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She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt and her hair
brushed back like a boy's. She started all that.
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (2006[19261)
Despite the ease with which the term is used, there is little clear consen-
sus abour what counts as "modernism." There are two general types
of definition of modernism, although variations and hybridizations of
them abound, both of which pose some problems for useful discussion
of fashion and modernism. Tbe first is an aesthetic definition, in which
the particular conventii)ns of modernism—its use of "self-consciousness;
simultaneity, juxtaposition and montage; paradox, ambiguity, and un-
certainty; and the dchumanization of the subject" (Felski 1995: 25}—
are based on genres to which fashion rather uneasily conforms. And the
second is pcriodiziiig, where modernism is a stage of modernity stretch-
ing roughly from the late nineteenth century to World War 11 and re-
quires historical specificity into vyhich particular designs and designers
sometimes fit but at the expense of other histories important to fashion.
In this respect, "fashion" is one example among many that calls for a
distinction between such definitions of modernism and that attitude to
modernity also captured in many crucial uses of the term "modern-
ism." I propose that we need to distinguish between what we might call
"Modernism"—the now institutionalized assemblage of generally aes-
thetic forms and practices that appeared (roughly) in the early twentieth
century—and the "modernism," which names an attitude to modernity
that has much less formal or temporal coherence. In this article, in an
argument that comes closer to thinking about modernity (rather than
postmodernity) as a philosophy of temporality, I will use Chanel as a
conjunction of and distinction between the concepts of "Modernism"
and "modernism" for thinking about fashion.
I draw this approach in part from Foucault's provocation, in ''What
is Enlightenment?," that we think of modernity as an attitude rather
than an epoch. At the conclusion of an essay that spans Immanuel Kant,
Charles Baudelaire and "ourselves today" (in 1978), Foucault asks:
For Baudelaire, this artitiide could be detected in both art and the
everyday, which combined in particularly significant ways in fashion.
In praising Constantin Guys' attention to the everyday, Baudelaire also
sees the man of modernity as he who "makes it his business to extract
from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history"
(Baudelaire 199511863]: 12). This man of fashion writes the history of
the present and the history of himself in the various dimensions of his
performance of fashion and perception of fashion in others. Indeed,
Baudelaire stressed the importance of fashion as self-representation, as
in "the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior,
his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art" (Foucault
1984[I978]:41).
Like many before him, Fredric Jameson credits Baudelaire with in-
venting our concept of modernity through the "category of the clas-
sical," against which modernity is defined and which is "the birth of
historicity itself" (Jameson 2002: 22). But Jameson's argument adds
something crucial In stressing that modernism is difficult to periodize
precisely because it is always claiming to break with something. This
is another way of expressing the critical attitude that constitutes
modernism—reflection on the difference of today with regard to yester-
day. The position of ground-breaking innovator in the field of women's
fashion that is widely assigned to Chanel is one form of this modernist
break. It is typical too in that such breaks are identified primarily by the
Institutionalization of great names like "Chanel." In fact it is In install-
ing a look that is both "classic" and "modern" that Chanel constitutes
a rupture: she claims to be a forceful periodization of fashion that delin-
eates what will always be true ¡in style). It is ciear that Chanel is not the
single creator of, or even inspiration for, the transformations of fashion
in the Modernist period, and still less of modernist attitudes to fashion.
But in this I am not simply dismissing Chanel as less radical or innova-
tive than she is sometimes seen to be. Instead, I want to reconsider what
we want from the radical innovations of Modernism when we seek to
apply them to fashion and what we want, moreover, from the installa-
tion of Chanel as a classic'
Fashion is modern. This might mean no more than that the condi-
tions of modern life, as George Simmel suggested in 1911, exacerbate
the starkest tendencies of fashion (20(}0[19I I ]: 191). Fashion partici-
pates in that popular (as well as canonical) image of Modernism as,
to quote Jennifer Craik's The Face of Fashion., "a commitment to new
ways of living that explicitly rejected the old" (Craik 1994: 75). Eliza-
beth Wilson also prioritizes the "desire for the new" (2000: 63) in fash-
ion, btit her Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (2003) adds to
this an emphasis on the relation between fashion and modernity. "The
138 Catherine Driscoll
Chanel i
Apocrypbally, Cbanel once met fellow designer Paul Poiret in tbe street.
Sbe was dressed in her own highly fashionable black and he asked who
she was in mourning for. She reputedly retorted, "For you, dear M o n -
sieur!" it is iust as often quoted that Poiret dismissed the Chanel look as
"undernourished telegraph boys dressed in black jersey." But Chanel's
democratic "undertaker's mutes," to invoke Baudelaire again, are not
tbe sum of modernist fashion, wbicb names instead tbe field in which
tbey appear. Even Modernist fasbion is not confined to the simplicity
of the Cbanel design any more than to the exotic, romantic, or surreal
styles of Poiret, Erté, or Elsa Scbiaparelli. It also incorporates wbat the
new idea of tbe fashion designer meant and to wbom. If the first strik-
ing thing about Cbanel is how sbe dressed women at the leading edge
of changes to dominant fashion and gender norms, the second is that
there could be a "Chanel woman" for whom clothes spoke to new ways
of living and possible new styles. In fact, for the purposes of this ar-
ticle I am not discussing this biographical woman Cbanel or even, more
strangely, tbe label Cbanel, but ratber tbe Modernist moment in fashion
we bave come to call "Chanel."
boy" look, bobbed hair, designer perfume, suntans, and the "lirtle
black dress." With a little research, however, it is easy to use the
facts of fashion history as sniper's ammunition to pick off these
inflated claims. (Steele 1998: 247)
But this argument, consistent in many but not all respects with Thor-
stein Vebien's {I899[|9651) representation of fashion as conspicuous
consumption, does not work for Chanel, even if she should not be seen
as single-handedly having changed this system.
