The Politics and Spectacle of Fashion and Femininity

Sarah Berry. Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. xxiv + 235 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8166-3312-6 (cl); 0-8166-3313-4 (pb).

Cheryl Buckley and Hilary Fawcett. Fashioning the Feminine: Representation and Women's Fashion from the Fin de Siècle to the Present. London: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2002. xi +164 pp.; ill. ISBN 1-86064-605-2 (pb).

Gilles Lipovetsky. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter. With a Foreword by Richard Sennet. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. x + 276 pp. ISBN 0-691-10262-7 (pb).

Wendy Parkins, ed. Fashioning the Body Politic: Dress, Gender, Citizenship. Oxford: Berg, 2002. xi + 260 pp.; ill. ISBN l-85973-5827 (cl); 1-85973-8 (pb).

As the four books under review testify, fashion history no longer resides in the realm of art or design studies (although each of these works refers to earlier works on individual designers and innovative styles). The Empire of Fashion, Fashioning the Body Politic, Fashioning the Feminine, and Screen Style link the apparently ephemeral and frivolous subject of fashion (especially, although not exclusively, ladies' clothing) to admittedly long-term and serious developments such as democratization, modernization, and class and gender formation. Perhaps as a consequence of this connection to certifiably "important" developments, these authors eschew the often-impenetrable theoretical deliberations of many fashion researchers determined to rescue their field from the margins of academic respectability, deliberations that actually discourage many historians from reading and benefiting from recent scholarly writing on fashion.

Gilles Lipovetsky, a French scholar whose 1987 work on fashion was first translated into English in 1994, takes the broadest perspective on the political implications of fashion. A revisionist when he wrote The Empire of Fashion, he contends that fashion, defined as "a specific form of social change, independent of any particular object" (although historically "embodied" in clothing) was "a primary agent of the spiraling movement toward individualism and the consolidation of liberal societies" (5, 16). Fashion promotes modernity, defined primarily as freedom from tradition and valuing individual autonomy. This new paperback edition, in the Princeton series on New French Thought, locates this historical overview of western, primarily French, fashion from the mid-fourteenth to the late twentieth century within French theoretical literature. His non-deterministic approach explains why many subsequent specialists, including feminist scholars, cite The Empire of Fashion. Lipovetsky "complicates" the influential interpretation of the symbolic anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu that haute couture reflects a bourgeois search for social distinction. Lipovetsky also rejects Foucauldian arguments about bureaucratic or disciplinary control of fashion consumers through the ritual of seasonal collections and other institutions of haute couture or through such arbiters as fashion magazines. Instead, fashion seduces through "the multiplication of prototypes, and the possibility of personal choice." He very briefly analyzes the fashion industry's "theatricalization of merchandise, fanciful advertising and appeals to desire" but disputes Baudrillard's notion of consuming only for performance in a system of exchange (78, 144-45). If fashion is "a stage for the appreciation of the spectacle provided by others, it has also unleashed an investment in self. . . . Fashion goes hand in glove with the pleasure of seeing, but also with the pleasure of being seen, of exhibiting oneself to the gaze of others" (29). This type of argument may seem abstract and overly optimistic to social and economic historians, but Lipovetsky's insistence that fashion allows "complex blends of refusal and acceptance" offers historians of women, fashion, and consumption an escape hatch from reductionist models of modern women as fashion victims or irrational consumers.

Although gender is not the central analytical category in The Empire of Fashion, it is present and productive. The emergence of fashion is associated with the accentuation of differences in dress between the sexes in the mid-fourteenth century, even if, in the first, aristocratic phase of fashion, both sexes changed apparel, especially accessories, frequently...