Maarten Lambrecht

S/S

Seduction / Space The Mechanics of the Fashion Show Maarten Lambrechts AA_H&CT 2013-2014 Aesthetics and History

Alexander McQueen S/S 2001 RTW collection - VOSS

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eduction is the play of desire. Moreover, it is a play for continuously renewing desire. Where desire strives for some kind of finality (perhaps fatality?), it is seduction which controls this condition by keeping the desire on a strictly artificial plane, i.e. to prevent the search from finding. Seduction manages to provide no interpretation, no meaning, as a very carefully chosen tactic. Here, it is the game in itself, from which you can never win, that seduces the players, using it as its own pawns. It is the game, and how it is explicitly exposed, that makes apparent that any appearance, and therefore also any subject of desire, is an appearance which only exists within the conditions of the play of seduction.

To lift the veil, which means to present it as such, only maintains the seduction.

Because, ultimately, it is the great void, the nothingness, the complete realization of meaninglessness, that keeps all our desires moving. It is the desire for seduction; the one thing that can never be represented because it is by nature superficial, only dealing with surface and nothing behind it. Or, as Jean Baudrillard stated, meaning has never seduced anyone.

Who controls seduction then? We all do. To seduce is to let oneself being seduced.

By giving in to the great artificial play of seduction, we not only ensure ourselves of being part of the play, it makes us also recognize ourselves in the reflection of ourselves in the seductress. And even if this only underlines the fact that all of it is deception, including the play of seduction, it nevertheless prevents us of falling into mortal absorption, the alternative of becoming Narcissus, sliding from eros to thanatos. This underlines the vital importance of accepting. There seems to be no other way than to give in to the play of seduction. Therefore, realizing the deception is also giving in to the deception, and in this way we can hardly speak of real control. However, we can get deeper into the game, learn its extremes and limits, and start exploring the boundaries of the deception, which are not fixed but seduce us into an ongoing flow, deep into the abyss of the surface.

This leads to the point of the spectacle of the fashion show, and I will discuss one show in particular: Alexander McQueen’s VOSS in 2001. As any fashion show could be described as a stage for seduction, in this case the designer went further and turned the show in a masterful trap of desire. It starts with forcing the - 33 -

spectators to look in a giant mirror for two hours. We want to see, desire, but only look at ourselves in the reflecting glass surrounding the catwalk. After a long day of shows, the tired audience is not pleased with the image of its own reflection, it wants to see itself reflected in the illusion of the models, what is promised behind the looking-glass (as mentioned before, within the play of seduction, absorption equals slowly dying). However, during the incredibly long time of two hours the audience is gradually led into a virtual world and when finally the catwalk lights up, the image of the mirror is distorted, there’s relieve.

But the models are not glamorous this time. They are presented as hysterical women kept behind glass which is still mirroring from the inside. As a result, the audience is unsure of how they are supposed to relate to the model and its fetishized body. Where the fetish of the body originally posed an intriguing quality in the image of the living doll, a great resource for desire and an ultimate tool of seduction, placing life and death so close together, now the psychological aspect of this fetish is exposed. Arguably, increasing desire (we can not know the consciousness of the object, however the challenge is much more interesting when talking about the insane), but at the same time also increasing the uneasiness that goes with the uncanny experience of looking at one’s double in a distorted reflection. In addition, we see how some of the models, while on the catwalk, shed off the clothes they are dressed in. And then there is also throughout the show one massive closed box right in the middle of the spectacle. Impossible to look through, threatening and fearful by its very own enigmatic nature. It is only at the end of the show that the sides of this black box come crashing down and the audience gets to see what is inside. It is death, but embodied by a mutant life form artificially kept alive through air tubes (an image copied from a photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin). Just before this sight is revealed, before the sides of the box come crashing down, and when the butterflies come flying out, the audience is treated with a last glimpse of its own reflection, and hence we are reminded of the nothingness lying behind all images, even our own reflection.

