Fashion Cultures and Media: Canadian Perspectives December 28, 2018
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REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES GUEST EDITORS IMAGINATIONS KATRINA SARK JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES | ELENA SIEMENS REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE CONTRIBUTORS KATRINA SARK ELENA SIEMENS Publication details, including open access policy KATHRYN FRANKLIN JULIA PETROV and instructions for contributors: JACLYN MARKUS SUSAN INGRAM http://imaginations.glendon.yorku.ca SUZI WEBSTER JILL HARBIN Fashion Cultures and Media: Canadian Perspectives December 28, 2018 REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES FASHION CULTURES AND MEDIA: CANADIAN PERSPECTIVES ISSUE 9-2, 2018 To cite this article: Ingram, Susan. “Where the Boys Who Keep Swinging Are Now: Locational Relationality in Hedi Slimane and Helmut Lang.” Imaginations, vol. 9, no. 2, 2018: Web (date accessed), pp. 67-83. DOI 10.17742/ IMAGE.FCM.9.2.7. To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.FCM.9.2.7 The copyright for each article belongs to the author and has been published in this journal under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 3.0 license that allows others to share for non-commercial purposes the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal. The content of this article represents the author’s original work and any third-party content, either image or text, has been included under the Fair Dealing exception in the Canadian Copyright Act, or the author has provided the required publication permissions. WHERE THE BOYS WHO KEEP SWINGING ARE NOW: LOCATIONAL RELATIONALITY IN HEDI SLIMANE AND HELMUT LANG1 SUSAN INGRAM Abstract | Tis article illustrates the mechanisms by which ome cities lend themselves to better com- Berlin and Vienna have come to fgure diferently in the global parisons than others. As the capitals of the fashion imaginary. It establishes the stylistic locational rela- two German-speaking empires (the Prus- tionality of Hedi Slimane and Helmut Lang, two fashion de- Ssian and Habsburg, respectively), Berlin and Vi- signers known for distinctive styles that resist the mainstream enna are well positioned for comparison, par- of bourgeois respectability. Te relational nature of their lo- ticularly due to the very diferent ways the two cational identities—Slimane’s attraction to Berlin and Lang’s cities have come to fgure in the global popular rejection of Vienna—is tied to the cities’ urban imaginaries, imaginary on account of their very diferent his- which work by making particular periods and styles of the cit- torical trajectories. Upstart Berlin with its back- ies’ histories hegemonic. ground as a Garnisonstadt (garrison city) has become the “poor but sexy” clubbing capital of Résumé | Cet article illustre les mécanismes par lesquels Berlin Europe (see Bauer and Hosek), while Residenz- et Vienne en sont venus à fgurer diféremment dans l’imag- stadt Vienna—the city that efectively served as inaire mondial de la mode. Il établit la relation locale stylis- the capital of the Holy Roman Empire from the tique de Hedi Slimane et Helmut Lang, deux dessinateurs de time the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II estab- mode connus pour leur styles distictintifs qui résistent aux lished his residence there in the early 17th cen- normes prévalentes de la respectabilité bourgeoise. La nature tury to its dissolution by Napoleon in 1806 and relationnelle de leurs identités géographiques—L’attrait de as home to the Habsburgs for most of the past Berlin pour Slimane et le rejet de Vienne pour Lang—est liée à millennium—, steadfastly remains a capital of l’imaginaire urbain des deux villes, ce qui se manifeste en ren- faded imperial splendor (Figures 1 and 2). Tese dant hégémoniques des aspects particuliers des époques et du imaginaries inform the ways in which these two style de l’histoire des deux villes. cities’ respective fashion systems have respond- ed to contemporary global pressures brought about by fows of capital, goods, and people, as well as the way the global fashion system has en- gaged with them. As of the time of writing, the Sartorialist still had not visited Vienna, while there are 40 images from Berlin on his site.2 Te mechanisms by which Berlin and Vienna have come to fgure diferently and the role of visual style culture in both forming and greas- ing the circuits underpinning their respective WHERE THE BOYS WHO KEEP SWINGING ARE NOW Te relational nature of these locational identi- ties and their (visual) styles is thus shown to be intimately tied to the cities’ urban imaginaries, which work by making hegemonic particular periods and styles of the cities’ histories. In po- sitioning Lang’s or Slimane’s work as resistant, I am not contesting their prominence as fash- ion designers but rather pointing to the relation between the radical nature of their visions and their associating, or not, with the urban imagi- naries of Berlin and Vienna. As Bradley Quinn pointed