Karena de Perthuis

This chapter surveys the recent history of fashion photography and provides an introduction to current scholarship and scholarly debates on the topic. It argues for the centrality of the image to fashion and explores the changing world of the fashion photograph. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ two distinct representations of the garment - image clothing and written clothing the author provides a close analysis of the street style fashion photography blog, The Sartorialist. The unclear status of fashion photography as art is also explored.

The question of what a fashion photograph is – its ontology – is a key concern. Traditionally a commercial image created by professionals in the service of the fashion industry, fashion photography now exists in numerous forms, contexts and functionalities. This has not altered its fundamental nature. Inventing something other, something new and the endless quest to imagine the future while creating desire for a soon-to-be-forgotten present, fashion cannot be understood without fashion photography.

In the history of Australian fashion, the creative partnership of Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson marks a turning point of innovation, creativity, originality and dynamism that saw the emergence of a uniquely Australian fashion aesthetic and the forging of an Australian identity that celebrated an Australian vernacular style. The exhibition, Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson: Step into Paradise, curated by Glynis Jones, is the outcome of decades of collecting and documenting the vast archives of Kee and Jackson by the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences (MAAS). Key words: Australian fashion design; Aboriginal design; Australian identity; Flamingo Park;  Bush Couture

Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons is an anomaly in fashion’s celebrity designer, brand-driven world. Intensely private, she rarely gives interviews, expecting instead those wanting to understand her work to look at the clothing itself. So when she released a 'creative manifesto' that offered insight into the Comme des Garçons spring/summer 2014 collection, it made an impression. In the manifesto, Kawakubo claimed to 'break the idea of "clothes"', and certainly the collection, Not Making Clothing (spring/summer 2014), represented a new degree of abstraction in the designer’s repertoire. Bypassing the common response to explain away Kawakubo’s work as art, anti-fashion or a refusal of fashion, in this article I approach the manifesto itself as one of Kawakubo’s 'works'. Pulling at its threads to unravel the seams of the text, I begin with its 'making' and weave in and out of the history of the fashion manifesto to compare Kawakubo’s work with the fashion manifestos of the Futurist artists Giacomma Balla and Volt. I then come back to the clothes themselves. In breaking the idea of clothes, I argue, Kawakubo puts into doubt what we take for granted, changing what clothes signify and intensifying the normal work of fashion.

Tilda Swinton is a performer who eludes classification as she moves effortlessly between independent and Hollywood cinema, performance art, theatre, music video and fashion. In this article, I resist reducing either Swinton or fashion to one kind of performance and look instead to the terrain where fashion, performance and Swinton meet. In claiming that Swinton performs fashion, I look beyond what can be directly identified as her fashion performances as model, muse and style icon to include her cinematic performances in films where the discourse of fashion is woven through costume, character and the body of the film. It is in this catalogue of endless self-inventions, metamorphoses and transformations that Swinton embodies the mercurial, shape-shifting ambiguity of fashion. Inhabiting a liminal space between surface and depth, artifice and authenticity, Swinton slips seamlessly between multiple personae and selves. By wearing indeterminacy as a perpetual mode of being, I argue, Swinton performs fashion in all its open-ended complexity.
https://sup-estore.sydney.edu.au/jspcart/cart/Product.jsp?nID=1140&nCategoryID=41

This article begins with a long-lens view of the street style blog to see where it fits in the broader frame of fashion photography. From a starting point of uncertainty, the article investigates whether images on street style blogs are indeed fashion photographs or simply, to use Nancy Hall-Duncan’s term, “fashion gesture.” It then follows a path that traces the commercial imperative of the fashion photograph and unfolds how this operates in one of the most successful—and earliest—iterations of the street style blog, Scott Schuman’s The Sartorialist. It does this via one of its “particularities”—the interactive contributions of user-viewers on the comment roll. Described as a “living fabric” by Schuman, this interactive commentary mirrors Roland Barthes’ two distinct representations of the garment—image clothing and written clothing. An analysis of the comment roll, it is suggested, reveals the “backstage” machinations of how the fashion image constructs or invents a narrative of desire around a fashion object and thus contributes to our understanding of the fashion photograph and its sometimes opaque world.

Some garments demand a narrative of their own. Such was the case with a jumper that I darned for my partner in the winter of 2010. The jumper was old and moth-eaten; Mark was gravely ill with only a few months left to live. In the process of darning, each stitch was an act of love, each passage of the needle restoring something that had been eaten away.