While the models leave the catwalk, the lights dim, the show ends, the mutated embodiment of artificial life stays on the catwalk. This image stays, and although it is also just an image as all the other images produced by the show, it is supposed to stick since it questions the reality of the image itself. Here we see a critical

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depiction of the ambiguity of the ephemeral, fashioned image and its place in the ongoing flow of the fashion system. An image aware of its own place between life and death, just as seduction is aware of its own illusion and the fashion system of its own arbitrariness. McQueen therefore does not only challenges us, the audience, but also the fashion system which we are part of. We are challenged to look through (the glass being only another metaphor, another image, for the condition of transparency). It is in that challenge that we are seduced to see that the system is artifice. The deeper we look, the deeper we stare into the void. Only by distorting the mirror reflection and by opening the box, the flow of spectacle, i.e. the fashion show as model for the entire fashion system, is disrupted. In this sense, we could think of Guy Debord’s counter-use of spectacular images for the dÊtournement. The manipulation which happens from within, pushing the system to its extremes, hence creating an event by revealing its construction.

The act of accepting therefore is a radical move. There is something of awe, be it awful or awesome, about the power of the fashion system and the capitalist market in which it takes place. Giving oneself completely over to its ruthless mechanisms is therefore not simply being part of it, like we all are, but means going much further into exploring its extremes. It entails pushing the conditions of the system as far as possible so that when the individual and the fashion system are accepted as the artificial replacement for the subject and the universe, maybe the subjects disinterested pleasure could also be replaced by the individuals sensual pleasures. Or sensation could, at least, come extremely close to it? In any way, when accepting the conditions of the fashion system, when living in fashion space, which is ephemeral by nature, there seems to be no more fixed notion of taste and judgment. Furthermore, the system is not only continuously moving, but it also moves fast. So fast that the antinomy between the identity of the individual and the identity of the collective, which Georg Simmel posed in the center of the discourse on fashion, becomes in itself accepted as a driving force rather than an unsolvable problem. It could of course be argued that the urge for making oppositions productive, and furthermore consumable, is only market driven.

Nevertheless, in the fashion show (on a critical point in between production and consumption), we see that by accepting the conditions of the system, the sensation coming with the marketed image of the new could be a resource for some sort of innovation transcending its own origin, the market.

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Accepting fashion. As Val K. Warke stated, while discussing fashion and architecture, even Picasso, considered by many as one of the greatest modern artists, valued the recognition of fashion. The reason being that it allows the artist to focus on the nature of art, instead of worrying about why some subject or technique would be better than another. So the excess, that is not just the debris of the fashion system but rather its most important feature, must be accepted in order to have a sort of overview on this condition. It may be a confusing condition for the consumers who are deliberately deceived into consuming the same product, but each time with a different image. But at the same time it puts the hysteria of the accumulating and temporal signifieds outside the self. In doing so, it is possible for any author to use any form of fashion, also outside the fashion of clothing, to have an idea of control of his own creative mind. And again, it is only by being inside the system that it becomes possible to recognize and then also to manipulate; transgressions from within which are precise tactics for change and, ultimately, a critical exchange on the conditions of the system itself.

This is most apparent in the image of the avant-garde that is presented in the fashion show. Through the presentation of haute couture we get a simulation, which is heavily marketed, of the avant-garde, as an image of the new. (Or via ready-to-wear collections, which by blurring the lines between high and low fashion, facilitate the rapid expansion of the market.) However, by playing with our desire for the new and turning it into its most superficial form, the fashion show can be seen as not only a pure product of the market but also as an exponent of the ongoing process of modernity. The desire for the new and the belief in the avant-garde (which Greenberg already in 1939 called the imitation of imitating) are in the fashion system carelessly exposed as artifice, and this allows the system to go faster and faster, but could also allow us to kill it by over-exposing its own construction. Not that it seems possible for fashion to ever really die, seeing that death actually is its ultimate trump. The image of the avant-garde therefore, as embodied by e.g. haute couture, has not its function in serving that very small number of ultra-rich women. Its function lies in being devoured by the audience, through the media apparatus (Barthes’ Système de la Mode), to seduce us all in consuming the image. And from that moment, when it has landed in the retail store and ignites the consumer spectacle, when it has established itself as style; fashion itself has died.

