Sometime in
1932, Salvador Dalí met with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. A deliciously
queer photograph records them loitering together in a Parisian street, swaddled
in fur coats so sumptuous that Liberace would have died of envy. Dalí’s is
draped insouciantly across his shoulders like a black cape, his straggly
collar-length hair lending him a vampiric air. But Lacan, distracted, has his
hands shoved in his pockets, and the coat, a plush and stripy affair, mink
perhaps, is a kind of nonchalant afterthought.
That Lacan
should be a dandy is predictable enough to those familiar with his writings on
the ‘mirror stage’ of infant development. For Lacan, no account of the ego is
complete without narcissism, the gaze and the ‘specular image’ – the idea that
selfhood is profoundly bound up with the ways in which we are seen from the
outside. Lecturing to a captivated audience at the University of Leuven in
1972, grainy film footage records him as imperious, idiosyncratic and, it turns
out, fond of pussy-bowed paisley-print chemises. Puffing at a fat cigar, his
hands strain and curl with the intensity of his efforts at articulation:
‘Language,’ he says, ‘never gives, never allows us to formulate…’
Where
language falls short though, clothes might speak. Ideas, we languidly suppose,
are to be found in books and poems, visualised in buildings and paintings,
exposited in philosophical propositions and mathematical deductions. They are
taught in classrooms; expressed in language, number and diagram. Much trickier
to accept is that clothes might also be understood as forms of thought,
reflections and meditations as articulate as any poem or equation. What if the
world could open up to us with the tug of a thread, its mysteries disentangling
like a frayed hemline? What if clothes were not simply reflective of
personality, indicative of our banal preferences for grey over green, but more
deeply imprinted with the ways that human beings have lived: a material record
of our experiences and an expression of our ambition? What if we could
understand the world in the perfect geometry of a notched lapel, the orderly
measures of a pleated skirt, the stilled, skin-warmed perfection of a circlet
of pearls?
Some people
love clothes: they collect them, care for and clamour over them, taking pains
to present themselves correctly and considering their purchases with great
seriousness. For some, the making and wearing of clothes is an art form,
indicative of their taste and discernment: clothes signal their distinction.
For others, clothes fulfill a function, or provide a uniform, barely warranting
a thought beyond the requisite specifications of decency, the regulation of
temperature and the unremarkable meeting of social mores. But clothes are
freighted with memory and meaning: the ties, if you like, that bind. In
clothes, we are connected to other people and other places in complicated,
powerful and unyielding ways, expressed in an idiom that is found everywhere,
if only we care to read it.
If dress
claims our attention as a mode of understanding, it’s because, for all the
abstract and elevated formulations of selfhood and the soul, our interior life
is so often clothed. How could we ever pretend that the ways we dress are not
concerned with our impulses to desire and deny, the fever and fret with which
we love and are loved? The garments we wear bear our secrets and betray us at
every turn, revealing more than we can know or intend. If through them we seek
to declare our place in the world, our confidence and belonging, we do so under
a veil of deception.
Old, favoured
clothes can be loyal as lovers, when newer ones dazzle then betray us,
treacherous in our moments of greatest need. There is a naivety in the perilous
ways we trust in clothes. Shakespeare knew this. King Lear grandly insists to
ragged Poor Tom that: ‘Through tattered clothes great vices do appear;/ Robes
and furred gowns hide all’ – even when his own opulence can no longer obscure
his moral bankruptcy. Emerson too, mockingly corrects us when he writes: ‘There
is one other reason for dressing well… namely that dogs respect it [and] will
not attack you.’
Yet dress
never promises to indemnify us from external assault or internal anguish. When
the weaver invokes Khalil Gibran’s ‘Prophet’ to speak of clothes, the Prophet
answers him dreamily:
“Your clothes conceal much of your
beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful. And though you seek in garments the
freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain. Would that you
could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your
raiment. For the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in
the wind.”
Skin turned to
sunlight. Exultation in exposure. But there is also no burying our real-world
unloveliness in clothes: the ugly truth bears no dressing up. As Gibran tells
us, dress can bind and constrain us; its regulated repertoire is a bondage
estranging us from truer, freer, more naked realities. E M Forster wryly cautions
us to ‘Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes,’ but his own prim
English Edwardian elegance was the keeper of his undisclosed confidence, sexual
and otherwise.
Yet
clothes can provide refuge, offering a canopy under which we shelter those
anxieties and agonies from whose force we might otherwise cower like a naked
king on a stormy heath. If there is despair at the back of life, it might be that
dress helps us pacify and mute it. And yet to entrust to clothes the keeping of
our secrets is a seduction in itself.
For some
people, clothes are a disguise in which we dissolve, a kind of camouflage that
allows us to keep something of ourselves in reserve, as though all we are and
own for ourselves refuses to be articulated and shared in outerwear. For
others, clothes are an acknowledgment of our alertness to life; we signal it in
the deft and quirky ways we fix a belt, hang a tie, pin our jewellery. The
clothes we love are like friends, they bear the softness of wear, skimming the
curves and planes of our bodies, recalling the measurements and ratios of
proportions they seem almost to have learnt by heart.
There are
certain clothes that we long for and into which our limbs pour as soon as we
find a private moment: the jumper in which you, at last, exhale at the close of
day, the slip that is the only thing pressed between you and your lover through
the long hours of the night. We need not wear our hearts on our sleeves, since
our clothes seem already to know everything we might say and many things for
which we could never find words.
