Of Critics and the Catwalk: Interdiscursive Dialogue in the Postcouture Era

Of Critics and the Catwalk: Interdiscursive Dialogue in the Postcouture Era Gwendolyn M. Wells Like the best French couture, the tags speak not only of quality but the very highest chic, and are safe guarantees that one is getting not thought off the peg but the best possible design in the field of ratiocination. Today it would be foolish, or decidedly unsmart, to attend any congress or cocktail party in the great cities of the world, and not be able to parry a Lacan with a Derrida, lead with Foucault and follow up with a Kristeva.1 MALCOLM BRADBURY'S COMPARISON between fashion and critical theory in My Strange Quest for Mensonge (a satire that remains enjoyable despite its somewhat dated feel, due to the current tendency, at least in the U.S., to consider French haute theory outmoded) is funny in part because it so neatly captures an important truth: there are uncanny parallels between what is considered "smart" in dress and in the realm of thought; intellectual discourse, like virtually any other area of cultural production, is inevitably inflected by notions of fashion and fashionability. The fashionability of fashion itself as an object of scholarly scrutiny is a relatively recent phenomenon within the English-speaking academy. To be sure, there have been significant studies by distinguished writers over the past decades, works such as Anne Hollander's Seeing Through Clothes, Alison Lurie's The Language of Clothes, Quentin Bell's On Human Finery and, earlier in the century, J. C. Flügel's The Psychology of Clothes, among others.2 Still, the recent arrival of fashion on the scholarly "scene" in the U.S. was sufficiently dramatic to cause Valerie Steele (herself an established fashion historian) to exult in 1991 that fashion was suddenly no longer taboo, no longer "the F-word," in intellectual circles.3 The flurry of academic writing on fashion over the past several years has essentially coincided with the vogue of Cultural Studies, which field has in effect legitimized the study of popular culture. Logically enough, much or even most of the work currently being produced on fashion in the U.S. and in the U.K., reflects the concerns and critical apparatus associated with Cultural Studies: issues of race, class and gender are central ; scholars decipher various modalities of dress in terms of power relations , invoking various neo-Marxisms, feminisms, and the theories of Michel Foucault. Such approaches, of course, are perfectly topical. As 72 Spring 1997 Wells Kim Sawchuck puts it: "When we are interested in fashion, we are concerned with relations of power and their articulation at the level of the body."4 Contributions informed by such a perspective are often lively and insightful, sometimes brilliant.5 However, as I will suggest in this essay, a more ample array of critical strategies may be called for when it comes to the specific phenomenon of French fashion, which must be understood as something that is both paradigmatically French and vastly more complicated than just clothes. Fashion—or perhaps more accurately, to borrow Roland Barthes's expression, the fashion system—is profoundly imbricated in French culture; any account of its operations must take into account, among other things, the points of convergence or interface between the discourses of fashion and of literature, and indeed of criticism and theory, as well as those aspects of fashion more commonly studied: the meaning (s) of design, the social and economic underpinnings of the fashion industry, and so forth. My objectives in this essay will be to situate fashion within contemporary French culture, to underscore the particular perspective French critics bring to the world of fashion and the continued relevance of some of their contributions, and to sketch, via a few examples, some of the exchanges or reciprocities that are now occurring in the interface between fashion and paraliterary discourses. Such exchanges, I will argue, have the potential to yield fresh paradigms and insights, and might even lead us to meditate on "fashionability" as it pertains to critical styles. A striking dissymmetry exists in terms of the gaze that French and non-French scholars direct toward fashion. Essays written in English convey a conventional sense of scholarly...