Te Movement of the Fashioned Self:

Richard Hamiltons Fashion-Plate

Corey Ratch
Richard Hamiltons Fashion-Plate (19691970) appears to the viewer, in a sense, as an
ideal beauty.
1
However, this form is constructed of fragmented parts. Paradoxically, it is
both whole and fragmented. It is this dual naturethe recognizable form of the human
gure as well as its fragmentationthat informs my analysis here. Hamilton takes
discrete parts from fashion imagery at large to create one image. !e image is
fundamentally di"usive in its half-tone composition and its construction as collage, but
when viewing it we cannot help but see a whole. !is tendency reects Jacques Lacans
suggestion that human perceptual experience is characterized by the coalescence of wholes
abstracted from otherwise fragmentary reality. !is coalescence could be in the form of
an image of the body or, more broadly, the conceptualization of the self or anything
around us. Lacans theory of the mirror stage sees the immobile, uncoordinated body of
the infant given movement in the world. With the formation of the ego, the body
proceeds from fragmentation to continuity. !is operation places the subjects
understanding of itself and the world into temporal space, that is, into movement and
change over time.
!is paper will argue that the speed of change appears to us to increase as the
proliferation of images in consumer society increases. I will detail how, much in the same
way Jean-Louis Baudry understands the apparatus of lm, fashion media images that help
to make up this proliferation move through our perceptual experience so rapidly as to
create a totalizing view of the form of the fashion industry. !is view gives us a
paradoxical understanding of the institution of fashion that, like Hamiltons Fashion-
Plate, appears to o"er coherent form while being fundamentally broken apart. I would
like to suggest that, just as Lacan critiques the ctional construction of the coherent self,
we may consider that the idea of a coherent institution of fashion is as well a false whole.
In his short essay from 1961, For the Finest Art tryPOP, a manifesto of sorts
for the newly emerging Pop movement, Hamilton outlines the current role of ne art
UBC Undergraduate Journal of Art History Issue 3 | 2012
1 !e licensing costs for this image were prohibitive. It can be viewed at http://www.tate.org.uk/art/
artworks/hamilton-fashion-plate-p07937.
within a society in ux.
2
Hamilton sees a change occurring in twentieth-century culture
whereby ne art has lost its position of importance as principal mythmaker to the
e"ects of popular culture.
3
Given this observation, Hamilton made the expression of
popular culture in ne art terms
4
his primary interest and it is in this context that he
created many of his works. Fashion-Plate is but one example of the incorporation of mass
media images into the realm of ne art. Hamilton does not look to destroy ne art, but to
save it from irrelevance next to the massive allure of popular culture. As such, he proposes
a strategy of appropriation, a levelling procedure where the worlds of ne art and mass
culture, high and low, are mixed. After all, he contends, the artist in twentieth century
urban life is inevitably a consumer of mass culture and potentially a contributor to it.
5

Hamilton embraces the glamorous aesthetics of popular culture, though he is cognizant of
its role, like ne art before it, as a maker of myth. Pop cultures ability to express the
classic themes of artistic vision once expressed in ne art will take on particular
importance later when we look at Baudrys critique of classic art.
6

