OF FASHION
BA(HONS) FASHION STUDIES
MODULE TITLE: Fashion and
Postmodernism Project
HOW IMPORTANT ARE THE MEDIA IN
CONTEMORARY FASHION?
TUTOR: Reka Buckley
By: Bucuk Ajsela
June 2002
How important are the media in contemporary fashion?
_____________________________________________________________
to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose –garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only trough time time is conquered.
T. S. Elliot 1920 1
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The idea is that popular culture
signs and media images increasingly dominate our sense of reality, and the way
we define ourselves and the world around us. The mass media, for example, were
once thought of as holding up a mirror to, and thereby reflecting, a wider
social reality. Now reality can only be defined by the surface reflections of
this mirror. Society has become subsumed within the mass media.
Moreover, image becomes
all-important in competition, not only trough name-brand recognition, but also
because of various associations of quality and prestige. Competition in the
image – building trade especially fashion becomes a vital aspect of inter –firm
competition. Nowadays success is so plainly profitable that investment in image
–building (celebrities, fashion shows, store openings, television productions,
internet as well as direct marketing) Pict 1 becomes as important as investment in
new designers. The image serves to establish an identity in the market place.
The acquisition of an image (by the purchase of a sign system such as designers
clothes) becomes integral to the quest for individual identity, self
–realization, and meaning. Pict3
High culture and popular culture
used to be regarded as two separate cultural forms. In today media induced
world these two form are increasingly being mixed, both when it comes to
production and to consumption.
One of the key predictions of the
postmodern condition is the proliferation of signs and their endless
circulation, generated by the technological developments associated with the
information explosion.pict2
Since cave dwellers began drawing
pictures on walls, human beings have been interested in self – representation
and have inferred meaning from the pictures that they create and view. In today
society not much changed, promulgators of motivation research cheer their
ability to shape the consumers unconscious desires trough media images. The
visual aspect of fashion, especially the use of photographs and coulored could
arouse interest, spur associations and instill desire. In this yearning for
self-expresions we reach for product, for brands, for fashion, which will be
compatible with our schemes of what we think we are or want media wants us to
be.
Andy Warhol’s notorious prediction
that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes was something
more then an off hand remark that made for good copy.
The prognostication was based on
two themes: mass media and celebrity. The world we are living now.
This is what fashion senses
really is-the ability to register and appreciate and remember the details of
the way those around you look and dress and then reinterpret those details and
memories itself.
Malcom Gladwell, ‘listening to khakis’The New Yorker, July 28,1997
The realm of consumption – what
we buy and what determines what we buy-is increasingly influenced by media.
Consumption is increasingly bound up with fashion as well because fashion
increasingly determines consumption. For example, we watch more films because
of the extended ownership of VCRs, while fashion advertising, which makes
increasing use of popular cultural references, plays a more important role in
deciding what we will buy. Implication of this point is that in a postmodern
world, surfaces and style become more important, and evoke in their turn a kind
of ‘designer ideology’. Or as
puts it: images dominate narrative. 2The argument is that we increasingly consume
media images and signs for their own sake rather than for their ‘usefulness’ or
for the deeper values they may symbolize, we consume images and signs precisely
because they are images and signs, and disregard question of utility and value.
This is evident in fashion culture itself where surface and style, what things
look like, and playfulness and irony, are said to predominate at the expense of
content, substance and meaning. Pict 4
From the postmodern point of
view, contemporary fashion is seen to be indulging in nostalgia, living off its
past, ransacking it for ideas recycling its images and plots and cleverly
citing it in self-conscious postmodern parodies.pict 5 The repeat and the
prologue have been part of the way fashion has worked from its earliest stages.
Initially it made use of other forms of popular culture like the magazines,
billboards and movies, and very soon these media fed off each other for ideas
and stories.