This article explores the multiple levels of meaning that run through the narrative I have woven around darning Mark’s jumper – an irreplaceable garment – at once priceless but worthless, worn but unwearable, empty yet embodied. It explores the concept of the fetish and draws on Igor Kopytoff’s analysis of our relationship to commodities and things in the modern, capitalist economy, where discarding and replacing old clothes with new is the default option. The theoretical heart of this paper, however, lies with Elizabeth Wilson’s writings on the ‘quasi-magical properties and meanings’ of a garment and with the work of Peter Stallybrass, who has written brilliantly on how in moments of crisis, in the ruptures of our lives, in mourning, it is to these irrational attachments that we turn.

KEYWORDS

Mourning; fetish; old clothes; wearing; commodification

From the Behind the Silver Screen series, Costume, Makeup, and Hair charts the development of these three crafts in the American film industry from the 1890s to the present. The Postwar Hollywood chapter examines the era from 1947 to 1967, covering the fall of the studio system and the rise of independent and ‘runaway’ productions and explores how practitioners in each of these artistic fields adapted to new technologies, fashions, and economic conditions.

This article consists of a number of thoughts about and meditations on men’s underpants. Beginning with a ‘day in the life’ of a standard pair of underpants, it moves on to explore some of the specific characteristics that accompany the wearing of this particular garment. There follows a consideration of the role played by underpants in the creation of male characters for screen and television. A brief look at Homer Simpson’s Y-fronts is followed by the examination of a crucial moment in the history of Australian undergarments, namely the move from wool to cotton as the chief material of their manufacture. After an exploration of the humour that is often associated with men’s underpants the article finishes with a series of recollections that show how undergarments can be folded into the most intimate of memories.

Film Review: When Too Much Spectacle is Not Enough: Costume in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (edited version)
Karen de Perthuis

Pace was never going to be a problem with Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013) which, by the time I got round to seeing it, had clearly divided opinion. A hit at the box office, the critics had been scathing. David Denby of The New Yorker suggested it was less a film than a music video made with ‘endless resources and a stunning absence of taste’ (2013: 79). The respected fashion writer, Colin McDowell, condemned it ‘as vacuous as the pages of most fashion magazines’ (2013). But ever hopeful that Luhrmann and production designer Catherine Martin could repeat the visually thrilling experience of Romeo+Juliet (Luhrmann, 1996) I was willing to take my chances. I was expecting spectacle – ‘glitz and bling’ as someone else put it. I went for the costumes. I went for the fashion. The film has an excess of both. So why the disappointment?

Let’s start with the costume. By chance, I had spent the afternoon at the V&A’s popular ‘Hollywood Costume’ exhibition showing at the Australian Centre for Moving Images (ACMI) in Melbourne, so I did not need to be reminded that costume design involves the creativity and hard work of many talented individuals. In the complex process of getting a script to the screen, nothing is left to chance; everything matters. In this, The Great Gatsby is no exception, and if ACMI (or the V&A) were to put all of the film’s spectacular Academy Award winning costumes on show, I have no doubt that they too would draw murmurs of admiration from the visiting crowds.

But at ‘Hollywood Costume’, spectacle is not given pride of place. In the curator notes and in the interviews with designers, actors and directors, the exhibition at ACMI had one take-home message: the most important function of costume design is not to provide spectacle, but to transform the actor into a character we can believe in. In the book Hollywood Costume (2012), published in concert with the exhibition, costume designer and fashion scholar Deborah Nadoolman Landis offers the representative view that costume embodies ‘the psychological, social and emotional condition of the character at a particular moment in the script’ (2012: 52). In this, it is hard not to hear echoes of Edith Head’s so-called ‘storytelling wardrobes’, written about by Jane Gaines in her influential article, ‘Costume and narrative: How dress tells the woman’s story’ (1990: 180). Although Nadoolman Landis emphasizes that ‘costumes are so much more than clothes’ (2012: 52), Gaines’s analysis suggests that it is only when costume ‘disappears’ into ‘clothes’ that it can effectively portray character. In other words, what we are supposed to see on the screen is not an actor dressed in a costume but ‘merely someone wearing clothes’ (Gaines 1990: 192). If we buy into this fiction, then the film can concentrate on the narrative and we can sit back and enjoy the story.