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Accepting the death of fashion. The sooner fashion dies, the sooner it can be born again. This is so vital for the self-sustaining and ongoing flow of the fashion system that one could argue that the death of fashion is actually more important than fashion itself. Furthermore, it is death that is the ultimate seductress. Our fear for of death, the void, the absolute nothingness, is what draws us to the image. It seems that we actually want to be absorbed by the illusion of the mirror, instead of moving through while being aware of the reflection. As a result, the fashion shows cleverly provides us images of the new in a steady (once natural) rhythm of the seasons, ready to be absorbed by mass consumption. And in this absorption we already long for the new image of the new. This is what Mark Taylor coined as planned obsolescence, meaning that the fashion system controls its own life as well as its own death. In this sense, the fashion show could be seen as the main ritual of our time, a form of obligatory excess which, as Warke points out, is at the end always linked to death. To celebrate the now means also to be painfully aware of the infinite. But in the ephemerality of the fashion system both seem to be unified in an infinite process of ephemeral moments; bringing the now and the infinite extremely close together in the virtual model of fashion. And in how far has life itself not become a virtual model? Should we really hold on to an original world-view? Or is it the ephemeral system of the passing and passing away that we, as secret necrophiles, have grown to love?

As we know that the nature of fashion space is ephemeral, we should also accept urgency as a condition of that ephemerality. Because the condition of urgency is the force behind the constant renewal. In such manner that in its urgency fashion can easily evade obstructing critique, questioning if the fashion system really is the system most fit for our times, since it simply moves too fast to think about its own meaning or origin. Therefore, we can not really make a true judgment within the system because there lies nothing behind the system or its product, the image.

At the same time, this is how fashion can portray its supreme confidence, which always seems a matter of appearance and, I would argue, only seductive because there is no possible reason to ever be truly confident. So, we don’t have time to question the system or its confidence, just as we don’t ask ourselves thus accept, in general, whatever the reason is behind the arbitrary variations of clothing always coming from the same basic patterns. In short, it is only the image of the new and its function in the continuously expanding flow of renewal which has significance.

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As we see that in fashion it is not per se the product but the image of that product which is produced, distributed and consumed, we should also see how within the fashion system the focus lies upon and only upon the surface. Therefore, we should accept the condition of great superficiality. This entails that the sensations which arise from this focus are completely meaningless, transmitted directly from the surface to the body in such a way that superficiality, in its purest superficial form, might even supersede any linguistic meaning or social conventions. And since Gilles Deleuze stated that to experience the sensation is to become the sensation, we can now link sensation as an affect; a concentration of the senses towards the ‘deep surface’, within the play of seduction (not to forget that the original desire which is to be affected/seduced, by the image, is actually very real). Here it becomes clear that it is not only literally the construction of the fashion show which is defined by surfaces (and its manipulations: effects), closing it from the outside, providing the catwalk, and most importantly providing the screen from where the models appear and disappear. What we see now is that also the body in fashion space is ultimately reduced to its superficial appearance trough which it affects the other bodies, the audience. This also shows why it is so important to hide the skin of the model with maquillage, seeing that it is only the pure, artificial, perfect surface of the clothing that should transmit the sensation. (When Andy Warhol, perhaps the greatest master of superficiality, was asked to name one problem in life, his answer was, as usual, very concise: “skin”.)

