The quote in my blog post title comes from Carrie Bradshaw in the Season 4 finale of Sex and the City, when she spies a pair of confectionary pink Louboutins in a window display. I think it captures the often rapturous affective relationship women have to fashion, which frames many of this week’s readings.
In “Women Recovering Our Clothes,” Young’s proposed schemata of identifying and analyzing the unique pleasure women take in their clothes [touch, bonding, fantasy] creates this internal polarization in me: I am so almost completely in accord, and she captures some of the inchoate but powerful and sensual allures of fashion BUT there are also inflections of near-sentimental womanhood rhetoric that for me, seem a bit antiquated, predicated on notions of essential femininity. “Touch” is one of the especially dualistic categories. Citing Irigaray, Young sets up the ideological differentiation between visuality (with all its associations of patriarchy and western rationality) against the purportedly feminine sensory realm of tactility—as I understand it, this is also the basis for haptic cinema, as articulated by Laura Marks, so Young seems to be proposing something akin to haptic fashion, a pleasure derived not from the rigorously colonized empire of masculine sight and the gaze, but one that is situated in the other senses, “an orientation to sensuality as such that includes all senses. Thus we might conceive a mode of vision, for example, that is less a gaze, distanced from mastering its object, than an immersion in light and color. Sensing as touching is within, experiencing what touches it as ambiguous, continuous, but nevertheless differentiated” (204).
On the one hand, I am wholeheartedly with her on this, and the part on the affective relationship we develop with our clothes rings especially true, “Some of our clothes we love for their own sake, because their fabric and cut and color charm us and relate to our bodies in specific ways—because I almost want to say, they love us back…Some we love with a passion or tenderness, though, and we are sad or angry when they become damaged or go out of fashion” (205). As I’m writing this, I’m staring at some of my new acquisitions, still with their tags on, hanging in my closet—I look at them adoringly with something similar to maternal devotion—13 dresses hanging there, they are my newest babies and I love them, for every brazen embellishment or 80s-revival shoulder; for the slippery touch of the satin or the fish-scale scratchiness of sequins —they may never even be worn this year (which caused a 12-step breakthrough moment that I will recount in another post) but I care deeply for them as possessions, and they seem to return the favor, transforming me into whatever my particular projected fantasy may be (Grecian goddess, Emmy presenter, charming date—never mind that I am none of these things).
This of course ties directly into Young’s third part of the pleasure triumvirate which is Fantasy, “women take pleasure in clothes, not just wearing clothes, but also in looking at clothes and looking at images of women in clothes, because they encourage fantasies of transport and transformation…The fantasy of multiple and changing identities without the anxiety of losing oneself is possible because fashion creates unreal identities and utopian places (208-209). I’ve never felt so validated, and I’m sure we’d reach a general consensus in class that the selection, purchasing, and sensual delight of our wardrobe is tantamount, sometimes even paramount to wearing them—I covet, archive, acquire and collect, all undergirded by fantasies of where and when I may wear these new outfits, what persona I shall assume, what look I will communicate.
So, given those astute observations that codify what we all probably instinctively know but don’t often analyze, I still have a problem with Young’s descent into sisterhood and some of the assumptions about feminine traits. Last week we touched on how Second Wave feminist theory found utility and potency in claiming, detourning, and valorizing supposedly “feminine” traits—taking gendered traits that were historically maligned or derided and reversing the value e.g. celebrating the nurturing, pacifist nature of women, especially in the wake of Vietnam. As Prof. McPherson mentioned, this tactic was particularly useful in terms of rallying and unification, given that this was a period of foment and politicization, not detached, erudite theory, so a rhetoric of sisterhood and feminine values could have a mobilizing effect. However, beyond that historical moment, I wonder how useful it is to continue to ascribe femininity with signifiers likes sensuality and intuition. Young seems to be evoking those concepts when she aligns femininity with sensuality, as if woman is inherently more touch-oriented, instinctual (earthier, more in touch with her body etc). I understand that she wants to juxtapose a masculine visual regime with an alternative or subaltern feminine one, but outside the context of a political movement, these associations just seem touchy-feely and new-agey. I don’t want to be an earth-mother; I am a woman, but I don’t need to roar…
“A Woman’s Two Bodies”
In Rabine’s history and deconstruction of fashion magazines and their continual conflicts, she lists the third factor of postmodern contradiction as the self-reflexivity of the magazines themselves, “Instead of relegating everything about the life of the implied reader and her relation to fashion to the level of implicit assumption, the magazines now not only reflect endlessly upon the reader, upon who she is, what she does, what she wants, and what she thinks, but also invite the reader to be more self-reflexive about her relation to fashion, cosmetic, and beauty, and to reflect upon her body in a new, detailed way” (61).
