Chanel: the Order of Things

Fashion Theory. Volume 14, Issue 2, pp. 135-158 DO!: 10.2752/175174110X12665093381504 Reprints available directly from the Publishers. Phoiocopyifig permitted by licence only. Chanel: The Order Catherine Driscoll of Things Catherine DriscotI Is the Chair Abstract of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University ol Sydney. She is Ihe author of Girls: Feminine This article considers the importance of fashion to both modernism and Adolescence in Popular Culture and modernity and the importance of modernism to understanding fashion. Cultural Ttieory (2002). Modernist It docs so through a close consideration of the example of Chanel—not Cultural Studies (2009), and forthcoming books on teen film and the biographical woman Chanel, or even the label Chanel, but rather on Australian country gidhood. the Modernist moment in fashion we have come to call "Chanel." The [email protected] position of ground-breaking innovator in the field of women's fashion that is widely assigned to Chane! is one form of the modernist break that produces both "the avant-garde" and "the classic." Using such an understanding of Chanel, this article examines the intimacy between 136 Catherine Driscoll fashion and modernity tlirougli Modernist aesthetics, modernist writing on fashion and culture, and that critical attitude Michel Foucault calls "modernism." KEYWORDS: Chanel, modernism, modernity, style She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt and her hair brushed back like a boy's. She started all that. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (2006[19261) Despite the ease with which the term is used, there is little clear consen- sus abour what counts as "modernism." There are two general types of definition of modernism, although variations and hybridizations of them abound, both of which pose some problems for useful discussion of fashion and modernism. Tbe first is an aesthetic definition, in which the particular conventii)ns of modernism—its use of "self-consciousness; simultaneity, juxtaposition and montage; paradox, ambiguity, and un- certainty; and the dchumanization of the subject" (Felski 1995: 25}— are based on genres to which fashion rather uneasily conforms. And the second is pcriodiziiig, where modernism is a stage of modernity stretch- ing roughly from the late nineteenth century to World War 11 and re- quires historical specificity into vyhich particular designs and designers sometimes fit but at the expense of other histories important to fashion. In this respect, "fashion" is one example among many that calls for a distinction between such definitions of modernism and that attitude to modernity also captured in many crucial uses of the term "modernism." I propose that we need to distinguish between what we might call "Modernism"—the now institutionalized assemblage of generally aesthetic forms and practices that appeared (roughly) in the early twentieth century—and the "modernism," which names an attitude to modernity that has much less formal or temporal coherence. In this article, in an argument that comes closer to thinking about modernity (rather than postmodernity) as a philosophy of temporality, I will use Chanel as a conjunction of and distinction between the concepts of "Modernism" and "modernism" for thinking about fashion. I draw this approach in part from Foucault's provocation, in ''What is Enlightenment?," that we think of modernity as an attitude rather than an epoch. At the conclusion of an essay that spans Immanuel Kant, Charles Baudelaire and "ourselves today" (in 1978), Foucault asks: I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by "attitude," I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made hy certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feel- ing; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same Chanel 137 time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. (Foucault i9841197BJ:35>) For Baudelaire, this artitiide could be detected in both art and the everyday, which combined in particularly significant ways in fashion. In praising Constantin Guys' attention to the everyday, Baudelaire also sees the man of modernity as he who "makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history" (Baudelaire 199511863]: 12). This man of fashion writes the history of the present and the history of himself in the various dimensions of his performance of fashion and perception of fashion in others. Indeed, Baudelaire stressed the importance of fashion as self-representation, as in "the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art" (Foucault 1984[I978]:41). Like many before him, Fredric Jameson credits Baudelaire with in- venting our concept of modernity through the "category of the clas- sical," against which modernity is defined and which is "the birth of historicity itself" (Jameson 2002: 22). But Jameson's argument adds something