Thread for Thought

A friend of mine sent me a link to Janelle Monáe’s “Tightrope” video earlier this summer, and I have been obsessed with the dame ever since (I give you permission to play it when you want to cheer yourself up, and/or have an impromptu dance party, as I do). Not only are her pipes amazing (her concept CDs Metropolis: the Chase Suite, and the sequel The ArchAndroid, are testament to her vocal and style range), but her look! — it’s quirky, fun, formal, and has a healthy dash of what I must assume are her professional singer / performer icons, who mostly appear to be men (James Brown and Michael Jackson high up there). Metropolis is obviously an homage to Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic, and both Lang’s and Monáe’s are futuristic tales of class struggle and oppression; in Monáe’s case, it’s more explicitly about race, with a healthy smattering of gender twisting in there.

Janelle’s first video “Many Moons” depicts an android auction of Janelles, each robot primped and dressed and coiffed for different personalities; bidding wars take place among the underworld elite members of the audience as they compete for the Janelle version they desire, while the prototype Janelle performs live while her sisters are sold off.

The Chicago Tribune wrote of the sequel album (which can just as easily be applied to the premier):

“‘The ArchAndroid’ has ambition to burn. It’s a self-empowerment manifesto couched inside a futuristic “emotion-picture” about an android’s battle to overcome oppression. The notion of space travel and “new worlds” becomes a metaphor for breaking out of the oppression that enslaves minorities of all types in the present one — a theme that has a long tradition in African-American music, from Sun Ra and Parliament-Funkadelic to Cannibal Ox and OutKast.”

What I couldn’t help noticing was an uncomfortable similarity to modern-day fashion shows the auction block was. The chic foreign announcer, Lady Maxxa, introduces auction show with live performer Cindy Mayweather (Janelle), who is the prototype of the Alpha Platinum 9000 droid line. Cindy Mayweather performs the song we’re listening to, to the enthusiastic concert-like crowd’s cheers, dressed in Janelle’s staple white dinner jacket with black silk ribbon tie and nouveau saddle shoes shown to their advantage by highwater tuxedo pants, topped by Janelle’s ever-amazing pompadour.

The introductory celebrity shots of crowd members in the video mimic the paparazzi shots of the front rows at runway shows (which actually have their own photo section on Style.com), giving perhaps undeserved clout and prestige to the designer who snags A-listers attendees, regardless of the strength of the collection on display. The photo below of Jennifer Lopez and Eva Longoria literally cuts off the actual model in favor of the famous attendees:

When Cindy Mayweather throws her jacket off in a burst of enthusiastic performing (2:06), revealing her cinched cummerbund, girls in the mosh pit shriek in ecstasy, upsetting the typical gender divide of girls shrieking for male sex symbols. This is only mildly surprising, since the outfit, high hair, and energetic mic moves are very much in the vein of James Brown (whom Janelle readily claims as a primary inspiration):

Over the years, fashion shows have moved from private parlors of the fashion house to larger and more ornate venues, often bombarding the larger audiences with light shows, video installments (Steve McQueen famously used holograms one year), and live musical performers, increasing the fashion spectacle to performance art highs. Below is the delightfully quirky Tori Amos performing for one of my favorite Viktor & Rolf runway shows, Autumn/Winter 05:

The theme of multiplicity and interchangeability of non-Caucasian ethnicities (“they all look the same”) is explored too (see my earlier post on multiplicity in Coraline). All androids, including the performer Cindy Mayweather, are part of the same line of androids, but are dressed up differently. Their shared roots are only made explicit in shots of the chorus backstage, when they’re all wearing identical tuxes (but different from Cindy Mayweather’s tux):

Monae has turned the fashion industry’s standard of racial desirability on its head here, since in our world, models of color are notoriously overlooked and under-employed. In a rather shocking NYTimes article about model scouts who seek recessive white gene pools in Brazil it was noted, “The goal, he and other model scouts say, is to find the right genetic cocktail of German and Italian ancestry, perhaps with some Russian or other Slavic blood thrown in. Such a mix, they say, helps produce the tall, thin girls with straight hair, fair skin and light eyes that Brazil exports to the runways of New York, Milan and Paris with stunning success.” Janelle has tipped the scales so in her futuristic world there is the unapologetic presentation of beautiful women of color on the runway, but with the uneasy narrative of an android (slave) sale. Below is an etching of an actual slave auction; you can see there is the auctioneer (not a stunning, fashionable black woman but a white man), the dapper white men looking to buy a human being (some of whom have switches in their hands already), and an upsettingly orderly clump of black men, women and children behind the stage awaiting their turn to be put on the auction block:

The advertised prices of the androids could just as easily be pricetags of designer clothes…

and Monae’s androids aren’t so meek. The fierce faces the various androids make are taken directly from the fashion runways: no smiles allowed, just sexy, defiant snarls.