The question of the model brings us back to the seductiveness of death in fashion. With skin being replaced by dress and ultimately the body by its own, commoditized, version as an object, we come to a fifth commandment which is that of accepting the fetish. In the figure of the model we can historically trace the roots of the object-body seeing that the concept of the mannequin, as it was introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century, was nothing more than that of a living doll for fitting clothes on. In addition, an interesting point is being made in Caroline Evans’s essay on the model, where she describes how in this move, paradoxically, the body became even more objectified, in that the actual fitting dolls were specifically customized to the bodies of different clients. However, we can trace these roots even further back. It seems that the image of the woman historically, perhaps biologically, has consistently been used as an object of desire, and not the least by women themselves. The seductress is therefore dominant in

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the play of seduction, understanding the technique of the self, and understanding the fundamental rule that underlies the whole play of seduction, as indicated by Joan Entwistle, namely that we are and have a body. This knowledge is cleverly applied in the display of the models during the modern fashion show, an invention that according to Nancy Troy came from New York and, not surprisingly, from the mind of a woman, who went by the name of Lady Duff Gordon. It is in this form of the show that we see how the image of the moving body is deliberately used to seduce, by explicitly displaying the ambiguity of the models body as an objectbody.

This ambiguity plays with the original erotic desire of the body, but then makes it into a perversion by sustaining that desire infinitely since the body as image can never really be touched. What we see is only the image, therefore an object, which welcomes the gaze of the spectator but which at the same time can only exist in the virtual model of the show. As already stated, the image is ephemeral , it slips away, and the model as image emphasizes this with the continual appearance and disappearance from behind the screen, from the unknown space behind the surface, as an emblem for the complete meaninglessness from which the image arises. The audience, from the other side of the spectacle, focuses with eyes full of desire purely on the image so that dress and body can become one in the image, making the idea of the body completely superficial and therefore also much more interchangeable or reproducible. As a result, the body of the model, doubled in its repeated appearance and disappearance, appears merely as the embodiment of our desire. Any time any of the models appears (they of course look all alike) there is, therefore, a sense of relief amongst the audience because it shows that the system is still working, the ongoing flow of fashion is still going. We, as part of the fashion system, are rest assured by these continual moments of renewal, as it is the reason to sustain our desire.

In the case of the fashion show, it seems moreover that the model only moves through space, as we can see, but not really through time. Because what we don’t see is a living body changing, we don’t see a metamorphosis, but rather the repetition of the double, a repetition of representation, a continuous row of frozen reflections. And this repetition of frozen moments seems to go on forever, simultaneously with the continuous expansion of the fashion system (after all,

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life becomes an endless movie). Here, we see again the ambiguity of the fashioned body, in between the animate and inanimate, and how this comes together in the ephemeral image which lies at the heart of the fashion system. Furthermore, in an ongoing system there seems to be no real sense of time, which allows the fashion system to construct its own dead at its own convenience; even death now has been reduced to an image produced in order to increase consumption. Living within the fashion system therefore reverses our notion of fetishism. The desire of the living body for the continuous consumption of the new is fully directed towards the ephemeral image of the object-body which is the only resource in the play of seduction that can sustain this desire. Considering the tyranny of the fashion system, we could now ask ourselves if the fetish is still the ‘model perversion’ as it was described by Michel Foucault.

Following Foucault’s idea that sexuality is the master key to understanding society, we should now question this notion of sexuality within our society and how it relates to the fashion system. A first link could be made between the dominance of capitalism and the growing exposure of eroticism. Seeing that with the rise of industrial capitalism (and simultaneously the fashion system) also the sex market expanded, which allowed people to explore more freely their different and more extreme sexual desires. In this sense we could wonder if Marx’s commodity fetishism should also be understood by its psychological definition, namely that it is a pathological condition which is caused by restrictive sexual upbringing. When the fetishistic desire for the object is caused by the socio-economical construction of society, then can we really still call it a pathological perversion? Rather than symptomatic, I would argue that fetishism has become emblematic for society.

Furthermore, if the space of society is defined by the way we cohabitate, why then could this not be a new way of interacting, from object-body to object-body.

A shift that can already be noticed when looking at the front row of the fashion show where the audience seems to feel the need to respond to the seduction of the model by dressing up so that they appear as a similarly objectified, fashioned body. The fashion system has of course, in its turn, already reacted; following Rick Owens AW/14 collection, the trend forecasting collective K-Hole coined the term ‘normcore’, blending the normal and the hardcore into stylized blandness, as described by Isabella Burley on up-to date hipster website dazeddigital.com.