Surprisingly,
the discipline of philosophy has rarely deigned to notice the knowledge to
which dress makes claim, preferring instead to dwell on its associations with
disguise and concealment. In part, this has something to do with philosophy’s
ancestral debt to Plato. Haunted by Plato’s anxiety over how to distinguish
truth from its ‘appearance’, and niggled by his injunction to see beyond an illusory
‘cave of shadows’ to a reality to which our back is turned, philosophy’s
concept of truth is intractably aligned to ideas of light, revelation and
disclosure. We’ve learnt to revere the nakedness of truth and to deplore the
screens and masquerades that keep us from it. The very figure of truth,
aletheia (ἀλήθεια), is undressed in the Greek tradition, figured as a nude.
When Martin
Heidegger reprised the classical notion of aletheia, he imagined nothing as
stark as naked truth, but figured something more like a slow dawning
realisation of that which is already there: an evocative kind of disclosure of
the world to the beings within it. But philosophy’s revelations remain
nonetheless at odds with the idea of dressing up.
In a
journal entry of 1854, Søren Kierkegaard notes that ‘in order to swim one takes
off all one’s clothes – in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a
far more inward sense’. Even for modern philosophy, then, the truth of
self-knowledge seems to require renunciation, the stripping of metaphorical
clothes, but also all material preoccupations and vanities. And there is an
implicit elision here too: material preoccupations are a vanity. Those garish
outward garments keep us from our naked inward truth.
Before
Kierkegaard, Immanuel Kant dispensed with fashion, declaring it ‘foolish’. And
yet his notion of ‘appearance’ has provided one of philosophy’s
longest-standing concerns. Kantian thought distinguishes between the reality of
things in themselves (noumena) and how they appear to us (phenomena), and the
business of philosophy is the handling of this irreconcilability – that of a
world that might exist on its own terms, and our limited abilities to apprehend
it. Whereas Kant agonised over this distinction, Friedrich Nietzsche’s
radically iconoclastic philosophy prized appearance as the means by which we
play and overturn received ideas. In the figure of Dionysus, Nietzsche recasts
truth as only ever a series of performances, appearances and surfaces behind
which there can be no single, unchanging or inherent morality. The world appears
in ever changing disguises, to be experienced aesthetically.
Although
‘appearance’ remains a resolutely perceptual and epistemological issue in
philosophy, this concern is entirely disconnected from questions of physical
appearance or dress. And yet to ignore the material reality of the clothed body
is to deny something crucial to the ways human beings see and are in the world.
The
notable exception here is Karl Marx. For him, dress naturally figured as part
of a fully materialist account of the world. Clothes, it seemed, could embody
the mystification of objects that he detected in modern culture. In the opening
chapter of Capital (1867), it is a coat that exemplifies the distorted nature
of all commodities in a capitalist society. Marx understood this first-hand. In
the summer of 1850, he deposited his gentleman’s overcoat with a local
pawnbroker, hoping to generate funds during one of several periods of penury.
To his puzzlement, though, without appropriate dress, he found himself debarred
entry to the reading rooms of the British Library. What was it about objects
such as coats that they could magically open doors and bestow permissions? Not
even a coat belonging to Marx himself could evade the ineluctable mechanism of
capitalist exchange and value.
All
commodities, including coats, were, it seemed to Marx, mysterious things,
loaded with strange significances, drawing their value not from the labour
invested in their production but instead from the abstract, ugly and
competitive social relations of capitalism. The mundane, repetitive making of
such objects exhausted workers, draining them of their will and vivacity, but
Marx also noted the perverse way a commodity could, in turn, appropriate and
imitate the qualities of a human being, as though it possessed a diabolical
life of its own. Clothes represent that awful mimicry with particular acuity:
think of the swaggering braggadocio of the newest trainers with their swishing
insignias, or the dress that seems to possess its own flirtatious personality
in its swing; even vertiginous heels that speak of a languorous life without
exertion, worlds away from that of the worker who made them. Such garments
enter the market, virginal and untouched, wiped clean of the prints of the
working hands through which they have passed.
When
Marx condemns the all-consuming commodity ‘fetishism’ of modern culture, he
derives the term from the Portuguese feitiço, meaning charm or sorcery, and
referring specifically to the West African practice of object worship, as
witnessed by 15th-century sailors. To the fetish, worshippers attributed all
kinds of magical properties that such objects did not possess in reality. In
the same way, modern capitalism, it seemed to Marx, traded on the supernatural
life of objects. Clothes are not exempt from eliciting this false idolatry. We
sing the praises of shoes, dresses, jackets and bags as though they possess an
inherent power, a spirit or soul; we give them stories, lives, identities, and
in so doing blot out their real origins.
For Sigmund
Freud – himself a notable wearer of high-quality, decently made three-pieces –
clothes were not an object of intellectual enquiry per se, yet the idea of
dress figures the premise of psychoanalysis itself, insofar as it concerns the
relationship between the hidden and revealed. When Freud contrasts the manifest
or outward content of dreams with their latent or submerged significance, he
notes how the work of dreams is the binding together of inside and out, surface
and depth. We speak, sometimes, of weaving dreams, as though dreams are spun.
More to the point, our unconscious is clothed in the stuff of our dreams.
In Freud’s
account, memories are fabricated. By invoking the phenomenon of ‘screen
memories’, Freud radically challenged the integrity of infant recollection.
Seemingly derived from pleasing early experiences, the screen memory records a
relatively insignificant story in order to shield or protect a more
catastrophic, hidden, import. The screen memory is not a ‘real’ memory, but one
whose façade conceals another. When Freud uses the term ‘screen’, it is
commonly taken analogically, to suggest a movie screen, a visual plane upon
which an image is imprinted or projected and which occludes another, truer
memory; but the term ‘screen’ can also mean a guard, or shutter. The screen is
a textile; and just as dreams are bound and memory fabricated, the psyche too,
as Freud understands it, is shrouded and veiled, layer after layer.