This sequence of new critical approaches to fashion insists that
choosing one or another fashionable item involves a complex social
positioning. Vehlen and Simmel both stress that an economy of style
shapes one's relations to strangers along lines that also support Baude-
laire's conception of modern style as always performed in transit. But
after Chanel, fashion was not predominantly a statement of "pecuniary
strength," "written in characters which he who runs may read" (Veblen
1899(19651; 49). In fact, the expensiveness of Chanel required a cer-
tain skill to divine In others. This consciousness foregrounds from these
writers what Pierre Bourdieu would later describe as a system negoti-
ated by taste. Bourdieu writes:
This idea of dispositions clarifies not only how Chanel impacts on the
way fashion indexes social change, or what is generally presumed for
any individual, but also the way her style works. Taste, Bourdieu says,
is not a sign of something outside it (like access to what is beautiful) but
a classifying statement that "classifies the classifier" (1986(1979]: 6).
This denaturalization of taste—replacing beauty with style—is not a
"postmodern" product but part of the complexity of modernist dis-
course on fashion.
Images of fashion within the critical terrain of Modernism generally
focus on what style means, which is not to say there are not substan-
tial disagreements about that. Simmel's interest in differentiation from
the mainstream via fashion is as typically modernist as the dismissal of
fashion by others. He argues that it is impossible to ignore fashion al-
together and that even those who claim to disdain fashion in fact make
fashion "statements" that situate them in relation to fashion in ways
that can not be reduced to a homogenizing "culture industry." And even
those Modernists most stridently critical of mass culture acknowledge
fashion's creativity. Adorno emphasizes the proximity of avant-garde
art and fashion:
The bourgeois religi{)n of art would like to keep art neatly apart
from fashion. This is simply impossible. Ever since the aesthetic
142 Catherine Driscoli
Ready-to-Wear
Figure 1
Coco Chanel (Chanel. Gabrielle,
1883-1971): Dress, c. 1927.
(Manufacturer: House of Chanel,
founded 1913.) New York,
Metropolitan fViuseum of Art. Silk.
wool, metal, (a) L. at center back
21^4 ¡n. (55.2 cm), (b) L. at center
back: 40 in, [101,6 cm),
(c) L.: 40'/^ in, (102,9 cm). Marking;
[label] c) (on buckle) "Chanel,"
Purchase, the New-York Historical
Society, by exchange, 1984.
Acc.n,: 1984.28a-c. © 2007.
Image copyright The Metropolitan
Museum of Art/Art Resource/Sceüa,
Florence.
Chanel 145
Figure 2
Man Ray, "Gabrielle Chanei." 1935.
© 2009 Man Ray Trust/Ariisls
Pigiits Society (ARS). NY/ADAGP.
Paris.
jackets, and plunge their hands Into their pockets, a clear counterpoint
to the static, stylized poses characteristic of the period" (2005: 12).
Wilson describes Chanel's designs—"Agile and full of movement"—as
"the spirit of modernity and futurism" (2003: 41). Chanel's star status
and the timeliness of her designs were simultaneously imported into
productions of timeliness, whether those were magazine pictorials, fash-
ion parades, or rhe collaborative art projects for which Chanel designed
costumes: for example, for Le Ballet Russe's 1924 Le Train Bleu, botb
new sports and leisure travel were referenced by tbe costumes Chanel
designed to complement Picasso's sets. In Chanel's mobile and stream-
lined designs, like avant-garde art and aesthetics but also popular cul-
ture and everyday life at the time (for example, in the rise of radio and
car cultures), we see the continued meaningfulness of an iconography of
the machine. Indeed, if a house is a "machine for living in," as Le Cor-
busier claimed in L'Esprit Nouveau (Le Corbusier et al. 1981(19211:
86), tben fashion might aiso be described that way. Fashion as much
as modern architecture and design stresses the conjunction of machine
and subject (see also Wigley 2001¡l995|). just as the ideal modernist
cities (see Harvey 1989: 25-6) described networks of lives, and net-
works of cultures intersecting them., so Chanel addressed a conception
of the modern woman thr{)ugh fashion as technology.' Innovation at
this level affects something like Bourdieu's "habitus." 1 find the account
of habitus that is linked back to Gottfried Leibniz most useful here: "an
Chanel 147
Commodity Art
i
The Order of Things
and the logic of form and color in the architecture, evoke cultural as-
sociations and determine the temporal and spatial unfolding of vistas
and patterns" (2004: 43). While this may contribute to a novelty effect
by tbe combination of particulars, the elements themselves are already
known—as the phrase "evoke cultural associations" makes clear. They
rely on a preexisting order of things. This provides a new perspective
on how the set of changes we give the shorthand "Chanel" reordered
the expected forms of fashion to foreground new possibilities. Rather
than avant-garde, then. I want to try out another term for this Chanel;
heterotopic.
