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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 8]
Fashion speaks a distinct language, whether in the form of a photograph, an individual’s personal dress or a passing trend. This language, in turn, emblematizes the essence of its social context. Retrospectively, fashion photography constitutes a historical document that offers us evidence of the practices and ideals of a given period. However, fashion photography is not merely a passive reflection of a period; it serves as a vehicle for circulating new patterns of consumption tied to evolving notions of the self (Radner 128). Further, the images of the form speak the essence of the time. As scholars such as Walter Benjamin, Mary Douglas and Barthes have noted and reinforced, fashion operates as a language, functioning on numerous levels and fashion photography is the medium through which this language is spoken because of its tremendous capacity for mass reproduction and dissemination. Clothing, like any commodity form, is a mode of communication. Douglas notes in her text, The World of Goods, “man needs goods for communicating with others and for making sense of what is going on around him. The two needs are but one, for communication can only be formed in a structured system of meanings” (95). For fashion, clothes speak the identity of the wearer and images of such individuals prompt or provoke discourses about culture and society on the greatest scale. In Caroline Evans’s essay “Yesterday’s Emblems & Tomorrow’s Commodities: The Return in Fashion Imagery Today,” the author references many of the ideas and themes present in Barthes’s work. In describing the contemporary position and the form it takes in an economic framework, Evans uses semiotic terminology to construct her argument, asserting that the garment now circulates in a contemporary economy as part of a network of signs, where the actual garment is a sign itself. From its existence primarily as an object, the fashion commodity has evolved into a mutant form with the capacity to insert itself into a wider network of signs, operating simultaneously in many registers. Whereas it used to exist as, for example, a dress, which preceded its single representation in the form of an advertisement or fashion photo, it is now frequently disembodied and deterritorialized. As such, it can proliferate in many more forms, within a larger network of relations. (96) Garments, through the lens of fashion photography, have come to mean more than just their function. Operating within this network of symbolic language and meaning, fashion photography has come to speak a more profound and diverse reality. Fashion’s inherent dynamism and pervasiveness highlights its continued relevance beyond a purely aesthetic and decorative function. Supporting this statement of fashion’s greater purpose and role in culture, Finkelstein notes how Barthes retains a metaphor of the semiotic system, however Barthes recognizes the fluidity and ambiguities inherent in the structure of fashionable appearance that force its codes to remain open-ended (25). Davis also references this more transient quality of the medium, writing, For other things being equal and regardless of the ‘message’ a new fashion sends, merely to be ‘in fashion’ is to be one up on those who are not as yet. From this perspective, assumed by Barthes, all fashion, irrespective of the symbolic content that animates one or another manifestation of it, gravitates toward ‘designification’ or the destruction of meaning. That it is to say, because it feeds on itself (on its ability to induce others to follow the fashion ‘regardless’) it soon neutralizes or sterilizes whatever significance its signifiers had before becoming objects of fashion. (72) Fashion’s almost parasitic behavior maintains its problematic position and character of contradiction. Barnard notes that Barthes wrote, “Fashion is both too serious and too frivolous at the same time” (94). Exploring the fashion system in his seminal text by the same name, Barthes embarks on an in-depth semiotic analysis of the codes, subtexts and languages of dress and the self and attempts to reconcile the schism within the form, in terms of its opposing and divergent qualities. He gives fashion a stature, naming it “the dream of identity” (254) and dedicates much time to the nature of fashion in culture and the meanings it communicates. Baudrillard later concurs in the characterization that fashion is elemental of the ‘dream world,’ constituting in part, “a dimension of reality constructed from images” (Finkelstein 81). Barthes seems at odds with his study of the language of fashion and quickly becomes entangled in his deconstruction. Barnard writes of Barthes’s attempt, Anyone who has been tempted to look into The Fashion System will be aware that it is not the easiest reading. Moreover, it must be admitted at the outset that the work has been almost universally written off, even by Barthes himself, as a semiological disaster. (92) The text remains largely impenetrable and convoluted and offers proof of fashion’s complexity. Even Barthes, engaging in an in-depth analysis of fashion as a semiotic system, struggles with the inherent contradictions of the form. This difficulty highlights the non-simplistic quality of the form, and refutes the previous dismissals of scholars against it. The one thing that is made clear is that fashion possesses the capacity to communicate, speak a specific language. What remains unclear is what exactly is said or meant by it. Barthes, and later, the postmodern theorist, Jean Baudrillard, seem to be alternately “bemused and outraged by fashion’s alleged displacement in the modern era of ‘the real’ (Davis 195). In his examination, Barthes focuses on the written fashion text rather than the real garment or its pictorial representation. He maintains, “written clothing is unencumbered by any parasitic function and entails no vague temporality” (Entwistle 68). This mode of fashion is the most accessible to him and yet, still he fails. Barthes writes specifically of fashion photography in The Fashion System, Increasingly, the magazine substitutes a garment-in-action for the inert presentation of the signifier…Actually, and this is what is strangest about Fashion Photography, it is the woman who is “in-action,” not the garment; by a curious, entirely unreal distortion, the woman is caught at the climax of a movement, but the garment she wears remains motionless. (302) This stasis, this state bereft of movement, feeling and reality has transferred to the present conditions of fashion photography. Like the garments in these images, modern creativity seems to be frozen in time. The only movement that exists occurs in current photographers’ increasingly desperate stabs at presenting something new, however this manifests as its opposite. Fashion photography today resembles either cartoons or recycled and feeble clichés of prior photographic styles, modes, and conventions.
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