Hamilton details how the forms of popular culture have superseded those of ne
art and implores the artist to plunder the popular arts to recover the imagery which is his
rightful inheritance.
7
In this new landscape, he tells us that it is the Playboy Playmate of
the month pull-out pin-up which provides us with the closest contemporary equivalent of
the odalisque in painting. Automobile body stylists have absorbed the symbolism of the
space age more successfully than any artist. Social comment is left to TV and comic strip.
Epic has become synonymous with a certain kind of lm and the heroic archetype is now
buried deep in movie lore.
8
In the spirit of Hamiltons contention, it could be said that the world of fashion
and fashion photography provides images of beauty unmatched by ne art. Like many
forms of popular culture, its visuality marks itself with a precise cultural date-stamp
while simultaneously constantly moving forward.
9
It is both a vision of ourselves in time
and it moves ahead of us, showing us the way. It is mythmaker, presenting an ideal of
beautya fabulous world of aesthetic perfection to aspire to, to set our identities against.
To fashion something is to make something, to give it form. Fashion plays a large part
in the formation of our personal identities. Clothing, accessories, make-up, and the like
become part of the signifying fabric of identity, inscribed on bodies, acting, as Lacan
suggests, as an armour that delimits and polices the self.
10
To be fashionable is to be
current. Fashion moves at a speed unmatched by art. It is about what is hot, what is now,
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2
2 Richard Hamilton, For the Finest Art TryPOP, in Collected Words: 19531982, (New York:
!ames and Hudson, 1983), 43.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Jacques Lacan, !e Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic
Experience, in crits (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 78.
and what is tomorrow, evoking temporally expressed notions of change and movement.
As a capitalist endeavour, it is about the perpetual movement of product. !ings are new
and then they degrade or lose their lustre (both literally and in our esteem) as they move
through time. !ey become old, are replaced by new products, and are disposed of. !e
world of fashion moves. Fashion media and advertising are the main means by which
fashion rst enters into our vision and it must move at the speed of product turnover, if
not faster (given that not everyone updates to new products at the same rate as new
products are unveiled).
!e obsolescence of style, of rapid change, was a dening feature of 1960s
culture.
11
In On !e Move: Fashion Photography and the Single Girl in the 1960s,
feminist cultural critic Hilary Radner gives an account of the role of fashion and fashion
photography in the formation of identities in the 1960s. She takes the ideal of the Single
Girl as one such identity, an identity she says came to represent movement.
12
!e 60s
Single Girl was photographed on the move, no longer constrained to the home. Radner
says that the underwear and home appliances highlighted in the 1950s were supplanted
by products that promoted a body that was the result of self-control and that was
ultimately concerned with its self rather than others.
13
During the 1960s, the female
subjects of fashion photography began to be cast in active as opposed to the passive roles
traditionally assigned to them in art.
14
As Hamilton has said, the images of fashion as
pop culture phenomena outstrip art. !rough this photography and the subsequent
consumption of the fashion it presents, the consumer is interpellated into the identity on
o"er. !e consumer of Single Girl is propulsed from a passive, immobile state into
active movement, given independence and agency through fashion. An ideal, an identity, a
sense of self is formed. However, just as Lacan theorizes subjectivity as only an illusion of
autonomy
15
(suggesting instead that subjectivity relies on a misrecognition of the other
as the self and is thus socially contingent), identities such as the on-the-move Single
Girl are socially determined and prescribed. Moreover, it is an ideal that, like all ideals,
belies its own instability and irreducible deferral.
!e schema I am outlining can be understood through Lacans theorization of the I
function. Prior to an infants ability to walk, or even stand, the mirror stage occurs. In this
moment, the child still trapped in his motor impotence and anatomical
incompleteness, that is, still in a state of fragmentation and physical uncoordination,
xes upon an image of the total form of his body and assumes the image for himself.
16

!is misrecognition of the other as the self ideologically interpellates the individual
into subjecthood in the form of an externally situated gestalt. In this dialectic of
Corey Ratch
3
11 Nigel Whiteley, Toward a !row-Away Culture. Consumerism, Style Obsolescence and Cultural
!eory in the 1950s and 1960s, Oxford Art Journal 10, no. 2 (1987): 3.
12 Hilary Radner, On !e Move: Fashion Photography and the Single Girl in the 1960s, in Fashion
Cultures: Teories, Explorations and Analysis (London: Routledge, 2000), 128.
13 Ibid., 130.
14 Ibid.
15 Lacan, 80.
16 Ibid., 76.
identication with the other,
17
the child bears witness to its own potentiality as complete
and active bodily form. !e imago or image helps objectify the I (the prior, fragmentary,
and immobile body) into coherent form as the child formulates an essentialized view of
itself. Lacan calls this objectied I the ideal-I or what is more commonly referred to as
the ego.
18
!e I, through transformation from fragmented to whole, is given
coordination, control, and movement. It is the Ithe material bodythat moves through
the world, although as a kind of automaton under the will of the ego.
19
As well, it is the I
that operates in the linear landscape of time, having been subjected to a temporal
dialectic that decisively projects the individuals formation into history.
20
Lacan explains
the distinction between the ideal-I and the I. !e ideal-I situates the agency known as
the ego, prior to its social determination, in a ctional direction that will forever remain
irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptomatically approach
the subjects becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical synthesis by which he
must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality.
21
!e I must contend not only with its own fundamental state of fragmentation but
as well its own measurement against the ideal established in the form of the ego, itself
irreducible. !e ideal-I is a fully abstracted formulation of the self, utterly unattainable by
the functioning I. !e form of the self is frozen in the mind of the subject (seemingly
attainable), in opposition to the turbulent movements with which the subject feels he
animates it.
22
!e ideal-I remains irreducible. Although the subject feels they may be
making progress in this regard, the ideal eludes them, forever out of reach in fully
coherent form. !is paradoxically incomplete, unstable, and mutable ideal is a kind of
animated still image and is similar to Radners view of style as presented by the fashion
industry: both immutable (an ideal) and the result of the purchase and use of goods that
are by their nature evanescent, ever-changing.
23
!is view of fashion-identity as yet another illusionary gestalt shows how the I
function can be extended from an understanding of ourselves to an understanding of
objects in the world at large. In summation, fashion and our relation to it can be
understood by taking into consideration six forms:

the ideal of the fashion industry that we perceive as dictating style from on high

the ever-changing nature of the fashion industry that we try to meet or keep up
with

the non-temporal, di"usive fashion industry that, in reality, presents no such

ideal

the ideal we have of ourselves, expressed in the ego

the form of ourselves that we use to move and operate through time

the non-temporal, di"usive nature of objective reality

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17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.,78.
21 Ibid., 76.
22 Ibid.
23 Radner, 141.
In total, the subject moves through time, chasing the ideal it believes it is being fed
by the fashion industry in relation to its own ideal self. !is is the will to achieve the
perfect look, the perfect style that will resolve the discordance Lacan outlines, but is never
achieved or even achievable, given that the ideal it is based upon was, from the outset, a
misrecognition. !e chasing of this ideal is a constant, rapid movement to nowhere.
I want to make clear: our perception is characterized by a predisposition to the
seeing of wholes. Even our understanding of a di"usive reality, as well as Lacans theory of
the mirror stage itself, are forms of sorts and may provide a sense of philosophical
mastery. My view of fashion presented here is, in its way, an illusionary gestalt. I am as
well subject to the operational necessity of understanding forms in space and time. It is in
the establishment of these forms that we come into relation with the world around us.
!ere is a necessity in this. In his essay Ideological E"ects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus, Jean-Louis Baudry tells us that this is what makes objects in the world, as
well as works of art, readable, that is, subject to language and/or thought.
24

In the case of Hamiltons Fashion-Plate, the gestalt e"ect is undeniable. Although it
is composed of di"erent women from di"erent pictures from di"erent perspectives, as
well as negative space between all of these elements, our mind accounts for the
incongruity, the di"erence, to make a whole form. Given the spatial orientations,
Hamiltons addition (with over-the-counter cosmetics) of a nostril and right eye, and our
ability to identify each of the parts as necessary in the formation of the human head, we
ll in the gaps and recognize something of a whole human form. In 1971, Hamilton said
that he [has] never made a painting which does not show an intense awareness of the
human gure.
25
He continues:
assumptions about the human gure were fundamental to the location of elements
within the painting and the paintings relationship to the viewer was prescribed. !at
is to say, one justication for the picture was its value as a contribution to the total
perspective of the spectator. . . . Later pictures of mine have absorbed into this
external concern a recognition of the potency that representation of the human
gure adds to this dialogue between image and witness. A fellow creature in the
viewers environment, either articial (a semblance) or real, must be the strongest,
most emotive, factor in it; he will command attention for no other reason than his
gurative identication with the ego. . . . It, another self, real or semblance, revealed
or implied, will always be a major factor in my art.
26