Of course, if the actor happens to be playing Elizabeth I, Marie-Antoinette or Daisy Buchanan, a certain degree of spectacle is required. But even costumes that dazzle can serve the narrative by revealing the psychological state of a character – the exterior shell of costume, if you like, is innermost feelings turned inside-out. In her book, Hollywood Catwalk (2010), Tamar Jeffers McDonald offers examples of transformation scenes where a character tries on numerous outfits in an attempt to find one that is ‘just right’ – a Goldilocks- style trope that, often as not, combines fashion spectacle with a final choice that, in costume terms, is the perfect psychological ‘fit’. When it comes to The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald helps out by describing what his characters are wearing: ‘Gatsby, in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-coloured tie’ ([1926] 1974: 90–91); ‘the grey haze of Daisy’s fur collar’ ([1926] 1974: 115); Myrtle’s ‘spotted dress of dark blue crêpe de chine’ ([1926] 1974: 31). The film cherry-picks these clues and then fills in the gaps.

So we get Carey Mulligan’s Daisy, America’s version of an aristocrat, wistful and romantic in pastel confections. At Gatsby’s party, wearing a Prada-designed stole that frames her delicate features in a lilac haze of fur, she is seductively vulnerable – but also trapped prey, an image that reinforces Gatsby’s vision of her as something rare and precious. Gatsby (Leonardo di Caprio) himself is appropriately obsessive about his appearance, everything is hand-finished, everything perfect. His fondness for ‘brands’ (‘My man in England sends things over’), his compulsive expenditure (that extraordinary shirt scene), and his conspicuous display of wealth all betray a character who is both conscious of the symbolic power of clothes and clearly eager to impress.

For this viewer, interest starts to wane when it comes to the supporting characters. Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), with her ‘hard, jaunty body’ (Fitzgerald [1926] 1974: 65) probably makes sense as a fashion-plate; fickle, all surface and ‘incurably dishonest’ ([1926] 1974: 65), she plays into the popular stereotype of fashion and the fashionable as morally bankrupt. Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), dressed as ‘the sporting hero’, successfully conveys the impression of someone who never loses. But tragic Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher), Tom’s low-rent mistress, dolled-up and overdrawn in reds and blacks? And Nick (conveniently played by Fitzgerald lookalike, Tobey McGuire) in a cardigan and bow tie? Surely there are rules against turning nuanced characters into cardboard cutouts?

The same broad brushstrokes are applied to the party scenes, those lavish spectacles showing Gatsby ‘dispensing starlight to casual moths’ (Fitzgerald [1926] 1974: 85) that form the backdrop to much of the action. Fitzgerald coined the term ‘The Jazz Age’ and Luhrmann’s film fills the screen with everything we have come to expect of the era, as well as adding a mass of pop culture clichés from our own. The effect is a mash-up of frenzied kineticism. ‘It’s not too much, is it?’ asks Gatsby. Obligingly, Nick shakes his head, ‘No’.

But it is. I love this sort of stuff and want these scenes to work. Film is made for such moments and it’s not hard to imagine that Gatsby’s parties were designed to resemble a euphoric explosion from one of those cannon-sized bottles of Moët that keep turning up in the film. Every shimmying guest, kiss-curled dancer and spangled entertainer a gorgeous sparkling droplet, cascading across the screen in a glorious celebration of wealth, beauty and excess. Instead, the spinning dizzyness is nauseating and all the intricate elements of design get lost as they dissolve into a kaleidoscopic vomit of confetti, streamers and glitter.

Perhaps I would not have minded so much if Luhrmann had managed to make it all mean something, if he had not made the mistake of confusing excess with decadence, if he had not made it all look like such good, clean fun. Where are the consequences? Where are the torn dresses, the shredded hearts, the angry diamonds and the trainwrecked souls that are scattered throughout the novel? Colin McDowell is right to compare the film to a fashion magazine; youth, sex, money, image – like the glossy pages of Vogue, the film has it all. But he is right for the wrong reasons. Despite the collaboration with Prada and the commercial tie-ins with Tiffany’s, Brooks Brothers, Fogal and so on; despite costumes that could walk straight from the cineplex to the retail store, the problem with the presence of fashion in this film is not that there is too much, but that there is too little.

Let me clarify. What fashion can do, what fashion offers a film like The Great Gatsby, is an immediate entrée into a gilt-edged world. Not without reason, fashion has a reputation as obsessively preoccupied with surface and appearance; it is superficial, frivolous and fickle – all traits that play precisely into Fitzgerald’s depiction of hard, cut-glass characters, those ‘careless people’ who casually abandon people and things ([1926] 1974: 186). Instinctively, Luhrmann gets this. But whereas Fitzgerald knows the value of the shadow side of style to the telling of his tale, Luhrmann cannot help turning back towards the light.

