Every book has a jumping-off
point, a theoretical idea, a text or an artwork that sparks the imagination and
gets the ideas up and moving. For me, that point was embodied in the
turn-of-the-twentieth-century social economist Thorstein Veblen, a Yale-trained
academic whose ideas I discovered as a Yale graduate student and who helped set
my ideas about spectacle in motion. Actually, you could say two theorists
shaped my ideas: Veblen and RuPaul. If you’ve heard the term conspicuous
consumption or seen a person carry a designer handbag with the logo scrawled
across the front in a giant font, you already know a lot about Veblen. He was
best known for a book published in 1899 called The Theory of the Leisure Class
in which he lays out his claims about the ways that conspicuousness, spectacle,
and over-the-topness connect to power. The book was published less than two
years after the opening of the sumptuous Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York
City. The Theory of the Leisure Class made such a splash that it inspired
of-the-moment novelists like Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, and
Marcel Proust to write fictional illustrations of Veblen’s teachings about the
role of appearance. One critic described Veblen’s book as “an opportunity for
American fiction,” a chance for writers to fictionalize Veblen’s economic
theories. His ability to see beyond the dazzling surface of things shows how he
was able to offer up a theory of the leisure class, and it is telling that the
boldest analysis of wealth and its patterns of consumption was written by a
critic who was the child of immigrants and who grew up in a simple agrarian
household where luxuries were not tolerated. As Veblen’s fictional mother Kari
Bunde Veblen says in the economist Leonard Silk’s posthumous 1966 satirical
play Veblen: A Play in Three Acts, “All those Yankee women are good for is to dress
up.”
The narrative of The Theory of
the Leisure Class goes like this: leisure is the only job of the wealthy class,
as opposed to the working or middle classes, so all the leisure class has to do
is appear, exist. That’s their only task. Of course, this is all wrapped up
into a spirit of capitalism that rewards those who are able to seize the most,
as if barbarians in a jungle. For Veblen, one of the defining features of the
leisure class is the need to always look really rich, where looking that rich highlights
a competitive ability to get more and better and bigger things than anybody
else. Under capitalism man hunts but he also requires physical evidence of his
conquests, evidence that takes the form of “trophies”–stuff–that show off his
prowess. He beats his chest and yells in triumph, and as he screams and yells,
gold coins pour out of his mouth.
Veblen’s theory of the leisure
class is an alluring one because it is all about appearance. Clothes are the
most visual artifacts available to convey messages about social standing. A
high-society portrait like John Singer Sargent’s Mrs. Hugh Hammersley (1892)
gets straight to the point: a well-heeled woman of means luxuriates in a
reddish-pink couture gown with ruffles around her neck. She crosses her legs,
pointy gold shoes on. The rug is opulent, as is the chaise she gracefully leans
on. There is an abundance of abundance in this image: an abundance of gold
cloth behind her, framing her portrait, and the dress itself is so voluminous
that the whole thing couldn’t even be captured within the frame of the
painting. No finger is lifted–not even one–and here the painting tells us, in
unmistakable terms, that Mrs. Hugh Hammersley doesn’t work. She is not only
posing for the painter; she has the leisure to do so. Here’s what Veblen would
have said to Mrs. Hammersley if he had stormed into the room during her
portrait sitting: “Our dress . . . should not only be expensive, but it should
also make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of
productive labor.” Or, put plainly, Mrs. Hammersley is a show-off, bragging
about her pocketbook and her luxury.
Fancy clothes are restrictive,
binding, and otherwise totally ridiculous for everyday tasks. We can look at
this painting of Mrs. Hammersley, which is ultimately a trophy, and feel
certain that she is not about to mow the lawn in that dress. It’s the clothes
that drive home the message. Indeed, Veblen was always interested in the
binding powers of clothing and once taught a seminar at the University of
Chicago on the history of high heels, arguing that they were intended to bind
women as yet another trophy item for men while also demonstrating the man’s
ability to pay. Think of the stunning photo-realistic paintings of the
contemporary American artist Marilyn Minter, a work like Strut (2005), a
blown-up image of a dirty, bruised, even bound foot struggling to walk in a
glamorous, diamond-laced Christian Dior heel. For Veblen, the high heel is
added evidence of enforced leisure, an object that places women under house
arrest. It is “obviously unfit for work.” While such apparel may make women
attractive and expensive-looking, the trade-off is that it incapacitates the
wearer, making her conspicuously exempt from manual labor and turning her into an
object in the process.