Hamiltons recognition of Lacanian theory as it relates to his work is evident. In
Fashion-Plate he has given us a gure that we immediately identify and connect with as
human. In that sense, it is as if we are looking into a mirror.
Corey Ratch
5
24 Jean-Louis Baudry, Ideological E"ects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus, Film Quarterly 28,
no. 2 (1974): 41.
25 Richard Hamilton, Statement, in Collected Words (New York: !ames and Hudson, 1983), 269.
26 Ibid.
Hamiltons awareness of the duality of crafting an illusion of wholeness out of
fragmentation is expressed in Fashion-Plate in multiple ways. As detailed, the concept of
assemblage of discrete and identiable parts
27
has been realized as photos from various
sources (among them, Harpers Bazaar, Vogue, and Queen magazines) have been brought
together in photomontage. In this, the very illusion o"ered by the technology of the
printed half-tone photograph and its distribution of dots is analogous to the distribution
of the irreducible fabric of material reality.
28
As well, Hamiltons employment of various
mediums (photolithograph, cut-out photo pieces, painterly cosmetic touches) into the
larger collage of Fashion-Plate highlights his predilection for diversity of media [in]
establish[ing] itself as an oddly unifying factor.
29
He argues that the making of a new
unity of unlikely parts from di"erent sources is the crucial idea behind collage, a key
feature of twentieth century art in almost any medium.
30
Lastly, Fashion-Plates totality as
screenprint blurs the lines between these mediums. Hamilton says, as time goes by I
become increasingly aware of the irrelevance of making a distinction between one
medium and another, or one process and another, or even one style and another.
31
As if
to strengthen the point, the nal print of Fashion-Plate was put through the press three
times to soften the mechanical half-tone dot, enhancing the illusionary e"ect.
32
Fashion-
Plate, in the tradition of much mimetic art, can be seen as a complete scene, perhaps even
a narrative. From its disparate parts, Hamilton gives us a scene of a human fashion model
posing for the camera. Characteristic of Hamiltons art, we see a levelling of ne art
technique and mass culture imagery in the making of myth.
!e ordered, coherent readability of Fashion-Plate places it within the tradition of
Western art going back to the Italian Renaissance, which Baudry references in his essay.
!is readability is based on the principal of a xed point by reference to which the
visualized objects are organized . . . specif[ying] in return the position of the subject, the
very spot it must necessarily occupy.
33
Again we see Lacans notion of the self existing in
an exteriority, contingent upon the viewed. !is prescribed viewpoint is the location of a
self around which a hallucinatory reality, the space of an ideal vision is formed.
34
In
other words, a fully delimited, ideal self with a view prescribed to its viewing that appears
orderly. Baudry says that Western easel painting, presenting as it does a motionless and
continuous whole, elaborates a total vision which corresponds to the idealist conception of
the fullness and homogeneity of being.
35
Further, he argues that the monocular vision of
the camera assists in giving us this totalizing view. Baudry is principally concerned with
lm camera and its ability to transform successive, discrete images . . . into continuity,
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27 Richard Hamilton, Printmaking, in Collected Words (New York: !ames and Hudson, 1983), 86.
28 See p. 89 of Collected Words for Hamiltons own discussion of this printmaking technique.
29 Hamilton, Printmaking, 84.
30 Ibid., 8586.
31 Ibid., 84.
32 Ibid., 92.
33 Baudry, 41.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 42.
movement, meaning.
36
In this presentation, the subject is given a hallucinatory feeling of
mastery over their surroundings through vision. However, in keeping with the fact that
Lacan sees the subject placed into temporality in the formation of the self, all sight can be
considered movement through time and provides the same totalizing view. !e subject is
given, albeit in the form of a multitude of illusionary gestalts, a mastery of its
surroundings. !is kind of illusionary presentation only becomes clearer to us when we
encounter the photograph, the lm or the mimetic art piece.
For its part, fashion photography presents to us a false sense of beautiful, coherent
wholes by which we may compare our own whole selves. As in lm, we view the
fragments of fashion media at such a speed they begin to play to us like frames of a lm.
Hamiltons Fashion-Plate is a snapshot, in traditional ne art terms, of a collection of these
frames as the animated still image. It is collage as lm, both recognizable while
simultaneously threatening to fall apart. It is a coming into wholeness of the human form
(the I) and the discrete images of fashion into one site: the viewing subject.
!e subject is propulsed along with fashion, giving a simultaneous sense of its
totality and its rapid, ever-changing movement. Although its ideals are both mutable and