crucial In stressing that modernism is difficult to periodize precisely because it is always claiming to break with something. This is another way of expressing the critical attitude that constitutes modernism—reflection on the difference of today with regard to yester- day. The position of ground-breaking innovator in the field of women's fashion that is widely assigned to Chanel is one form of this modernist break. It is typical too in that such breaks are identified primarily by the Institutionalization of great names like "Chanel." In fact it is In install- ing a look that is both "classic" and "modern" that Chanel constitutes a rupture: she claims to be a forceful periodization of fashion that delin- eates what will always be true ¡in style). It is ciear that Chanel is not the single creator of, or even inspiration for, the transformations of fashion in the Modernist period, and still less of modernist attitudes to fashion. But in this I am not simply dismissing Chanel as less radical or innova- tive than she is sometimes seen to be. Instead, I want to reconsider what we want from the radical innovations of Modernism when we seek to apply them to fashion and what we want, moreover, from the installa- tion of Chanel as a classic' Fashion is modern. This might mean no more than that the condi- tions of modern life, as George Simmel suggested in 1911, exacerbate the starkest tendencies of fashion (20(}0[19I I ]: 191). Fashion partici- pates in that popular (as well as canonical) image of Modernism as, to quote Jennifer Craik's The Face of Fashion., "a commitment to new ways of living that explicitly rejected the old" (Craik 1994: 75). Eliza- beth Wilson also prioritizes the "desire for the new" (2000: 63) in fashion, btit her Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (2003) adds to this an emphasis on the relation between fashion and modernity. "The 138 Catherine Driscoll concept of 'modernity,'" she argues, "is useful in elucidating the rather peculiar role played by fashion in acting as a kind of hinge between the elitist and the popular" (2003: 60). In fashion, as Wilson records, we can trace the impact ofthe industrial revolution and even the emerging modes of thought that transformed morality, art, and science into rec- ognizably modernist forms. The history of fashion, she suggests, is that of modernity itself. It is in part fashion's capacity to reorder the world that Foucault draws from Baudelaire as the critical attitude of moderniry. He writes: modernit)' in painting does not consist, for Baudelaire, in intro- ducing black clothing onto the canvas. The modern painter is the one who can show the dark frock-coat as "the necessary costume of our time," the one who knows how to make manifest, in the fashion of the day, the essential, permanent, obsessive relation that our age entertains with death. "The dress-coat and frock- coat not only possess their political beauty, which is an expression of universal equality, but also tlieir poetic beauty, which is an expression of the public soul—an immense cortège of undertaker's mutes (mutes in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes ...). We are eacb of us celebrating some funeral." (Foucault 1984119781: 41, quoting Baudelaire) ' Phrased in this poignant way, tbe modernity of fashion cannot be re- duced to a cycle of death and rebirth, redundancy, and innovation. This article examines this intimacy between fashion and critical reflection on modernity in several different ways. Tbe next two sections consider Chanel and her aesthetic as manifesting both Modernist aesthetics and tbat critical attitude Foucault calls "modernism." The following section considers Chanel as exemplifying modernism's critical conjunction of commodification and art as a perspective on both style and the contemporary, and the final section returns to Foucault's suggestions about fashion's capacity to reorder the world, using Foucault's concept of het- erotopias to suggest that we might make quite radical claims about the impact and ongoing significance of modernist fashion. While fashion is generally excluded from the Modernisr canon, deemed too transient and too superficial to count among its central rev- olutions, as Nancy Troy's Couture Ctdture (2003) argues, and the 200.5 Chanel exhibition at tbe Museum of Modern Art (see Koda and Bolton 2005) attests, the contested borders of Modernism are now sometimes extended to include bigh fashion. The name most persistently conjured in this way is Cabrielle (Coco) Chanel. And there is no question that the Chanel brand and "Coco Chanel" (her star status during her lifetime and her iconic status after it) together form a key Hgure in renovating relations between art, industry, leisure, consumer culture, and modern identity. Chanel 139 Chanel i Apocrypbally, Cbanel once met fellow designer Paul Poiret in tbe street.

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