then
refers to Paul Willemen, who introduces the notion of the “fourth look,” i.e.
a kind of negotiation of looks and enunciations that take place in the scopic
field, when shooting with film cameras, engaging views that capture certain
angles, motives or scenes. Willemen writes: “When the scopic drive is
brought into focus, then the viewer also runs the risk of becoming the object
of look” (Kaite 1987, 152).
To explain the process of identification as primarily visual and less
psychologically conditioned, Bryson draws a very long transhistorical
parallel: from the ancient Greek sculpture of Polycleitus’ Doryphoros to the
sculpted body of Arnold Schwarzenegger as depictions of phallic
symbolized power on one side, with the equestrian paintings of Théodore
Géricault as a symbol of endangered masculinity on the other. In the Greek
statue and Schwarzenegger’s press photographs, the American theorist
notes a marked discrepancy between the representation of primary and
secondary gender marks; namely, there is a striking discrepancy in the
display of masculine strength, muscle, and body beauty with the way the
male genitalia is represented. In Greek sculpture, it is markedly not
commensurate to the proportions of the body, while in bodybuilding
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photographs it is shown as if it does not exist or as if it has no place in that

photograph at all. Bryson argues that the penis is not simply banished from
these depictions but that the whole body is transformed into a symbol of
phallic power, from signs of bloating and the removal of body hair to the
excessive visibility of veins. The imaginary image of masculinity is created
by putting the genital area in the background or eliminating it and
transferring its characteristics to the body as a whole through the stylistic
means of expression of metonymy (Bryson 1994, 186). In other words, these
two bodies ceased to be what or how we truly see them and became tropes,
transmissions on the way to some other meaning or, as I mentioned earlier,
new, mythical signifiers.
Before we try to explain how contemporary fashion photography reflects
the ambivalence of masculinity, we will take from Bryson another very
instructive example from the history of painting. Géricault began making
his paintings of chasseurs (horseman) near the end of the Napoleonic Wars
when clear failures on the battlefield provoked a crisis of the militaristic
concept, which in turn created a culture of painting to which Géricault
contributed a pessimistic vision of war heroism with depictions of wounded
soldiers and overall moral decadence as a consequence of war suffering
(Bryson 2009, 200). However, what is most interesting for us, and Bryson
begins his analysis with this part of the French painter’s work, are the
paintings created at the very beginning of that period because they identify
the visual elements we analyze here in a contemporary context. In the
painting The Charging Chasseur of 1812, we see Napoleon’s soldier in a
position that seems to radiate a superior symbiosis of man and horse, and
which at first glance iconographically conveys the power of war victories
(Fig. 10).
 Iconic Bodies 145

Fig. 10. Théodore Géricault, Charging Chasseur, 1812; oil on canvas

Contrary to the original impression, the American theorist draws our

attention to a whole range of iconographic details that undermine the
greatness of French militarism and, more interestingly for our discussion,
destabilize the visual symbolization of masculinity. First, for example, the
outlines of the rider and the horse are not of the traditional pyramidal shape
due to the great perspective depth of the horse’s ascent; then, a strong
rotation of the horseman’s head and sabre directed backwards, instead of
forwards, stop the rectilinear movement forwards; third, unlike Antoine-
Jean Gros’s earlier painting The Battle of Abukir (1806), where a cavalryman
is in the midst of military turmoil surrounded by a multitude of bodies,
Géricault does not portray any context of the battle, as if the interrupted,
falling energy of other horses and the entirety of the cavalry (the invisible
preceding context, as explained earlier) is not enough to oppose the current
enemy. Could we assume that Géricault’s chasseur was the only really
visible character in the painting – remaining alone in the middle of the
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battle, without an enemy – so that, as a “weak subject,” he could retain the

fantasy? First, the fantasy of his own masculinity, and second, the illusion
of the masculinity of all other men who could and wanted to recognize
themselves in its visual symbols (see Bryson 2009, 197)?

4. Contingent bodies: Coming to terms

with the power of images
We can find a similar, more recent example in a motif from the Eros
advertisement by Versace. It is reminiscent of ancient depictions of gods
and classical sculptures of celebrities for at least one very visible reason: the
male figure is placed on a base characteristic for stone pedestals used for
presenting sculptures in a public space (Fig. 11). On the pedestal, the
Apollonian appearance of a dark-skinned man reveals a perfect “sculptural”
skill, although it differs significantly from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
extravagant muscular hypertrophy. The display is completely idealized and
minimally reduced as if deliberately placed in a time without history and
distinct associations to the fashion-stylistic aspects of any historical epoch.
However, the pedestal signifies duration, timelessness and everlasting
value, and in the Western Christian tradition, timelessness is most easily
associated with classical antiquity, this ever-coveted ideal of perfection. The
television version of this advertising campaign shows this much more
clearly: ancient gods carved in stone and the ruins of ancient Roman temples
serve as a mise-en-scène for the god Eros in his very carnal mission of
spreading love, passion and sexual lust. In the photo, Eros is not alone,
however; he is accompanied on the pedestal with an oversized bottle of
perfume, which thus becomes one body with a living sculpture of Eros.
 Iconic Bodies 147

Fig. 11. Mert & Marcus for Versace Eros, 2012

The photographic representation, again, treats the genital area interestingly:

it is not quite visible but is significantly emphasized by the position of the
perfume, as the diagonal line of the slanted bottle almost intersects the
region of the loin and continues through the torso vertically towards the
head and the sharp chiaroscuro line dividing the head into two parts. Despite
the instability of the slanted bottle that seems to fall to the right (it is not
entirely clear whether the man is holding the bottle with his left hand or
not), its diagonal seamlessly attaches the man’s body to his symbolic
prosthetic extension (the bottle), thus establishing a powerful vertical axis
that stabilizes the whole picture. We, therefore, experience advertising in a
constant dialectic of falling and stability, weakness and strength; like
Géricault’s Charging Chasseur, masculinity is precisely iconographically
established – by means of a pedestal, masculine strength and superior gaze
– but it is also precisely disturbed: by diagonals and the suggestion of
destroying and shattering precious objects. Although the depiction of the
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man in this photograph is in the service of paradigmatic masculinity, the

composition is deliberately “weakened” to establish an emotional, perhaps
even feminine counterpoint to unadulterated masculinity. Although he is a
mythological man, Eros can hit anyone with his arrow, and his message
concerns everyone. That is why the iconography of this painting has a built-
in “error,” and that is its intrinsic transhistorical significance: as with
Géricault, the ambivalence that hides behind a seemingly perfectly
constructed motif becomes a reason to look and reflect. Precisely because
of that, it would be too easy to draw a parallel with Schwarzenegger and his
smooth, well-built phallic figure, although Eros also nurtures the cult of the
(depilated) body in every respect. The symbol of masculinity in this ad is
not fully established, and to analyze the visual impact of the image from a
specific perspective of image science, as we have seen, it does not matter
whether the reason for this is an explicit current trend in fashion
photography or the fact that the producers wanted to attract audiences of a
different gender. What really interests us here is the way of intersecting the
meaning of those two images as an artefact and representation.
Let us now look at an ad for Versace’s high fashion women’s footwear
brand (Fig. 12). The first thing that every observer will notice is the strong
contrast between women’s shoes in the foreground and the visual
environment that is not associated with high fashion, glamorous evening jet-
set performances or some recommended identification or use of a
represented product, which should be the main function of advertising.
Another striking contrast concerns the accentuated femininity of the shoes
themselves and the male characters who dominate the composition, who in
turn, with their smooth reddish-toned bodies, produce the effect that the
brilliantly polished high-heeled shoes are actually meant for them.
Basically, this is an atypical work of semiosis that is very rare in advertising
and where the image is only an aid to achieve the self-referential role of the
brand itself, which wants to attract attention using often unconnected series
of metaphors or the circumvention of social norms to arouse shock and
transgressiveness. (The aforementioned Benetton ad is part of that
simplified chain of associations.) This ad, however, hides, in my opinion,
another important dimension that is masked by a whole range of interesting
visual and gender-performative issues mentioned earlier, which situates the
basic visual narrative into a much broader structure of modern art and
modern scopic regimes in general.
 Iconic Bodies 149

Fig. 12. Gianni Versace – magazine ad for a women’s line of shoes

In Versace’s advertisement, we find what we, together with the American

theorist Linda Nochlin, could call “a body in pieces” (Nochlin 1994, 23–
38). Like Norman Bryson, she views visual representations as semiotically
coded, as a kind of metonymy or substitute for transferred meanings that do
not arise from what the image narrates but from the way individual signifiers
are structured. Nochlin argues that the new way of framing – more precisely,
everything that falls within the scope of the impressionist painters, such as
Èdouard Manet, Edgar Degas, or Paul Cézanne – testifies to a new
understanding of pictorial representation as a convention. What we do not
see, because it remains outside the frame of the picture, has the same
dramatic importance as what we do see since the reality of the picture
testifies to the mere selection of a vast visual field and the fact that each
representation is based on choosing only one among many possibilities (note
our concept of the preceding context). That realization, Nochlin argues, is
at the core of the modernist scopic regime. For example, in Degas’s 1875
painting Place de la Concorde, we do not see a single character in their
150 Chapter Five

physical integrity, nor do any of the characters communicate with the

observer, which can be considered a method of fragmenting the frame and
rejecting psychological connections very similar to cutting male bodies and
wandering gazes in the Versace advertisement mentioned above (Fig. 13).

Fig. 13. Edgar Degas, The Concorde Square, 1875; oil on canvas

Nochlin believes that a distinction should be made between the meaning

of cutting or edging the image space itself on one side and the meaning of
the fragmented bodies that such cutting creates. It suggests two opposing
interpretations with the addition of a third possibility as the potential areas
of greatest artistic freedom:

(a) “Total contingency”: This is the equivalent of the meaningless

course of modern reality itself, which has no definite beginning,
middle or end. Contingency was most often associated with the then
new medium of photography and its ability to create random
fragments of the visible world as we would find it if we suddenly
stopped moving (which photography, in a technical sense, does).
(b) “Total determination”: This implies that the cut or the crop (a
photographic frame) is a deliberate creative tactic of the painter. In
this case, the limits of the frame and fragmentary visualization within
it must be read as the “laying bare of the device,” which leads us to
 Iconic Bodies 151

the self-referentiality of avant-garde and especially neo-avant-garde

art. One is “forced to pay attention to the formal organization of the
picture surface, which becomes the realm of the pictorial signifier,
not a simulacrum of reality, however modern.”
(c) “A third alternative”: This means creating works of art as
experiments with reality, between contingency and determinism, and
understanding art as a game, but one that has clear rules and
boundaries. The game, of course, involves breaking the rules on the
thin line between the old and the new, the known and the unknown,
the permissible and the forbidden (Nochlin 1994, 37–38).

Like Degas’s Place de la Concorde, Manet’s Masked Ball at the Opera of

1874 is a distant ancestor of Versace’s visual extravagance and its “total
contingency” as it shows the birth of modern society from a new media
perspective and a media-centric worldview (Fig. 14). Nochlin paraphrases
Manet’s friend Stéphane Mallarmé, who remarked that Manet had
discovered “a new manner of cutting down pictures” so that their frame is
now “such as the view I would see if I framed my eyes with my hand at any
given moment” (Nochlin 1994, 37; see also Harris 1964). Both artists show
us that we will shortly observe the whole reality through the lens of a camera
and that the upcoming cinematic logic of the image will consist of a series
of connected pictures and standstill fragments of time, none of which will
show the whole world or the whole bodies.
152 Chapter Five

Fig. 14. Édouard Manet, Masked Ball in the Opera, 1874; oil on canvas

Conclusion
Visual studies interpret visual codes as part of a universal system of
representation while delving most deeply into the field of pictorial
hermeneutics that connects lesser-known areas between the specificity and
the generality of the image. Its methodology starts from the belief that each
image frames one part of reality, but it does so not by being isolated from
other images, as much as their comparison may seem inappropriate and as
much as the proposed semiotic leaps connect temporally, stylistically and
thematically distant pictorial representations. Following Gilles Lipovetsky’s
thesis, we can conclude that the freedom to choose consumer goods based
on pictorial incentives is the lowest form of democratic participation, but
we may also add that the freedom to interpret these images is a much higher
form of consumerist and civic consciousness. As for the visual communication
of fashion, we have seen that gender stereotyping can be found in many
historical references that give additional justification to the transhistorical
study of visual phenomena and that it is possible to penetrate a different
meaning of fashion photography under the thin consumerist membrane of
advertising discourses. On this track, we found that art history and
contemporary fashion advertising can view the male body in its entirety –
 Iconic Bodies 153

physical, mental or gender – only as a series of fragments constituted

visually, culturally and historically, following representational traditions
and transcending them in unlimited open play between contingencies and
determinism. Finally, we have shown that the fragmentary nature of
masculinity can be experienced in a wide range between two extremes: from
the depiction of the whole body in various states of nakedness/nudity and
offered to diverse gazes – by using traditional conventions of revealing the
female body to deliberately giving bodies a feminine character (Dolce &
Gabbana) – to the formalistic fragmentation of the image itself which offers
no single male body in its complete physical integrity (Versace).

References
Bal, Mieke. 1999. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous
History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Bryson, Norman. 1994. “Géricault and Masculinity.” In Visual Culture:
Images and Interpretations, edited by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann
Holly and Keith Moxey, 228–259. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press.
Clark, Kenneth. 1956. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. New York:
Doubleday Anchor.
Emberley, Julia. 1987. “The Fashion Apparatus and the Deconstruction of
Postmodern Subjectivity.” In Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America,
edited by Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, 47–60. Montreal: New
World Perspectives.
Harris, Jean C. 1964. “A Little-Known Essay on Manet by Stéphane
Mallarmé.” The Art Bulletin 46 (December): 561.
Hollander, Anne. 1993. Seeing Through Clothes. Los Angeles: University
of California Press.
Imdahl, Max. 1996. Giotto, Arenafresken. Ikonographie – Ikonologie –
Ikonik. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
Kaite, Berkeley. 1987. “The Pornographic Body Double: Transgression is
the Law.” In Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America, edited by Arthur
Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, 150–168. Montreal: New World
Perspectives.
Levin, Charles. 1987. “Carnal Knowledge of Aesthetic States.” In Body
Invaders: Panic Sex in America, edited by Arthur Kroker and Marilouise
Kroker, 99–111. Montreal: New World Perspectives.
Lipovetsky, Gilles. 1994. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern
Democracy. Translated from French by Catherine Porter. Princeton, NJ-
Oxford: Princeton University Press.
154 Chapter Five

Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16,
no. 3 (Autumn): 6–18.
Nochlin, Linda. 1994. The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of
Modernity. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Purgar, Krešimir. 2013. Slike u tekstu. Talijanska i ameriþka književnost u
perspektivi vizualnih studija [Images in Text: Italian and American
Literature in the Perspective of Visual Studies]. Zagreb: Durieux and
HC AICA.
Williamson, Judith. 1994. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning
in Advertising. London: Marion Boyars Publishers.
 CHAPTER SIX

