Philosophical topics

[Analytic Philosopher]

Is a work of fashion really bound to the idea of body adornment, that is, why would it be constraint by such an ideal?

Could you maybe explain in a little more detail why you think the adornment of the body constitutes some sort of ideal? As far as I'm concerned, when I say that something is an adornment of the body, I just mean that it's something above and beyond the natural body. I take it that an American Apparel t-shirt and a CCP fencing jacket are both adornments of the body. Since you brought up painting, perhaps I can present an analogy. Let's say that an artist has a canvas, and she wants to turn that canvas into a painting. I take it that for the artist to do that, she'd have to, to force some terminology, adorn the canvas in some way, whether it be with paints, charcoals, or human feces.

We could maybe make here an analogy with the ideals that in the past characterized fine arts, where, for example, there was a point when a depicted object had to be represented as realistically as possible in order for the painting to be considered of a good quality. But this ideal changed, and radically so.

I'm not interested--at least at this point--in developing an account of which works of fashion are good and which works of fashion are bad. I take it that the evaluative project is going to be separate from the descriptive project. I'm very adamant that any plausible account of what makes a particular work a work of fashion is going to have to include both good and bad works of fashion. If it only does one, then it's not a good account.

Is body really prior to the garment, or is it there just to, so to say, hold the garment, independently of how "beautiful", "adoring", etc. this garment makes it?

Perhaps this is my fault, but I don't mean to use the word "adorn" in any normative sense. That is to say, I'm not trying to say that a work of fashion ought to make the body look better in some way. When I use the word "adorn," I simply mean something like "to be an ornament to," to borrow the OED's primary definition of the word "adorn." Ornaments are often beautiful, of course, but they need not be.

[Analytic Philosopher]

Patroklus, I'm only going to respond to a couple of the points in your latest post, mostly because I think we've reached a kind of end point. If I'm mistaken in that, though, feel free to reiterate anything that I may have missed.

Maybe it's too PC, but any reaction is legitimate.

If by reaction you mean something like personal emotional reaction, then that seems fairly uncontroversial. If by reaction, though, you mean interpretation, then I think you're going to run into problems. The example that I presented deals specifically with interpretations, not emotional reactions.

It is a musical form, it's just not very expressive or interesting to hear.

This seems right, I think. The musical scales are definitely a musical form, in the same sense that a canvas which has had paint accidentally spilled on it is a painterly form, but I would still say that neither the musical scales nor the accidental painting are works of music and painting. Thus, at least one of the reasons they're not very expressive or interesting, I think, is because they're not actual works of music and painting.

[Patroklus]

If by reaction you mean something like personal emotional reaction, then that seems fairly uncontroversial. If by reaction, though, you mean interpretation, then I think you're going to run into problems. The example that I presented deals specifically with interpretations, not emotional reactions.

Both. Any reaction to a piece is legitimate, even if it includes burning it. Any interpretation of a piece is probably legitimate so long as it's at least nominally relevant. If art is communication then it's okay for people to misunderstand each other and it doesn't necessarily mean that either party's interpretation is wrong even if the artist did not intend and never considered that angle while making his work.

This seems right, I think. The musical scales are definitely a musical form, in the same sense that a canvas which has had paint accidentally spilled on it is a painterly form, but I would still say that neither the musical scales nor the accidental painting are works of music and painting. Thus, at least one of the reasons they're not very expressive or interesting, I think, is because they're not actual works of music and painting.

No, musical scales are music and canvas with paint on it is a painting. They both meet the criteria - one is sound arranged with intent and one is, well, paint on a surface. That doesn't make them any good.

[tweeds]

Just to make sure that I'm understanding you correctly, you're putting forth an example of something, the very first Levi Jeans, that you think were not produced with the intention of being appreciated as an adornment of the body. Instead, they were intended to be appreciated as a high quality work tool. Is that correct? If it is, then I think my answer to the scenario posed would be that no, the very first Levi's were not a work of fashion. This seems okay to me. After all, not all pieces of clothing are works of fashion, right? Whatever the early hominids wore for protection from the elements might be considered clothing, but it certainly wouldn't be considered fashion. I think it's safe to say, however, that although the very first Levi's may not have been works of fashion, the Levi's of today do seem to be works of fashion.