out in his review of the Radical Fash- ion exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2001-2002, radical is a relative concept that, when applied to uncompromising collections Figure 1 On the Street… Mitte, Berlin (thesartorialist.com) urban imaginaries are the subject of this contri- bution. Building on both Doreen Massey’s argu- ment about the identity of modern places being constituted as much by their relation with oth- er places as by anything intrinsic to their loca- tion (Massey) and Rosi Braidotti’s understand- ing of a place as “an embedded and embodied memory: it is a set of counter-memories, which are activated by the resisting thinker against the grain of the dominant representations of sub- jectivity” (Blaagaard and Tuin 203), I juxtapose the career paths of two designers whose work resists the mainstream of bourgeois respectabil- ity: Hedi Slimane (Figure 3) and Helmut Lang Figure 2 Café Griensteidl on the Michaelerplatz in (Figure 4). I show how their relations have, in Vienna (photo: M. Reisenleitner) the case of Slimane and Berlin, and have not, in the case of Lang and Vienna, come to play a such as Lang’s, “implies a sudden thrill of mean- role in constituting these cities’ global identities. ings that themselves quicken, mutate, rupture, REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES ISSUE 9-2, 2018 · 68 SUSAN INGRAM Figure 3 Hedi Slimane (Victor Soto) Figure 4 Helmut Lang, 2008 (courtesy of HL-ART) fssure, or collapse. Fashion designers working the coterie of youth culture, a form of re- in this vein reshape the body, design according sistance to imposed defnitions of identity to philosophical and intellectual concerns, push and lifestyle. They emit a feeling of being boundaries, challenge perceptions, and usurp adrift from society as a whole; the youth conformity to give form to extravagant projects culture that fashion was drawing upon be- of the imagination” (Quinn 442). What interests comes a series of satellites that deny inclu- me here is not so much the collections them- sion in establishment ideals. (Arnold, “Her- selves, about which Fashion Studies scholars oin Chic” 286–87) have made many insightful observations (Re- es-Roberts,“Boys Keep Swinging”; Bowstead; Yet Berlin’s urban imaginary has been able to Arnold, “Heroin Chic”),3 but rather the rela- take that resistance into its own urban imagi- tions between the imaginations underpinning nary, while Vienna’s has not. As importantly il- these works and the cities in which they came lustrated here, the experiences of these designers into being. In the trend-setting work of both Sli- and their relations to these cities can help us un- mane and Lang: derstand, and see, why. Conspicuous consumption is refused in Helmut Lang is the fashion designer associ- favor of dress strategies that are disqui- ated with Vienna to have achieved the great- eting and unknowable by those outside est renown internationally, but he did not do ISSUE 9-2, 2018 · 69 WHERE THE BOYS WHO KEEP SWINGING ARE NOW so as a specifcally Viennese fashion design- Post-Punk to Neo-Modern” 14). However, Lang er. While Lang may have started out in Vienna quickly grew disenchanted by the growing con- with a boutique called Bou Bou Lang in 1979, solidation of the fashion industry into conglom- he used the success that his use of unconven- erates. When the Prada Group sought to consol- tional materials and minimalist utilitarianism idate its position as a leading luxury conglom- in designs garnered as a springboard to get to erate at the end of the 1990s by acquiring labels Paris, not to mention his “Viennese-ness,”4 and came knocking at Helmut Lang, he frst ced- which is not intended as a stylistic marker but ed 51% of his company in 1999 and the remain- simply a refection of his background. Te con- der in 2004. He lef the company the following nection helped him to show a collection in 1986 year, retired from fashion, and has since been in conjunction with the monumental “Vienne devoting himself to his work as an artist. As we 1880-1939: L’apocalypse joyeuse/Vienna 1900/ argue in Wiener Chic, Lang’s refusal to kowtow Traum und Wirklichkeit” exhibition at Cen- to global fashion’s powers-that-be, maintaining tre Georges Pompidou that brought a renewed instead a relationship to the fashion world res- appreciation of Vienna’s Jugendstil/art nouveau olutely on his own terms,5 is indicative of, and cultural heritage and popularized it elsewhere in keeping with, the larger Viennese fashion sys- (Ingram and Reisenleitner, Wiener Chic 162). tem, just as the rest of the city’s non-high cul- In Paris, he founded his own label and showed ture, tourist-oriented cultural production exists his frst ready-to-wear collection be- fore decamping for New York, where “in April 2000, he became the frst non-American designer to become part of the Council of Fashion De- signers of America (CFDA), a group which had named him Best Interna- tional Designer of the Year in 1996” (162), and began working with Jenny Holzer on the design of his boutiques (Figure 5).