Transient Vogue: the Commodification and Spectacle of the Vagrant Other
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TRANSIENT VOGUE: THE COMMODIFICATION AND SPECTACLE OF THE VAGRANT OTHER AIDAN MARIE MOIR A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS GRADUATE PROGRAM IN COMMUNICATION & CULTURE YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO NOVEMBER 2013 © Aidan Marie Moir, 2013 Abstract As creative director of Christian Dior, John Galliano received substantial press attention in early 2000 when he debuted his haute couture collection portraying models dressed as if they were homeless. Galliano’s couture collection is one of numerous ‘homeless chic’ examples, a trend referring to the resignification of symbols denoting a marginalized social identity into fashion statements by commodity culture. While there has been a re-emergence of ‘homeless chic’ within the contemporary context, the motif encompasses an extensive history which has not yet been properly acknowledged by the media outlets comprising what Angela McRobbie refers to as the fashion industry. A content and critical discourse analysis of the mainstream news media places ‘homeless chic’ within its significantly larger social and intertextual context, an element best illustrated through a comparison with its sister trend, ‘heroin chic,’ and a visual analysis of W’s “Paper Bag Princess” photo editorial. ii Acknowledgements Thank you especially to my family – Anne-Marie, Michael, Bridget and, most of all, my mother, Nancy – who contributed to this experience in far more ways than imaginable. Thank you very much to my wonderful supervisor – Anne MacLennan – for all your invaluable advice, guidance and opportunities. Thank you to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their financial support. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv Chapter One: Introduction – The Socioeconomic Context of ‘Homeless Chic’ 1 Chapter Two: Theoretical Frameworks of Fashion, Consumption, and Identity 8 Chapter Three: Methodological Approaches to the Study of Fashion 51 Chapter Four: Contextualizing Early Discursive Formations of ‘Homeless Chic’ 70 Chapter Five: Contemporary Mediations of ‘Homeless Chic’ 106 Chapter Six: Intertexuality in W’s “Paper Bag Princess” 152 Chapter Seven: Conclusion – ‘Homeless Chic’ as Cultural Parasite 195 Bibliography 203 iv Chapter One: Introduction – The Socioeconomic Context of ‘Homeless Chic’ Fashion is not art, you know. Fashion isn’t even culture. Fashion is advertising. And advertising is money. And for every dollar you earn, someone has to pay.1 --- Gia Following the sharp decline of the stock market and affiliated mortgage crisis of October 2008, the state of the American economy has consistently remained a highly influential issue within public discourse at both the domestic and international levels.2 The crisis became the subject of the 2010 Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job by Charles H. Ferguson, which traced the trajectory of financial deregulation and alleged corruption of the American economy.3 Popular news outlets quickly broadcasted sympathetic testimonials of American families, who naively trusted their life savings with gluttonous bank managers and mortgage brokers only to find themselves out of work and their homes foreclosed. Families moving out of their homes and adults lining up at employment fairs searching for work were disheartening scenes broadcast daily on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. When not attempting to humanize the ‘innocent’ victims of the recession, news outlets turned to demonizing individual actors within the capitalist economy, placing the blame on their greed as opposed to questioning the functionality of the system. Time composed a list of the “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis,” documenting the “good intentions, bad managers and greed behind the meltdown,” complete with backgrounds on industry insiders such as stockbroker Bernie Madoff and 1 Jay McInerney and Michael Cristofer, Gia, directed by Michael Cristofer (1998; New York: HBO Pictures, 2000), DVD. 2 Sections of this thesis first appeared as “Homeless Chic: Fashion, Consumption and the Symbolic Parasitically Intertwined,” in Fashioning Identities: Cultures of Exchange, ed. Sarah Heaton (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013), 199-234. 