BODY IMAGE AND AESTHETICS OF EVERYDAY

LIFE IN FASHION BLOGS:
A SOCIAL-SEMIOTIC PERSPECTIVE

MARIANNA BOERO

Introduction
This article aims to explore the communication trends of the language of
fashion in the social media universe, with particular reference to fashion
blogs. With the advent of social networks, the language of fashion has
undergone significant changes, which have led it to rethink and redefine
some communication logic. If fashion was previously a “closed universe”,
reserved for a small audience, thanks to social media, it has become a system
based on interactions between companies and their audience. Examples
include the possibility of attending high fashion shows through live coverage
on social channels or participating in social communities dedicated to
fashion events. In a context of this type, fashion experiences a process of
democratization while maintaining exclusivity as it increasingly enters the
daily life of the public in the social media universe. Fashion blogs play a
fundamental role in this sense, allowing users to identify with the proposed
narratives. It is precisely with the aim of investigating the way in which the
language of fashion redefines its communication and symbolic methods in
the social universe that this article traces the main studies conducted in the
field of the semiotics of fashion and then focuses on fashion blogs,
highlighting the role of body aesthetics and valorization in the overall
communication. The body changes with changing fashions: both are a sign
of the cultural and identity metamorphosis of society. The body of fashion
is always perennially deformed. It is the mirror of social identity, the eternal
return of the new. In this perspective, social semiotics can play a central role
in understanding the ongoing scenario.
156 Chapter Six

1. The semiotics of fashion: A theoretical framework

Semiotics began to be interested in fashion and in the language of clothing
in the late sixties when Roland Barthes (1915–1980) published the book
Système de la mode (1967), a fundamental text for the studies in this sector.
As recalled by Massimo Baldini (2005, 17), before Barthes, there were only
a few references to the subject, traceable in the works of Ferdinand de
Saussure, Pëtr Bogatyrëv, and Nikolai Trubetzkoy. In particular, de Saussure
(Cours de linguistique générale, 1916) stated that language is a system of
signs comparable with other systems of signs, such as the alphabet of the
deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, forms of courtesy, military signs, the language
of clothing, etc. and that it is simply the most important of these systems.
Pëtr Bogatyrëv, in his text The Functions of Folk Costume in Moravian
Slovakia (1937), highlighted the possible homology between language and
clothing more explicitly, stating that to understand the social function of
clothes, we must learn to read these signs (clothes) just as we learn to read
and understand different languages.1 The path to a more direct study of
fashion from a semiological perspective, however, started with Algirdas
Greimas and Roland Barthes, and it is precisely from their contributions that
this essay moves, with the aim of describing and specifying the field of a
semiotics interested in fashion, before then highlighting the most recent
semiotic research on the topic. In the first part of this essay, we will retrace
some of the stages of Greimas’s and Barthes’s studies on fashion before
then focusing on some contributions from the social semiotic perspective.2
As is well known, in Greimas’s studies, fashion was an early and apparently
transitory interest. He devoted his doctoral thesis, “La mode en 1830. Essai
de description du vocabulaire vestimentaire d’après les journaux de
l’époque”, to this topic in 1948 (see Pezzini 2018). It is a work of
lexicographical reconstruction and sociolinguistics that ranges from the
study of the lexicon to narrative analysis and from reflections on the forms
of life to the aesthetics of everyday life. At the beginning of the path to a
more directly semiological study of fashion, Greimas reconstructs the
1 Moreover, he underlined the different functions of “costume” and “fashion”: while
the former tends to remain almost motionless, fashionable clothing changes rapidly,
even if both are subject to mutual influences. Bogatyrëv also noted other differences:
the costume is more conservative and traditional, while fashion depends on the
tailor’s creativity and aims to be different from what is already in use. Beyond this
useful distinction, the semiotic setting of Bogatyrëv underlines a very important
aspect from a semiotic point of view: clothing, like language, has many functions
and, above all, has the function of an object and a sign at the same time, and it can
be worn and/or interpreted in various ways.
2 See Boero 2015, 2019, Landowski 1989, Marrone 2001, and Traini 2008.
 Body Image and Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Fashion Blogs 157

vocabulary of romantic fashion, starting from the abundant documentation

(fashion magazines, novels, memoirs) being a testimony of the fact that
fashion is clearly perceived as a very complex cultural phenomenon. In the
preface of the thesis, entitled “Objects and methods”, Greimas justifies the
choice of his object of study from various points of view. The vocabulary
of fashion, which he considers one of the main social forms of luxury, seems
to him to be of particular interest as a useful space to show both its
constitution processes and its fast changes. The continuous formation of
neologisms is endowed with a particular expressiveness, and it is therefore
suitable to become, like other areas of luxury, a source of unprecedented
correspondences and metaphorical creations. The period chosen for the
study is the era of the Restoration, around 1830, which is considered
important not only for the renewal of the language that more generally
characterizes it, but also for the stabilization of the way of dressing.
In the introduction of his thesis, “Les conception de l’élégance
vestimentaire”, Greimas emphasizes the social-aesthetic dimension that
concerns the performance of clothing in every society: on the collective
level, people define their status level or their social ambitions through
clothes, and at the same time, on the individual level, they try to express
their own personality through clothes. According to Greimas, this is a
seemingly contradictory search for identity, conceived both as belonging
and originality. Hence, a first exploration of the 1830 vocabulary concerns
the articulation of the judgment of taste in the fashion field. Being
fashionable, for people or things, is a value that marks the desirability of
someone or something, and it is linked to the need for novelty that
distinguishes modernity. Moreover, the fashion content of something –
dress, behaviour, place, etc. – depends on its adoption by those whom each
era considers its own judges of elegance (“reference group”). It is interesting
that the terms that appear in the fashion judgment are in turn subject to
fashion, according to an articulation that always opposes the positive terms
– the area of good taste – to their opposite. Therefore, a sort of isotopy of
veridiction emerges, useful to unmask those who seem elegant and
fashionable (but who, in fact, are not) and those who practice imitations of
what is fashionable, risking appearing vulgar and ridiculous.
While Greimas presents a historical-social study of French vocabulary
oriented on a historicist structuralism, Barthes explores the parallelisms that
can be observed between language as a whole and clothing in a more radical
way (Barthes 1967; Marrone 2006; Pezzini 2017). In the book Le système
de la mode (1967) and in numerous articles and essays, he agrees with de
Saussure’s considerations on the possibility of using the semiological
approach not only for verbal language but also for other types of language.
158 Chapter Six

For these reasons, he started to study fashion as an autonomous system with

its own internal rules, with a function similar to that of natural language.
Assuming a parallel between natural language and the language of clothes,
he postulated a single disciplinary perspective in the study of language and
dress and applied some Saussurean linguistic categories (langue/parole,
synchrony/diachrony, signifier/signified) to the study of fashion. Through
the analysis of magazines, Barthes noted the central role of the captions: the
dress, as a real object, is taken over by a second system, which is that of
language. This narrows the universe of possible meanings, highlighting
details the reader will linger over. Fashion, for Barthes, is an opportunity to
show a similar system to that of language. The word language does not only
indicate a verbal dimension but also involves all the sign systems through
which humans model their position and their relationship with the world.
Fashion falls into this definition because it has an axiological function, that
is, the skill to produce social values.
In his theory, there is an important analytical distinction between custom
and clothing: while the first is an institutional reality, essentially social,
independent from the individual, the second is an individual reality, a
practice through which the individual actualizes the establishment of the
general custom in his/her identity (Barthes 1998, 66–67). If the phenomenon
of clothing is the subject of psychological research, the phenomenon of
custom, Barthes says, is the proper object of sociological or historical
research (Barthes 1998, 67). The dichotomy between tradition and clothing
proposes the articulation of language in de Saussure’s langue and parole:
the first, social institution; the second, individual act. Barthes puts fashion
into the phenomenon of custom, though sometimes it oscillates between the
dispersion of the custom in clothing and, on the other side, the enlargement
of the latter in the phenomenon of custom.
According to this view, Patrizia Calefato (1999, 98) reflects on the social
significance of dress colours. For example, in some societies, the colour
black is traditionally associated with mourning and is banned from clothing
for infants, who are protected from images that are culturally characterized
by negative connotations (night, death, fear). Likewise, black is not
generally accepted as a suitable colour for a wedding dress. These thoughts
become part of the custom of a society and appear to be morphologically
stable. In fashion, however, the social significance of colours fades in a
proliferation of languages that become social discourses. For example,
fashion sometimes allows different colours in different contexts and
discourses from those provided by tradition: think of the wedding dress,
whose ritual function is subjected to fashion changes, with the abandonment
of white in favour of “provocative” colours and forms (for example, the use
 Body Image and Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Fashion Blogs 159

of red, black, slits, necklines, very short skirts, etc.). Calefato gives the
examples of “urban tribes”, such as the punk and dark tribes, of the semiotic
relationships between fashion and cinema, and of “designer style” – all
cases in which garments are no longer the product of collective events but
signs of a style, on the one hand, and consumer goods, on the other.
The communicative value of clothing and of the body that wears it is
also highlighted by Lurie (1981), according to whom clothing is a language
with its own grammar and vocabulary, like other languages. Dress
vocabulary includes not only clothes but also accessories, hairstyle, jewellery,
makeup, and body decorations: it is as wide a vocabulary as that of any other
language, if not more so, since it includes every item, hairstyle, and type of
body decoration that has been invented. Choosing a dress is a means of
defining and describing ourselves (Lurie 1981, 8). In the language of
clothing, like in speech, each person has their own reserve of “words” and
adopts personal changes in tone and meaning. In practice, however, the
dressing lexicon of a person may be very limited: that of a farmer, for
example, may be limited to five or ten words with which he can create only
a few sentences, often undecorated and only able to express mostly basic
concepts; on the contrary, a fashion leader may have hundreds of thousands
of words to build sentences connected to many different meanings. Lurie
shows an analogy between verbal language and the language of clothes. A
casual way of dressing conveys fluidity, relaxation, and vitality, as happens
in natural spoken language with slang. In some cases, it is also possible to
equate different articles of clothing with different parts of speech: trimmings
and accessories, for example, have the same function as adjectives and
adverbs, which is to enrich a dress or a phrase (Lurie 1981, 10). However,
we must not forget that some ornaments and accessories of a period may be
essential elements of another: fashion vocabulary often changes because
fashion is fickle and is just a reflection of the flow of time.
Within the limits imposed by the economy, clothes are bought, used, and
discarded, just like words, because they meet our needs and express our
ideas and our emotions. Any attempt by experts to save outdated words or
persuade people to use new terms correctly fails. Similarly, people will
choose and wear those clothes that reflect their identity or what they wish
to be at a certain time. Others will be set aside, even if promoted by means
of mass communication. According to Lurie, the fashion industry is no
longer able either to maintain a style that men and women have chosen to
leave because they are far from the emerging social context or to introduce
new ones that they do not wish to adopt. Thus, consumption practices
legitimize or de-legitimize fashion proposals, establishing the success and
sometimes also the end of a trend.
160 Chapter Six

Other contributions came later from social semiotics, a perspective in

which the phenomenon of fashion is not analyzed only through the study of
the verbal language used, as Barthes did, but in relation to all the types of
discourses distributed within it. In this regard, it is necessary to recall the
studies of Jean-Marie Floch (1995), who, considering fashion as a discourse,
analyzes the total look of Coco Chanel. This led him to distance himself
from previous semiotic studies, in particular from those of Barthes and
Greimas, who, believing that the meaning always passes through the
linguistic naming, studied non-verbal signification systems only starting
from their lexicalization. In contrast, Floch declares that he is not interested
in discourses about fashion (meta-discourses like the journalistic
vocabulary of fashion or the lexical system of fashion professionals) but in
the analysis of fashion as a discourse. First of all, he focused on the
figurative dimension of Chanel’s total look. Then, he reviewed the clothing
and the accessories invented by the designer, which, in some way, constitute
the identification signs of the brand: for example, the trousers, the black
dress, the blazer with golden buttons, the sailor’s cap, the black-tipped shoe,
and so on. Framing the appearance of these inventions historically, we can
see that Chanel systematically rejected the most characteristic features of
women’s fashion at the time. In fact, the designer refused everything that
did not respond to a precise functionality of clothing, which must be
practical and comfortable, to allow women to walk, work, and move freely
(Floch 1995, 130).
The first narrative content of the Chanel look, from a figurative point of
view, is therefore the conquest of an individual freedom, a result of
modernity.3 The second content of the Chanel look is represented by a
particular vision of femininity, exalted by paradox. The silhouette is in fact
built from signs belonging to universes such as men’s work (jersey, sailor,
striped vest) and men’s clothing (cap, trousers, tie, short hair), different
from the female fashion of the time. However, these signs act as signifiers
that refer to opposite meanings, such as femininity and luxury. Thanks to
this game of the inversion of signifiers and meanings, Chanel wanted to
affirm an original definition of the female identity that is exclusively hers.
The look of Chanel is “timeless”, and this sort of exteriority to time depends
on its production methods. The Chanel look, in fact, is the result of a real
bricolage, that is, a work of combining and adapting signs of different
origins and eras. The exploitation and co-presence of these signs suspend
the temporal difference they manifest. While fashion can “go out of fashion”

3 Barthes himself (1967, 120), analyzing the Chanel style, pointed out that it
corresponds to that rather short moment of our history in which a minority of women
finally had access to work and to social independence.
 Body Image and Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Fashion Blogs 161

because it is a question of signs, the look is timeless: it represents a sensitive

and intelligible structure, elaborated at the expense of the signs, regardless
of their historical characteristics and their original use.
In the context of fashion social semiotics, ultimately, it is necessary to
cite the studies of Landowski (1995) on the role of fashion in the processes
of identity construction. In fact, fashion is a key factor in the segmentation
and articulation of the social space, as it makes the differences between the
environments, the classes, and the generations more evident. In this context,
fashion indicates the individual adoption of exterior signs, with the help of
which the identity of a certain group or environment declines figuratively
(or momentarily), suggesting that it belongs to the environment in question.
Fashion should therefore be conceived as an interactive process of the
invention and production of identities. In this process, it implements a
“game of doubled oppositions”, according to which the identity of a group
is constituted and solidified not only in opposition, synchronically, to
others, but also, diachronically, to itself: what is fashionable here and now
is opposed both to what was fashionable here yesterday/will be fashionable
here tomorrow and to what is fashionable today in other places.
Within societies, fashions are not imposed unilaterally by a superior and
external instance but are always constituted through negotiations, repetitions,
and accumulations: they are created, in fact, from extremely complex
processes of interaction and self-regulation. Thus, fashion produces identities
not entirely given in advance but defined at the same pace in which each
specific fashion is made. Landowski closes his reflection by highlighting
two paradoxes that can be found in the changes introduced by fashion. First
of all, fashion, renewing the forms of objects and codes of behaviour from
time to time, causes objective changes. At the same time, however, it also
causes changes in the subjects themselves, who, in following it, adopt new
points of view on objects, behaviours, and, ultimately, themselves. They
will thus be inclined to change their habits and their criteria of judgment,
adhering to the values that, at that moment, are in vogue. A second
ambivalence is related to the fact that fashion enhances the present and, at
the same time, trivializes it. Constantly proposing the new and introducing
“discontinuities”, fashion euphorically ascends the course of time and
breaks everyday life, presenting itself as a party, freedom, openness, and
promise. In parallel, however, by defining what is done, it becomes a strong
referential moment and a common norm, a means of recognition and
normality in relation to what appears to be confused: it becomes convention,
repetition – in short, the form itself of the most stable everyday life.
Those mentioned are just some of the numerous studies conducted on
fashion from a semiotic point of view, but they allow us to understand how
162 Chapter Six

different the premises and the survey methods used to study the phenomenon
are. If, on the one hand, it is possible to focus on the study of the vocabulary
of fashion, on the other, it is possible to consider fashion as a discourse
itself. On the one hand, it is possible to focus on fashion as a way of
interacting with other discourses over time, while, on the other, the objective
is to study fashion in relation to the concept of identity. We have selected
these studies because they present problems of particular interest in relation
to the short forms of web texts as objects of study. In the following section,
we aim to evaluate the relevance of the cited studies with respect to the
changes that the language of fashion has witnessed and is experiencing with
the diffusion of new web technologies. In particular, we will consider the
relevance of structural studies in the face of the new textual forms that have
emerged in the Web 2.0 era. The following section deals with these issues,
providing examples and possible analytical directions.