troublingly immutable, we must only resolve the discordance between our ideal selves and
our becoming in the world to fulll the promise of a personal mastery. However, a
totalized view of fashion or the fashion industry at large would cast it as a hegemonic,
monolithic forcean institution with a purpose. Baudry suggests that the apparatus of
the camera is used to direct the subject to the dominant ideology of the day.
37
For
Baudry, the system of repression (primarily economic) has as its goal the prevention of
deviations and the active exposure of [its] model.
38
In the case of the fashion industry, I
would suspect the goal may be some element of economic control of the public through
the perpetual sale of commoditiesan institutionalized industry where its subjects are
made to conform by wearing the same dress, using the same fragrance, or wearing the
same lipstick. Just as with the subject surrounded by an array of readable objects, a single
site of institutionalized ideology is a kind of illusion as well. In opposition to notions of
ideological institution, what I would like to communicate is a critique of the concept of
institution as such. What we know as fashion is non-hierarchical and non-temporal.
It is not a sequential series of advancements, of progression. It is not necessarily about
tomorrow, today, or even yesterday, but a confounding mix of all and none of these. I
believe Fashion-Plate shows this as well, suggesting the objectifying nature of much of our
understanding. It points to the fragmentation of the body and of objective reality and
our will to make sense of it. As such, it points also to the illusion of the institution of
beauty ideals as handed down by powerful forces. Instead, Fashion-Plate can be read in
the context of large dispersals of power and contending wills. !ere is no central point.
We live in an existence in real ux, fragmented into a network of powers so irreducibly
complex as to defy easy study or critique.
Corey Ratch
7
36 Ibid., 43.
37 Ibid., 46.
38 Ibid.
!e consideration of objective fragmentation, though paradoxically both the denial
of form and, as a concept, a form in itself, is still useful in criticism. In light of
fragmentation, we see that consumer society is not about the mass production of identical
product-objects, or sameness, but a mass production of di"erence. It is only through
essentializing procedures that we come to perceive and identify things as the same. I will
hazard to suggest that nothing is the same. We will sameness, just as we will a self into
one, just as we will the disparate elements of Hamiltons Fashion-Plate or the fashion
industry into one. As we understand those in the world of fashion as members of what
we call the fashion industry, they themselves form no total alliances. !ey have competing
aesthetic and economic interests. !is fact echoes the spirit with which the Independent
Group, of which Richard Hamilton was a member, was founded. Again highlighting the
tension between fragmentary independence and unity, Hamilton recounts that the word
group appears in the name adopted for our loose-knit organization but it was the
independence of the members of the Independent Group that united them. . . . !e
members of the Independent Group were bound by no aesthetic brotherhood and sought
no concrete outcome of their deliberations.
39
With this quote as a guide, a way of thinking that favours the particular over the
whole could be applied to the institution of fashion or perhaps any institution we may
wish to name. In addition, Hamiltons insistence on the particularized individuality of the
members of the Independent Group could be applied to any such artistic movement or
group. Although they may organize themselves around broad concepts or ratify their
intentions through manifesto, how these are interpreted amongst individual artist
members or amongst individuals of the public at large is never harmonious. !is is not to
say that any appeal at all to grouping should be rejected, as I have established the
unavoidability of this on a fundamental, operational level (I am doing it with each word
and sentence I write now). What I am criticizing is the potential for strict epistemological
foreclosure in historical study. !is foreclosure pulls particulars out of history like
abstracted objects in the service of epistemological goals. As an alternative, we should
attempt to continue drilling down to more and more particularity, continuing to ask
more and more questions.
40
Hamiltons words, and his Fashion-Plate, while at once
recognizing what I have been calling variously wholes or forms, both speak to the
ambiguity that inheres in these strict, universal distinctions.

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39 Richard Hamilton, Richard Hamilton: Retrospective Statement, in Te Independent Group: Postwar
Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, ed. David Robbins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 191.
40 For instance, I feel it necessary to note that there is certainly more to be said concerning the
subjecthood of those who may fall outside of the largely visual experience of fashion and visual art or those for
whom self-directed physical movement is impossible.