In The Order of Things, Foucault uses the term "heterotopic" to
signify an "other" ordering, an apparently disorderly order. Fashion
clearly has Utopian forms, such as the modernist dress reform move-
ments (see Wilson 2003: 208-27), but like all utopias they work only in-
sofar as they do not come into being. In his lecture "Of Other Spaces,"
Foucault reuses the concept of heterotopia to distinguish sites where
"all the other real sites which can be found within the culture are si-
multaneously represented, contested, and inverted" (1986[1967|: 24).
Heterotopic fashion might form a particularly interesting juxtaposition
with "the Utopia of the mirror" (1986[1967]: 24): a place, rather than
a non-place, where the self is reflected and suspected at once. This is a
concept worth pursuing because, while fashion is not a site in the same
sense as the garden, theater, or cemetery, and nor does it have the appar-
ent institutional stability of those spaces, it is "a simultaneously mythic
and real contestation of the space in which we live" (1986[1967]: 24),
requiring, on the one hand, certain efforts and "rituals" to enter and
installing, on the other, "hidden exclusions" (1986(1967]: 26). Consid-
ering the move from hétéroclite to heterotopic in The Order of Things
(1973(19661) and the above lecture (1986[1967]), it seems that het-
erotopic fashion would fail to fit, but still exist within, present fashion
categories and, at the same time, gesture to another place, order, and
history. Chanel's reordering of the fashion system is not directed to-
ward any particular transformation but rather brings into question how
elements like "women," "dress," "trenchcoat," and "Chanel" are in
an everyday way distinguished (or not) in relation to each other. The
phrases "she dressed for tbe evening" and "she put on a work dress"
mean something different after Chanel because the possibility of dis-
tinguishing a work dress from an evening dress is problematized and,
just as significantly, because distinguishing "dressed" from "put on" no
longer works in the same way.
on and, at least for a time, gestured to some otber place where tbey
migbt make sense. As it appears in fashion the disturbance of expected
orders, and even of common sense, is crucial to the humor still huilt
into haute couture. But even the illogicality of haute couture depends
on opening up fashion's possibilities for representing not tbe body or
identity so much as life. And tbe interplay of recognition and disruption
is more important here than the cycle of death and renewal often used
to discuss fasbion.
In an essay representative of many discussions of contemporary
fashion, Steele claims that, between 1950 and 2000, fashion was trans-
formed utterly, "fragmented into hundreds of competing looks—what
Ted Polhemus calls 'style tribes.'" (Steele 2000: 7) Steele follows this
claim with a discussion of the ways in which Polhemus's focus on youth/
street styles can be adapted to find adult "style tribes, epitomized by
different fashion labels" (Steele 2000: 7). This "stylistic proliferation"
means that no new encompassing "Look" can now be launched for
any fashion season and any such claisii would be met by ridicule based
in tbe "antifashion" sentiment now thought to be a characteristic of
postmodernity (Steele 2000: 7-9). This postmodern version of design-
ers as barometers rather than originators—examples include Quant
and André Courrèges (Steele 2000: 10)—is distinguished from the great
Modernist names by stressing its debt to youth/street style, but whether
or not this argument for a "break" could be countered by talking about
the relation between Chanel and tbe flappers, sports stars, and shopgirls
around her ends up being irrelevant. Steele closes this essay with an ap-
propriate reprise of the continuity within which the emergence, instal-
lation, and critique of Modernism remains modernist: "fashion itself
remains alive and well, always new, always changing" (Steele 2000: 20).
The youthful look of the 1960s in many ways reprised the youthful look
of the 1920s and was just as readily displaced by more exotic and then
more tailored "work-related" styles in ongoing conversations between
society and personal style. But cycle is the wrong way to talk about
fashion because of its simultaneous dependence on continuity and dis-
ruption. Fasbion enables a culture of ongoing consumption in whicb
clothes are not built to be worn for years, howt-ver "classic" they claim
to be, but rather take part in a system where particular components or
motifs are redeployed repeatedly.
All this comes after, it seems, "the end of style and the death of
the subject" (Jameson 2002: .5) presumed tt) mark the end of Mod-
ernism. But, as Jameson points out, "museums and the art galleries
can scarcely function" without a modernist sense of the "new" predi-
cated on innovative style (2002: 5), and Chanel has clearly been in-
stalled as a Modernist classic in the realm of fashion—still succeeding
first of al! on the grounds of a recognizable style that is just disruptive
enough to generate excitement but clearly functioning within the pres-
ent system. In Chanel's "classic" fashionable look we find a refusal
Chanel 155
Acknowledgments
Notes
References