2. Aesthetics of the body and everyday life in fashion blogs

The studies that we have recalled outline the field of a semiotics of fashion
and clarify the specific contribution offered by semiotics compared to that
of other neighbouring disciplines, such as sociology. We saw the different
possible perspectives in studying fashion as a language, but what does it
mean to study fashion today? Are the descriptive categories of semiotics
effective in facing the ongoing changes in the language of fashion? In fact,
this latter language is experiencing significant mutations, both in the new
textual typologies through which it manifests itself and in the emergence of
a new vocabulary that redefines the expressive dimension as well as the
conceptual field related to fashion. The advent of Web 2.0 communication
has led to a change in the usual communication modalities, based on the
image of a passive user, exclusively receptive to media messages. With the
advent of social networks, the active role of the receiver is increasingly
rediscovered because they collaborate in the construction of the text,
establishing a relationship with the brand’s world: in the virtual places, the
users set out their reading path and chooses the pages of their interest
according to completely personal parameters, often difficult for the issuer
to control. For a brand that was previously “communicating to”, it now
becomes necessary to learn how to “communicate with” because, in the
space of the web, conversational dynamics are very different from the past.
We now talk about the attention economy, defined as the careful
management of user attention that is difficult to grasp and maintain.
The fashion blog is one of the tools to which this type of attention needs
to be directed. Fashion blogs are virtual spaces that lie outside the
 Body Image and Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Fashion Blogs 163

communicative territory controlled by brands where the author can openly

and quickly publish news, stories, reflections, ideas, personal opinions, and
information, which are then displayed in reverse chronological order. In the
jargon of the Internet, a blog is defined as a diary on the net; this definition,
however, does not really explain what a blog is. A blog can be a diary, a
notebook, a calendar, a collection of stories, or anything else the author
wants; the content can be anything, and therefore it is not its content that
defines a blog. What really identifies a blog is the conversational and
informal tone in which it is written, enabled by technology and spread by
fashion bloggers: a diary is something personal, while a blog is born to be
shared. Moreover, it is possible for any user to leave a comment on each
article visible to all: in this way, a discussion among users develops around
the proposed topic.
In recent years, the phenomenon of blogs has become widespread. Born
from the will of individual users to freely write and compare themselves
with the comments of others, they have become a source of interest for
brands, and now all the most active online companies have a blog with the
aim of creating a more informal and direct meeting point with customers.
The writing practised on blogs is a counterpoint to the institutional form
created for brands’ sites or newspapers: usually, the tone of the posts is
informal, and the messages are short and accompanied by the presence of
sources and links for supplementary information. Compared to the other
tools and services offered by the web, the blog presents some peculiar traits
because, on the one hand, it amplifies one of the most traditional types of
writing, that is, the personal diary, and, on the other, it transforms
individualism into sharing because its contents are accessible for a
potentially indeterminate audience and are exposed to debate, comments,
and rewriting. In fact, the content can be modified or questioned by other
users at any time in a dialogue that, despite appearing similar to spoken
communication, shows all the typical features of writing.
Blogs do not always belong to a specific communication genre, even if
they tend to maintain a certain structural coherence over time. It is possible
to identify different kinds of writing on the blog: the diary genre, the
thematic genre, and the literary genre. The “blog diary” uses a very free
form of writing, generally using the first person; it may present features that
are very similar to speech and compensation phenomena such as pitching
by imitating speech pauses (using ellipses for suspense and creative
punctuation). The “thematic blog” is dedicated to a specific topic (fashion,
make-up, cinema, books, politics). Very often, it presents a type of writing
that can be defined as journalistic. Although there are no excessive signs of
revision, it is possible to find conformity with the new standard languages
164 Chapter Six

used by newspapers. The “literary blog”, on the other hand, hosts texts with
literary ambitions, such as poems, stories, or prose of various kinds.
The complex textuality of the blog opens several points of debate in the
semiotic field. Within the blog, stories and discussions about products,
places, and services take shape according to unconventional and extremely
variable narrative schemes based on the author’s descriptive intentions. In
the blogs, values are narrativized, inscribed in a subjective perspective and
in a human context: the truth or the verisimilitude of the stories means that
the readers are personally involved in the narrated experiences. We can say,
using the words of Ferraro (2015), that the aspect of interest consists in the
fact that rather than reducing the narrative dimension to a literal act of
storytelling – that is to say, to the explicit condition in which a narrator,
qualified and recognized as such, “tells a story to conscious recipients” – a
blog calls into question a larger and deeper dimension, where “the experience
itself and the flow of events that surround us are subjected to a narrative
configuration” (Ferraro 2015, 245; my translation).
Coming more specifically to the fashion field, we can see that in fashion
blogs, the subjects of storytelling (fashion bloggers) become veritable
communication extensions of the brand. The strategies chosen by fashion
blogs can be very different from each other. In some cases, they choose to
create a warmer and more direct relationship with the public through
frequent verbal-visual interpellations – such as the invitation to replicate the
proposed look in a personal key – and ample space is left for comments. In
others, we find the choice of a more detached and self-referential language,
which recalls that of services in high fashion magazines; in these cases,
generally, images prevail over verbal elements, and the involvement of the
public is lower. There are, however, some recurring characteristics on which
it is useful to dwell.
First of all, the role of the body. At the centre of each image, there is, in
fact, the body of the subject, photographed in its entirety or with a focus on
certain details. The body exhibited is the protagonist of the stories: clothing
items acquire meaning only in relation to the body that supports them, and
each product is only one of the adjuvants that allow the realization of the
overall look. The general sense, in fact, derives precisely from the
intersubjective relationships that the protagonist’s body can establish with
other bodies and with the clothing garments in a regime that, referring to
Landowski’s theory of aesthesic contagion (2003), we can define as
“intercorporeality”. The representation of the body does not follow a fixed
and immutable logic but is influenced by the referral practices of the users,
who contribute to the renegotiation and construction of the proposed models.
In this way, if the body represents a means of promoting the individual self,
 Body Image and Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Fashion Blogs 165

it can also be seen as an expression of social tendencies at the same time.

The choices of the bloggers, therefore, are indicative of the relationship that
is established between the visual representation of the self and the set of
social models in which the body is represented, accepted, or denied.
Another feature common to fashion blogs is the predominance of visual
aspects. Although the verbal component is always present within blog posts,
images play the main communicative role, anticipating a trend that
represents the basis of the most used social media platforms, such as
Facebook and Instagram. In fact, it is visual content that collects the greatest
number of hits because of its communicative immediacy, and it is precisely
for this reason that the wise use of images to tell stories has become crucial
for brands. The relevance of visual aspects also concerns the narration level,
as at the centre of each image is a core story, that is, a main story onto which,
sometimes, additional micro-stories are grafted. The effectiveness of the
story comes from the combination of visual signs through which actors,
spaces, and times are staged. If, in some cases, information is provided
through images, in others, we find a playful use of visual narration with the
aim of creating atmospheres and arousing feelings. Consequently, through
the image, different types of gazes (formal and informal) are summoned,
and they refer, through visual statements, to a specific reader profile.
A third aspect that should be stressed in the analysis of fashion blogs
concerns the anchoring to a recognizable and daily context. In the blog, the
product is included in the life of the blogger, and this anchorage makes the
narrated world closer to the real world of the readers. At the centre of the
stories, we find a relationship between the story and actual life, between
fiction and reality: the presence of credible environments and characters, of
likely situations in which life scenes and replicable practices of use are told, so
that the recipient can identify themselves in the proposed story. If, on the one
hand, the blog text aims at telling experiences and practices of real life, on the
other hand, its similar story contributes to the construction of the way in which
reality is, in turn, perceived and experienced by consumers. Blogs, in other
words, have the ability to speak, with a specific language, of the surrounding
reality in which consumers in turn are included as subjects of experience.
The verisimilitude of the settings and the stories proposed is linked, in
closing, to the verisimilitude of the models of beauty conveyed by the blogs,
which gradually free themselves from the dominant aesthetic canons.
According to these traditional canons, there was a certain image of the body
which, although it varied according to an ideal of beauty and seduction tied
to a specific historical and cultural context, was nevertheless a traditionally
beautiful body, exhibited without imperfections. The body could serve to
underline the dress or to increase its seductiveness, but in any case, it was
166 Chapter Six

distant from the daily and real life of the public. The bodies depicted on the
blogs, on the contrary, while continuing to refer to certain canons of beauty,
desirability, and form, are no longer unattainable, diaphanous, and distant:
they break the usual representative canons and propose a reading contract
based also on playful values (Floch 1990), such as irony. The communication
on blogs thus opens the way to other models of beauty that gradually acquire
legitimacy, helping to define not only new canons of elegance or wearability
but also different images of their recipients. From this point of view, the
blog produces identities and becomes the expressive channel of the new
logic of the independence of taste that is emerging.

Conclusion
As we have seen, the language of fashion is experiencing a continuous
redefinition due to the emergence of new forms of textuality, as well as to
the new interaction practices of social users. In the previous section, we
highlighted the elements that characterize fashion blogs’ communication
and the aspects that distinguish them from other forms of textuality. We
have seen, in particular, the centrality of visual aspects, non-verbal
communication, and the body, which deserves a more in-depth study.
Moreover, we have seen that blogs represent scenes of everyday life and refer
to the idea of accessible fashion, aimed at reaching the user’s involvement
through a more direct and informal dialogue than in the past. Currently,
however, the fashion blog increasingly seems to be losing its communicative
strength, giving way to a faster and more essential form of communication
that is mostly entrusted to images. Indeed, in the most recent blogs, the verbal
component is reduced and leaves more and more space to a narration made
up of visuals and temporary stories. For this reason, Instagram is increasingly
assuming a central role in fashion communication: here, the overall
communication is based on stories communicated through images, and the
verbal component often becomes a mere caption.
Therefore, should we talk about the end of the fashion blog? We do not
know what the answer to this question is, but we seem to be seeing signs of
this transition in three characteristics offered by Instagram. First of all,
Instagram seems to better satisfy the users’ need for the aestheticization of
the self, emphasizing the aesthetic dimension of bodies and objects,
photographed with filters and different photographic angles. Secondly,
Instagram allows the users to share content rapidly and to express it in an
essential way, with simplified language: indeed, the language on Instagram
is becoming ever simpler, devoid of decorations or frills; the syntax is
streamlined and aims at the emphasis of the essential concept, expressed
 Body Image and Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Fashion Blogs 167

through a single simple proposition. The third element is the importance

given to the present offered by the communication on Instagram: indeed,
the conversation is postponed to other places (posts or hashtags that are
mentioned in the captions) but not to other times. This trend is made even
more evident by Instagram’s introduction of Stories, the content of which is
usable and visible for only 24 hours, demonstrating how it is only the
present moment that matters in this type of communication.
From a semiotic point of view, this article will hopefully lead to a search
for tools able to analyze visual stories more specifically, redefining some
elements that are necessary to decode the new communication reality.
Particular attention must be paid to the semiotic analysis of the contents
expressed by images, from which we can trace a line back to a certain idea
of fashion. At the same time, it will be necessary for semiotics to collaborate
with quantitative methods of investigation for the analysis of the huge
number of comments linked to images and posts. Only through this dialogue
will it be possible to manage big data and to reconstruct, through the
analysis of the comments, a path that can help to interpret the continuous
evolution of fashion language, which is increasingly redefining itself from
below, starting from the comments and the active participation of web users.

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Traini, Stefano. 2008. Semiotica della comunicazione pubblicitaria. Milan:
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 CHAPTER SEVEN

FASHIONING THE CINEMATIC SCREEN:

BODY TRANSMEDIALITY, APPEARANCE
AND THE ‘EVENT’

PETRA KRPAN

Introduction: New media and the body transformation

In the age of new technologies, the question arises as to whether new media
can bring something new to contemporary fashion. We take the work of the
Turkish-British designer Hussein Chalayan and the Dutch designer Iris van
Herpen, as fundamental representatives of the symbiosis of technology,
media, fashion and art, as a paradigm when we talk about the possibilities
of new media in fashion, but also vice versa: of fashion in new media. This
relationship, very much present in the work of Chalayan and van Herpen,
brought a departure from the classic anthropological understanding of the
term media as “extensions of the human senses” (McLuhan 1964). This
paper also takes into account McLuhan’s understanding of the concept of
media but in the context of fashion as follows:

(1) Contemporary fashion takes place as a media representation of the

body in an event,
(2) The body becomes a media object, and
(3) The notion of the observer (audience) changes its meaning.

There are many definitions of the term media, but what this paper seeks to
clarify is how they are used within contemporary fashion discourse and how
they have contributed to the ever-changing fashion practice. New media is
used as a term in many theories and research, and thus there has been a loss
of references, and it is now difficult to recognize what exactly the term
media refers to. In the anthropological understanding of the media as
extensions, coined by Marshall McLuhan, media are part of the technical
170 Chapter Seven

environment and the human environment and act as extensions of the human
body and its abilities (McLuhan 1964). Paul Virilio, a French cultural
theorist, urban planner and aesthetic philosopher, on the trail of McLuhan,
elaborated in detail what media studies are and how he uses the term media
as a prosthesis (Virilio 1999. In contemporary fashion practice, there is an
adjustment to the media, but also, conversely, the medium adapts to the form
of fashion practice. Sunþana Tuksar states how media are always
overlapping into various areas – film, fashion, literature, etc. – and that there
is a clear transgression between these areas (Tuksar 2021). Media in the
context of contemporary fashion, as this research understands it, represent
a new set of cultural information that identifies the body practice.
The difference lies in the media mediating the same message and thus
changing the relationship between the subject (sender) and the object
(recipient) of the message. Let us dwell for a moment on these authors when
we talk about the media transformation of the body in fashion. McLuhan’s
media theory suggests that the media always refer to other media. In that
sense, McLuhan states: “The effect of the medium is made strong and
intense just because it is given another medium as ‘content’” (McLuhan
2008, 22). In the same way a semiotic sign always refers to another sign,
the circulation of the media no longer points to reality but is about the
symbolic construction of reality. As no medium is autonomous and
homogeneous (Mitchell 2005) in the digital age, media impurity occurs
because everything mixes and appears in hybrid forms, and this is exactly
what is characteristic of modern fashion. It is a constant metamorphosis of
the same in various forms. However, we need to distinguish between media
according to two criteria of their practical use according to Žarko Paiü: 1)
technical and technological, and 2) socio-cultural (Paiü 2008, 92).
Contemporary fashion, therefore, belongs to the socio-cultural criterion,
which “refers to changing social structures and cultural orders by introducing
a ‘new’ medium” (Paiü 2008, 92). Fashion therefore radically changed its
structure with the introduction of new media but also experienced
fundamental changes in fashion photography and fashion film, which we
will talk about in the following sections. New media have complex
structures, abolishing old concepts of understanding time and space and
causing decentralization, or, to be precise, the loss of the centre. The
instantaneity of appearance, which is expressed in fashion practice, comes
from the field of media. The medium makes us immediate participants,
whether we like it or not.
The age of telepresence in virtual space and the loss of the space of
reality related to experience and temporal distance are concepts that were
introduced by the Austrian artist, curator and new media theorist Peter
 Fashioning the Cinematic Screen 171

Weibel. He calls this the era of absence, a period of radical absence and
telematic presence (Weibel 2005). Vilém Flusser went a step further in
considering information transfer and distance communication. Essentially,
the fundamental difference is that technology is not a human tool and the
media are not just “extensions of man.” Media, like technology as a whole,
is of an IT nature because, according to Flusser, it is a concept of technology
(technical images) that generates the reality of the world. It is about the
transfer of social relations between entities that creates a telematic society,
one that exchanges information and communicates at a distance.
Contemporary fashion finds its identity in this context because it takes place
at a distance as a medialized event in the magnificent performance of the
body. The identity is, as Tuksar writes, “virtual identity in the transmedial
understanding,” and “where there is identity, there is culture” (Tuksar 2021,
96). The era of absence has arrived in which the body and corporeality are
established differently. In this context, contemporary fashion signifies a
new media platform in which we can connect time, space and the body in
motion. The body in new media is at the same time absent and present.
Chalayan’s work has been marked by the usage of technology in
collaboration with the body. He includes technology in fashion installations
and collections, while van Herpen considers technology as a fundamental
starting point of contemporary fashion. In that sense, van Herpen went a
step further in her research. Her understanding and experimentation with
body and materials at all levels of contemporary fashion design emphasized
the importance of fashion silhouette and body performance. Unlike
Chalayan, van Herpen subtly uses technology in collaboration with the
body, creating delicate contours and presenting soft, voluminous fashion
objects. Technology is no longer an extension, it is already a matter of a
complete acceptance of the physical with the technological. Van Herpen
includes the fundamental elements of fire, water, earth and air in her work
on the trail of Alexander McQueen. However, modern fashion, in the
context of body transformation, is represented in photography and film.
Therefore, in this article, preference is given to the field of photography and
fashion film to show the paradigm shifts in fashion that led to the
transformation of the body. Although some designers, such as Chalayan,
directly involve the media as extensions, photography and film radically
change the representation of fashion. Thanks to new media, fashion
performances and the presentation of the collections take place, as predicted
by Flusser, at a distance. Accordingly, the fashion house Maison Martin
Margiela presented the couture autumn-winter collection in 2012 in which
there was no audience, but there was a camera that monitored and recorded
everything. Fashion photography and fashion film have gone a step further
172 Chapter Seven

in considering the relationship between fashion, body and corporeality. The

most significant changes in contemporary fashion have taken place in the
context of fashion photography, fashion film and fashion performance, all
under the visible influence of the media. Therefore, the notion of media is
the basis for understanding the paradigm shift that fashion experienced at
the beginning of the 1990s.