Veblen focused on how fashion
is used to communicate power by showing off, but what he missed is that when
you are forced to the margins, drawing attention to yourself is an act of
self-love. Veblen wrote about wealthy people who already have power, and that’s
fair enough. But using the effervescence of creative agency, style, and
fabulousness allows marginalized people to empower themselves as a triple act
of defiance, confidence, and self-love. For the fabulous, those beautiful eccentrics,
a group of rogue creative individuals linked together by sensational style, the
body is the canvas for creative expression, but it’s never just style for
style’s sake. Eccentrics see norms but then use their bodies and aesthetics to
displace and expose them.
Fabulous is a form of
currency, there’s no doubt about it. The catch is that a sickening outfit
doesn’t pay the rent. You can’t give your landlord twenty thousand Instagram
likes instead of the rent–cash money, honey! This kind of currency falls into
what Elizabeth Currid-Halkett has called “the Warhol economy,” an economic
world of creativity where being at the right party or fashion show at the right
time is just what you need to advance in the creative industries. In our social
media era, the more followers you have and the bigger the splash you can make
online, the more chance you have to turn those followers’ admiration into paid
opportunities. More likes means more attention, which then can often be
translated into other forms of cultural and economic capital. If we can figure
out how to get the attention of consumers and other passersby long enough to
make them interested in a specific product, idea, or experience, then knowing
how to get attention becomes an important type of currency.
That’s why fabulousness is a
kind of “symbolic capital,” a term the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu used to
describe any alternative, nonmonetary form of capital that pops up and assumes
value in a social group. Symbolic capital works in all kinds of subcultural
groups. Think of the secret gay hankie codes of the 1970s, whereby
handkerchiefs of a certain color placed in a specific pocket indicated interest
in a specific kind of sex–but only to those in the know. For Bourdieu, the sex
appeal of symbolic capital lies in its world-making power and its ability to
create alternative universes and systems of value. The thing about these kinds
of alternate universes is that the real world and the alternative universe both
exist at the same time.
Madison Moore
The Nigerian author Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie, in an essay called “Why Can’t a Smart Woman Love Fashion?,”
wrote of her frustration that women in Western culture who want to be taken
seriously need to show an indifference to appearance: “I hid my high heels. I
told myself that orange, flattering to my skin tone, was too loud. That my
large earrings were too much. I wore clothes I would ordinarily consider
uninteresting, nothing too bright or too fitted or too unusual. I made choices
thinking only about this: How should a serious woman writer be? I didn’t want
to look as if I tried too hard.”
Indeed, why is it that if you
care about fashion, style, and being a bit flashy, then somehow your work is
unserious? Why does wearing a sequined caftan to a department meeting make you
unproductive and incompetent? I agree with Jack Halberstam, who wrote in The
Queer Art of Failure that “being taken seriously means missing out on the
chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant.” The problem with
“seriousness” is that we don’t get the chance to follow “visionary insights or
flights of fancy.”
In 1991, fashion historian
Valerie Steele wrote, very humorously, that “academics may be the worst-dressed
middle-class occupational group in the United States,” not because they are
roundly incapable of fashion, but because they have been trained to associate
an interest in surfaces with frivolity, inappropriate to their practices of
close reading, deep interpretation, and analysis, all tools that aim to dig
beneath the surface. In the essay Steele explains how her dissertation on
fashion history was received by the Department of History at Yale with scorn
and suspicion. “Academics implicitly believe that fashion is frivolous, vain,
and politically incorrect.”
The issue is why certain
people believe that fashion is not worth pursuing, intellectually or
aesthetically. The answer to this hostility to fashion, for the art critic Hal
Foster, might be that we are in an age of “total design”; in the megastore of
commodities, packaging is more important than what’s inside. This culture of
superficial appearances is “all image and no interiority.” If only we could get
rid of surfaces once and for all, the suggestion seems to be, then we would
finally be liberated from the chains of capitalism and able to enjoy a truly
democratic social world.
Appearance matters, so much so
that the French philosopher Guy Debord once said, “All social life is mere
appearance.” As early as ancient Egypt, laws were in place to rigidly define
who could wear what kinds of clothing. At the time, only the upper classes were
allowed to wear sandals, and later in Rome only a citizen could go out in a
toga. In medieval Europe both church and state viewed luxurious clothing as an
indication of the excesses of vanity. As citizens aimed to outdo their
neighbors in the ballet of appearances the church retaliated by inaugurating
sumptuary laws that defined how members of a given social rank could dress,
essentially sifting them out by controlling how they could appear. At one point
it was illegal for lower classes to wear clothes that were above their social
class even if they could afford them. The whole point was to prevent confusion
between the upper class and the lower class. What these laws tell us is that
appearances matter enough that large-scale institutions, like the church and
the government, have intervened to manage how people look.