Very briefly, to offer something else to the definitional question & the intentionalism being discussed between AP and Patroklus. Barthes offers a deceptively brief definition of the object of his study in The Fashion System. He refers to his object as

"...women's clothing as currently described by Fashion magazines..."

which, if correct, splits our pair of Levi's pants (~1870?) into real clothing, and described Fashion. Beyond this almost cursory definition, we see that by "described", he refers to the interposition of images and verbal description between the object and its user. In short, our object - this pair of indigo-dyed twill trousers - is mediated by its describing, creating a simulacrum - a pair of Levi's jeans - which the user consumes simultaneously. So the original intention (to put it crudely) of the object-creator could well have been to create a piece of non-Fashion, a piece of clothing. But the images and utterances deform, post hoc, the intention of the creator.

We might argue, therefore, that it is this deformation after the event that produces the Fashion-object. As such, even vintage workpants (say 1960s) are perfectly capable of continually being read by the writers and image-creators in the system of the present day as Fashion.

(And if we continue to look behind it, the fashion system is an economic system, assigning to creator and user the roles of producer and consumer, generating the simulacra of qualities necessary to preserve the consumption of Fashion-objects - a Lacanian auto-referencing Other.)

Anyway:

I think, as it is the case with most other definitions, the notion of fashion may be better represented as a set of notions that are mutually related by "family resemblances" (in Wittgensteinian sense, for those who are familiar with his work): neither of them can be applicable to all contexts, and hence no one, unique definition is going to be *the* definition of fashion. However, that doesn't mean there isn't a set of mutually related notions, which delineate the boundaries of this term.

The way forward for our definition, I suspect.

[Patroklus]

going back to what tweeds wrote, if we're going to examine women's fashion as described and purveyed today in popular magazines, we've to first look at the way clothing styles changed over time prior to the advent of fashion in the popular sense as it is known today. for academic purposes, the official birth date of fashion is 1858, and the founding of house worth, with doucet following shortly as the first french couturier. the technical difference there is that while the 'fashions' were dictated by court seamstresses, tailors and the like and on down through the rungs of society, from this point a person or persons established themselves as arbiters of taste and aesthetic to offer their vision both to society and those emulating it.

This has always reminded me of the difference between pre-Renaissance devotional craft and Renaissance and post-Renaissance art. I don't know if anyone has ever told me when nonWestern craft suddenly became art.

with poiret enjoying a rick owens-like status (his pochoir catalogues illustrated by paul iribe were politely returned by, amongst others, queen alexandra for being a bit too forward for her liking) ..there were sort of sz-like niche cats like mariano fortuny & maria gallenga..

Paul Poiret is an interesting study for a guy that was pretty successful in building one of the first sort of lifestyle brands. Some neat stuff too, in between a lot of dowdy old junk like that cascading bead dress.

the feeling was that social changes acted in part as the driving force behind the changing fashions. the androgyny and youthful abandon of the 20s being a direct result of the preceding war and flu epidemic.. it feels like the popular choice amongst women towards la garçonne aesthetic was a genuine desire for increasing social equality, and not something forced or so much reinforced by marketing campaigns and magazines, though they definitely were there already. they chose to abandon the trappings of the old and embrace something radically new. it looks sort of seismic and genuine, and i sometimes wonder if anything works that way anymore, or if it ever did..

People involved in the business aspect of fashion generally agree that trends are caused by movements in society and culture, and that marketing will not be successful at selling something that the public is not willing to consume in the first place. Marketing is only successful at selling people things they actually want compared to competing products. That does beg the question as to how designers like Ann D, et al, can be so successful and especially for so long in spite of allegedly operating 'outside' of trends.

fashion just seems massively at odds with itself. it must create over and over again with (in varying levels depending upon the designer) conviction and sincerity. yet these are understood to be ephemeral?

I like to think that's mostly endemic to what a few people have described as mainstream fashion. Plenty of fashion labels are content to make clothing for you to wear for a long time, usually with more of their newer offerings.

I'm not so sure we can make this clear disjunction between the capitalistic system and the people it has so quickly engendered ...

Huh?

[tweeds]

To go down a slightly different route (but related to the main discussion about fashion, as I'll explain), I want to return to Patroklus' very interesting probing about economics:

I'm pretty disappointed that no one took me up on this discussion. For what it's worth I'm actually a left-leaning Keynesian, because there's some things that are more important to me than optimal economic efficiency. At the same time I feel that there's some misconceptions about the market system here, and I'm worried that someone might know something juicy and contradictory that I hadn't considered before.