Darkness and Luhrmann, it has been suggested, ‘don’t really move in the same circles’ (Davies 2013: 40). Fashion is not so squeamish; the best fashion imagery understands that the flip side of glamour is death. In ignoring the dual nature of fashion, by keeping it one-dimensional, or at best a cipher, Luhrmann misses the chance to corral his considerable talent for spectacle into a film that would have been worthy of Fitzgerald’s novel. If Luhrmann had got the costume, spectacle and fashion right, then perhaps he would have also got right Fitzgerald’s depiction of the Janus-faced coin of the American Dream. Where the author gives us a mirror, the filmmaker gives us ... nothing.

This article examines the relationship between costume and character, self and appearance in Luca Guadagnino’s film, I Am Love (Io Sono l'Amore, Guadagnino: 2009). As played by Tilda Swinton, Emma Recchi is a woman whose dress reveals a meticulous record of her emotional journey, providing an almost text-book case of costume performing emotional exteriority. Complicating any straightforward analysis of costume design in I Am Love, however, is a deep fashion consciousness that pervades the film and goes beyond the widely publicized association with fashion houses, Jil Sander, Fendi and Hermès, to a recognition of fashion as a complex discourse able to canvas multiple, even contradictory, interpretations. Just as Guadagnino draws on other narratives and other films to tell his story, Swinton’s off-screen life and on-screen personae shadow her portrayal of Emma, constructing a character who is both the unique individual of ‘I Am Love’ and the hollow image of fashion that is the Emma of ‘I Am Style.’

Abstract
In this paper, I consider the street style blog through a close analysis of one of its most distinctive features—the combination of image and text—against Roland Barthes’ two distinct representations of the garment—image clothing and written clothing. Text in the street style blog is largely provided through the commentary of viewer-users. Described as a ‘living fabric’ by Scott Schuman, creator of the influential site The Sartorialist, this inherently promiscuous commentary, I argue, functions like the caption of the traditional photograph, as analysed by Barthes in The Fashion System, eliminating uncertainty and directing “immediate and diffuse knowledge…of Fashion” (Barthes 1983:17). What unfolds in this living fabric, then, is the ‘backstage’ machinations of how the fashion image constructs or invents a narrative of desire around a fashion object and thus opens up one path to understanding the ontology of the fashion photograph.

KEYWORDS fashion photography, street style blog, The Sartorialist, Roland Barthes, written clothing, The Fashion System.

Artifice lies at the very core of fashion’s existence. At every appearance, fashion throws down the gauntlet to nature, mocking its claim over the aesthetic and moral high ground, goading it into submission. With its intimate relationship to clothing, the human body has long been the battlefield where this struggle is played out. Throughout history, the body appears as a malleable form, bowing to fashion’s superior armoury, surrendering to its often extreme vision of beauty – padded out, pulled in, shortened, extended in almost unimaginable ways. Meanwhile, fashion’s inability (or refusal) to settle on one absolute form of beauty has earned it the vitriolic condemnation of its critics. Its attempt to create and re-create over and over its shifting image of beauty on the canvas of the human body, it is charged, is responsible for manipulating the physical structure of the body by methods that are, at the very least, ugly and, at the worst, mortally dangerous. However, fashion, which has been credited with a power and an aesthetic logic that operates independently of any one individual, can also wear, along with its reputation as a despot, the mantle of an artist. Viewed in this light, its determination to ignore the precedents set by nature can be characterized as a creative impulse. Unable to find, as J.C. Flügel has put it, ‘complete satisfaction with reality’, it creates a new world ‘nearer to the heart’s desire’ (Flügel 1933: 237)

This chapter surveys the recent history of fashion photography and provides an introduction to current scholarship and scholarly debates on the topic. It argues for the centrality of the image to fashion and explores the changing world of the fashion photograph. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ two distinct representations of the garment - image clothing and written clothing the author provides a close analysis of the street style fashion photography blog, The Sartorialist. The unclear status of fashion photography as art is also explored. The question of what a fashion photograph is – its ontology – is a key concern. Traditionally a commercial image created by professionals in the service of the fashion industry, fashion photography now exists in numerous forms, contexts and functionalities. This has not altered its fundamental nature. Inventing something other, something new and the endless quest to imagine the future while creating desire for a soon-to-be-forgotten present, fashion can...