The word
‘fabric’ itself derives from the Latin fabrica meaning workshop or place of
production, and faber – the artisan or maker who works with materials. It
recalls the Indo-European dhab, appositely meaning ‘to fit together’. In the
psychoanalytical scenario, analysand and analyst piece together the strands of
the psyche, retracing forgotten pathways that lead from trauma to original
experience, like Ariadne’s thread marking the route out of a maze. This piecing
together, or fabrication of psychic life, entails a certain kind of creativity,
even fictionality, albeit a fiction that is born of truth: the imaginative
elaboration of dreams and writings revealed in talking cures and linguistic
slips that lead us back to experiences we might be incapable of confronting.
We’re prone to
disparage as crude the analogue of self with stuff, as though the substance of
the soul might only be short-changed by the material things with which we seek
to express it. And it is difficult not to read the diminution of dress in
philosophy as part of a more general disdain for matters regarded as maternal,
domestic or feminine. ‘Surface,’ wrote Nietzsche, is a ‘woman’s soul, a mobile,
stormy film on shallow water.’ Relegating women to the shallows is, of course,
to deny them depth, but the surface to which they are condemned is not without
its own qualities: fluidity, responsiveness, sensitivity to a given moment or
sensation. Female writers have always understood this. In Edith Wharton’s novel
The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart concedes to herself the powerful truth of
her passion for Lawrence Selden:
“ She was very near
hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin,
dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes – she was conscious
that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.”
When we speak
of things being ‘woven together’, we mean affinity, association,
inseparability, but Wharton’s ‘inwoven’ intimates more: an intimacy so close
that it is constitutive. Wharton’s contemporary Oscar Wilde quipped in The
Picture of Dorian Grey (1890) that ‘it is only shallow people who do not judge
by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the
invisible.’ With his dandyish green coats and carnations, Wilde teasingly
nudges us towards the stark secularity of a new world in which divinity could
be as readily located in dresses as in deities.
But Wharton’s
insight goes beyond reference to a newly outward-facing modernity, and is more
profound than the upturned paradox of a surface that could speak of the inner
self. Lily is bound to Lawrence not simply by some romantic pledge of affection
but in the particularities of his being, as though the tightest seam ran back
and forth between her slow-gathered sense impressions (his voice, his hair, his
clothes) and the interior life to which they seem to reach. As Lily is to
Lawrence, we too are inwoven with the stuff of the world and the people to whom
those things belong or refer.
Taking up this
idea of a deeper, inwoven life, Anaïs Nin in Ladders to Fire (1946), writes of
a woman in love:
“weaving and sewing and mending because he
carried in himself no thread of connection… of continuity or repair… She sewed…
so that the warmth would not seep out of their days together, the soft inner
skin of their relationship”.
This is not to
say that clothes are the self, but to suggest, exploratively, that our
experiences of selfhood are contoured and adumbrated by many things, including
clothes, and that the prejudices by which we disregard the concern for
appearances or relegate dress to the domain of vanity, are an obstacle to a
significant kind of understanding. As Susan Sontag says, contra Plato, perhaps
there is ‘[no] opposition between a style one assumes and one’s “true” being…
In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being.’
Perhaps we
simply are in clothes. And in clothes, our various selves are subject to
modification, alteration and wear. This happens in clumsy ways – the glasses
you hope might lend you new seriousness, the reddened lips that mimic arousal –
but also in innumerably subtle ways: the heel that cants the body, contracting
your stride, the tie that stiffens your neck and straightens your spine. Some
garments constrict and reshape us physically, but also, sometimes, emotionally.
And there are garments we can feel, that itch and chafe, that make apparent the
difference of their textures to that of the surface of our skin, as though we
and they are not one. In these, we are alert to the experience of being in our
bodies, in a way that seems at odds with the rest of the world gliding past,
apparently immune to discomfort. In such garments, too, we are always alert to
the ever-present physicality of our bodies.
By contrast,
there are clothes we wear almost imperceptibly, that are light or diaphanous to
the point of being hardly seen or felt, as though we are sheathed in air. There
are clothes that we are so accustomed to that we go about our business with
barely a thought to the bodies they encase. If the self is somehow experienced,
then perhaps there are moments when we strive to be seen and others when we
seek a certain kind of invisibility. We wax and wane in the things that we
wear. In clothes, there are always possibilities for difference and
transformation.
Yet if those
possibilities for transformation are exciting, they are also dangerous,
dislodging the security of a self that could believe itself shored up,
imperturbable and unchanging. How, for instance, could it be that we so easily
emulate others in what we wear, as though our selves were interchangeable,
indistinguishable, altogether indistinct? We make light of costumes and fancy
dress, yet their very possibility contests the privileged exclusivity of
personhood. In costume, after all, there is betrayal, the dispelling of an
enchantment rather than the casting of a spell, an exposure of the pretence
that is authenticity: if I can glibly dress like you, how then are any of us
ourselves?
The anxiety of
authenticity is never far away from dress. We seek clothes that ‘are us’, and
there is an implicit insolence in the ready-to-wear, off-the-rail garments we
rifle through, that unsettle us in suggesting that our precise measurements
might be generic, predictable and average. Still, there can be immense
tenderness in the ways our clothes tell the stories of a self subject to all
kinds of alteration: the bitter-sweetness of ‘growing’ into a coat inherited from
a long-gone parent; folding away the maternity dress you will never have cause
to wear again. Sometimes, there is only anguish: the blood stain on a T-shirt
from that most terrible of days. Clothes mark our mutability. They parallel the
vicissitudes of our lives in their subtle shifts of colour and sheen, and they
stretch over time.
