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The Counterfeit Body: Fashion Photography and the Deceptions
of Femininity, Sexuality, Authenticity and Self in the 1950s, 60s and 70s [Page 11]
Fashion feeds on grounded and static images for material, and yet seeks to create a quality of perpetual transformation and reinvention. The industry operates on constant visual instability and alteration, amid essentially rampant derivation. Fashion’s unsteadiness that manifests in fashion photography complements society’s nature of what is at once the spectacle in transition, and at the same time, a traditional framework stuck on repeat. Bruzzi and Gibson address some of fashion’s additional discordant prejudices, writing, Part of the perceived problem of fashion has been that academics in particular have not always known with what tone to approach and write about it—it’s too trivial to theorize, too serious to ignore…fashion’s fundamental dilemma is that it has inevitably been predicated upon change, obsolescence, adornment and, in the so-called First World, it has been inextricably bound up with the commercial; this has led to the assumption that it is therefore superficial, narcissistic and wasteful. (2) Fiona Anderson further supports this viewpoint, asserting in her essay, “Museums as Fashion Media,” “Fashion is surely the fastest changing source of new ideas in contemporary visual culture” (372). Adorno asserts, “Fashion enthrones itself as something lasting and thus sacrifices the dignity of fashion, its transience” (121 Davis). All of these elements that speak opposites about the same form contribute to the case for fashion photography being a postmodern embodiment. Fashion’s innate contradictions render its validation for study more difficult. Gibson, writing in 2000, discusses the difficulties of presenting her case of fashion being an area worthy of academic pursuit, claiming that fashion has only been established as a serious academic discipline and as an important area of theoretical debate in the last decade. The reasons she lists for this case include, [The] centuries-old belief in the essential frivolity of fashion, reinforced by the puritanism of many on the left, for whom fashion is the most obvious and…objectionable form of commodity fetishism, and the conviction of the majority of second –wave feminists that fashion is an arena in which women…display themselves in order to gratify male desire. (36) Further supporting the general consensus of previous academics against viewing fashion as a serious element of culture, Noel McLaughlin writes in his essay, “Rock, Fashion and Performativity,” “[There] has been a reticence to consider the significance and pleasures of costume” (264). The general sense of uneasiness and unsteadiness that pervades fashion and fashion photography only serves to further reveal the forms as truly postmodern entities. They are conflicting and messy collages of history and experience. Arnold re-emphasizes the disparate quality of fashion, writing, “Fashion is inherently contradictory, revealing both out desires and anxieties and constantly pushing at the boundaries of acceptability” (xiv.). Even while looking at fashion through the lens of postmodernism, Baudrillard remains a harsh critic of fashion and its effects on the simultaneous blanching and corrupting of culture and societal mores. Crediting fashion with being wasteful and futile, he writes, as quoted by Entwistle, [Fashion] fabricates the ‘beautiful’ on the basis of a radical denial of beauty, by reducing beauty to the logical equivalent of ugliness. It can impose the most eccentric, dysfunctional, ridiculous traits as eminently distinctive. This is where it triumphs—imposing and legitimating the irrational according to a logic deeper than that of rationality. (61) Part of his hostility toward the medium seems to stem from his positioning of fashion as an independent entity; Baudrillard differs from other theorists on the topic of fashion with his removal of fashion from the social sphere. He claims that fashion stands on its own, distinct from social influence, and perpetuates and recycles its own values, standards and styles, while infecting society with its own impure influence. While many have argued the opposite, that particular fashions indeed reflect values, beliefs, attitudes and aspirations of the social landscape in direct ways, Baudrillard maintains his minority position. According to Finkelstein, he argues that fashion does not mirror its social context, and rather, “[it] speculates on the recurrence of forms on the basis of their death and stockpiling, like signs in an a-temporal reserve. Fashion cobbles together, from one year to the next, what “has been,” exercising an enormous combinatory freedom” (33). Baudrillard’s assertions are a hard sell given the amount and convincing nature of evidence pointing the other way. Finkelstein, for example, wisely declares, “Fashion is a mode of social exchange and, like other social discourses, its function is ultimately to maintain cultural continuity” (66). She may not credit fashion with creativity per se, but Finkelstein does name it as having an active exchange with culture. Returning to Baudrillard, he seems to later contradict himself, compromising his already isolating and insulated viewpoint. He writes, Fashion represents what can least be explained: actually, the obligation that it presents of a renewal of signs, its continual production of apparently arbitrary meaning, its thrusting of meaning, the logical mystery of its cycle in reality—these all represent the essence of social moment. (Ibid.) In this statement, Baudrillard links fashion inextricably to society. Weakening his initial debasement of fashion as an area unworthy of scholarly focus is his own lingering focus on the topic. Further still, he emphasizes the importance of the possession of aesthetic objects, in which fashion must be included. Relating fashion’s ultimately commercial and thus economic properties and function, Baudrillard recognizes the conflation of the origin versus the effects of fashion. It is a business enterprise with a visual and decorative manifestation. Seeing a continuity, ‘between the urge to consume and the disappointment of possession…. Baudrillard understands the desire to extract aesthetic satisfactions from everyday life since, without such pleasures, it can be a grinding monotony. (Finkelstein 75). He writes, “objects, and the needs that they imply, exist precisely in order to resolve the anguish of not knowing what one wants” (Ibid. 100). While the very essence of fashion and the practice of keeping with it, seems to defy logic, the necessity of this irrationality is overpowering and ultimately deeper than pure visual fetish of fashion objects. It is about constructing and presenting an idealized identity to society.
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