While I’m sure most books have adopted this tactic (out of economic pragmatism and social responsibility), I want to use Allure as a case study, since as a fairly new addition to the pantheon of woman’s mags (founded in 1991), it came of age in the postmodern era of self-reflexive savvy consumers and fragmented concepts of femininity, and that oscillation between opposition and recuperation has been integrated from it inception. Allure has always positioned itself in the industry as being the serious journalistic contender of the beauty books (it’s subtitle is “The Beauty Expert”), and under editor in chief Linda Wells, they have always sought to balance whipped cream escapist fantasy with the gravitas of serious journalistic coverage, from detailed interviews with chemists who opine on active ingredients, to an expose on the potential carcinogens of the new Brazilian hair straightening treatments.
It is significant that since 1991, Allure has always been under the creative control of Linda Wells and her team, creating a relatively consistent ethos that pervades the magazine, while other mags had identity crises and had to evolve or make nominal concessions to the changing culture. Allure copy skewers towards the wry and self-aware, stopping just short of cynical, with a measure of self-deprecating humor. When articles introduce a new color palette e.g. purples or a must-have item for the season, the writer will often acknowledge the clichéd fashion editor’s penchant for labeling every new incarnation “the new black” to instill consumer desire and bestow an aura of novelty and desirability, when the look may in fact just be a shopworn return to something we’ve seen.
The Allure staff writers are always quick to turn a self-referential mocking focus onto themselves and their history of breathless excitement, of course only to recuperate that by telling us about what we simply must buy or try, but the fact that they convey the message with a wink gives us at least the sense of agency and that we are on their side. Similarly Allure often runs features called “editors beauty secrets” or “how to shop like a fashion editor,” where the allure staff will give surprisingly candid answers that ostensibly counterpoise the magazines ideal of unified consumer-impulses aided by articles. For example, beauty editors will admit that while they write about rainbow hues being the colors of the moment, they themselves stick to a natural palette of taupes and beigey pinks.
It seems antithetical that they would admit to not practicing what they preach, but that very honesty likely fosters a sense of belonging to a privileged female subculture that will ultimately be economically successful because it creates devoted readers who will continue to buy, read, and see the ads. Speaking personally, I've been reading allure since 2001 (I still have every issue, and I frequently go through them to cross-reference or look at the pictures... pack rat much?), and I realize the hook is aggregate tone: funny, informative, and irreverent. While all magazines have had to adapt, whether it be in content and the look of the layouts, or the anthropological content as Rabine puts, this element of self-reflexivity is a cornerstone of 21st century femininity.
A quick word on “Things to do with Shopping Center”—I didn’t expect national identity to play so heavily in the exploration of shopping centers and semiotics—Once I realized we were reading about Australian malls, I figured that an English-speaking first-world country’s experience would be commensurate to our own, but on the contrary, I tended to have no bloody idea what Morris was talking about, once she delved into the regional and geographic specifics. Also, if anyone has ever been to the Eagle Rock Plaza (which temporarily became a Westfield but then returned to the old name) you will have witnessed in real-time, the slow death and degradation of an outdated community shopping mall.
It is unable to accommodate Morris’ face-lift in terms of aesthetics, or stay commercially relevant in terms of stores (like the Glendale galleria has managed); it is certainly unable to compete with the themed lifestyle destinations of Caruso (The Americana and The Grove); and it lacks the heralded picturesque charm and history of Old Town. The Eagle Rock Plaza is just about the saddest damn place you’ve ever been—in fact, we residents really just call it Target—that’s its only draw and the only place the middle class families, Occidental students, and east side hipsters go. The rest of the woefully archaic looking mall with its heinous 80s brown tile floors is one bullshit shop after another, most closing after a few months (nothing even close to name brands—I think Payless is as upscale as it gets), a smattering of arcades, and an army recruitment office. The Macy’s that serves as the anchor store on the opposite side of the mall from Target is depressingly down-market and always empty.
And capping it all off, the death knell of the mall-as-a-mall, a third of the downstairs real estate is given over to a specialty food mart called Seafood City, so now the entire interior of the mall reeks of crab and fish. I’m definitely guilty of some nativist snobbery here, since the market is really popular with the pacific islander and Philippino contingent of Eagle Rock/Highland Park/Glassel park, and I’m probably just resentful of incursions, but I also remember going there as a child when it was a prototypical mall experience with movies, anchored by thriving and “classier” department stores, with a sense (at least in my admittedly romanticized remembrance of the past) of community and shopping as an event…..I’m becoming a grumpy old person. Of course now I work at The Americana, that eternal paean to an imagined nostalgic past full of pastiche referents to a aspirational high culture aesthetic, and that’ s whole new can of worms….
A quicker word on “Pedagogies of the Feminine”: who is Brudson’s intended addressee?—while interesting, this piece strikes me as having the tone of a department circular or inter-office memo, where she just wants to alert her colleagues to some pressing concerns. I’m curious about her intentions, and how we’ll use her work in our class.
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