French postmodern theorist Jean
Baudrillard claims that we have reached a stage in social and economic
development in which ‘it is it no longer possible to separate the economic or
productive realm of ideology or culture, since cultural artifacts, images,
representations, even feelings and psychic structures have become part of the
world of economics’.3 This is partly explained, Baudrillard claims, by the
fact that there has been historical shift in the west, from a society based on
the production of things to one based on the production of information trough
media. As Best and Kellner write:’ We are now, Baudrillard claims, in a new
era of simulation in which computerization, information processing, media,
cybernetic control systems, and the organization of society according to
simulating codes and models replace production as the organizing principle of
society.4
What happens is to according to
Baudrillard, the connection between images and simulations and reality’
implodes’ (explodes inward) and as this happens, our sense of the real
disappears.5
Models replace real. We see the
phenomena, in lifestyle magazines, and fashion shows, where the imitation of
models become more important than the reality they imitate.
a new era in which the old forms of production and consumption have given way
to a new universe of communication.6
Consider any fashion
campaign. It is simply a succession of
surface images for the viewers to experience. It is a collage of fragmented
images and each image spawns more, each image is a simulacrum- a perfect copy
that has no original. Initially, fashion campaign attempts to reach the
greatest audience possible trough the use of the Internet, on-line services,
magazines and billboards. Media allows us to watch fashion shows across the
world, and have access to more information than ever before. Media has also
transformed the fashion essence. The world, it is argued increasingly consist
of media screens and popular cultural images-TVs, Videos, adverts and shopping
malls, -which are part and parcel of the trends towards postmodern popular
culture.
During this period, media culture
became a particularly potent source of cultural fashions, providing models for
appearance, behaviour and style.
Fashion world have always held
fascinating thirst for celebrity and models, as result of television and
magazines they have now become dominant theme and accessory as such. Followers,
once attracted spend millions on fashion items and imaginary life style.
Film, TV and
important role as a showcases for chic and fashionable clothes. Fashion became
fasten
between the cinema and big
business, and it has been suggested that Hollywood movies contributed in a
mayor way to the ‘consumerism that developed in America, ‘A virulent form of
movie mania’ 7 was exploited to sell clothes such as Joan Crawford suits, or
more recent movie Prêt a Porter (1994) which emphasize style, spectacle and
images at the expense of content, character, substance and social comment.
Jessica Parker worn flower brooch on jacket has style influenced many fashion
followers as well as street retailers for a whole year. Repetition of victorian
jacket and flower ornament, refers to another cultural reference, and is taken
for granted that consumers have the knowledge to recognize this.
Intertextuality and visual appeal of series was as crucial to the series as
the designer clothes worn by its stars, and the imaginative day and night
images of
The visual pleasures derived from the style and ‘look’-locations, settings,
people, shoes, were a crucial motivation in the making and appreciation of the
series and as such blurring of distinctions of High and popular culture
(Hermes Kelly bag, designer Manolo Blahnik shoes but a small apartment in
Down-town New York.) pict 8
Television has been particularly
influential in popularizing retro-chic’ period clothes from the recent past.
Dramatization of novels, documentaries and plays popularized every recent mode
from the twenties to the hippies fashions of a couple decade earlier as a
‘period’ style.
This obsession with pastiche,
this ‘nostalgia mode is related to the way in which the dictatorship of Haute
couture broke down in the 1960’ and 1970’s.
A single style can no longer
dominate in the post-modern period. Instead there is constant attempt to
recreate atmospheres. Pastiche is the re-imaging of the signifier; it may be
thought of as parody without the parodic dimension. If nothing can be
completely original, then it becomes natural to make new versions of old
styles. 8
The traditional way of creating
fashion is often described as a trickle down process. Fashion houses create
haute couture, expensive, unique creations, a new way for what a fashion should
look like; these creations are then subsequently imitated and mass-produced.
it continue to exist trough fashion
magazines, magazine have also influenced trickle up process, process in which
fashion originate from people ‘ everyday lives’ and from there is picked up by
fashion industry, in this instance using media as a tool Moschino destroys the
myth that fashion must be original and serialized, it is up front and in your face.