On paper, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has all the makings of a great film. With its delicate story of hope, loss and the fading American Dream, its glamorous setting of wealth, celebrity and desire and its finely drawn, enigmatic characters, Fitzgerald’s novel offers grand themes all wrapped up in the trappings of popular appeal. A slim volume, it avoids the adaptation dilemma of most great fiction, i.e. too much complexity. And as an added bonus, in Nick Carraway producers are handed a trustworthy narrator whose insider/outsider status conveniently draws the audience in as both participant and informed observer. In reality, cinematic adaptations have been less than successful. The 1926 (silent) attempt (The Great Gatsby, Brenon, 1926) is lost save for a one-minute trailer, but apparently in its entirety the film so disappointed Fitzgerald and his wife that they walked out of the screening. Eliot Nugent’s 1949 version (The Great Gatsby, 1949) is a confused shambles with i...

Tilda Swinton is a performer whose work traverses avant-garde, independent and Hollywood cinema, performance art, theatre, music video, and fashion.1 In the seven or so films she made with Derek Jarman in the first decade of her career, and as the eternally fashionable aristocrat in Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), she forged a reputation as a unique actress with a performance style that was difficult to pin down. This quality of eluding classification as a performer has only intensified in the decades since, as Swinton has moved effortlessly between genres and art forms. Across her film and fashion work, her repertoire is a catalogue of endless self-inventions, metamorphoses, and transformations. It is hard to imagine another actor with as wide a range of roles: from angel to witch to vampire; from criminal alcoholic to grieving mother to corporate lawyer; from aristocrat to scientist to corpse

For years the iconic Australian bush brand, RM Williams, looked ripe for a fashion makeover. With its signature handcrafted boot leading the way, something along the lines of what Burberry had managed on the back of its trench coat seemed likely. Hardly an original idea, and somewhat redundant given that couturier Jonathan Ward had been the company's executive designer since 2001. But with the recent sale of 49.9% of the company to L Capital Asia, a private-equity firm backed by the French luxury giant LVMH Group, the transformation of RM Williams into a major fashion label now appears inevitable.

Some garments demand a narrative of their own. Such was the case with a jumper that I darned for my partner in the winter of 2010. The jumper was old and moth-eaten; Mark was gravely ill with only a few months left to live. In the process of darning, each stitch was an act of love, each passage of the needle restoring something that had been eaten away.This article explores the multiple levels of meaning that run through the narrative I have woven around darning Mark’s jumper – an irreplaceable garment – at once priceless but worthless, worn but unwearable, empty yet embodied. It explores the concept of the fetish and draws on Igor Kopytoff’s analysis of our relationship to commodities and things in the modern, capitalist economy, where discarding and replacing old clothes with new is the default option. The theoretical heart of this paper, however, lies with Elizabeth Wilson’s writings on the ‘quasi-magical properties and meanings’ of a garment and with the work of Peter Stallybras...

Abstract This article begins with a long-lens view of the street style blog to see where it fits in the broader frame of fashion photography. From a starting point of uncertainty, the article investigates whether images on street style blogs are indeed fashion photographs or simply, to use Nancy Hall-Duncan’s term, “fashion gesture.” It then follows a path that traces the commercial imperative of the fashion photograph and unfolds how this operates in one of the most successful—and earliest—iterations of the street style blog, Scott Schuman’s The Sartorialist. It does this via one of its “particularities”—the interactive contributions of user-viewers on the comment roll. Described as a “living fabric” by Schuman, this interactive commentary mirrors Roland Barthes’ two distinct representations of the garment—image clothing and written clothing. An analysis of the comment roll, it is suggested, reveals the “backstage” machinations of how the fashion image constructs or invents a narrative of desire around a fashion object and thus contributes to our understanding of the fashion photograph and its sometimes opaque world.

This article examines the relationship between costume and character, self and appearance in Luca Guadagnino’s film, Io Sono l’Amore/I Am Love (Guadagnino, 2009). As played by Tilda Swinton, Emma Recchi is a woman whose dress reveals a meticulous record of her emotional journey, providing an almost textbook case of costume performing emotional exteriority. Complicating any straightforward analysis of costume design in I Am Love, however, is a deep fashion consciousness that pervades the film and goes beyond the widely publicized association with fashion houses, Jil Sander, Fendi and Hermès, to a recognition of fashion as a complex discourse able to canvas multiple, even contradictory, interpretations. Just as Guadagnino draws on other narratives and other films to tell his story, Swinton’s off-screen life and on-screen personae shadow her portrayal of Emma, constructing a character who is both the unique individual of I Am Love and the hollow image of fashion that is the Emma of ‘I Am Style’