But there is a
promise in dress, too. The French philosopher, Hélène Cixous writes of designer
Sonia Rykiel and the perfect dress – the dress in which one might, at last, be
comfortable, almost natural (if not in your skin, then at least in your dress):
‘The dress that comes to me… agrees with me, and me with it, and we resemble
one another… The dress dresses a woman I have never known and who is also me.’
This dress is a dream, or a dream dressed up as a dress, casting the wearer
anew but also affirming an account of themselves that they gladly snatch up for
display. In this dress, Cixous is unplagued by the anxieties of her body, her
beauty, her age and her sex – the sense of perfection or completion it imparts,
is almost divine:
“ I enter the garment. It is as if I were
going into the water. I enter the dress as I enter the water which envelops me
and, without effacing me, hides me transparently… And here I am, dressed at the
closest point to myself. Almost in myself. “
Here there is
no rupture or discontinuity, only fabric that feels like the body itself,
transmitting the truth of the self through it, without impediment. In an odd
way, perhaps this dress of dresses aspires to a kind of transparency or an
invisibility, whereby we might be seen as we really are, at our very best, in a
light that is undiluted, perfectly truthful, and just.
Some of us
might believe we possess such a dress, a rare thing lovingly preserved and only
carefully exposed to the light of day; others reach for its possibility and
find in every new purchase a pretender, sensing it forever slipping from our
grasp or gaze, like the faces of the dead that come to us only in dreams.
Perhaps the power of the right dress necessarily comes only rarely, like
hard-won self-knowledge, the shining truth of which cannot stand too much
scrutiny. Philosophy might have forgotten dress, but all that language cannot
articulate – the life of the mind, the vagaries of the body – is there, ready
to be read, waiting to be worn.
Whenever
I catch a glimpse of my reflection during late-night lecture writing or midway
through a mountain of marking, I recall, with dismay, a line from Jonathan
Swift: "She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on her with a
pitchfork." Academics can be a motley crew, coffee-stained and
ink-blotted, so dedicated to ideas we can barely spare a thought for what we
wear. But this dismissal of dress seems to me so often only an artful pose,
implying that to care about clothes is to have fallen victim to vanity when you
ought instead to have been immersed in abstract intellectual inquiry.
The way
that we dress in the academy has changed because the academy has changed.
Learned professors once inspired confidence with their tweed jackets and
elbow-patched blazers, understandably unbothered by fleeting fashions when the
longue durée of tenure stretched so happily ahead of them. A few hard-wearing
separates, well-made and durable, in a muted palette, could make for a
perfectly passable and desperately dull uniform, worn on rotation, week by
week.
By
contrast, the harried teaching assistants of today’s university, underpaid and
overworked, have neither time nor income to spare on sartorial matters. Somehow
they must seamlessly segue from graduate students slumming in sneakers to
professorial formality. A blazer thrown over a Ramones T-shirt might do the
trick, or you could try fishing out that pair of respectably stout court shoes
you bought for the wedding you went to last summer.
And
while those dusty dons sail in from time to time, the rest of us are asked to
put our best (shoe polished) foot forward, smiling on campus-visit days for
prospective students and for marketing brochures. Wandering around the
administrative corridors, you can feel suddenly surrounded by a swarm of
smartly pressed suits. Here you can see in clothes the professionalization and
managerialism that increasingly circumscribe the modern university.
The
glaring irony is that despite this gleaming vision of the university as a
smoothly managed and efficiently administered organization, appearances are
deceptive. Wander over to an actual department, and you’ll find a teaching
assistant working late in a still-unwashed sweater, a lecturer slumped over a
pile of essays, an errant pen mark on her brow. There is a gap between the way
the professionalized university wants to present itself and the less glossy
realities faced by the people who teach within it.
What we
wear should not matter: Ideas, arguments, theories, and thought are the stuff
in which academics trade. But our institutions are riven by power, and teaching
and research are themselves underwritten by claims to authority and expertise.
No matter how much we know, we still feel the need to show that we know it to
solidify our status as bona fide intellectuals, deserving of deference and
respect. One of the ways we demonstrate our possession of knowledge is in what
we wear — an age-old tradition beginning with Plato in a himation, or cloak.
Only now we stroke manicured beards in thought, carry bulging book bags to
demonstrate commitment, and wield Moleskine notebooks when inspiration strikes.
But,
sometimes, embarrassingly, the assurance and authority we possess on the inside
is betrayed by the clothes we wear on the outside. My friend Anna, hurrying in
from the rain to teach her sophomore-year poetry tutorial, once jammed the
zipper on her fluorescent yellow puffer jacket in the rush to remove her coat
and commence class. "I tried to shimmy out of the thing," she
explained to me glumly afterward, "and then my head got stuck in the neck
hole." Apparently the students sat and watched in silent horror for the 20
minutes it took for security to arrive with a pair of scissors. "Read
stanzas 28-35," she instructed them, weakly, from the muffled interior of
the coat. Nobody did.
And who
hasn’t had the odd sartorial disaster? Who hasn’t casually brushed a sleeve
across a flame while reaching over the Bunsen burner, or had to Sellotape her
stockings to her legs when the adhesive wore off minutes before a lecture? If
you’ve never tumbled down the stairs with a cup of coffee in hand and a crisp
white shirt gleaming in its freshly washed glory, you’re more agile than I.
