Fashion and Psychoanalysis : Styling the Self
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Alison Bancroft is a writer and cultural critic. She specialises in interdisciplinary approaches to modern and contemporary art and visual culture, and is committed to working across all media and contexts. Her research interests include visual culture and theory, psychoanalytic thought, and sexualities. She was awarded her PhD by the University of London in 2010. This is her first book. Fashion.indd 1 12/01/2012 12:28:24 Fashion.indd 2 12/01/2012 12:28:24 Fashion and Psychoanalysis Styling the Self Alison Bancroft Fashion.indd 3 12/01/2012 12:28:24 Published in 2012 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2012 Alison Bancroft The right of Alison Bancroft to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. International Library of Cultural Studies: 23 ISBN: 978 1 78076 003 2 (hb) 978 1 78076 004 9 (pb) A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Caslon by JCS Publishing Services Ltd, www.jcs-publishing.co.uk Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Fashion.indd 4 12/01/2012 12:28:24 For my grandmother, Emma Byers, who showed by example the importance of always being well-dressed. Fashion.indd 5 12/01/2012 12:28:24 Fashion.indd 6 12/01/2012 12:28:24 Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 Fashion Photography and the Myth of the Unified Subject 23 2 Inspiring Desire: The Case for Haute Couture 59 3 Queering Fashion, Dressing Transgression 103 4 Fashion, Text, Symptom 149 Conclusion 189 Notes 199 Bibliography 221 Index 235 VII Fashion.indd 7 12/01/2012 12:28:24 Fashion.indd 8 12/01/2012 12:28:24 Acknowledgements I would firstly like to thank Philippa Brewster and her team at I.B.Tauris for their support and their guidance in getting this book to print. I must also thank a number of colleagues for their insights into psychoanalysis, art, fashion and French, without which I would almost certainly have committed some embarrassing oversights. They are: Jacqueline Rose, Peter Evans and Michael Moriarty at Queen Mary, University of London and Tim Dean at SUNY Buffalo. A thank you also to Jessica Bugg from the London College of Fashion, who provided the cover image for this book. Special mention must go to Lisa Downing at Exeter University for her intellectual generosity and the many kindnesses she has shown me since we met in 2005. Thanks also go to the Journal of Fashion Theory (published by Berg) and Sexualities (published by Sage), who first published versions of Chapters 2 and 3 of this book and who have allowed me to reprint them. And finally, to all those who have provided me with support, friendship, refreshments and entertainments while this book was being written – thank you. You know who you are. IX Fashion.indd 9 12/01/2012 12:28:24 Fashion.indd 10 12/01/2012 12:28:25 Introduction Psychoanalysis is a unique discipline that has since its inception followed two parallel and simultaneous trajectories. On the one hand, it has gone into the clinic, where it is the ‘talking cure’ for people suffering from some sort of mental distress, and on the other it has moved out into the wider intellectual world, where it enters into dialogue with creative forms and practices in order to investigate, quite simply, what it means to be human. Freud himself talks about Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Leonardo da Vinci and even jokes, seeing in them paradigms of the operation of the mind. It has been profoundly influential to both artists and thinkers alike, who all recognise its capacity to add layers of meaning to things that, without it, would remain obtuse, intractable. It has proved crucial to the development of film studies and art theory, while in literature it has become synonymous with writing, and not, as one might expect, reading. What it has not yet been brought into dialogue with is fashion. Fashion seems, in the last decade or so, to have changed the way it perceives itself. Certainly, the way in which it presents itself has changed. There has been an increasing emphasis on creativity, with fashion arguing its case as an aesthetic form instead of merely a product to be sold. SHOWstudio.com, the influential website set up by the photographer Nick Knight, led the charge, and any number of exhibitions in major galleries and museums in London and elsewhere reflect on an almost weekly basis on fashion’s contemporary creative agenda. The late Alexander McQueen, interviewed about his costumes for the remarkable modern dance piece Eonnagata (performed at 1 Fashion.indd 1 12/01/2012 12:28:25 2 FASHION AND PSYCHOANALYSIS Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London in 2009), very pointedly complained about the emphasis on fashion as a mere business that sees designers being set up, as he put it, as ‘lap-dogs of the ladies who lunch’.1 This change is long overdue. Scholars and critics of literature look at literature itself, not the publishing business. Likewise, art scholars and critics are concerned with the art work itself, and are less interested in the art dealers that sell it. Treating fashion as a creative and aesthetic form rather than as an exclusively capitalist concern is central to a serious and scholarly consideration of fashion objects and artefacts. Defining Fashion Fashion is not necessarily a matter of expressing one’s ‘identity’, nor is it merely about trends or the business of products, branding and retail, although there are many instances when these issues are very much in evidence. Fashion is, perhaps, primarily concerned with innovation in the surface decoration of the body, and the wider social and cultural responses to this innovation. It would follow, then, that it is the wearer, and the act of wearing, that are in fact central to fashion. Fashion is not a discrete or enclosed collection of fixed objects. A garment is not an independent, fully formed entity that is superimposed on the blank canvas of a woman’s body. On the contrary, it exists only when it is in the process of being worn; when fashion is encountered in contexts other than the act of being worn, it can often evoke a sense of disquiet. Elizabeth Wilson has remarked that, ‘Clothes without a wearer, whether on a second hand stall, in a glass case, or merely a lover’s garments strewn on the floor, can affect us unpleasantly, as if a snake has shed its skin.’2 This unease that wearer-less garments can induce is explored in the fashion/art installation Spring Summer Collection 1770–1998 (1998), by Lun*na Menoh, which demonstrates the processual nature of fashion with a linear depiction from left to right of consecutive changes in style through time. More interestingly, though, it demonstrates how imperative the wearer is to the operation of fashion. These Fashion.indd 2 12/01/2012 12:28:25 INTRODUCTION 3 ghostly garments, devoid as they are of any corporeal relation, are suggestive of a sinister otherworldliness that Sigmund Freud calls ‘The Uncanny’. They are simultaneously familiar, almost mundane, in the way that only something as ubiquitous as clothing can be, and also alienated, following their removal from their expected context. As Freud puts it, ‘. the uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it.’3 Besides its relation to the human body, fashion is also closely associated with femininity and with art. It was Baudelaire’s ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ that first distinguished this association and tied this relationship to modern culture. In this essay, Baudelaire identifies a shift in fashion, from its role in revealing social distinctions predicated on class, to distinctions predicated on gender instead.4 He sees fashion as synonymous with the feminine, and writes: When he describes the pleasure caused by the sight of a beautiful woman, what poet would dare to distinguish between her and her apparel? Show me a man who [. .] has not enjoyed, in a wholly detached way, the sight of a beautifully composed attire, and has not carried away with him an image inseparable from the woman wearing it, thus making of the two, the woman and the dress, an indivisible whole.5 In ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Baudelaire uses the words fashion (mode), costume (costume) and dress (robe) to talk about a particular mode of dress that he describes as the historically specific aspect of beauty, and that renders beauty of a particular type, and in doing so makes it altogether more human than it might otherwise be. He sees beauty, femininity and fashion as bound together, contingent upon one another, and at once a product of its time and ahistorically classic.6 This association remains even today, as Anne Hollander points out: ‘“men’s fashion” is an acknowledged subset, and has scarcely any of the fame and resonance attaching to “Fashion”.’7 Fashion is unique in this.