3 Inside Job, directed by Charles H. Ferguson (2010; New York: Sony Pictures Classics, 2011), DVD. 1 Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozillo that explored the overwhelming debt of American consumers.4 The inclusion of the American consumer in Time’s article is representative of a larger issue embedded within the politics of consumer society pertaining to wasteful consumption and consumer debt. Recognizing the intricate history of debt in American cultural politics and its previous sinful connotations under the Protestant work ethic, Jackson Lears argues that while the term, “is as American as cherry pie,” debt continues to shed its twentieth century association as an hedonistic expenditure with larger percentages of Americans resorting “to borrowing for groceries as well as cars.”5 Time reported that in 2007 U.S. debt represented more that 130% of reported income,6 while The New York Times cited the claim made by the Federal Reserve that $1 trillion in American consumer debt had been cleared by credit lenders as of October 2012.7 Recognizing the drastic disparities in earned income and the growth of class inequalities originating in the 1970s with Ronald Reagan’s financial political structure, socioeconomic theorist Juliet B. Schor argues in The Overspent American that the following decades gave rise to a “new consumerism.”8 With the upper-middle-class lifestyle the predominant representation on film and television programs, Schor’s “new consumerism” speaks to American consumers’ competitive desire to emulate a higher social class beyond their tax bracket, achieved through the consumption of luxurious commodities. At a philosophical level, the current economic climate is marked by an intensification of the neoliberal policies set forth in the 1970s. The 4 “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis,” accessed December 22, 2012, http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1877351,00.html. 5 Jackson Lears, “The American Way of Debt,” The New York Times, June 11, 2006. 6 Ibid. 7 Annie Lowry, “Rise in Household Debt Might Be Sign of a Strengthening Recovery,” The New York Times, 27 October 2012, B1. 8 Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 12-19. 2 present capitalist system imparts social approval and acceptance to individuals who consume within a manner deemed productive by the cultural politics of neoliberal consumer society, where those who fail to satisfactorily perform this cultural practice are stripped of their symbolic social citizenship.9 It is within this perspective of global financial instability and drastically escalating socioeconomic inequalities that consumer society has also created the images that comprise the fashion trend of ‘homeless chic’ in contemporary popular culture. ‘Homeless chic’ refers to the semiotic transformation of markers of poverty, such as ripped, torn and oversized clothing, and the appropriation of essential material commodities, including garbage bags, mattresses and blankets, into fashion statements by consumer culture. The trend gained significant press attention in early 2000, when John Galliano, creative director for Christian Dior, debuted his runway collection featuring models dressed as members of France’s homeless population. His haute couture collection was highly criticized by the news media, and became the source of satire for actor and writer Ben Stiller, who incorporated the fashion collection into his 2001 comedy film, Zoolander. ‘Homeless chic’ relies on the individual consumer comprehending the appropriate signifiers in order to understand how the symbolism and imagery of the trend is detached from the materiality of economic scarcity.10 The trend’s cultural power is contingent upon the consumer exhibiting the appropriate knowledge, taste and cultural capital in order to 9 See Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005), and, more recently, Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities In A Global Age (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2011). 10 For a discussion on how the function of difference is expressed through fashion advertising from a Marxist-psychoanalytic framework, see Judith Williamson, “Women Is an Island: Femininity and Colonisation,” in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 99-118. 3 grasp the identifying socio-political forces ‘homeless chic’ both rejects and embraces through its symbolism. Categorizing what constitutes ‘homeless chic’ is often problematic as the trend is expressed through a plenitude of cultural identities, predominantly articulated in appearances of ‘heroin chic,’ ‘peasant chic,’ ‘shabby chic,’ and ‘poor chic.’ Sociologist Karen Bettez Halnon views ‘poor chic’ as the commercialization of commodities symbolic of a lower-working class identity for the pure enjoyment of middle-class consumers, citing examples such as Timberland construction boots, designer trucker hats, wife-beater t-shirts and bowling shoes by designers such as Prada and Kenneth Cole.11 Halnon and Saundra Cohen expand the boundaries of ‘poor chic’ to include tattoo parlours, weight lifting, dirt biking and wrestling, sports and