In such
moments of sartorial crisis, the best strategy is to adopt a nonchalant
attitude: Forget the wretched perfidy of outward appearance and immerse
yourself instead in the holy life of the mind. When your zipper fails, teach
Zola! But this decided indifference to matters of dress is itself an
intellectual attitude, a pretense of haughty detachment, as though the
indignity of material life and bodily form could never be of real concern to a
real thinker.
In 1991,
Valerie Steele, a fashion historian and now director of the museum at the
Fashion Institute of Technology, made this same point in a nicely arch essay
for Lingua Franca. She recounted how a Yale history professor, inquiring after
the topic of her dissertation, responded enthusiastically, evidently mishearing
her reply of "fashion" as "fascism." "Oh," he
replied, once corrected, apparently aghast, "and then, without another
word, he turned and walked away." In 2017 a dissertation on fashion is
unlikely to send a Yale professor scuttling from a seminar. Indeed, histories
of dress, costume, and textiles are topics deemed illuminating enough to
warrant monographs, conferences, and research centers — the whole scholarly kit
and caboodle.
It is a
mark of our broadened academic horizons that the modern study of material
culture thrives. This intellectual adventurousness is our profit on all the
Barthesian hijinx of the early ’80s and ’90s — that melee of "signs"
and "semes" once hurled so wildly that it seems astonishing that we
should have escaped from it uninjured. Happily, there are now many ways in
which scholars might valuably investigate fashion, variously finding in
textiles a pathway into the history of race and empire, reading dressed bodies
through the lens of feminism, assessing costume and performance as the site of
complex sexualities. And if you’re looking to try dress studies on for size,
you might rifle though Alison Matthews David’s excellent Fashion Victims
(Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2015) for the history of 19th-century industrialism,
Peter Stallybrass’s 1998 essay "Marx’s Coat" for commodity fetishism,
or Mark M. Anderson’s Kafka’s Clothes (Clarendon Press, 1992) for modernist
aesthetics.
Yet,
while fashion can be a deep and enlightening subject of study, there remains
within the profession a niggling suspicion about scholars who spare a thought
for matters of their own dress. To show that you care about your clothes can be
taken as a token of intellectual inferiority. That we might be faintly
interested in what we and others wear is too mortifying a folly to reveal, so
instead we exchange earnest opinions over the coffee machine, only espying by
side-eye the patch on the jacket, the brooch on the collar, the neat Cuban
heels. If we do deign to remark on a new scarf or admire a jaunty tie, we do so
hurriedly, exchanging pleasantries in passing, en route to the abstractions and
arguments that are, apparently, the real business of our lives. This seems an
especially absurd position at which to have arrived since, at times, ours can
be such a dandified profession. We are plumed peacocks at the lectern. We are
poseurs with PowerPoint.
In
retrospect, my own undergraduate days seemed unusually peppered with marvelous
old dons and brilliant young brains, all dressed with the most astonishing
nonchalance and an artfully careless savoir-faire. I recall, for instance, the
venerably three-piece-suited emeritus who would stride into the lecture hall
with black homburg firmly planted on head and attaché case swinging in hand, as
stiff-lipped as though food rationing had ended just yesterday; the radical
Renaissance feminist scholar and yoga aficionado, nose studded and blonde
cropped, whose lilac leather jacket would fly (like her thrown caution) in the
wind as she roared off on a motorcycle at the end of a supervision; the
serious-minded and untenured tutor who would arrive to teach Hamlet,
inadvertently dressed as, well, Hamlet, in full sables and weeds, complete with
mournful expression.
In
fiction and film, where clothes serve as a kind of shorthand for character,
academics rarely escape unscathed. When Kristen Wiig’s timid physics professor
abandons academic ambitions to become a "Ghostbuster" in the recent
reboot, she casts aside her habitually frumpy plaid skirts and pussy-bowed
shirts for overalls and "proton laser" backpack. But even an
ectoplasm-splattered suit won’t get you tenure at Columbia, the film reveals.
In
Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, Delphine Roux, Coleman Silk’s French feminist
nemesis, is mocked by cruel colleagues and derided as "so passé, such a
parody of Simone de Beauvoir" in her "vintage Chanel jacket with
tight jeans." But Roux’s expensive wardrobe is only a costume. She is a
bundle of carefully concealed status anxiety, cultural mistranslation and
academic isolation, all of which is expressed in her clothes. Roux favors
cashmere and leather, Roth informs us, as though it were code for her
particular continental brand of vanity and pretension.
Roth’s novel
is a rare exception with its imaginary academics whose surface appearance
conceals deeper waters. Michael Douglas’s ponderous professor of creative
writing in Wonder Boys (2000), is a model of academic despair, disguised in a
black turtleneck. A jaunty maroon scarf casually slung around the shoulders
just so gives him a dash of verve and flair, the horn-rimmed glasses sitting
low on his nose remind us he is an intellectual. Even the covertly rolled
joints and Katie Holmes’s demure-lipped, overfamiliar grad student seem part of
the act. It feels hokey as hell.
And yet
there is something familiar in the film’s depiction of academic languor and
stalled intellectual ambition, particularly in the scenes in which Douglas
takes to staring blankly at his cranky typewriter, lolling in his ex-wife’s
dusty-pink bathrobe. Haven’t we all been there? Maybe some of us are there,
right now, whiling away an unproductive midafternoon in crumpled nightwear,
cowering behind a squalid tower of coffee cups and a glaringly blank Microsoft
Word document.