1. Fashion film: From the Golden Age of Hollywood

to experimental fashion film
The emergence of fashion film after the 1990s as a new possibility of body
performance, as well as the emergence of the body on the screen, is an
important area that combines fashion theory and media as well as the field
of film and photography. Film and photography in the context of
contemporary fashion represent a valuable field in which the emergence of
a new cinematic body is explored. It is certain that film, and before that
photography, has provided an insight into the new concept of body and
reality. With the advent of photography and film, the process of mediation
radically changed its course; the result is a forever changed fashioned body.
The connection between fashion and film and, finally, the emergence of the
term fashion film after the 1990s dates back to the period of classic films
and big movie stars, so it is necessary to briefly chronologically describe
how film influenced fashion and vice versa. It is important to emphasize
how fashion film is not genre-specific; as stated by Croatian filmologist
Nikica Giliü: “Classification is extremely important in discussing any art
form” (Giliü 2007, 9).
But fashion film does not belong to a film genre, and yet we call it a film.
Therefore, in that sense, it belongs to a certain interspace between gender,
type (film type) and genre because it uses all the above categories for its
representation. Iris van Herpen uses a fashion documentary film that follows
the process of her work, and Nick Knight uses experimental film and mixes
different media in his work. There are many film achievements in classic
film, which are highlighted in this article, that have combined the fields of
film and fashion and significantly influenced fashion practice and style.
Fashion film belongs to the field of documentary, feature and experimental
film (basic film genres), but it should be emphasized that fashion film is still
an unfounded film category. As for film genres, as Giliü classified, there are
genres of feature, documentary and experimental film (Giliü 2007), but due
to the great influence of film on fashion, fashion film does not belong only
to one genre or style. Fashion film appears in different categories and in
different genres, and it can consist of feature and documentary parts.
 Fashioning the Cinematic Screen 173

Therefore, the classification in this paper is somewhat different because it

is associated with film and fashion within classic Hollywood films, fashion
documentaries and promotional art fashion films.
It is necessary to emphasize the special connection between film and
fashion because films represent a new style and new ideas for a mass
audience. The film, like fashion, has changed the concept of reality in a truly
radical way, as well as the idea of body and corporeality on screen. The film
changed social rules with fashion, setting a new fashion for a new audience.
The American actress Mae Marsh agreed in 1912 to show off her bare feet,
risking scandal, in a paradigmatic cave scene in the film Man’s Genesis (dir.
D. W. Griffith). As early as 1910, Hollywood began bringing in famous
designers and costume designers to design film costumes. In 1911, French
fashion designer Paul Poiret shot his summer collection called The
Thousand and Second Night, inspired by oriental harem trousers,1 and later
used it for advertising purposes. In 1920, Coco Chanel was hired to design
for the American actress Gloria Swanson, but Swanson despised the dark
and clean Chanel lines that were not suitable for photography and film.
A new generation of designers and costume designers then emerged who
understood the connection between stars, film and fashion. This group of
costume designers included Edith Head, who trained as an assistant to
Travis Banton, himself one of the most famous designers of the 1930s,
notable for dressing German-American actress Marlene Dietrich. Head’s
success was that she managed to satisfy her stars, dressing them in the then-
current American style, taking over from French fashion, and designing
wearable fashion. Its special design always reflected the spirit of the times;
when Christian Dior introduced New Look in 1947 with his significantly
longer skirts, Head refused to specify the length of her dresses in the films
she designed for, waiting for the reactions to such a fashion change to calm
down. It was not until the very late 1940s that Head began designing longer
dresses. Her New Look release was in 1950 in All About Eve (dir. Joseph L.
Mankiewicz), in which actress Bette Davis wears a richly lined, bare-
shouldered party cocktail dress that later became an iconic dress in the
fashion context. The role of the designer and costume designer in the film
had changed from the Hollywood dressing system since the 1950s, when
American actress Audrey Hepburn asked Hubert de Givenchy, a Parisian

1Poiret made significant changes in women’s clothing: he introduced trousers into

haute couture, and this later became a generally accepted item of clothing for
women’s sports activities and leisure. Harem pants signified a liberation from
Western norms and conventions. In the context of the connection between fashion
and film, Poiret made a step towards a more creative and free approach to costume,
often taking on elements of the Far East.
174 Chapter Seven

couture designer, to design the clothes she would wear in Sabrina (dir. Billy
Wilder, 1954). It was Head who did her studio work on the costumes, but
the Hepburn-Givenchy relationship created the Hepburn Look, which
influenced a wider audience. Classical cinema was closely associated with
the concept of haute couture in Europe, especially with French fashion
designers and big stars (such as Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn and Kim
Novak), and in the mid-1950s, with the rise of television, film experienced
a kind of a turning point. Both films starring Audrey Hepburn, Sabrina and
Funny Face (dir. Stanley Donen, 1957), became places of the transformation
of this actress with a fashion costume (Bruzzi 1997, 6).
Although costume designers, such as de Givenchy, continued to be
significant in the world of film, the relationship between fashion and film
changed radically under the influence of street fashion. However, thanks to
high fashion, costume designers gained a greater degree of autonomy in
film. Fashion and film in the Golden Age of Hollywood represented a
significant link between dressing up on film, character visualization and
consumer society. Fashion was presented in film in other ways; from the
1994 film Prêt-à-Porter by Robert Altman to the 1994 documentary
Notebook on Cities and Clothes by German director Wim Wenders, there
were the beginnings of Japanese deconstruction that accompanied the
creative process of the work of fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. A short
film by the American director Martin Scorsese, Made in Milan, made in
1990, is dedicated to the work of Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani.
Films that follow the process of designer work have become the standard
in recent years. Iris van Herpen has re-emphasized the process of working
in contemporary fashion design, even though such short documentaries
existed as far back as the early 1990s. We can say that the main reason for
this return of interest in observing the working process of a fashion designer
is the same as the claim of Boris Groys, a theorist of avant-garde and
contemporary art. Groys noted that it is necessary to document the work of
contemporary artists (conceptual, performative and installation artists), and
in the process of the democratization of art at the end of the 20th century,
art sought to reject any form of creative idealization – not only of art but
also of the creative process (Groys 2008, 53–66). In this way, the process
of documenting the event of the emergence of something new in culture is
connected with what belongs to the enchantment of the mass audience with
its fetishized idols. As early as the late 1960s, the Spanish fashion designer
Christóbal Balenciaga argued that haute couture no longer existed (Mendes
and de la Haye 1999, 24). This can be seen much earlier in the 1957 film
Funny Face (dir. Stanley Donen), in which a young Audrey Hepburn
appears dressed in black capri pants and a black dolcevita, which was
 Fashioning the Cinematic Screen 175

unknown until then in the world of film and rich costume design. A similar
example is found in Kim Novak, who was also dressed in black trousers and
a dolcevita in Bell, Book and Candle (dir. Richard Quine, 1958) and looks
like a member of the popular beatnik subculture.2 Many films became
references to fashion change and adhered to the great power of film in
shaping fashion styles.
During the 1980s, film and fashion underwent a radical change. High
fashion was no longer present in films, famous costume designers and
designers were working less with directors, and there was no more classical
film. However, Giorgio Armani designed the costumes for the film
American Gigolo (dir. Paul Schrader, 1980), which features a young
Richard Gere as a symbol of the affirmation of men’s fashion and freedom
in experimenting with colours and fabrics in his paradigmatic scene where
the protagonist dresses. This film presented the connection between fashion
costumes and ready-to-wear fashion (Bruzzi 1997, 7). What has happened
to fashion and film in the meantime, and why is their relationship important
for research in the field of fashion theories, media, and ultimately film
itself? Film and fashion have discarded some of their essential features over
time. Sometimes fashion on film triggered mass trends, such as cropped T-
shirts and leg warmers, which were used in the film Flashdance (dir. Adrian
Lyne, 1983). Some films followed tradition and functioned like a fashion
show from the beginning to the end of the film. Examples of this include
Pretty Woman (dir. Garry Marshall, 1990), which features American actress
Julia Roberts as a Cinderella character, but also films such as My Fair Lady,
directed by George Cukor in 1964, and Grease, directed by Randal Kleiser
in 1978. Of all the costumes shown in the film, the costume of the prostitute
played by Julia Roberts (high and narrow boots, with a top and short
miniskirt) became extremely important for the youth of the 1990s.
As in the case of Sabrina, Pretty Woman constructs a similar fairy tale
about a young woman who becomes different by changing her appearance,
clothing, and thus her economic status (Bruzzi 1997, 15). Contemporary
designers from 7th Avenue have often collaborated in designing costumes
for films, however their style has never prevailed over the existing
character. Costume design for American productions has been done by
American designers Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and Ralph Lauren, who is
best known in the sector for his work on Annie Hall (dir. Woody Allen,
1977) with American actress Diane Keaton. Keaton wore clothing items
with Lauren’s signature and influenced the female audience who, years
later, wore clothes in a relaxed and liberating way, like the main character

2 The beatnik style existed during the 1950s and 1960s with subcultures dressing
predominantly in black, and it was recognizable by dolcevitas and French hats.
176 Chapter Seven

of that film. Since the late 1960s, the female star type has been stratifying,
which will be discussed in more detail in the next section. It is Keaton who
retained certain characteristics of the good friend type3 so that, in the 1990s,
there was an “obvious revitalization of the type (which accompanies the
revitalization of romantic comedy)” (Kragiü 2005, 14). However, the
connection between fashion and film cannot be seen only in this costume
design context, which is, of course, an important element of the film story.
What film offers in terms of fashion became visible only after the 1990s
with the emergence of short artistic semi-documentary fashion films.
Thanks to new technologies but also the need to move fashion from the
catwalk to the cinematic screen, fashion film has gradually profiled itself as
an important element in research in fashion theory. Although authors such
as Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson have been researching film and
fashion for more than thirty years, there are not enough other relevant
researchers in this theoretical field. Therefore, this chapter intends to
analyze what fashion is in film and how both concepts and areas have
influenced each other, starting from the period of classic Hollywood film.
Fashion films can, therefore, be divided as follows:

(1) Film and fashion in a classic feature film

(2) Fashion documentaries
(3) Advertising art fashion films

Film no longer serves as a unique experience for the viewer, and this process
took place precisely under the great influence of television, VHSs and
DVDs, which particularly changed the experience of the film in general.
The decentralization of film, and thus the fashion that appeared in films,
resulted in a new type of communication. In this context, the British fashion
theorist Pamela Church Gibson speaks of “images spilling over on screens,”
thus creating a new way of looking at the fashion body on-screen (Church
Gibson 2011, 11). The new image of the film event now represents a body
that is no longer aestheticized and stylized on screen but has been pre-
constructed by the media for a new kind of image of fashion film. In fashion
film, the body is predetermined by its content and structure and represents
an experimental and hybrid body performance. The body appears in fashion
film as a process, from the emergence of the garment object on film (but no
longer in the context of costume design) to the complete medialization of

3 The character type of the good friend, according to the typology of female stars by

Enno Patalas, is described as “the ideal partner of a guy from the neighborhood who
needs her as a friend and helper … a good friend is not the subject of a struggle of
men who then primarily fight for social ideals” (Patalas 1963, 180).
 Fashioning the Cinematic Screen 177

the body. The growing emergence of fashion in the context of the theory as
well as the philosophy of film is an important area that connects theories of
fashion, media and performance. Film and fashion have developed a strong
connection, from the era of classic Hollywood to today’s art documentaries
about fashion. In the next section, this article will try to present the area in
which we want to indicate what kind of body appeared in film after the
1990s, what its task is in moving images in the context of fashion in the
film, and what the new possibilities of body and physical performance are.
The great influence of female movie stars on fashion was most
pronounced in the 1930s and 1940s. Female stars became style icons for
mass audiences. Hollywood Golden Age costumes emphasized the natural
beauty of individual stars but later served as important references for
fashion designers. Hollywood, in a fashion context, served as a machine for
setting fashion norms and displaying what was currently in fashion, but it
also paved the way for further consideration of the relationship between film
and fashion. The classic Hollywood film was associated with the strong
development of the industry and was based on Fordism, the division of
labour necessary for mass production. Films of that time displayed a
pragmatic spirit and a respect for patriarchal norms. The space of the scene
in the classic film was constructed according to the line of action or on a
line of 180 degrees, which provided a common space from frame to frame.
A clear relationship between the characters was established, and thus the
space was clearly defined so that the viewer always knows where the
characters are placed. The mode of the film makes the technique invisible
(Peterliü calls the classical style an “invisible style” because the author’s or
director’s interventions are hidden, or at least are such that they do not
distract attention from the main plot). The shots are arranged linearly
spatially and temporally so that the actor or actress does not look directly
into the camera.
Interestingly, this invisibility of style is replaced by other characteristics.
In classic Hollywood films, stories are organized by genre patterns that have
always served the film industry for the production and marketing of films.
Genres, just like film stars, have emerged as a need for product
differentiation systems. Each genre has a recognizable array of common
features that run through the story, visual style, characters, mise-en-scène,
music, and film stars. Genres consist of specific systems (patterns) for
creating certain expectations and assumptions with which viewers see and
understand the film. These patterns offer a way to conclude what happens
on screen: why certain actions and events take place, why characters look
as they do, why they speak and behave in a certain way, and so on, and all
this is of importance in the context of researching fashion and film.. Singing
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is appropriate for a musical, but not exactly for a thriller or war movie. In
this sense, genre systems presuppose rules, norms and laws. Given the
stardom system (a cinematic phenomenon related to the level of popularity
and recognition of stars), which is based on the guarantee that as many
viewers as possible will react to the appearance of an actor, the types that
form the structure develops. The structure is maintained by the social and
psychological interests of the audience in correlation with the industry in a
certain period. Therefore, it is important to present the connection between
fashion and film in the Golden Age of Hollywood. In that period, we can
see the relationship between the concept of the stardom system, the film and
the fashion pattern. Fashion and film influenced each other, not only in the
design of costumes for the cinematic screen but also in the emergence of the
notion of a fashion costume, which then completely turned into a fashion
object.4
Classic Hollywood film traditionally produces heroes and heroines
directed towards their goal, that is, solving problems that, nowadays, are
often related to saving the world. The notion of happiness presupposes the
realization of a heterosexual love affair, which is the main theme of the film.
Classic Hollywood relies on a so-called classic narrative style in which the
story moves toward problem-solving. The montage cuts are invisible and do
not require the conscious effort of the viewer to follow the action of the film,
and the viewer is encouraged to identify with the characters. The study of
stars is associated with the study of genres in film. A star is a less fluid
category and is associated with a particular actor or actress. The types of
stars emerge as links between certain actors or actresses and the roles they
play, and we have already listed some in the previous section as significant
to the relationship between fashion and film. The typology of female stars
in classic film is very important for fashion since these actresses represented
new fashion expressions and served to popularize the then lavish fashion
design. The term fashion costume is used here as a link between a costume

