Dress and Ethnicity (review)

L'Esprit Créateur Madonna's putative efforts to deconstruct gender through repeated transformations of her body, clothing, and hair are ingested as yet more marketable ideas and strategies in a consumer culture. Madonna's transformational world where one can apparently become anyone , any body one likes, seems deceptive indeed when compared to Carol Shloss's discussion of how Diane Arbus's photography exposes the flesh's intractability in the face of the transformative promise of "fashion." Essays by Iris Marion Young, Hélène Cixous, and the fashion designer Sonia Rykiel work to articulate women's experience of fashion that escapes the larger objectifying machinery of the masculine gaze. Young writes: "I love to walk down a city street when I feel well dressed and to catch sight of my moving image in a store window. ..." " Whose imagination," she wonders, "conjures up the pictures and their meanings?" Reconceiving the pleasure women take from their clothes (shopping together, the texture of the fabric on our bodies), she urges us to transcend the limited understanding provided by gaze theory as we take account of the range of social practices that converge in dress. As the editors point out in the introduction, "the pleasures of viewing are different from the joys of wearing." Meditating on the diverse pleasures of the body associated with her Sonia Rykiel jacket, Cixous enacts to a large extent the possibilities speculated on by Young. From her position as a designer of women's fashion, Rykiel suggests that ultimately her creation of clothing is her way to explore different versions of femininity itself. Many of the essays in this collection are striking in their assessment of the complexity of the cultural production of images: Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey's study of Barbie Magazine and the indoctrination of young girls into the fashion industry; Linda Benn DeLibero on the contradictory social meanings engaged by the emergence on the popular scene of Twiggy who was, for DeLibero, as much a figure of liberating androgyny as she was the first cult figure of anorexia; Diana Fuss's theory that the identificatory desire elicited in straight viewers of fashion images defends against a revivified lesbian desire; and Leslie Rabine's remarkable account of the bifurcation of femininity being purveyed by fashion magazines. The reader gains an understanding of how we relate to images on multiple conscious and unconscious levels, as members of different ethnic and class communities as well as at different ages. Images are not one-way, from outside in. As this collection indicates, such a narrow conception of identity-formation is no longer tenable. Benstock and Ferriss have assembled one of the best collections to date on popular culture. Virginia L. Blum University of Kentucky Joanne B. Etcher. Dress and Ethnicity. Oxford & Washington, DC: Berg Publications, 1995. Pp. xiv + 316. $19.95. If Eicher's subtitle, "Changes across space and time," unsettles the commonplace that ethnic dress is synonymous with unchanging tradition and indigenous clothing, the volume has already succeeded in announcing one of its most significant critical points. This provocative collection of fifteen social anthropological essays, richly illustrated by photographs , drawings, and maps, relocates our understandings of ethnicity and dress within a dynamic historical context. By eschewing the term "ethnic dress," together with its suggestions of ethnicity as a fixed, self-evident determinant of dress, these essays reverse the terms and refer to dress and ethnicity. The essays study the ways dress strategically constructs and reinterprets ethnicity, stressing process over stasis. In this conceptual, collective remapping, 112 SPRING 1997 Book Reviews undertaken through analyses of Indians and mestizos in Ecuador, Turkish Cypriote in the UK, Bunu Yorubas in Nigeria, and Hmong Americans, amongst others, the once inevitable antonym to ethnic dress—western dress—gives way to the term "cosmopolitan dress," a term more appropriate to contemporary geopolitical realities. Analyzing the function of dress as a fluid, shifting styling of ethnicity, the authors explore its responses to contact with other cultures and to processes of intracultural differentiation, its modifications in the course of migrancy, and its adaptations to historical exigencies, as in the case of colonialism 's artificial administrative regrouping of peoples. Together with many recent critical interventions across the...