By 1750 Jean-Jacques Rousseau
railed against the emptiness and vanity of luxury and the pursuit of
appearance, advocating for a more naturalist state of humankind. “There would
be neither vanity nor luxury” in his vision of an idealized, definitely
unfabulous Christian society, because such artifice places emphasis on the
external rather than on the qualities of one’s character. In 1792 Mary
Wollstonecraft took it further, describing women who follow the whims of
fashion as slaves. “The soul is left out,” she felt, “and none of the parts are
tied together by what may properly be termed character. This varnish of
fashion, which seldom sticks very close to sense, may dazzle the weak; but
leave nature to itself, and it will seldom disgust the wise.” Wollstonecraft
believed that the artifice of fashion blinds the weak, whereas the truly wise
do not feel a need to enhance the natural. Here again is the association of
fashion and appearance with artifice and deception, wherein the naturalness of
the body automatically means the display of truth.
Despite church- and
government-backed sumptuary laws and intellectual efforts to control
appearances up through at least the late 18th century, the boom in
industrialization and the rise of commodity culture in the 19th century ushered
in a heightened role for appearance, shifting the focus away from the body as
an expression of truth and toward external appearance as a manifestation of
personal character. Take the volume of novels, realist fiction, fashion
journals, and etiquette guides published in the 19th century, such as Stephane
Mallarmé’s 1874 fashion journal La dernière mode as well as writings by Zola,
Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Oscar Wilde on the dandy as
a creature of cultivated appearance. As Lord Henry memorably tells Dorian Gray
in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, “It is only shallow people who do not
judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the
invisible.” But the emphasis on appearances and new ways of looking that
exploded in the 19th century, which included things like world exhibitions,
arcades, fashion, the display of commodities, and the flâneur, did not mean
that appearances were finally emancipated from theories of deception. Negative
critiques of appearance increasingly led to what one historian called
“conspiratorial theories of mass deception,” or the ways skeptical critics
argue against the value of spectacle, fashion, and ornamentation.
In 1904 the German sociologist
Georg Simmel argued against fashion because he felt it differentiated groups at
the same time as it actually created a certain unity within them, at least
temporarily. The evolution of fashion was largely about keeping the class
boundaries intact. “Just as soon as the lower classes begin to copy their
style, thereby crossing the line of demarcation the upper classes have drawn
and destroying the uniformity of their coherence, the upper classes turn away
from this style and adopt a new one, which in its turn differentiates them from
the masses; and thus the game goes merrily on.” Fashion, for Simmel, is a line
of demarcation that visually solidifies unity and membership within a social
class. This is still true today: the moment a red-hot fashion item becomes all
the rage, the trend is over. Trends are less about class status and more about
subcultural status and an access to cool. The reason fashions change so quickly
is essentially to make sure that a higher class status is not given in error to
someone like Rastignac who can afford to purchase the status symbols of a
particular class but isn’t actually a part of it.
For what it’s worth, I don’t
actually believe in “trends.” Trends do happen, of course, but I’m of the mind
that having a personal look, a signature style, is a much more interesting way
to go about fashion. A signature look means you are you all the time, no matter
what’s going on in the fashion world. I will always love black leather pants
and big hoop earrings, whether or not they are “in.” Period. Have you ever seen
Anna Wintour with a different haircut? Or Lady Bunny? Even as you hold down the
fort of your personal look, the fashion system will still move at a breakneck
pace, but having style is timeless.
No matter how much or how
little you’re interested in fashion, whether you’re invested in the latest
trends or if you march to the beat of your own drum, and even if you think
fashion doesn’t impact you, know that it does. I have a pair of spiked wedge
shoes that are always a conversation piece when I wear them out. They are my
favorite thing, and I would be totally depressed if I lost them somehow.
Whenever people see them in my room they always ask to try them on. Everyone
does this—male, female, heterosexual, gay. They try them on for the fun of it
and they love the feeling the shoes give them. But then they say: “I could
never wear those,” a phrase we have all used to describe an item of clothing
that makes us uncomfortable or that we don’t see ourselves in because it goes
against the image we have already constructed for ourselves. But who actually
says we can’t wear it?
The power of appearance,
that’s “who.”