4 Fashion costume was a transition from the classic costume design and is located
between costume design and ready-to-wear fashion. This process of change was
already visible in the 1970s where there were direct links between fashion costume
and, for example, street fashion. One example is Foxy Brown (dir. Jack Hill, 1974)
and the aesthetics of the Black Panthers, which was then the inspiration for the
British fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner for her spring/summer 2015
collection. Other examples of the transition from fashion to ready-to-wear exist in
John Galliano’s collection inspired by the film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,
directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie in 1985, in which the designer dealt
with the notion of an imaginary woman warrior. The boundaries between fashion
costume, ready-to-wear, and later fashion object were more pronounced in fashion
after the 1990s, especially in the designs of Rick Owens.
 Fashioning the Cinematic Screen 179

design solution and a fashion suit. It should be said that costume design is
not fashion in its entirety, but film and costume lead to specific fashion
clothing elements and even styles, which are permanently written into the
history and theory of fashion. Through the typology of predominantly
female stars, the fashion costume was established as an important element
in film, but also in fashion. Using the social typology of stars, the German
film historian Enno Patalas stated that there are eight basic types of female
stars (Patalas 1963), and we will try to connect film genres and fashion
costumes in relation to these types.
The first type in Patalas’s typology is occupied by a naive woman who
very often has “long curly (light) hair, heart-shaped lips, big eyes and
eyelashes” (Kragiü 2005, 3). Female characters played by actresses like
Mary Pickford, Florence Lawrence and Lillian Gish have been branded as
naive girls with no life experience. For example, in the period from the
1910s to the 1920s, the male star appeared as a man of action and deeds, but
also as a hero of western films. In the male context of the 1920s, Latin lovers
appear in the form of Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro, and the
character of the mundane woman announces her aspiration for liberation
from traditional orders. Croatian filmologist Ante Peterliü states that the
type of the Latin lover is “a person who in the first place is not ‘obliged’ to
fight for justice, but to win women’s hearts, according to all the rules of
romantic seduction” (Peterliü 2008, 105). Another type (Cr. mondenka), on
the other hand, is one who appears after the First World War as a pursuit of
women’s emancipation (Kragiü 2005, 9) and remains a long-standing type
of star in film. In the mid-1930s, the neighbourhood good guy type (in a
male context) and the good friend type (in a female context) appear, such as
the American actress Katherine Hepburn. The good friend type can draw
parallels with the virgin or naive type; she is good in her actions and not so
dependent on the man. A good friend does not have such a strong
personality trait in Patalas’s typology, but the type includes a large number
of actresses (from Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur and Rosalind Russell to
Ginger Rogers), mostly “paradigmatic for the type of screwball comedy
stars of the 1930s” (Kragiü 2005, 13). This type, although not so greatly
expressed in character, betrays a “youthful cheerfulness and carefreeness”
(Patalas 1963, 183). In Patalas’s typology, there is also the character of the
femme fatale, “a kind of negative of the virgin whose ideal it is opposed to”
(Patalas 1963, 50). The femme fatale, a very common character in the
fashion system, especially among the designers Thierry Mugler, Jean-Paul
Gaultier and Gianni Versace, is a dark-haired beauty and seductress whose
character can be both positive and negative. The main representatives of this
type are Lyda Borelli and Pina Menichelli, while Ava Gardner, Rita
180 Chapter Seven

Hayworth, Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall are important for fashion. The
femme fatale, in the history of film and fashion, is an interesting type to
explore as it continues to evolve into a vamp.5 In the earlier period, in the
1930s, the vamp type was a woman of magical magnetism who destroyed
men due to fate. The man who accompanies the female vamp is often a
gangster hero, a type associated with the gangster film genre and which
appears in the new Hollywood. According to Kragiü, the main difference
between the vamp and the femme fatale types are the following:

In Patalas’ definition, the vamp is mostly associated with imaginary

ambiences that emphasize the artificiality of the type, which is also a
reaction to the increasingly realistic characters that appear with the arrival
of sound film, and is a character diametrically opposed to men (which, by
destroying a man, also destroys itself), and in an important distinction from
a femme fatale, the vamp must not destroy because of evil but because of
fateful circumstances. (Kragiü 2005, 7)

The film Gone With The Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), starring Vivien
Leigh, greatly influenced fashion and style at the time. Costume designer
Walter Plunkett designed more than forty costumes just for Leigh, the most
dress changes in cinema history (Butchart 2016, 74). This film undoubtedly
influenced Dior’s collections of the 1950s and his H Line from 1954 and
1955, and the paradigmatic barbecue dress6of the character of Scarlett
O’Hara became an inexhaustible inspiration of the time. Not coincidentally,
the femme fatale type in fashion history appears as a reference to films of
the mid-1940s. Lauren Bacall embodies a slightly milder version of the
femme fatale in the 1946 film The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks
and starring Humphrey Bogart. Furthermore, the femme fatale type is
strongly presented on screen by Rita Hayworth in Gilda (dir. Charles Vidor,
1946) and by Ava Gardner in The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1946), but
Bacall represented a fashion element that conquered the film world with her
distinctive look and appearance (Butchart 2016, 14). Following this track,
in 2010, John Galliano created a homage to film noir and Bacall, using
glittery raincoats and blonde models resembling actresses of the time. A
direct reference to Marnie (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1964) was made by
Alexander McQueen for the autumn-winter 2005 collection. Taking the
character of American actress Tippi Hedren as its inspiration, the collection

5The vamp is a specific type in the typology of movie stars, very often superior and
enchantingly beautiful, but also vague and often associated with imaginary
ambiences.
6 A white-green muslin dress worn by Vivien Leigh and designed by Walter

Plunkett.
 Fashioning the Cinematic Screen 181

presented classic costumes on the legacy of Edith Head, who was also the
film’s lead costume designer. Hitchcock’s paradigmatic blonde actresses
have provided inexhaustible inspiration for fashion designers, especially
McQueen and Galliano in their 2005 and 2009 collections, in which they
refer to The Birds (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1963).
The early 1940s were also marked by the losers type among male actors
(hero-losers with Bogart) and the pin-up girl type among actresses. The pin-
up is a very important type, as it developed during the war and refers to
American actresses of prominent beauty such as Marilyn Monroe and Betty
Grable. Peterliü states that pin-ups are attractive actresses who are
“challenging, luxurious, lush and racially beautiful” (Peterliü 1990, 325). In
fashion, the pin-up appeared as a revival of the style of the late 1940s and
1950s, as a reflection of the rebellion against conventional values. Thanks
to female stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, Grace Kelly and the
aforementioned Marilyn Monroe, the female audience embraced waist-
length dresses and capri pants to mix a variety of clothing elements in the
later 1950s and which are still in fashion today.
There are also transitional types of stars, while some develop into other
types, which can sometimes be unfavourable to the career of a particular
actor or actress. These types correspond to the value structure of society at
a given historical moment. Elizabeth Taylor is an example of various types
of changes in film: “from a child actress to A Place in the Sun she is a naive
type (virgin, according to Patalas), then becomes a good friend, then
fashionable (emancipated woman), then a femme fatale in Cleopatra”
(Peterliü 2010, 328). The 1963 film Cleopatra (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
and its eponymous main character inspired Galliano’s collection for the
French fashion house Dior’s spring-summer 2004 collection, in which the
designer refers to Cleopatra, Nefertiti and Tutankhamun with rich decor and
gold (Butchart 2016, 85). McQueen was also interested in the character of
Cleopatra in his Egyptian-inspired autumn-winter 2007 collection, in which
a specific cut of clothing elements predominates. The fascination with
Cleopatra spread to other fashion-related industries, and when the American
photographer Richard Avedon photographed the famous model Suzy Parker
for the Revlon fashion campaign, he called it simply the ‘Cleopatra look’ in
1962.
Furthermore, the 1950s were marked by a ‘rebel without a cause’ type,
characteristic of American actors Marlon Brando, James Dean and Paul
Newman, and the emergence of the nymph type. The nymph in Patalas’s
typology denotes a young, spiritually immature girl, predominantly driven
by emotions. This type was mostly popularized by the French actress
Brigitte Bardot (Kragiü 2005, 16). Bardot appears as a “complete embodiment
182 Chapter Seven

of a nymph” who “offered herself because she liked it, which confirmed her,
unlike the pin-up, as a subject” (Patalas 1963, 255). The film The Wild One
(dir. László Benedek, 1953), starring Marlon Brando, influenced many
young people at that time, as they started wearing leather jackets down to
the waist, while in one of his previous films, A Street Car Named Desire
(dir. Elia Kazan, 1951), a plain white T-shirt became a symbol of rebels
(Buxbaum 2005, 77). In a fashion context, the rebel without a cause type is
visible in the 1990 film Cry-Baby, directed by John Waters, starring Johnny
Depp and with costume design by Van Smith. Depp’s costume is in a direct
relationship with Brando, Dean and Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock (dir.
Richard Thorpe, 1957), dressed in a white T-shirt, jeans and a black leather
jacket, charming but also fatal to women. Costume designer Waters took
advantage of the rockabilly revival and the notion of delinquency in the film,
while Italian designer Miuccia Prada presented female delinquents dressed
in vests and leather jackets with scarves around their necks for her 2015
collection.
The crisis of the star system appeared in the 1960s and resulted in the
loss of visible characteristic types, so some actors and actresses embodied
several types at once, some of which were even contradictory.According to
Peterliü, characters’ characteristics are most strongly connected with genres.
Furthermore, a star system was created in the new Hollywood on the
example of the American actress Jodie Foster. However, there was no
longer just one type of star but, in each period, several different types, some
of which were more permanent (as we saw in the example of the innocent
bride or man of action) and some more short-lived (like a flapper-girl).
Durable types were evolving and thus gaining new characteristics.
According to Peterliü, the types differ according to one’s sex, whereby one
is usually dominant and the other secondary, and the one that does not
predominate already exists in a certain period (Peterliü 2010, 324).
Properties characteristic of a star of one sex can fluctuate, over time
becoming the properties of the other sex. Difficulties are worked with, and
so-called character actors, specializing in complex characters, may or may
not belong to a star in the system but often have a different leading role.
However, Peterliü states that specific problems are created by regenerating
stars, that is to say, stars that renew themselves, incarnate different
characters and change types within the system (Peterliü 2010, 324). One
female star who had a rich career and often changed in her various roles was
the already mentioned Elizabeth Taylor, who, in the role of Cleopatra,
brought together diverse types within the star system. These dizzying
changes enabled her to become, in a fashion context, one of the most
significant inspirations for the orientally inspired collections of Galliano
 Fashioning the Cinematic Screen 183

and McQueen, and she also proved that she was more important than the
film itself. As Cleopatra, Taylor proved herself “as a character actress (and
even an Oscar winner), earning the most that only Hollywood provides. In
the most expensive spectacle, this beauty from the dream factory gets the
role of a legendary seductress, and although the film proved to be a ‘failure,’
she was beyond that failure; she could survive a film as such, and as a power,
that is hard to shake” (Peterliü 2010, 327). With her looks, fashion costume
and influence on the female audience, the fashion industry changed its
impulse. Namely, under the regeneration of the fashion impulse, a kind of
revival of styles could be introduced, which appeared in fashion after the
1990s.
Another example of a regenerating star is Jodie Foster, who had a very
similar career to Taylor. Changing types within the new star system, Foster
has been a “prostitute, a gangster girl, a mortal, a person who kills herself,
but who can try something like that – these are roles that have largely been
interpreted by so-called character actresses” (Peterliü 2010, 331). Both
characters, in the fashion sense, represent the spirit of the 1970s: freedom
and liberation. The characters of Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro)
and Iris (Jodie Foster) in the film Taxi Driver (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1976)
strongly influenced the audience at the time but also the later collections of
the Italian fashion house Gucci, the French fashion house Louis Vuitton,
and the American fashion house Marc Jacobs, all referring directly to this
film.
Today’s Hollywood, however, has created stars from other cinemas by
reducing them to the level of local stars. It is also interesting to see a fusion
of femme fatale, vamp and emancipated woman created in the roles of the
American actresses Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Kathleen Turner and
Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns (dir. Tim Burton, 1992). A direct
connection between the film and the character Selina Kyle (Catwoman) is
visible in the work of the recently deceased designer Thierry Mugler and his
spring-summer 1997 collection and in the 2014 collection from the studio
The Blonds. It is important to point out that the star is not only created by
films, i.e. by roles and their interpretations, but also by the promotion and
publicity of the actor and actress with the great support of the fashion
system. As the typology of female stars has changed since the Golden Age
of Hollywood, so has the role of predominantly female actresses in fashion.
Peterliü also stated this clearly: “It is obvious that the pin-up has become a
more secondary type; it has been supplanted by models, poster girls”
(Peterliü 2010, 342). Therefore, models can be vamps, good friends or pin-
ups, and the fashion system allows them to make a big impact on the
audience. As the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli accurately stated, “what
184 Chapter Seven

Hollywood creates today will be up to you by tomorrow” (Haggard 1990,

6).