As far as the current economic crisis goes, it's not the result of a failure of any particular economic model except for fiat currency. It's the result of a very large group of people who had failed to understand basic arithmetic and was exacerbated by a very powerful group of people who saw an opportunity to orchestrate the grandest heist in history.

A particular sort of Marxist such as Zizek would argue, in return, that the danger lies in failing to acknowledge that the economic crisis was a symptom of underlying systemic failure, and attributing it (as you have) to a series of incidental events - careless homeowners, irresponsible banks, greedy bankers, etc. The same sort of explanation has been given for the recent rioting and looting in the UK: it's an race issue, it's a problem with the youths today, troublemakers, greed, materialism, etc.

This explanation ignores the possibility that greedy bankers and looters are themselves a product of our current system of Western ideology, the capitalist liberal democracy, say. The very act of marginalising, of attributing our present problems to some Other, is a further symptom of the automatic, unseen responses that are aimed at preserving the system. These explanations are not objective, technocratic answers; they are steeped in their present ideological situation.

Now I present this argument as Zizek's and not my own because I find myself personally wavering. On some days I find his attack on capitalism convincing, on other days I ask "What other alternative is there?" mostly on the basis of history (the triumph of capitalism after the Cold War, the end of history, so to speak, the rise of the 'socialist' democracy, capitalism with 'Asian values', etc).

But (and this is where we come back to fashion) my wavering is perhaps a sign of a deeper uncertainty: in my own practice as a musician, in my thinking/studying about law, art, architecture and the other design fields (applied art, if you like, including fashion), I'm still grappling with the problem of whether these fields can be apolitical. Can art be divested from its socio-political context? Is disaster-response industrial and product design, for example, a series of objective technical operations from first principles, or does it reflect a tacit acknowledgment of the market system's ability to distribute emergency aid?

Ai Weiwei, ever so bitterly nowadays, would claim that art is necessarily political.

[tweeds]

Yeah but I'd like to put it to him again, as cleanly as I can manage...

Also, his "Huh?" would be exactly the automatic response of the system, referred to in the second part of that paragraph.

[Patroklus]

A particular sort of Marxist such as Zizek would argue, in return, that the danger lies in failing to acknowledge that the economic crisis was a symptom of underlying systemic failure, and attributing it (as you have) to a series of incidental events - careless homeowners, irresponsible banks, greedy bankers, etc. The same sort of explanation has been given for the recent rioting and looting in the UK: it's an race issue, it's a problem with the youths today, troublemakers, greed, materialism, etc.

This explanation ignores the possibility that greedy bankers and looters are themselves a product of our current system of Western ideology, the capitalist liberal democracy, say. The very act of marginalising, of attributing our present problems to some Other, is a further symptom of the automatic, unseen responses that are aimed at preserving the system. These explanations are not objective, technocratic answers; they are steeped in their present ideological situation.

I don't think I'm marginalizing the issue. I also don't have the utmost confidence in the current system, but rather in capitalism itself. In short the problem in general with American economic policy since at least FDR is that we practice deficit spending but not Keynesian economics - we have a habit of enacting big spending programs when the economy goes sour but we do not close our deficits or even bother to balance the budget when the economy is in a boom cycle. So to the question of, "Is American economic policy broken?" I would answer yes.

There's also the big deal of corporatism versus genuine capitalism. I don't know where to start with that.

Now I present this argument as Zizek's and not my own because I find myself personally wavering. On some days I find his attack on capitalism convincing, on other days I ask "What other alternative is there?" mostly on the basis of history (the triumph of capitalism after the Cold War, the end of history, so to speak, the rise of the 'socialist' democracy, capitalism with 'Asian values', etc).

That's an important thing. The biggest problem with Communist economic theory is the requisite sprawling bureaucracy, which is not only generally inefficient economically but is very dangerous towards personal liberty. Communist nations have definitely shown a habit of investing capital unwisely based on the tendencies and tastes of the ruling class, but that's a given with a lot of very centralized systems and that's why decentralized market systems are generally a good idea.

Public institutions are sometimes better too - privatized emergency services and transportation infrastructure don't make a whole lot of sense.

[tweeds]

Quick behind-the-scenes question: what sorts of background are we each coming from? merz alluded to the fact that his is linguistics, (and that laika's is anthropology?) could I ask - of what sort? INteresting angles being thrown up in this thread by each of us.