Wearing
a black turtleneck, of course, condemns you to existential crisis, being, as it
is, so beloved of pained writers and French philosophers. Part of its allure is
pragmatic insofar as it circumnavigates the stuffiness of a shirt and tie,
whilst not quite degrading the wearer to the slovenly blasphemy of a T-shirt.
What we wear can signal our intellectual identifications, nodding to the
schools of thought to which we subscribe.
Think of
Foucault in a leather jacket and bottle-top glasses, Beauvoir with an elegant
chignon and silk scarf, Butler in loose-fitted pants and deep pockets for a
casually plunged hand, Cixous insouciant in an artfully draped Sonia Rykiel and
a turban for added panache. Derrida dressed, as someone once put it to me, with
the look of a "rakish ski instructor."
Even the
ubiquitous tweed jacket has its place. It is not always redolent of the
humorless humanities, of stuffy and stagnated spheres of scholarship. The great
irony of the tweed jacket is that it should have fallen, quite by accident,
back into fashion as part of the reclamation of heritage style in recent years.
These days, department-store blazers come with elbow patches attached — a worn
sleeve no longer the proud war wound of long stretches at library desks.
Even my
very own array of academic cardigans, uniformly perforated at the elbow, and
shirts, ink-stained at the breast pocket, are made (God forfend!) fashionable
in the ironic light of "normcore" — the modern hipster aesthetic
which so placidly appropriates the sensible and staid as the height of style.
"Where did you get them?" a student keenly inquired of my owlishly
oversized plastic glasses the other day. "1986," I replied.
Yet not
all of us can wear what we like. Behind our workplace wardrobes lies the nexus
of inequalities that structure the university. Dress bears upon our
relationships with students and staff. The female professor who looks younger
than her years knows this; she thinks hard about how to connote her age and
command the respect her learning deserves. So too does the recently graduated
teaching assistant who wants not to be mistaken for a student any longer, but
to be seen by colleagues as an equal in the competitive job market. "Dress
for the job you want," goes the mystifying mantra. The irony is that this
should mean so little in an industry marked by a paucity of any jobs at all.
What We
Wear in the Underfunded University. By
Shahidha Bari. The Chronicle of Higher Education , August 27, 2017
Dressed
: The Secret Life of Clothes. By Shahidha
Bari. Penguin, 2019.
Clothes
are so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, in many instances by their
wearer’s design. Yet few material objects so necessary to human existence are
as flippantly treated: consider the gravitas and column inches often given over
to food and shelter (i.e. "property"), which Abraham Maslow posits
are equally essential as clothing to humans in his heirarchy of needs. Perhaps
our concept of clothing has become too easily conflated with fashion, by its
very nature fleeting and impermanent.
Shahidha
Bari’s Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes seeks to redress that. "Lots of
people think that clothes are superficial or functional or not worthy of
intellectual inquiry," she says. "If that is the case, why is it that
they are everywhere, in literature, in film, in art, in music?"
It’s not
so much that the subjects of those artforms are wearing them, but rather the
attention that is given to such garments by artists: see the labourer’s
battered leathers in van Gogh’s "Shoes", or Zinedine Zidane’s
balletic footwear in "Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait", or the
mismatched shoes Robinson Crusoe happens upon. All three are analysed in Bari’s
book, which uncovers and knits together such allusions, with chapters split
into Dresses; Suits, Coats and Jackets; Shoes; Furs, Feathers and Skins; and
Pockets, Purses and Suitcases.
The
breadth of references is remarkable, and Bari says it owes much to her work as
an academic, cultural reviewer and BBC radio presenter, specialising in
literature, philosophy and visual culture. "I spend my life watching
films, visiting galleries and reading literature," she says, adding that
she "already had a backlog" of interesting references to clothing in
artforms before deciding to write the book some five or six years ago. "My
weird brain was attracted and distracted by those things," she laughs.
Dressed
is a meandering, enriching and sprawling read. Of its style, the author says
that "you have to get really good at code-switching when you are an
academic who works in culture", arguing that "philosophy in
particular is a really arid, ugly discipline in terms of its language".
Dressed is a far cry from that. "I worked really hard to make prose
poetic: often it rhymes or there’s a rhythm... I wanted it to feel sort of,
almost incantatory." Each chapter opens with a lucid, novelistic
first-person soliloquy introducing the type of clothing under scrutiny, then
delves into its genealogy and portrayal in popular (and less popular) culture,
with a fair dose of philosophy, too.
When
conducting research, Bari "couldn’t find the book that I wanted—that
philosophical-cultural account of clothes, the experience of wearing clothes...
clothes aren’t flippant, they are profound artefacts of our human experience.
So I wanted it to have serious philosophy; I didn’t want to compromise on the
ideas. But I wanted the experience to be beautiful—if you want someone to
understand a lived experience, you have to make them live it."
Bari
wanted the prose to be "evocative", and her literary influences are
fittingly broad. She names Elena Ferrante (Dressed muses on the significance of
Neapolitan quartet protagonist Lila’s shoemaking lineage); Roland Barthes
("he says really curious things; that the things that are part of our
everyday life can be really profound"); art critic T J Clark and novelist
Rachel Cusk ("I wanted their precision and sensitivity"); and James
Baldwin ("there’s warmth to his intelligence—you never doubt how clever he
is, and how kind"). She also notes that both writing and dressing have an
element of "exactitude", arguing: "When you write, however you
write, you are looking to capture that exact thing you are trying to describe.
Clothes are like that, sometimes. You are looking to articulate that exact thing
that you are, or the occasion you are going to. And you can hide in language,
and clothes are about hiding, too."