2. Fashion film: Philosophy and body transformations

The philosophy of film and the idea of whether film can be thought of in the
context of making a short fashion film and a new body category seem to
have little connection. Can we think within a film, or does the film create
an opinion imposed on us by its complex mechanisms of action, or is it just
an impression that the film leaves upon us? How are new bodily
performance elements created in a film, what is their effect on the notion of
the body, and is the notion of fashion film emerging – which signifies a new
performative of the body and changes the concept of physicality on the
screen? The movement that exists in moving images marks a new concept
of body performance. There is already, in the concept of mere media
mediation from the real body to the body on the screen, a radical change and
understanding of what the body is, or what it was, in the image before the
creation of the concept of the body. From Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his
consideration of film to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of an organless body, the
body on the screen has undergone many transformations precisely through
its performance. If we adhere to the thesis that the film does not think but
perceives, a question arises as to what is perceived in the film. Can we argue
that cinema art is phenomenological? What unites the philosophical
approaches of film and fashion film? Furthermore, if the film thinks, as the
French theorist Dominique Chateau argues (2011, 129), what is the result
of that thinking process? It is, of course, about the notion of the immaterial
in film and movement, which always refers to some kind of change and
action. It is important to emphasize that this methodology does not apply to
all films because, as Deleuze clearly stated, “thought in the film belongs to
good films and great authors” (Deleuze 1983, 7). But fashion films do not
belong to great authors, nor do they want to; their fundamental intention is
to archive the process of creating an aesthetic body in motion. As the body
moves, it fills the media space and time of the film but also immerses itself
in the process of constant bodily transformation. The idea of the film, which
deals exclusively with the concept of the body that is aestheticized and
media-constructed, is visible in fashion film. The central idea is the body,
which now no longer represents a suit or a clothed body.
How, then, should one approach such a complex form of film when we
talk about the media construction of the body on the screen, which is
fashionable and experimental? The subject appearing with the body on the
screen signifies interaction with the outside world, while the body signifies
 Fashioning the Cinematic Screen 185

the interspace of action. The body in film, in this case, is both a fashion and
a film body. We cannot speak of the physical exclusively as a concept of
the material in the film. The physical character of fashion film is also its
purpose. As Merleau-Ponty argues, “observing the body in motion, one sees
better how it inhabits space (and, after all, time), because movement is not
satisfied with suffering space and time, it takes them actively, captures them
in their original meaning” (Merleau-Ponty 1978, 116).
Fashion film as a genre in the field of filmology does not exist, as we
noted earlier; however, in the last ten years, a lot of scientific and research
work has been devoted to the fields of fashion and media theory. Film and
fashion have had an unbreakable connection throughout history because
film does not exist without the influence of clothing and fashion elements.
The notions of clothing in film and fashion in film should not be confused
here because the difference exists primarily between fashion and clothing.
Fashion is always realized in the context between culture, art and industry,
while clothing is associated with a bodily process – which is not necessarily
fashionable. Fashion film has profiled itself as a term in the theories of one
of the leading authors in this field, Stella Bruzzi, a British-Italian theorist
who published Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies:
Clothes, Identities, Films in 1997 and became one of the founders of fashion
film theory.
Although this type of film was established later due to the predominance
of the digitalization of the entire visual culture, the film is explored in the
context of fashion theories in connection with the construction of identity,
but also to emphasize how the fashion element participates in the construction
of a film image and its body. Fashion, in this context, is not explored as a
costume design element that exists in all film images; it already emphasizes
how the identity of the character and his/her physicality are built. The
costumes in the film represent spectacular interventions on the body (Bruzzi
1997; Gaines and Herzog 1990; Landis 2012), but this is not enough to
explore clothing elements or how they correspond to and with the body
(Monk 2010). Fashion film is often misinterpreted in this way as fashion in
film or film costume design. It represents a new media body image, while
clothing elements support the development of visuality, emphasize the
spectacular nature of fashion and re-design the concepts of the body and
physicality.
The phenomenon of fashion film has appeared thanks to the digital
image and a new type of culture, and although fashion previously existed in
film as clothing and costume design, it was only with the rise of new digital
technologies that the term fashion film emerged. Although the history of
fashion film begins much earlier than Bruzzi’s very significant book and
186 Chapter Seven

research, it has profiled itself thanks to a carefully chosen methodological

framework between fashion, film (media) and performance. Intermediality7
is a key concept in understanding fashion film because it is linked to these
three significant research areas. Thanks to film as a medium, fashion was
allowed to present itself visually as a highly aesthetic image in motion, and
the bodily modes of presentation were completely adapted to the medium
of film. This type of film does not adhere to fashion photography or fashion
advertising but unites the two areas and is, therefore, an important area of
research in fashion theories and image theories, as well as in researching a
new type of corporality. As a medium and as an art, film is at the same time
material and immaterial, that is to say, it is corporeal yet also virtual – it is
a material spirit (Perez 1998).
The emphasis in the fashion image is always based on the depiction of
the body and its possibilities, while clothing in film represents a kind of
tactile transmediality.8 Fashion film, above all, has the task of redefining,
redesigning and reconstructing the concept of the body on film. New
performance practices in film have been visible in films since the early
1990s. For example, in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (dir. James Cameron,
1991), we see visible changes in the body of the Terminator and its ability
to continually transform. This transformation, however, not only applied to
the bodily changes of the Terminator T-1000 but also to voice identities
(Codeluppi 2006, 119). Since the beginning of the 1990s, the film has been
paying increasing attention to the possibilities of the technological
transformations of the physical identity of the characters. Such a body,
which has been redesigned for the image, emerges as a new possibility of
bodily transformation in the film image. The body of the Terminator, of
course, was preceded by the 1927 film Metropolis by Austrian director Fritz
Lang with the image of Mary. However, she does not have the possibility
of a complete bodily transformation or of merging into other objects. What
has made fashion film extremely important in the transformation of not only
the genre but also the media logic of the film are not only the new
possibilities of changing the body as such, but also the ways of performing
the body on the screen. Before making a fashion film, short films appear
that follow the process of making a garment and the concept of performing

7 The notion of intermediality refers to the takeover of one medium and its
transposition into other media. The multiplication of the media leads to a kind of
media impurity where the real meaning of the media cannot be deciphered.
8 The term tactile transmediality denotes a new practice of the body in media and

how it behaves on the screen.

 Fashioning the Cinematic Screen 187

a fashion event.9 The constant change of the body on the screen can be
clearly defined by the notion of a liquid body (Codeluppi 2006) but also that
of a metastatic body (Baudrillard 1988, 47). The metastatic body can change
indefinitely and is constantly in bodily transitions. This is possible in a
media-constructed film image, as the body in fashion emerges as the only
possibility of translating into a liquid, changeable body without a clear
identity. Digital processing, in which characters can be physically changed
independently of the clothing element, developed in an era of the growing
influence of new technology and its influence on the construction of the
character in the film. A good example of this process is Martin Scorsese’s
2019 film The Irishman, in which the faces of the main protagonists (Robert
De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci) are visibly, almost unnaturally,
rejuvenated by technology. How much de-ageing technology10 has helped
to bring body art and its aspects closer to the real course of time and how
much it represents a new area within film theory is still an under-explored
area within filmology; however, technology is certainly important for the
concept of body modifications on the screen. The ageing process of the body
can now be accelerated or slowed down, and it marks the character of
fashion film – the fusion of body and clothing elements as one of the main
markers in the film image, no longer as costumes or decor, but as conditions
for transforming the body and its identity. The body on film has become the
interest of film practice “by increasing the visibility of the body and
corporeality in postmodern theory and media practice” (Šakiü 2017, 200).
Theoretical concepts of the fluid and metastatic body are now being
visualized in film, and no longer just in the form of photography or
advertising. Therefore, clear connections between fashion and film appear
here as new possibilities for decorating the visual aspects of the characters,
the transmedial tactility of the body, and the new body connected to the
costume. This link is made by film and separates the body from the outside
world while, paradoxically, drawing into the pro-cinematic reality.11 Such a
body is seen on film, and it levitates between what exists as a body and what
is filmed as a body in the film. When we talk about the body in the film and
9 A fashion event is defined as a pre-media constructed event in contemporary
fashion in which the performance of the body is emphasized. The notion of an event,
on the other hand, refers to the definition of Alain Badiou (Fr. événement), taken
from Deleuze (Paiü 2017, 344–361).
10 De-ageing technology is used to change the appearance of the protagonist, most

often for the purpose of rejuvenation, and is achieved by CGI (computer-generated

imagery: a computer-generated application that designs images).
11 The notion of the pro-cinematic reality refers to the reality captured by the camera.

It was developed by the French philosopher and aesthetician Étienne Souriau in

1951, who described eight fundamental levels of cinematic reality.
188 Chapter Seven

the body in the film, “that film can be a thematic determinant, content, but
not form” (Šakiü 2017, 200). What happens to the body is a technological
transformation in which the ability to distinguish what is authentic is lost.
The character of such a doubled body has the task of presenting it as a
medialized aesthetic object, which is the central idea of a fashion film. In
this way, as in the field of performing arts, the film fashion body experiences
a conceptual reversal: from the body on film shown as part of the story to
the body that is a condition for the existence of fashion film. The body is
understood as the possibility of the transformation in the event into a
multitude of characters as an anthropological but also a performative fact.
What, then, is to be achieved with the emergence of fashion film, and is it
even needed as a new film-media category? What does this type of film
mean for the field of film philosophy now?12 Fashion film emphasizes that
the body operates in the now artificially created space because fashion is
possibly no longer only a material thing but also an immaterial virtual
performance in the film.
With the advent of photography and film, technology enters the process
of mediation and radically changes the subject-body-image relationship.
Film changes the meaning of life and shapes the body in new media, but
also radically changes the concept of film language and image. The notion
of body and corporeality in fashion film is characterized by bodily change
as a result of various technological processes. A fundamental feature of
fashion film that is made possible precisely by becoming technological is
the notion of a new performance of the body, as well as the creation of a
new philosophical notion of the body. The term new performance means the
following: a new meaning of the body, which, by its performance, marks
the body as an aesthetic and fashion object. Fashion film, if it is established
as stable and autonomous, wants to represent the aestheticized body that
emerges as a necessary process of a film image. It is important to emphasize
that this does not apply to all genres within the field of cinema studies
because otherwise we are talking about fashion that exists in every film.
Equally, one cannot speak of the philosophy of film for every film, but, as

12 Film philosophy is an area that developed under the influence of Gilles Deleuze,
Jean-Luc Nancy, André Bazin, Dominique Chateau, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Stanley Cavell and many others, and it explores the relationship between film and
philosophy and the reflective nature of film. Nancy believes that the work of Abbas
Kiarostami has the dimension of cinematic metaphysics (Nancy 2011, 45). Croatian
filmologist Ivana Keser, in her text “Conditions of the Physical in Film,” explores
how “everyone who is close to film with a foothold in philosophy wonders whether
it is possible to make a philosophical film, a film that could be considered a relatively
autonomous philosophical work” (Keser 2015, 533).
 Fashioning the Cinematic Screen 189

Deleuze asserts, only for good films and great authors (Deleuze 1983, 7).
The film, above all, proves the disappearance of the traditional notion of
painting, although this is already evident in the photographic image. There
is a change in the relationship, not only of the image but also of the language
itself, in which the linguistic level of the image changes its real meaning.
But a question also arises as to the real meaning of this type of film. Is there
still language behind such images, and, if so, can it be semiotically
dissected, or is it something else entirely? The photographic image was
crucial for understanding technical and later digital images, but it is
primarily related to the linear nature of text because technical images13 take
over functions related to linear texts.
Fashion images in film want to emphasize a new kind of body
representation, as well as a medium that changes the perception and points
to a transformation of the body, rather than the linearity of the text behind
the image. Deleuze emphasizes the film movement in particular, which
always points to “change, migration, changing ages.” This is no less true of
bodies: “the fall of a body presupposes another one that attracts it and
expresses a change in the whole that encompasses them both” (Deleuze
2010, 16). The existence of movement in the film is crucial for the
performance of a fashion film and its body. Thanks to movement, we come
to the whole image because movement decides what the whole image will
be like (Deleuze 2012, 20). In the context of fashion film, which is still an
13 The concept of a technical image was introduced by the Czech-Brazilian

philosopher Vilém Flusser and denotes a new type of image that has a scientific and
technical origin. According to Flusser, the world is no longer our projection, but
exclusively the projection and construction of the media. What is similar now
appears in the virtual world, and thus both realities show their “punctuality.” Images
that call into question the very concept of the image are technical images. It is
necessary to build a new bridge to the “world” with the help of technical images,
and this is being built by the unity of science, art and technology. As Paiü states,
“the world is therefore nothing more than a ‘codified world’ – a network of signs,
symbols, images. In this manner, Flusser’s notion of the world is not
phenomenological, but hermeneutical. The world is understood with the help of
‘artificial’ signs by which societies communicate with each other” (Paiü 2008, 119).
The digital technical image does not reject language or text – it includes it – but its
linear nature turns into a structural, cybernetic form of operation. The text is now
primarily of a scientific nature, and its realization is found in technical images.
Technical images are those that give meaning to the world and direct connections
with the traditional, artistic, cultic and magical, and as Paiü states, “the world of a
technical image is an artificial world of virtual/digital reality. Flusser drew the most
radical possible conclusion from there. Everything that arises from the change of the
image paradigm in the digital age must necessarily cover all areas of human
activities” (Paiü 2008, 127).
190 Chapter Seven

under-explored area, preference is given to the mobility of the fashion body.

This type of movement is visible in the fashion art advertising films Iris van
Herpen, who noticed that fashion without film can no longer represent the
fashion process. The fashion process14 includes not only the creation of a
garment object but also the way it is performed through the film. Short art
fashion documentaries date back to Wim Wenders’s dedication to Yohji
Yamamoto and Japan (although they were more fashion documentaries and
less promotional art films), and van Herpen later popularized them and
presented the hidden work process of a fashion designer. The difference
between documentaries and short feature films is in the process of making
a film. The former often follows the work of one designer, such as L’Amour
Fou (dir. Pierre Thoretton, 2010) on the life and work of Yves Saint-
Laurent. The latter intends to advertise through the artistic process. The
wave of films exploring the lives of famous designers, such as Coco Chanel
and Yves Saint-Laurent, who have risen to the status of myths or icons in
the promotion of culture and art, points to the importance of fashion or
heritage history before the renewed critical interest in biographical film as
a transnational film genre (Rees-Roberts 2018, 136). In contrast, the film
Dries (dir. Reiner Holzemer, 2017) is an intimate portrait of the Belgian
designer Dries Van Noten that emphasizes the design practice of this
fashion designer as well as his production process and his way of stylizing
his collections. The film is a combination of professional and intimate and
gives an insight into both lives of Van Noten, filming him both at work and
in his private life.
Fashion films are viewed as an experimental marketing tool of fashion
houses that use storytelling and film aesthetics to promote brands and
establish close and more intimate relationships with consumers. This is
evident in almost all fashion commercials of major fashion houses, such as
Chanel. The emphasis in fashion films is primarily on the experimental way
of advertising because, as in the case of the advertising image, it is the
intention of the image, in this case, the image for consumption. But fashion
film also has the task of experimenting, collaging and creating a new look
at the fashion body. The transformation of the body into a fashion body
takes place in a fashion film, which should seduce the viewer and draw
him/her into the atmosphere of fashion. Certainly, fashion photography

14 The fashion process refers to the change of body and physicality in contemporary

fashion design after the 1990s under the influence of the media (first photography
and then fashion film). The fashion process is close to Iris van Herpen’s concept of
process film, which marks the initial process of the creation of a fashion object to its
performance. The process also signifies the constant state of change in which fashion
takes place, which is then reflected on the body.
 Fashioning the Cinematic Screen 191

cannot do that because it is not a moving image and there are fewer
technological possibilities. Fashion art advertising film has also profiled
itself as a kind of an online digital platform. As early as 2010, many fashion
houses started using film as a kind of advertising and artistic platform. Since
2015, the Italian fashion house Gucci has been presenting innovative
advertising fashion campaigns in the form of moving images. But fashion
houses are not the only ones to have started making films for their
consumers; in the 3-minute short film L’Odyssée from 2012 that director
Bruno Aveillan shot for Cartier, the luxury of a Parisian jewellery
manufacturer was represented. Despite the film’s short running time, Cartier
tried to portray a new era through a media film spectacle, referring to the
Golden Age of Hollywood. This type of fashion film was also adopted by
Chanel for its fragrances Coco (1991) and Égoïste (1990). In the first, the
young French actress Vanessa Paradis appears as a fragile bird trapped in a
cage, while in the second, there is a direct reference to actresses like Ava
Gardner or Lauren Bacall, in which the models manically shout “egoist!” in
the fight for their women’s rights. In the context of fashion, Iris van Herpen
is making a breakthrough in fashion film, such as with her 2018 Ludi
Naturae process film, which closely follows the making of her 3D models,
but now has an artistic overtone. Although it is a film that simply follows
the process of making each element, van Herpen noticed the importance of
such promotions of her virtuosic work. Collaborating with a variety of
artists, technologists and architects, van Herpen has placed herself at the top
of contemporary fashion performance practice. No matter what kind of
fashion film it is, its task is very precise: to make contact with the viewer as
only a film can, to seduce them with the production process, and finally to
popularize the fashion product so that the viewer identifies with the
characters or their feelings.
After the 1990s, the relationship between fashion and film went a step
further than classic costume design and fashion costume. Therefore, the
question arises: does fashion film deserve its place only in theories of
fashion, or does it also belong in cinema studies? Although fashion film, as
we can see, has not become a genre or establish itself as a separate film
within a multitude of films, it has certainly done one thing – it has changed
the relationship in the fashion system itself. Photography, although an
important element of contemporary fashion practice, is still being replaced
by fashion film because only film can represent the fashion body in motion
and in its process.
192 Chapter Seven