For my part I am a law graduate, but hoping to make the jump into architecture school.

[darkbydesign]

^^Rilu, here's the thread you seek:

http://www.stylezeitgeist.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4356

BTW-fantastic, well thought-out discussion here. Thanks for the good read.

[Patroklus]

He got one thing right: pornography is really great. It's what all other art strives to be. Unpretentious, yet utterly fascinating and endlessly compelling.

I want all pornography, all day. I never want to not have it. It may be that I’m outside the accepted diagram on this, but I find that kind of thing profoundly educational, and it is educational at a rate inversely proportional to its carnal appeal. I hope that I live to see alien pornography; I’ve held forth on the topic multiple times, and the thought of conscious molecules swapping electrons generates so much lust I have to bite down on a knuckle to vent it.

[Patroklus]

Oh man, are you kidding? Clothing is the most erotic thing there is, even moreso than pornography. We all know about clothing fetishism and, I don't know if there's a term for this, but the added eroticism that can come with the human body in clothing and lingerie compared to plain nudity. Is there even anything more to say about this that hasn't been said already?

[Patroklus]

I don't know about that - I generally refer to designers by their whole name or last name. I've also noticed that it's sometimes a matter of writing style. I see a lot of people refer to Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis as Jimi and Miles.

[Pumpfish]

Rilu,

For the science, it comes from conventions around identifying research papers. For Bowie, it was to avoid confusing him with David Cassidy or David Jones.

With the designers, I blame the sales assistants. It creates a fake intimacy to tell you "it's by Boris. It comes with a bag of feathers. Boris would like you to wear it and roll around in the feathers."

A second thought is that designers usually use their own names, inviting intimacy.

Interesting the divide between people who called McQueen, Lee and those who read the label and called him Alexander. Unless you really knew him, then you had no rights to Lee.

[Analytic Philosopher]

Sorry for being out of the game for so long. I've been keeping up with the forum, but haven't really had the time or the motivation to sit down and write anything out. But let's get right back into it.

Any reaction to a piece is legitimate, even if it includes burning it. Any interpretation of a piece is probably legitimate so long as it's at least nominally relevant. If art is communication then it's okay for people to misunderstand each other and it doesn't necessarily mean that either party's interpretation is wrong even if the artist did not intend and never considered that angle while making his work.

On your first point, I agree--to an extent. You're certainly free to subjectively respond to a work in any way you want. However, I'm not sure I agree that an act like burning a work of art is a reaction of the same kind that I've been assuming so far, and I do think you're going to run into problems if you think burning works of art is perfectly legitimate. The desire to burn a work of art for one reason or another is perfectly legitimate. Actually doing so, not so much.

On your second point, I also agree--again, though, to an extent. I'm not an actual intentionalist when it comes to interpretation, so I don't think that the artist's intentions are the end of the discussion when it comes to the meanings of the art works. However, it seems wrong to me to say that any interpretation of a work is legitimate, depending on what you mean. If you mean that works of art can have different, equally legitimate subjective interpretations, then I think that's fairly uncontroversial. I can say that to me the Beatles's "Yellow Submarine" is a wonderful song about Kant's metaphysics, and I'd be right in that to me it is a wonderful song about Kant's metaphysics. I see no reason, however, to then move from that and say that my subjective interpretation of "Yellow Submarine" is in any way a legitimate interpretation of the work itself. Works of art, I take it, have meanings, but that doesn't mean that they can mean anything. Maybe this is what you had in mind when you said that interpretations have to be relevant in some sense, but if that's the case, then I think you ought to refrain from saying things like "any interpretation is legitimate," because the qualification is just too big to go unstated.

No, musical scales are music and canvas with paint on it is a painting. They both meet the criteria - one is sound arranged with intent and one is, well, paint on a surface. That doesn't make them any good.

I can maybe see the argument with regards to musical scales, but I constructed my example of the accidental painting with the explicit assumption that there was no intentionality involved. The paint just accidentally landed on the canvas. Even with the musical scales example, however, it's not going to be that cut and dry. I take it that when musicians play the musical scales, they play them with the intention of practicing or warming up for their performance, not with the intention of having them be heard as a work of music (I'm obviously ignoring the task of defining music here). As I write this, I realize that perhaps a musical example wasn't the best choice, as music is notoriously difficult. But I don't think that anything really rides on this particular example.

Tweeds, I think I remember you saying that you had a music background. Do you have any thoughts here?