In the
book she writes that she is "haunted by clothes", which is not to say
she has a bulging wardrobe or a devout love of fashion ("fashion studies
was new to me," she claims), but rather, it speaks of her method of
apprehending the world. "Some of us have particular kinds of memory: some
people are musical and attach songs to things; my brother is a mathematical
genius, and sees the world as numbers... my memory is very visual. I often
attach colour and texture to people. I am slightly synaesthesic." Bari
says she would remember my (wholly unremarkable) get-up were we to meet again,
"because that is how my memory is organised—I’ll remember the things a
person wears, the colour and the feel of those things, the sound of a zip or a
button. Those are the things that my memory retains, weirdly."
That is
not to say that she is uninterested in clothing from an aesthetic or artistic
point of view. Designers Yohji Yamamoto, Alexander McQueen and Walter van
Beirendonck of the Antwerp Six are referenced, and Bari’s own experience of
fashioning clothes was drawn upon, too. She learned to sew from her Bangladeshi
mother—introduced in the author’s BBC Radio 4 documentary "My Mother’s
Sari" in 2016—who "always sewed when I was growing up. If you are a first-generation
immigrant, you aren’t going to find the clothes that you wore at home. She
would buy yards of fabric, and sew. If you move between cultures, as someone
like me, who is British Asian does, you have different registers of clothes. I
was always conscious of different dress codes, cultural dress codes," she
says, joking that her needlework skills were also developed out of necessity
because "I’m small—I’m really tiny. So nothing ever fits."
The book
chronicles thousands of years of clothed humans, yet Bari was a little
reluctant to forecast their future. Ecological and welfare concerns are
apparent throughout the book, notably in an analysis of an illustration of
Cinderella by John Tenniel. His drawing muses on the plight of Mary Ann
Walkley, a young seamstress worked to death after a near 27-hour shift; her
case was also cited by Marx in Capital. Bari writes: The ballgown that brings
life to Cinderella is the dress that brings death to Walkley... They are the
two inseparable strands of one thread. Little has changed: in 2013 an
eight-storey garment factory in Dhaka collapsed, killing 1,134 workers.
Yet Bari
believes it is not straightforwardly a consequence of Western greed, narcissism
or consumption. "The problem isn’t us buying—it’s overproduction as much
as overconsumption. We have to stop blaming ourselves, and we have to challenge
industry. I think that young women do buy a lot of clothes, that’s true, but
they do it because there is a hole or an emptiness in life that they are trying
to fill. I don’t blame them for that. I don’t blame them at all. I want to try
and work out what that emptiness is. I don’t blame them for our environmental
crisis—and we are totally in an environmental crisis. Fashion is one of the
most polluting industries in the world.
"In
a way, the whole project is driven by that. I didn’t want to write a polemical
book, but I want you to think—when you put on your coat, or button your
shirt—about what your clothes mean, who has made them." Bari says that to
affect change, "we have to change our relationship with clothes, to take
them seriously", because "if we care about our clothes, we might care
about the people who make them. That’s the spine of the book, in a way. That is
the secret life of clothes."
She has
a more optimistic take on the aesthetic side, though. One could think mass
production, low prices and ready availability of clothes, in addition to the
increasing reach of media espousing a certain appearance, fashion or body type,
may lead to a homogeneity of dress. Bari disagrees. "We complain about
hipsters looking the same, or fast fashion, but human beings have never looked
more different, precisely because they have so many different fabrics, colours,
styles and shapes available to them," she says.
"We
have this cross-cultural influence... it is miraculous and amazing to me, it’s
endlessly exciting and interesting, that we have never looked more different.
We’re lucky."
Shahidha
Bari | 'Fashion is one of the most polluting industries in the world'. By Danny Arter . The Bookseller , May 30, 2019.
Writer,
academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari discusses her book about clothing,
‘Dressed’.
Monocle,
June 23, 2019.
Mistrust
all enterprises that require new clothes,” says EM Forster in A Room With a
View, adapting a quote from Henry David Thoreau. What a spoilsport. Because
surely one of the best bits about starting a new job, getting a dog or even
taking up sky-diving is that it gives you permission to fashion yourself in a
slightly different way. With the acquisition of new and unusual kit comes the
chance to become someone fresher, sexier or, at the very least, someone who is
prepared to give yellow a go.
The
reason we are so desperate to buy or borrow new clothes, says the academic and
broadcaster Shahidha Bari in her clever, subtle book, is because they appear to
bestow on us a charm and intellect that we can’t quite muster for ourselves.
Yet the moment we acquire that new coat or those new trousers, we realise that
nothing much has changed at all. For no matter how fancy we look on the
surface, underneath we still come with metaphorical trailing threads and odd
socks. “Dressing is so hard,” Bari writes. “It is astonishing that we ever find
the courage to keep trying as we do every day.”
Although
her writing is critically informed – Foucault, Deleuze, Cixous and Irigaray all
rock up here to chat about schmutter – her tone is insistently personal,
intimate even. Between her main chapters she drops in lyrical accounts of her
own encounters with specific items of clothing. She tells us about mending a
dress for a college friend who has since died, or the first time she wore
spiked shoes as a schoolgirl and found herself running like the wind. Other
passages are determinedly oblique, as when she buys little girls’ dresses the
colour of buttercream yet makes no mention of who they are for. Her future
children, her past self? The withholding is deliberate since Bari wants us to
think not so much about what clothes say as how they make us feel. Take the suit.