Conclusion: Body transmediality and the ‘event’

Contemporary fashion and its hybrid, eclectic form represent a new way of
understanding the body and the fashion object.15 Many studies in fashion
theories have neglected the fashion process and the creation of a fashion
object. The visual and tactile aspects of fashion certainly should not be
neglected in this area, otherwise fashion cannot be fully decoded. Fashion
is, without a doubt, associated with the body (not just as dress) and creates
new categories when it comes to the notion of corporeality. It is, therefore,
necessary to list the most important authors who have significantly
contributed to the understanding of this concept so that we can come up with
formulations of fashion as an event. As Paiü states: “Corporeality in the
aesthetic sense and corporeality in the sense of the material substance of an
object from the living environment (flesh) are two necessary preconditions
for noticing what makes the body an essential substance – the subject of
visuality in perception” (Paiü 2009, 234). The German philosopher Edmund
Husserl laid the foundations of phenomenology but did not deal with the
return of the body. The body is no longer a mere observer but rather a kind
of intermediary through which we enter the world. But the phenomenology
of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty provided a methodological
framework for researching the philosophy of the body. Although Merleau-
Ponty did not deal with fashion, his understanding of the body and the
corporeal turn is very important for understanding contemporary fashion
design and the creation of a fashion object. Merleau-Ponty departed from
Husserl’s understanding by pointing out that “physical experience forces us
to consider that there are acts of thought that are not the result of universal
consciousness alone” (Ruthrof 2000, 11). The body is always set in a world
woven of other subjects and objects; it changed radically in the 1990s in the
context of a body with a suit, thus creating a fashion object. As Paiü states,
“the body is not a mere object of perception of consciousness from the
position of the transcendental self. It is in its physiological state the
substance to which the gaze is directed” (Paiü 2009, 235). Jean Baudrillard
understands the end of the body in the context of dismembered organs
(Baudrillard 1995, 68), but Paiü adds to this by clarifying that “the body is
dismembered because it is a fragmented whole” (Paiü 2009, 220). The body
can no longer be understood as a function or structure of the human in a pre-
set world but more as an autonomous event in contemporary fashion design.

15 A fashion object refers to the combination of a fashion dress and the body in a

different, changed form, mostly with large dimensions and a sculptural character. It
is characteristic of contemporary fashion since the 1990s and emerged as a result of
the intertwining of the fields of fashion, performance, design and architecture.
 Fashioning the Cinematic Screen 193

Fashion just refers to the visual construction of the body of today’s society.
The body of contemporary fashion in new media is gaining new experiences
and opportunities. Through this process, fashion constantly shapes its fluid
identity. The impossibility of finding the identity of the body is a
consequence of the simulation of the media, and fashion has been articulated
as a new kind of bodily event and experience. The consequence of the
interaction of the body with the medium is the body that, due to the
disintegration of the whole, continues to decompose in the event of fashion.
Donna Haraway introduced the concept of cyborg in the early 1980s and
described it as “a creature of the post-sexual world,” while “skin is the
traditional border between bodies and the border of internal and external,
and that border is threatened by communications and biotechnology”
(Haraway 1990, 190–233). The issue of the dematerialization and
disappearance of the body is important when we talk about contemporary
fashion design because we have paradigmatic examples in which the body
is almost non-existent; it exists only as a reminder that the body is dressed,
but the dress itself does not define the body. Judith Butler, in her book
Bodies That Matter: On Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993), writes about the
discursive boundaries of “sex” and emphasizes the re-definition of the
notion of the materiality of the body by its sex and behaviour. For Butler,
sex is obtained by action. Gender is, therefore, an artificial product, and “if
a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies,
then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only
produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity”
(Butler 1990, 136). In the context of marking the boundaries between
internal and external, the Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz states,
however, that bodily “boundaries, edges and contours are osmotic – they
have great power to include and exclude external and internal in constant
exchange” (Grosz 1994, 79). For Martin Heidegger, “the body is in the view
of the Being as an event structured within the existential set Dasein of our
existence” (Paiü 2009, 233). It sounds almost unbelievable, but in a way,
Heidegger’s work Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) contributed
significantly to reflections on the body. The reason is to be seen in the fact
that its place (topos) is marked by the existential structure of being in the
world. The fragmentation of the whole, and thus of the body, adds value to
contemporary fashion because it always exists thanks to new media. Its
constant presence and the constant replacement of the new brings the body
to the new media environment. Thanks to the automatization of perception
and reality, according to Paul Virilio, new media now rule the human body,
especially in the field of performance art (Virilio 1999, 69). As Jean-Luc
Nancy states about his reflections on the body: “Bodies aren’t some kind of
194 Chapter Seven

fullness or filled space (space is filled everywhere): they are open space,
implying, in some sense, a space more spacious than spatial, what could
also be called a place” (Nancy 2008, 17). That space in which the body
realizes fashion in a fashion object becomes a meeting place of diverse
physical, fashion and artistic techniques.

When we say ‘body’ (body, Körper, corpus), we mean something that is

framed and closed, which is also limited by its surface as an object. Each
body is located in a specific space. It can even be argued that space for the
body is what is an inescapable possibility for time, a reality and a necessity
of existence. (Paiü 2019, 46)

Merleau-Ponty and his phenomenology enabled research into embodied

experience and emphasized that the mind is located in the body and how,
with the help of our body schemes, we get to know the world. As Merleau-
Ponty states: “I consider my body, which is my point of view from the
world, one of the objects of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1978, 86). The body,
for Merleau-Ponty, exists concerning spatiality as an object. His
phenomenology has also provided us with theoretical tools by which fashion
cannot be understood as an aesthetic or symbolic form but more as an
experience of the body. As Paiü states in the context of thinking about the
body and the consciousness of the world: “With the help of the body, man
is aware of the world. It is this realization that is the reason for human
irrationality. Thus, existence becomes a condemnation to freedom and
meaning” (Paiü 2019, 28). The central thought of Merleau-Ponty’s work is
the awareness of the body as an active receptor of the external world and as
a kind of medium within which we exist in the world. In this context, fashion
is understood as a new category that takes the experience of the body as a
paradigm. We operate in the world, as stated by Merleau-Ponty (1962: vii–
xxi, 73–89), but not only based on the construction of the mind. In addition,
contemporary fashion after the 1990s deals with the experience of the body,
especially when it comes to the relationship between fashion and
architecture and the concept of Refuge Wear by Studio Orta. In the work of
the American fashion designer Rick Owens, there is a connection between
the body and the suit as an important element of creating a fashion object
that does not necessarily have a form; it can be without form, cut and
silhouette (Geczy and Karaminas 2017, 123). Owens skillfully uses a
minimalist approach to the suit to emphasize refined form and monochrome,
so his collections are often futuristic. Following in the footsteps of
Chalayan, Owens also explores corporeality, installation and architecture in
contemporary fashion. In his collections, heavy materials are often used in
combination with feathers, silk and cotton to depict the body as a sculpture.
 Fashioning the Cinematic Screen 195

He draws inspiration for his body shaping from cubism, futurism,

constructivism and suprematism. Each object exists separately in the world,
playing with gender/sex categories. According to Adam Geczy and Vicki
Karaminas, “suits serve to complement the body” (2017, 137). However, in
this process of replenishment, an event takes place between the body, the
dress and the spatio-temporal elements of the world. No, fashion is no
longer worn. It is not watched or merely represented. Its presence and
eventfulness enchant us in a spectacular bodily manner.
Various experimental operations of contemporary fashion are
indispensable for researching a new fashion body. The body and corporeality
radically change their meaning and significance within fashion theories
through fashion photography and film. Therefore, this paper has aimed to
open a new field of research for fashion theory, filmology and cinema
studies. The impact of the film process on the fashion body is very
significant for this area because it has been clearly shown how fashion film
is a kind of virtual performance of the body. The process that the body
experiences within that medium leaves various positive and negative
consequences and modifications. It is therefore not unusual that the notions
of trauma, anxiety and narcissism form a triad and will provide a new
referential framework for contemporary fashion, not just as an aesthetic
experience of the subject’s search for his problematic identity.
Contemporary fashion marks the final synthesis of visuality and
eventfulness. Everything we see happens simultaneously in virtual
actualization, and it defines reality as the visual construction of fashion.
Therefore, the fashion we see does not necessarily have to be the fashion we
wear, but it will certainly be the fashion we passionately want to see if we
are not already given to decorating our own bodies with it. The most
significant achievements of contemporary fashion designers such as
McQueen, Galliano, Chalayan, Owens and van Herpen constantly remind
us that the magic and power of fashion is realized in the spectacular
performance of the body in the event. For fashion, in the end, remains a
catalogue of fascinating images, a pure visualization of life as an aesthetic
pleasure.

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slavistiþke škole, edited by Lana Molvarec and Tatjana Piškoviü, 199–
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Tuksar, Sunþana. 2021. Transgressions: Transmedia Culture and Film.

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Virilio, Paul. 1999. The Politics of the Very Worst. New York: Semiotext(e).
 CONTRIBUTORS

Marianna Boero is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Theory of

Language in the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the University of
Teramo, Italy, where she teaches Semiotics and the Semiotics of
Advertising and Consumption. She deals mainly with the semiotics of
advertising and consumption, the semiotics of culture, the semiotics of
fashion, social semiotics, and communication studies, and she has published
several papers and three scientific monographs on these topics.

Petra Krpan works as an assistant in the Department for Fashion Design,

Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb. She completed her
education at the Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb,
obtaining a BA in Fashion Design and an MA in Fashion Theory. Her PhD
thesis title was “Contemporary Fashion as an Event: The New Media and
Body Transformations.” She is the co-founder of the Fashion, Costume and
Visual Cultures (FCVC) Network. She recently published Contemporary
Croatian Fashion Photography from the 1990s to the 2020s (Croatian
Association of Applied Artists Zagreb, 2022), and she is an editorial board
member of Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty.

Žarko Paiü is a Professor in the Department of Fashion Design, Faculty of

Textile Technology, University of Zagreb, where he teaches aesthetics,
semiotics and media studies. His recent publications include White Holes
and the Visualization of the Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019),
Neoliberalism, Oligarchy and Politics of the Event: At the Edge of Chaos
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of
Contemporary Art: Pictures Without a World (Springer Nature, 2021), and
The Spheres of Existence: Three Studies on Kierkegaard (Toronto
University and The Kierkegaard Institute in Ljubljana, 2021).

Krešimir Purgar is a Professor at the Academy of Arts and Culture in

Osijek, Croatia. He is the author of Pictorial Appearing: Image Theory After
Representation (2019) and Iconologia e cultura visual: W.J.T. Mitchell,
storia e metodo dei visual studies (2020). He has also edited W.J.T. Mitchell’s
Image Theory: Living Pictures (2017), The Iconology of Abstraction: Non-
200 Contributors

figurative Images and the Modern World (2020), and The Palgrave
Handbook of Image Studies (2021).

Katarina Nina Simonþiþ is an Associate Professor of Fashion History,

Fashion Anthropology and Fashion Museology in the Department of
Fashion Design, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb. Her
scientific research is focused on the correlation between fashion history and
the sociocultural representation of clothing in visual sources such as
paintings, graphics and photography. She deals with the phenomenon of
clothing artefacts as symbols of belonging and as symbols of memorial
inscriptions of past times. She is the author of several publications dedicated
to the research of Croatian fashion history, the relationship between fashion
and tradition, and the role of fashion artefacts as historical documents.

Tonþi Valentiü is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fashion

Design, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb, where he
teaches courses in media theory, sociology of culture, semiotics of fashion,
and cultural anthropology. He obtained an MA degree in philosophy and
literature from the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Zagreb, an
MA degree in sociology and anthropology from CEU in Budapest, and a
PhD in sociology from the University of Ljubljana. His books include
Multiple Modernities (2006), Camera Absondita: Essays on Ontology of
Photography (2013), Archipelago of Contemporary Philosophy (2018), and
Media Construction of Balkanism (2021).
 INDEX OF NAMES
Abramoviü, Marina, 57, 73
Adorno, Theodor, W., 35, 46
Agamben, Giorgio, 5, 30, 53, 59-60,
64, 96
Aglaea, 131
Alberti, Leon, Battista, 138
Allen, Woody, 175
Altman, Robert, 174
Anÿelkoviü, Ĉambiü, Ljubica, 109-
110, 121
Apollo, 113, 146
Apter, Emily, 55, 96
Armani, Giorgio, 174-175
Armstrong, Neil, 102
Artaud, Antonin, 64, 74, 87
Arthur, Jean, 179
Austin, John, Langshaw, 85
Avedon, Richard, 111, 181
Aveillan, Bruno, 191
Bacall, Lauren, 180, 191
Badiou, Alain, 187
Bal, Mieke, 133-134, 153
Baldini, Massimo, 156
Bale, Gareth, 131-132
Balenciaga, Christóbal, 174
Balla, Giacomo, 100
Banton, Travis, 173
Barbarella, 84, 102
Bardot, Brigitte, 182
Barnard, Malcolm, 2, 30, 63, 65, 96
Barthes, Roland, viii, 4-6, 8, 13, 18,
21, 23-24, 27, 30, 43, 46, 50,
59-60, 63, 66, 72-73, 89-90, 96,
126, 138, 156-158, 160
Bataille, Georges, 19, 54-55, 71, 75-
80, 92, 96
Baudelaire, Charles, 95
Baudrillard, Jean, 17-18, 21, 24, 30,
61, 69, 73, 90, 96, 127, 187,
192, 195
Bazin, André, 188
Benigni, Roberto, 87
Benedek, László, 182
Benetton, 139-141, 148
Benjamin, Walter, 12, 14, 30, 35,
67, 85, 96
Bergman, Ingmar, 80
Bernardo, Bernardi, 103
Bickle, Travis, 183
Bitanga, Iva-Matija, 109-110, 121
Blau, Herbert, 60, 96
Blumer, Herbert, 3, 48
Boehm, Gottfried, 85-86, 96
Boero, Marianna, xii, 155-156,
Bogart, Humphrey, 180
Bogatyrëv, Pëtr 156
Bonaþiü, Vladimir, 103
Borelli, Lyda, 179
Borges, Jorge, Luis, 70, 74
Botticelli, Sandro, 137
Bourdieu, Pierre, xi, 3, 20, 31, 34,
36-50, 100
Bousfield, Jonathan, 102, 121
Bowie, David, 22, 28, 63, 101
Brando, Marlon, 181-182
Bregovac, Zdravko, 103
Breward, Christopher, 4, 31
Bruzzi, Stella, 174-176, 185-186,
196
Bryson, Norman, 142-144, 146,
149, 153
Buñuel, Luis, 64
Burton, Tim, 183
Butchart, Amber, 181, 196
Butler, Judith, 193, 196
202 Index of Names