Fashion naysayers are often
people who are “uncomfortable with taking full responsibility for their own
looks,” Anne Hollander tells us, “who either fear the purely visual demands of
social life—‘appearance’ or ‘appearances’—or don’t trust the operation of their
own taste,” which means in the end that they “feel threatened and manipulated
by fashion.” Negative theories of appearance emerge out of a nervousness and
anxiety about one’s own way of looking, which coincidentally works to reinforce
the power of appearance. When Rastignac puts on his best clothes and shows up
at the house of Madame de Restaud he believes he is entitled to be there. The
influential sociologist Erving Goffman, who used theater as a metaphor to
explain everyday social interactions, also believed that as soon as we walk
into a room we are already busy trying to understand details about a person’s
background, things like his or her class status, trustworthiness, and sense of
self. Appearance prompts a close reading of other people, a reading strategy
meant to tease out biographical and contextual information.
Everyone has a ritual of
appearance. When we groom ourselves and choose what to wear for different
social occasions we are already performing a specific version of ourselves.
Even choosing not to groom, wearing the same thing every day, or saying things
like “I don’t care about fashion!” is still a confirmation of appearance. It is
still a look. There are ways of dressing up for job interviews, going shopping,
first dates, and gym class that are different from going to a concert, getting
into exclusive nightclubs, attending a vogue ball, or working at avant-garde
fashion boutiques. No matter the given socio-theatrical situation, people are
always subject to the laws of appearance. This is what the American drag icon
RuPaul meant when in his 1995 autobiography Lettin’ It All Hang Out he said,
“You’re born naked and the rest is drag,” a significant comment because it
implicates everyone in the act of getting dressed.
Madison Moore
And when I listen to all my
favorite Prince tunes or every time his music comes on at a party, I will
whisper, Thank you. Thank you for setting me free. Thank you for helping me
accept my own identity as a black gay male, diamonds, pearls, and all.
Madison Moore
In your book you talk about
writer Minh-Ha T. Pham’s idea of ‘Fabulousness as the right to be seen.’ When
was this something you knew for yourself?
When you try to live in your
body differently, there are so many ways that you are suppressed. Whether
that’s being told you’re too femme or you’re not masc enough or you’re too that
or you’re too this, it's really harmful and it actually makes you fold up
inside. It makes you want to feel like oh, okay, well I need to be like this
now because if I want to be desired, to be kissed, to meet people, to be loved,
I have to be the way they want me to be. What I’ve discovered and what I love
so much about fabulousness as an idea is that people say, fuck you and do you
know what? That’s not me, I don’t want to do that anymore. That’s the recurring
theme that I found in almost all of the interviews I did with the folks I spoke
to for the book as well as thinking about my own personal experience. If you
can’t take me at my most, if you can’t take me living my best life, then maybe
you don’t deserve me at all. Then finding a community of folks who are with you
and deserve you as you are.
In what ways is fabulousness politically powerful? What is the power of fabulousness in marginalized and queer communities especially?
Fabulousness is a political gesture because to live in the world is to be constantly under surveillance. As we see people, we try to read their bodies and assess them visually based off of the clues they give us and the clothes they wear. It could be that you might be a business person in a suit and I might assume these 10 things about you because you’re in a business look. But the stakes are different when you are gender nonconforming or queer, marginalized in other ways and you decide to be a spectacle or to be visual. You are not fitting into the boxes people want to put you in. You are more visible thereby more able to be attacked verbally, even physically. Think about how privileged people are to circulate and move totally unbothered totally unharassed then think about people, what it must be like, to actually have your photo taken without your permission or to be laughed or to be verbally or physically attacked. Just try to get a sandwich. And you can’t even do that without being somehow harassed. For me, these are the political stakes of fabulousness and that’s what I would want people to remember or realize.
Dr. Moore,
who is already at work on a second book, about the sociology of clubbing, says
gentrification in cities like London, New York and Barcelona is threatening
clubs and other arts spaces that act as crucibles of fabulousness.
The
difference between clubs in Europe and U.S. is that in Europe, club culture is
seen as an engine of creativity,” Dr. Moore said. “My love for techno — my
ability to get lost in that perpetual motion — is due to my love of classical
music. It all ties together and merits support. Could you imagine a club in New
York getting the same tax breaks as the New York Philharmonic or Lincoln
Center? Yet that’s that happens in Europe.
He also
points out something that had been a subtext of the Berlin ball weekend — that
in an age of President Trump, populist firebrands like France’s Marine Le Pen,
and a global lurch to the right, clubs, ballrooms and other spaces frequented
by marginalized people and their allies need to coordinate and fight for their
right to exist.
Clubs are
engines of politics,” Dr. Moore said. “A day after the ball, nearly all of the
clubs in Berlin got together and staged one of the country’s largest protests
against the AfD,” a far-right political party whose full name translates as
Alternative for Germany, and which now sits in the Bundestag, the country’s
federal legislature. The party’s leader has been rebuked for playing down Germany’s
Nazi past.
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