Will the normopath become the new perversion? Or does this just show that we can never win? In either case, everyone will become a victim of fashion sooner or later.

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We should therefore also accept the constant state of excess. As Mark Taylor points out in his text on De-Signing, the market creates fashion, which in turn, creates the market. Knowing that this market is expansive, by its capitalist nature, it seems inevitable to become absorbed by fashion, to become absorbed by the reflection of life. Because that is what excess has become, a metaphor for live, just as inevitably happening to us all, and just as inevitably leading to death. And it is exactly this state of excess which is celebrated in the fashion show through providing even more excess, time and time again, regenerating a projected image of life. If Debord’s notion of the spectacle is defined as social relationships mediated by images, then we could see the fashion show as a crucial event which constantly provides new images in order to sustain the spectacle. In this position of distribution, in between production and consumption, Michael Sheringham argues, while discussing Baudrillard, that the fashion show provides endlessly commutable and permutable fashion signs which not only apply in the sphere of the signes lÊgers such as clothing, but also in the sphere of the signes lourds such as politics, economy, culture and sexuality. This becomes apparent from the moment the fashion show ends. From this moment, the new image starts a global mass production of that image, which then is transmitted straight into the shop, and via the shop into daily life where it gets absorbed and eventually dies, but also somehow will give rebirth to fashion.

So it seems that, finally, we also have to accept the radicality of the everyday.

Not in that the everyday exist completely outside of the exclusive show, as it would seem through its mediatized iconic image, but rather in that the everyday looks more and more like the show, having nevertheless one major trump in its unpredictability. It seems that with every show, the fashion system invades, little by little, the everyday; the image gains more and more control, the artifice becomes more and more real. However, because of the fashion systems dictation of continual desire for the new new, differentiating from the overabundance of established middle-class life styles, there also seems to be a space necessary within the fashion system for invention which sheds conformity. Somewhere deep down the reality of cosmopolitan life, a body finds a new way to interact with the latest, fashioned embodiment. And even though this kind of anti-fashion is actually the most fashionable reaction, it is this act, coming from completely within the system, which is the most radical practice, and which is crucial for the continuity of fashion.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY - Barthes, R. (1983) Fashion System University of California Press - Baudrillard, J. (1990) Seduction St. Martin’s Press

- Burley, I. (2014) Say hello to ‘avant-normcore’ on dazeddigital.com (02 March 2013)

- Entwistle, J. (2000) The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory Polity Press

- Evans, C. (2011) The Ontology of the Fashion Model In: AA Files, vol. 63, pp. 5669

- Debord, G. (1994) Society of the Spectacle Zone Books - Foucault, M. (1986) History of Sexuality Penguin

- Greenberg, C. (1993) Avant-Garde and Kitsch In: Greenberg, C. (1993) Clement Greenberg: the collected essays and criticism University of Chicago Press pp. 5-22

- Sheringham, M. (2000) Fashion, Theory and the Everyday: Barthes, Baudrillard, Lipovetsy, Maffesoli In: Dalhousie French Studies, vol. 53, pp. 144-154

- Simmel, G. (1957) Fashion In: American Journal of Sociology, vol. 62, pp. 541558

- Stivale, C.J., ed, (2005) Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts Acumen

- Taylor, M. C. (1997) De-Signing In: Taylor, M. C. (1997) Hiding University of Chicago Press pp. 186-217

- Troy, N. J. (2001) The Theatre of Fashion: staging haute couture in early 20thcentury France In: Theatre Journal, vol. 53, pp. 1-32

- Warke, V. K. (1994) “In” Architecture: observing the meanisms of fashion In:

Fausch, D., ed., Architecture: In Fashion Princeton Architectural Press pp. 125141

Images:

- McQueen, A. (2001) VOSS on youtube.com/watch?v=vtYku0VzNBY (01 April 2012)