Buxbaum, Gerda, 100, 104, 121, Denegri, Ješa, 103, 121

182, 196 Depp, Johnny, 182
Cage, John, 71, 84 De Niro, Robert, 183, 187
Calefatto, Patricia, 63, 158-159, 167 Derrida, Jacques, 18, 24, 59, 63, 66,
Cameron, James, 80, 93, 186 68, 72, 76, 85-86, 96
Caravaggio, 128, 132-134 Dietrich, Marlene, 9, 173
Cardin, Pierre, 102, 105-106 Dior, Christian, 88, 173, 181
Cartier, 191 Domanþiü, Ksenija, 109
Cavell, Stanley, 188 Donen, Stanley, 174
Cézanne, Paul, 149 Dorfles, Gillo, 34
Chalayan, Hussein, viii, xiii, 6, 29, Doryphoros, 143
53, 91, 111, 114, 169, 171, 194- Duchamp, Marcel, 6, 101
195 Duda, Igor, 103, 121
Chanel, Coco, 10, 16, 67, 160, 173, Earle, William, 43
190-191 Eco, Umberto, 8, 31, 63, 66, 67, 70-
Chateau, Dominique, 184, 188, 196 74, 96
Christ, Jesus, 55, 136, 139-141 Edelkoort, Lidewij, 120
Christo, Tamara, 117-118, 121 Elias, Norbert, 82, 97
Church, Gibson, Pamela, 176, 196 Elizabeth, Queen, I, 2
Churchill, Winston, 102 Emberley, Julia, 63, 97, 125, 153
Chronos, 113 Entwistle, Joanne, 100, 121
Clark, Kenneth, 129, 130-131, 137, Eros, 146, 148
153 Euphrosyne, 131
Cleopatra, 181-183 Evans, Caroline, 4, 25, 31, 53, 62-
Cocteau, Jean, 101 63, 65, 71, 80-81, 85, 88, 91, 97,
Codeluppi, Vanni, 186-187, 196 121
Colbert, Claudette, 179 Fellini, Federico, 65
Courrèges, André, 102, 105-107 Fernbach, Amanda, 9, 31, 55, 56,
Courtes, Alexandre, 131, 132 68, 78, 82, 97
Craik, Jennifer, 100, 121 Ferraro, Guido, 164, 168
Critias, 94 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 57, 97
Cronenberg, David, 52 Fish, Michael, 101
Cukor, George, 175 Fitzgerald, Scott, F., 16
ýop, Matija, xii, 116-120 Fleming, Victor, 180
Dalí, Salvador, 64, 101 Floch, Jean-Marie, 160, 166, 168
Dante, Alighieri, 74, 87-88, 90 Flusser, Vilém, 73, 171, 189
Darwin, Charles, 94 Flügel, John, Carl, 107, 121
Davis, Bette, 173 Fortunati, Leopoldina, 70, 97
Davis, Fred, 12, 31, 43, 50, 63 Foster, Jodie, 182-183
Dean, James, 181-182 Foucault, Michel, 4, 31, 53-54, 66,
Debord, Guy, 16, 67, 93, 96 76, 97
Degas, Edgar, 149-151 Franke, Ivana, 109
Delaunay, Sonia, 100 Frare, Theresa, 141
Deleuze, Gilles, 18, 24, 27, 31, 63, Freud, Sigmund, 6, 19, 52, 59, 82,
68, 184, 188-189, 196 92, 142
Del Marco, Vincenza, 167 Fritz, Darko, 103, 121
 Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body 203

Gagarin, Yuri, 102 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 52

Gaines, Jane, M., 185, 196 Hollander, Anne, 129-132, 134,
Galliano, John, viii, xiii, 6, 81, 91- 137, 153
92, 178, 181, 183, 195 Holly, Michael, Ann, 138
Gardner, Ava, 179-180, 191 Holzemer, Reiner, 190
Gaultier, Jean-Paul, viii, 6, 19, 84- Horkheimer, Max, 46
85, 179 Horvat, Brane, 122
Geczy, Adam, 194-196 Horvat, Pintariü, Vera, 105-107.
Gere, Richard, 175 120, 122
Géricault, Théodore, 144-145, 147 Hoskins, Tansy, E., 35, 49-50
Giliü, Nikica, 172, 196 Houellebecq, Michel, 91
Gish. Lillian, 179 Husserl, Edmund, 61, 85, 192
de Givenchy, Hubert, 173-174 Imdahl, Max, 138, 153
Gnamuš, Nadja, 121 Ince, Kate, 122
Golob, Marko, 111, 122 Jacobs, Marc, 128-129, 183
Gotovac, Tomislav, 59 Jameson, Fredric, 86, 97
Gramsci, Antonio, 19 Jappe, Anselm, 67, 97
Greimas, Algirdas, 156-157 Jenks, Chris, 54, 97
Griffith, D. W., 173 John, de Baptist, 133-134
Gros, Antoine-Jean, 145 Joka, Saša, 122
Grosz, Elizabeth, 68, 97, 193, 196 Joyce, James, 71, 83
Groys, Boris, 67, 97, 174, 196 Kadoiü Ana, 109
Grujin, Ljubinka, 109 Kaite, Berkeley, 143, 153
Gucci, 191 Kamitsis, Lydia, 106, 122
Habermas, Jürgen, 62 Kant, Immanuel, 34-36
Haggard, Claire, 184, 196 Karaminas, Vicki, 194-196
Hall, Annie, 175 Karan, Donna, 175
Haraway, Donna, 193, 196 Katz, James, E., 70
Harris, Jean, C., 151, 153, 153 Kavuriü, Kurtoviü, Nives, 110
Hawks, Howard, 180 Kawakubo, Rei, 18, 117
de la Haye, Amy, 197 Kawamura, Yuniya, 43, 50
Hayworth, Rita, 180 Kazan, Elia, 182
Hebdige, Dick, 47 Keaton, Diane, 175-176
Head, Edith, 173, 181 Kelly, Grace, 174, 181
Hedren, Tippi, 181 Keser, Ivana, 188, 196
Hegel, Georg, Wilhelm, Friedrich, Kiarostami, Abbas, 188
10, 35 Kiefer, Anselm, 74
Heidegger, Martin, 52, 59, 61, 86, Kierkegaard, Søren, 61
97, 193 Kim, Sung, Bok, 99, 122
Hepburn, Audrey, 173-174 Kirby, David, 140-141
Hepburn, Katherine, 179 Kiš, Patricia, 104-105, 122
Herzog, Charlotte, 185, 196 Klee, Paul, 67, 80
van Herpen, Iris, xiii, 114, 169, 171, Klein, Calvin, 175
174, 190-191, 195 Kleiser, Randal, 175
Hill, Jack, 178 Knifer, Julije, 103
Hitchcock, Alfred, 180-181 Knight, Nick, 172
204 Index of Names
Konþiü, Jasminka, 109
Košþec, Gordana, 109
Kovaþ, Koraljka, 109
Kragiü, Bruno, 176, 179-180, 182,
196
Kristl, Vlado, 103
Krkaþ, Mia, 109
Krpan, Petra, xiii, 169
Kubrick, Stanley, 69
Kuhn, Thomas, 9
Kyle, Selina, 183
Lacan, Jacques, 9, 19, 21-22, 55, 59,
66, 72, 80, 87, 92, 97, 134
Lagerfeld, Karl, 57
Lake, Veronica, 180
Landis, Deborah, 185, 196
Landowski, Eric, 156, 161, 164, 168
Lang, Fritz, 186
Lauren, Ralpf, 175
Lawrence, Florence, 179
Le Corbusier, 8
Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 4, 14, 31
Leigh, Vivien, 180
Levin, Charles, 127, 128, 154
Lévy-Strauss, Claude, 39, 74, 97
Lipovetsky, Gilles, xii, 10, 12, 17,
19-21, 24, 26, 31, 34-35, 43, 47,
50, 54, 91, 98, 124-125, 135,
153
Loos, Adolf, 67, 86
Loschek, Ingrid, 60, 98-101, 122
Loscialpo, Flavia, 18, 31
Lukica, Ivana, 99
Lurie, Alison, 159, 168
Lyne, Adrian, 175
Lyotard, Jean-François, 26, 62
Makoviü, Zvonko, 103-104, 122
Malevich, Kazimir, 67, 105-106
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 65, 71, 84, 151
Manet, Èdouard, 149, 151
Mankiewicz, Jospeh, L., 173, 181
Mantegna, Andrea, 138-141
Margiela, Martin, viii, 6, 15, 18,
111, 171
Margolis, Joseph, 43
Marrone, Gianfranco, 156-157, 168
Marsh, Mae, 173
Marshall, Garry, 175
Martin, Richard, 99, 122
Marx, Karl, 3, 15, 19, 45, 60-61, 78
Maštruko, Nina, 41, 44, 51
Mati, Ida, 109
Mazzucchelli, Francesco, 167
McLuhan, Marshall, 8, 31, 73, 169-
170, 196
McConaughey, Matthew, 135, 136
McTiernan, John, 93
McQueen, Alexander, viii, xi, xiii,
6, 19, 23, 26, 69, 70-71, 74, 80-
81, 83, 85-88, 90-95, 114, 116-
117, 171, 181, 183, 195
Mendes, Valerie, 197
Menichelli, Pina, 179
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 23, 68, 85,
184-185, 188, 194, 192, 197
Mersch, Dieter, 65, 98
Michelangelo, Buonarotti, 128
Miller, George, 178
Miller, Sanda, 99, 122
Mitchell, W.J.T., 86, 98, 170, 197
Miyake, Issey, 18
Molvarec, Lana, 197
Mondino, Jean, Baptiste, 136
Monk, Claire, 185, 197
Monroe, Marilyn, 181
Moore, Demi, 183
Moss, Kate, 117
Motta, Giovanna, 167
Mrduljaš, Maroje, 111, 122
Mugler, Thierry, 179, 183
Mulvey, Laura, 142, 154
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 80, 98, 188, 193-
194, 197
Napoleon, Bonaparte, 144
Nefertiti, 181
Negrin, Llewellyn, 22, 31
Newman, Paul, 181
Nicholson, Linda, 196
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Wilhelm, 5,
59, 61
Nochlin, Linda, 149-151, 154
Novak, Kim, 174-175
 Fashion Theory and the Visual Semiotics of the Body 205

Novarro, Ramon, 179 Quasimodo, 79

Ogilvie, George, 178 Quine, Richard, 175
O' Hara, Scarlett, 180 Quinn, Bradley, 53, 98
Oppenheim, Méret, 101 Rabanne, Paco, 102, 106-107, 131,
Orlan, 70, 81 132, 134
Orpheus, 15 Radiü, Zvonimir, 103
Owens, Rick, xiii, 178, 194-195 Radoþaj, Morana, 118-119
Pacino, Al, 187 Rašica, Božidar, 103
Paiü, Žarko, x, xi, 1, 3, 6, 10, 14, 16, Redford, Robert, 16
18-19, 25, 27, 31, 34-35, 39, 40- Rees-Roberts, Nick, 197, 190
41, 43, 48, 51-52, 63, 65, 75, 98, Riccini, Raimonda, 70
170, 187, 189, 192-194, 197 Richter, Vjenceslav, 103
Panofsky, Erwin, 138 Roberts, Julia, 175
Paradis, Vanessa, 191 Rocamora, Agnes, 43-44, 51
Parker, Suzy, 181 Rogers, Ginger, 179
Parsons, Talcott, 8 Roman, Miro, 112
Patalas, Enno, 176, 179, 181-182, Russell, Rosalind, 179
197 Ruthrof, Horst, 192, 197
Peirce, Charles, Sanders, 71 de Sade, Marquis, 55
Perez, Gilberto, 186, 197 Saint-Laurent, Yves, 190
Pescie, Joe, 187 Sapir, Edward, 14
Pessoa, Fernando, 57-58, 64, 66, 98 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 72, 126,
Peterliü, Ante, 177, 179, 181-183, 156-158
197 Sawchuck, Kim, 62, 98
Petronius, 65 Schiaparelli, Elsa, 10
Pezzini, Isabella, 156-157, 168 Schiffer, Claudia, 57
Pfeiffer, Michelle, 183 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 55
Picelj, Ivan, 103 Schrader, Paul, 175
Pickford, Mary, 179 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 143, 146
Pietz, William, 55 Scorsese, Martin, 174, 183, 187
Pintariü, Snježana, 122 Scott, Ridley, 93
Piškoviü, Tatjana, 197 Segre Reinach, Simona, 168
Pitts, Victoria, 75, 98 Shusterman, Richard, 43, 51
Plato viii, xi, 26, 55, 69, 71, 73-74, Simmel, Georg, 3, 8, 12-13, 20, 32,
83, 86, 92-94, 117-118 34, 36-37, 39-40, 46, 48-49, 51
Plunkett, Walter, 180 Simonþiþ, Katarina, Nina, xii, 99,
Poiret, Paul, 173 102, 122
Polhemus, Ted, 21, 31, 63, 98, 107, Siodmak, Robert, 180
122 Smith, Adam, 35
Polidoro, Piero, 168 Smith, Van, 182
Polycleitus, 143 Soares, Bernardo, 57
Pound, Ezra, 60 Somaini, Antonio, 138
Prada, Miuccia, 182 Souriau, Étienne, 187
Presley, Elvis, 182 Spinoza, Baruch, 76
Purgar, Krešimir, xii, 121, 124, 136, Srnec, Aleksandar, 103
154 Stankoviü, Danijela, 109
206 Index of Names

Starobinski, Jean, 197 Valentino, Rudolph, 9, 179

Steele, Valerie, 53, 63, 76, 98 Van Noten, Dries, 190
Stelarc, 70, 81 Vasarely, Victor, 108
Stepanova, Varvara, 104 Vattimo, Gianni, 128
Stern, Radu, 100, 104-105, 122 Veblen, Thorstein, 8, 11-12, 16, 32,
Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 71, 84 34, 36-40, 46, 48-49, 51
Stone, Sharon, 183 Versace, Gianni, 146, 148-150, 153,
Strossmayer, Josip, Juraj, 116 179
Svendsen, Lars, 35-37, 43, 45, 51 Vidor, Charles, 180
Swanson, Gloria, 173 Virilio, Paul, 26, 32, 170, 193, 198
Šakiü, Tomislav, 187-188, 197 Volli, Ugo, 27, 32, 63, 168
Šolin, Vanja, 119 Vuitton, Louis, 183
Šutej, Miroslav, xii, 100, 102-105, Vujiþiü, Silvio, xii, 110-113, 115,
107-111, 117, 120, 122 117, 119-120, 122
Tatlin, Vladimir, 104 Wales, Bonner, Grace, 178
Taylor, Elizabeth, 181-183 Waters, John, 182
Teller, Jürgen, 128, 129 Weibel, Peter, 171
Tesla, Nikola, 121 Welsch, Wolfgang, 7, 32
Thalia, 131 Wenders, Wim, 174, 190
Thoretton, Pierre, 190 Westwood, Vivienne, 17, 22, 68,
Thorpe, Richard, 182 116, 196
Timaeus, 94 Wilder, Billy, 174
Tintoretto, Jacopo, 134, 135 Willemen, Paul, 143
Tito, Broz, Josip, 102 Williamson, Judith, 126, 154
Toscani, Oliviero, 141 Wilson, Elizabeth, 9, 20-22, 32-33,
Traini, Stefano, 156, 168 123
Trubetzkoy, Nikolai, 156 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 61, 85
Tsumura, Kotsuke, 114 Wood, Natalie, 181
Tuksar, Sunþana, 170-171, 198 Zarahoviü, Vladimir, 103
Turner, Kathleen, 183 Zeus, 131, 132
Turner, Vuþetiü, Flora, 102-103, Zinna, Alessandro, 168
122 Žižek, Slavoj, 87, 98
Tutankhamun, 181 Žižiü, Damir, 115
Ugo, Victor, 79 Yamamoto, Yohji, 18, 174, 190
Valentiü, Tonþi, xi, 33,