Appearance and Identity: Fashioning the Body in Postmodernity

201 Pages·2008·5.07 MB·English

by  Llewellyn Negrin (auth.)

Appearance and Identity
Appearance and Identity
Fashioning the Body in Postmodernity
Llewellyn Negrin
appearance and identity
Copyright © Llewellyn Negrin, 2008.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008
All rights reserved.
First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United
States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the
world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-37429-8 ISBN 978-0-230-61718-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230617186
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: December 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Transferred to Digital Printing 2009
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1 Appearance and Identity 9
2 Feminism and Fashion 33
3 Cosmetics and the Female Body 53
4 Cosmetic Surgery and the Eclipse of Identity 75
5 Body Art and Men’s Fashion 97
6 Ornament and the Feminine 117
7 The Postmodern Gender Carnival 139
Notes 163
References 173
Author Index 185
Subject Index 187
Preface
This book began its life as a series of articles that I have published over
the last decade. Chapter 2—“Feminism and Fashion”—is based on a much
revised version of an article, “The Self as Image: A Critical Appraisal of
Postmodern Theories of Fashion,” published in Theory, Culture & Society
16 (3), 1999: 99–118, while an earlier version of Chapter 3—“Cosmetics
and the Female Body”—appeared in The European Journal of Cultural
Studies 3 (1), 2000: 83–101. The chapter entitled “Cosmetic Surgery and
the Eclipse of Identity” was originally published in Body & Society 8 (4),
2002: 21–42, and a shorter version of Chapter 5—“Body Art and Men’s
Fashion”—appears in The Men’s Fashion Reader edited by Andrew Reilly
and Sarah Cosbey, first edition, 333–46, copyright 2008 by Fairchild Pub-
lications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Fairchild Books, a division of
Condé Nast, Inc. Finally, an earlier version of Chapter 6—“Ornament and
the Feminine”—was published in Feminist Theory 7 (2), 2006: 219–35.
I am very grateful to Rita Felski and Claire Colebrook, who commis-
sioned the last of these articles and provided me with invaluable feedback
during the course of writing it. Also, my thanks go to Andrew Reilly and
Sarah Cosbey, who asked me to write on the topic of body art and men’s
fashion for The Men’s Fashion Reader, and who provided me with useful
feedback on this chapter. I am also appreciative of the anonymous referees
who gave me insightful feedback on all of the other articles mentioned
above. I have also benefited from the comments received when I presented
earlier versions of some of these chapters at conferences and symposiums.
In particular, thanks go to the participants at the conference Culture and
Identity: City, Nation, World, organized by the editors of the journal Theory,
Culture & Society in Berlin, August 1995, where I presented the first incar-
nation of my chapter “Feminism and Fashion,” and also to the participants
in the Getty Summer Institute, Department of Art History and Visual
Culture, University of Rochester, New York, where I presented a paper on
“Cosmetics and the Female Body” in July 1999. I am also appreciative of
the feedback that my colleagues and graduate students at the University of
Tasmania have given me on the various occasions when I have presented
versions of some of these chapters. Thanks also to Janet Wolff, whose
VIII PREFACE
encouraging remarks on my initial proposal for this book spurred me on
to bring this project to fruition. Finally, my greatest vote of appreciation
goes to my husband, Don Cartwright, who painstakingly proofread the
entire manuscript, and without whose encouragement and support, this
book would never have happened, and also to my parents, Marjorie and
Angelo, who have always been there for me.
Introduction
Over the last twenty years or so, there has been a major reevaluation
of fashion, both in terms of its legitimacy as an area of serious aca-
demic investigation and its significance in contemporary Western culture.
Whereas, in the past, there was a largely dismissive attitude towards fash-
ion, which was seen as a subject unworthy of consideration since it was
concerned with the “trivial” realm of appearances, the last two decades
have seen a burgeoning of academic studies in this area.
At the same time as the importance of fashion as a realm of serious
investigation has been recognized, there has been a discernable shift
away from the notion of fashion as an instrument of oppression to
one that embraces it as an avenue of self expression and creativity, as is
evident in a number of recent writings on fashion such as Adorned in
dreams (1987 [1985]) by Elizabeth Wilson; Women and fashion: A new
look (1989) by Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton; The empire of fashion
(1994) by Gilles Lipovetsky; Sex and suits: The evolution of modern dress
(1994) by Anne Hollander; and Fresh lipstick: Redressing fashion and
feminism (2005) by Linda M. Scott.
In contrast to the conservatism of traditional folk costume, fashion is
lauded for its openness to change and love of experimentation. As Lipov-
etsky writes, for instance:
. . . Fashion is less a sign of class ambition than a way out of the world of
tradition. It is one of the mirrors that allow us to see what constitutes our
most remarkable historical destiny: the negation of the age-old power of the
traditional past, the frenzied modern passion for novelty, the celebration of
the social present. (1994, 4)
Likewise, Hollander praises fashion for the “great sartorial freedom and
range” it offers, which “reflects the social freedom of the last quarter of a
century, when social custom no longer offers strong guidance for appropri-
ate dress” (1994, 191).
In a similar vein, other recent theorists of fashion, such as Kaja Silver-
man (1986) and Evans and Thornton (1989), have embraced the con-
stant changeableness of fashion as something that challenges the fixity of