After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and
mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical
ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of
electronic technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a
global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is
concerned.
Marshal Mcluhan
media” 1966 9
Mass media is a powerful factor,
which influences our beliefs, attitudes, and the values we have of ourselves
and others as well as the word surrounding us. Media does not merely
communicate and reflect reality in a more or less truthful way. Instead, media
production entails a complex process of negotiation, processing, and
reconstruction similar process to this in fashion. It not only offers us
something to see, but also shapes the way in which we see by creating shared
perceptual modes. Media messages are used and interpreted by audiences
according to their own cultural, social, and individual circumstances, which as
such affect contemporary fashion today.
Post modernism, whatever form its
intellectualizing might take, has been fundamentally anticipated in the
metropolitan cultures of the last twenty years; among the electronic signifiers
of cinema, radio, television and video, in fashion and youth styles, in all
those sounds, images and diverse histories that are daily mixed, recycled
and’scratched’together on that giant screen which is contemporary city.
That the cascade of mass media
communications technologies introduced over the course of the 20th
century has had far-reaching effects in shaping our social worlds and personal
identities is an indisputable fact,
but Postmodern media it is more
concerned with the cultural representations of the fashion than any qualities
or impact fashion may have in the outside world, a trend in keeping with
supposed collapse of ‘reality into popular culture. The stylish look of media
images, their clever quotations from popular culture and art, their concerned
with the surfaces of things, their self-conscious revelation of the nature as
media constructions, and their blatant recycling of the past, are all said to
be indicative of the emergence of postmodernism today.
All styles are now
self-caricatures. It is no longer possible unreflectively to be the perfectly
dressed person whose dress never calls attention to itself; we have all become
so sophisticated about performance that recognize the attempted sleight of hand
that aimed to suggest the absence of effort or impression-creation. No longer
do any fashion seem normal or ‘natural’
In postmodern worldview, there is
no such thing as an essential “me”, no centering identity no inborn character.
There are only roles, images we take up in imitation of other images,
nevertheless contemporary fashion today.
Baudrillard speaks once more:
“caution: Object in this mirror may be closer than they appear.
Notes
Elliot, T.S. Whispers of Immortality-Poem (New
York: A.A Knopf 1920)
D. The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988)
pp234-348
Baudrillard, J. Simmulations(New
York:semiotix (e) 1983) p 2
Best, S. and Kellner D. Postmodern theory: Critical
Interrogation (New York 1991- Guilford Press) page 118
Baudrillard, J. The Mirror of Production (St.
Louis: Telos Press 1975) page 33
Ibid. page 27
Eckert, C.The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window’
(Quarterly Review of Film studies 1978)
Berger, A.A.The Postmodern Presence,
Reimer, B. (Sage Publication, London 1998) page 201
McLuhan, M. Understanding Media: The Extension of
man (
1966) p 62
Harvey
D.The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) 60-61
Baudrillard,
J. America (New York, Verso 1989)
Bibliography
Curran, J. and
Gurevitch, M: theoretical the Study of the media approaches
(Culture, society and the media London, Methuen 1982)
Denzin, N. Images
of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary cinema(London, Sage
1991)
Featherstone,
M. In pursuit of postmodern (London, Sage 1988)
Fiske, J. Television
Culture, (London and New York, Methuen 1987)
Lyotard, J-F. The
postmodern Condition, (Manchester, Manchester University Press 1984)
Collins, J Uncommon Cultures:
Popular Culture and Postmodernism (New York and London, Routledge 1989)
Photographic credits
Moschino(London -Thames and
Hudson Ltd 1997)
Vivienne Westwood (London,
Carlton Books LIMITED 1999)
POP magazine September
2001
ID magazine October 2001
Various popular culture,
celebrity magazines
Web pages researched
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