The one that she has in mind is worn by Cary Grant in North by Northwest
(1959). According to a panel of fashion journalists and stylists convened by GQ
in 2006, this suit is “the best in film history and the most influential on
men’s style”. Designed by Grant’s Savile Row tailor, Kilgour, French and
Stanley, it is neither exactly blue nor grey, and combines a ventless jacket
with high-waisted, forward pleated trousers. It is a suit (or suits – during
the five month shoot Grant got through eight replicas, since hanging from Mount
Rushmore by your fingertips involves a certain wear and tear) that is
simultaneously authoritative and insouciant.
Although
the appeal of the suit is that it doesn’t look as if it’s trying too hard, Bari
is convinced that beneath that sheeny worsted surface it is doing important
work. She discusses Grant’s early years in Bristol at the beginning of the 20th
century where, as Archibald Leach, he was abandoned by his father who turns out
to have been a tailor’s cutter. Could the suit, a form of clothing with which
Grant is permanently associated, be both a defence against and a triumphant
reworking of early childhood trauma? “A suit rises to the occasion in these
circumstances,” Bari explains. “It is capable of dignified deception, precisely
because it seems, on the surface … [to keep] unruly feelings at bay.”
She is
good on dresses too. By rights, of course, they have no business being in any
modern woman’s wardrobe. Nearly a hundred years after it became acceptable for
“advanced” females to wear “divided skirts” on the tennis court, why would
anyone voluntarily shimmy themselves into a garment designed to cling to one’s
body while simultaneously restricting its movement (cycling in a dress today
still feels like a risky business)? Bari is particularly good on how a dress
looks while on a hanger – like a second skin waiting for flesh and blood to
make it live. It is this sense of the dress as an alternative self that makes
it so potent, far more charged, say, than a well-cut pair of trousers or a
merino jumper: “This dress – not a poem, not a painting but a dress – is
something, maybe even all things, that we are not.” Which is why it is the item
most likely to be languishing, unworn, at the back of the wardrobe, waiting for
the moment when we feel good enough – thin enough, feminine enough, just enough
enough – to put it on and step out as someone improved and approved.
Dresses
aren’t always about lack or reproach. In a particularly luscious section, Bari
shows us women having fun with frocks. In a 16th-century Dutch tapestry, now in
the V&A, the figures of the three female Fates are stitched in the most
gorgeous red, blue and gold thread. Each fold of their plush skirts seems to
promise extra supplies of dense and complex satisfaction. Nothing odd about
this you might think – global art is flush with gorgeously dressed girls
flaunting their access to fabric. But the point here is that Clotho, Lachesis
and Atropos are usually rendered as badly dressed old crones, responsible for
producing the threads that other, luckier, people wear. They are the original
“spinsters”, a jibe that has historically disclosed anxiety around unmarried
women and their economic and sexual self-sufficiency. Here, though, the three
Fates are in their best dresses and seem to be enjoying every moment of it. It
takes a while to notice that at their feet, quite unregarded, lies another
woman. Bari tells us that this drably clothed figure is Chastity, and that the
three gorgeously attired Fates appear to have trampled her into the ground.
In her
final chapter Bari includes a short section of the role of the pocket in the
psychology of getting dressed. Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux have written
a whole book on the subject. Their pockets, though, are not the modern kind,
sewn into the seams of ready-made clothes. Rather, they are the soft,
detachable pouches that women used to tie around their waists and hide under
their skirts, reaching for them through discreet openings in their petticoats
and dresses as required. What particularly interests Burman and Fennetaux is
the way in which women of all classes have historically used these tie-on
pockets as a supplementary body part to help them negotiate their way through a
world that was not built to suit them.
Crammed
into a woman’s pocket was everything she might need to keep her going for the
day, from a snack to a tract from the New Testament. It was also a way of
carrying precious cargo safely. Some of the strangest things the authors came
across that were stowed away in pockets include two live ducks, the afterbirth
of an illegitimate baby and a pocket microscope. Tradeswomen of all sorts, from
pedlars to prostitutes, were most likely to stuff theirs with bank notes, which
is why when Lucy Locket lost her pocket it was worth a surprised posterity
noting that “there was not a penny in it”.
Pockets
were precious. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, ordered hers to be made of
finest silk. Middle-class girls effortfully cross-stitched theirs, turning the
whole experience into a lesson in precision and patience. Working-class women,
meanwhile, patched and darned their pockets relentlessly with sturdy fabric
saved from somewhere else in the household’s material economy.
The
proximity of pockets to the pelvic area inevitably gave them a seamy side –
hence the extra layer of salacious meaning in the Lucy Locket nursery rhyme.
However, there were some pitiable consequences too. Burman and Fennetaux tell
the story of Annie Chapman, one of the women killed by Jack the Ripper in the
autumn of 1888. As a semi-itinerant worker, scrabbling a difficult living,
Chapman’s pocket was her most valuable possession. The fact that she was still
using a tie-on pocket, rather than a new fangled handbag, is testimony to the
fact that for vulnerable women living in precarious circumstances, this was
still the best way of holding on to your worldly goods.
In the
early hours of 8 September, Chapman’s mutilated body was found slumped in a
yard. Particularly chilling was the fact that her pocket had also been “torn
down the front and also at the side” by the murderer, who clearly saw it as a
proxy for the woman’s sexual parts. Out of this ritually disembowelled pocket
spilled Chapman’s best treasures: an envelope, pills, a small comb and a piece
of coarse muslin that she had been hoping to pawn or sell.
Dressed
by Shahidha Bari and The Pocket review – two books on the secret life of
clothes. By Kathryn Hughes. The Guardian , June 6, 2019.
You Are
What You Wear. Review by Lucy Moore. Literary Review, June 2019.