2 APPEARANCE AND IDENTITY
identity. In contrast to those who condemn fashion’s ephemeral nature as
symptomatic of an economy of waste based on planned obsolescence, these
writers argue that the process of continually changing one’s appearance is
liberatory insofar as it serves to “denaturalize” the body, highlighting its
status as an infinitely malleable cultural construction not fixed by biology.
Reflecting this more positive appraisal of fashion, the conception of the
self as masquerade has become a central feature of much contemporary
discourse about the body and identity. Against essentialist conceptions of
the self as something static and pre-given that exists independently of the
clothes that one wears, this new notion of the self as masquerade conceives
of the subject as constituted wholly through the various guises that one
adopts. There is no self apart from that which is constructed through the
fashioning of one’s appearance.
However, in this book, the assumption implicit in much recent theoriz-
ing on fashion—that masquerade is inherently liberating through its rev-
elation of the culturally constructed nature of identity—is challenged. As
is argued, in the context of contemporary consumer capitalism, in which
the constant “makeover” of the self is widely promoted by the fashion and
advertising industries, such a conception of the self, far from posing a chal-
lenge to the dominant ideology, is complicit with it. While such a concept
may once have been subversive in an age where identity was regarded as
fixed by nature or ordained by God, now it is convergent with the impera-
tives of late capitalism, which actively promotes the idea of a constantly
transmuting self where the cult of appearance is privileged over all other
modes of self-definition.
In place of this reductionist conception of the self as image, the essays
in this book argue for the necessity of recognizing the importance of other
sources of identity formation in the construction of the self. The intention
is not to deny that there is a place for fashion in defining who one is, but to
propose that it has become overvalued in contemporary culture, and is an
insufficient basis on which to ground one’s identity. While the cultivation
of one’s appearance is an inescapable aspect of what it means to be a social
being, and can indeed be pleasurable, at the same time, it becomes prob-
lematic when it assumes such an importance that it comes to substitute for
other forms of self-realization. In these circumstances, rather than being
liberatory, it can in fact impede emancipation by diverting attention away
from other forms of social action. As the cultivation of one’s looks assumes
ever greater importance, aesthetic criteria come to substitute for ethical
ones in the conduct of one’s life so that the basis of decision making is no
longer “Is this a good thing to do?” but “Does it look good?”
As long as it is assumed that there is no self apart from that which is
constructed through the molding of one’s appearance, fashion comes to
INTRODUCTION 3
be seen simply as a random play with signs, unrelated to anything outside
itself. This is evident in the postmodern practice of pastiche, which char-
acterizes fashion in contemporary culture where elements of past styles
are “ransacked” and reassembled in an eclectic manner. While this practice
has been celebrated by a number of recent fashion theorists as a form of
ironic play that makes explicit the culturally constructed nature of identity,
at the same time, it empties the styles it references of meaning, treating
them merely as “free-floating” signifiers. Not anchored in anything out-
side of themselves, their “meanings” become entirely arbitrary. Since they
can potentially mean anything, they ultimately signify nothing. Thus, they
become blank ciphers to be playfully appropriated and recombined in ran-
dom ways according to their “look,” rather than their significance. In this
context, the fashioning of one’s appearance becomes a never-ending cha-
rade of constantly changing guises, none of which is any more “authentic”
than any other.
Although, at first glance, this freewheeling play with appearance may
appear liberating, insofar as it opens up seemingly endless possibilities for
constructing new meanings, in contrast to the relative fixity of meaning
that characterized the dress of earlier eras, at the same time, it carries with
it the danger of a total dissolution of the self as one’s identity becomes com-
pletely subsumed by the changing mélange of masks one adopts. Where the
self becomes equated with the different guises one adopts, all that one is
left with is a nihilistic experimentation with style for style’s sake in which
the various sartorial assemblages signify nothing beyond themselves.
As is argued in this book, if fashion is to be more than a random pas-
tiche of aesthetic forms, then it needs to be deployed as an expression of an
identity that has not been constituted solely by it. While it is true that one’s
appearance contributes to the sense of who one is, the self is more than
the masquerade. Identity and appearance, though interrelated, are not syn-
onymous. The reduction of identity to appearance can only be avoided if
appearance is recognized to be more than simply about the creation of an
aesthetic “look,” but refers to a self that is not constituted solely by it. Thus,
in contrast to the prevalent view of fashion as a freewheeling experimenta-
tion with different “looks” that are all equally “fake,” I argue that it should
seek to communicate the values and beliefs of the individual wearer. Rather
than being treated merely as a form of aesthetic embellishment devoid of
significance, the role of bodily adornment as a carrier of meaning needs to
be recognized and more fully embraced. Only then can it serve as a genuine
expression of identity rather than as a substitute for it.
As well as seeking to recover the communicative function of dress, it is
also important to recognize its materiality, since clothes are not just semi-
otic signs whose meaning depends simply on their relation to other signs,