And traditional gender and racial stereotypes are questioned subtly again in the backstage primping, when a white male adjusts the corset and hair of one of the androids;

The image most common in European and American art is that of a black servant or maid doting on his/her alabaster employer. One of the most famous is that classic depiction of enslaved Mammy from Gone with the Wind (1939), lacing Scarlett’s stays for a picnic she herself will not attend:

Interestingly, the costumes the various androids parade in aren’t typical slave rags, but are archetypes of wealthy white men pastimes. The jockey,

The gentleman hunter,

The slick banker,

and the flaneur dandy.

The exception is a clear homage to Amelia Earhart –  who excelled in a male-dominated profession in male clothes (see my post on Women, Pants & Politics) — and whose photo is actually projected behind the android who wears a similar pilot jumpsuit and goggles. Distinctly not glamorous, with a clomping booted gait, the low camera angle emphasizes the android’s strength, stature and importance:

All told, I’m not sure that Janelle Monáe intended this to be commentary on the fashion industry per se, but it’s undeniable that she took heavy inspiration from designer runways to develop her racial / social / gender agenda with these concept albums. Deliberate or not, it’s frankly a bit disturbing to me that the fashion runway format lends itself so perfectly to this tale of oppression, the stink of slavery and continued female oppression in a glossy, modern, eerily familiar context.

Balmain dress and petticoat, circa 1950

Though I love me some fashion, I confess I do not keep up with every single fashion collection that graces the runways (is it even possible, I sometimes wonder?). However, I happened to catch Dior’s Fall 09 collection recently and fell in love — both in the playful I-want-to-wear-that way and also the that-epitomizes-such-an-interesting-historical-trend way, leading to the inevitable I-must-blog-about-that-now conclusion. And so here we are.

For the couture Fall 09 collection of the Christian Dior label, designer John Galliano has played with the staples of ’50s innerwear and supporting garments by revealing them, eliminating portions of the outerwear and exposing the skeleton of what actually creates those feminine curves a la Dior’s own post WWII “New Look.” Galliano admitted that he’d been inspired by photos of Dior himself dressing his models before one of his salon shows in the 1950s. Galliano took the state of semi-dress and moved it from behind the curtain to in front of it, going one step further in his homage by presenting his 2009 collection in an intimate salon-esque setting rather than the modern blockbuster runway format. Here are a couple of my favorite items from the series:

The skirt is pared down to the stiff, transparent structural garment necessary to create the "naturally" feminine looks of the 1950s.

She appears fully dressed... except the outer skirt we expect is missing.

This has a modest silhouette but is obviously completely gauzy, ironically revealing "proper" 1950s understructures.

Let’s take a closer look at the fashions of the mid-20th century from which Galliano derived inspiration, shall we?

A tremendously successful Maidenform bra ad campaign in the ’50s and ’60s featured models in ordinary situations, dressed traditionally from the waist down, but swathed only in Maidenform bras above the waist.

"I dreamed I lived like a Queen in my Maidenform Bra," 1953 ad

It’s incredible how like Dior’s collection these ads are, non?

World War II necessitated rationing of all kinds: gasoline, metal, fabric, chemical dyes, and more. When the war concluded, droves of young military men returned to the States, hungry for women in all their stereotypically soft, curvy, feminine glory. Post-war women wanted to mimic glamorous actresses they’d been seeing in escapist movies all along, to replace the utilitarian suits and pencil skirts they’d adopted out of patriotic wartime necessity. Fashion responded to these desires and took advantage of the lifted restrictions to create voluminous skirts with yards of fabric, cinched waists and uplifted, pointy breasts to exaggerate the idealized curvy feminine body. And, as always, structural undergarments had tremendous import in realizing that ever-morphing, ever-exaggerated, idealized shape.

Undergarment retailers capitalized on the lifted restrictions by experimenting with color, sheer fabrics, lace and printed patterns, new fabrics like Dacron, nylon, Spandex, and rayon. These synthetic materials (several originating in government and military labs) provided durable, stretchy, lightweight alternatives to stiffer, heavier undergarments made of natural fibers like cotton and linen which needed boning for support, shape, and structure. Pantyhose were introduced in 1959, combining panties and “hose” or stockings, a mini revolution in underwear. Stockings even as late as the early 20^th century were not terribly stretchy. Romanticized today (not least of all by Yours Truly), the pesky back seams had to be manually straightened and their leg shapes were predetermined. So if your legs didn’t conform, you were left with distinctly un-sexy, ill-fitting stockings with loose knees and saggy fabric wrinkles:

In the late 1940s, designers like Jacques Fath incorporated corset lacings into evening wear, a risqué reference that also reflected the fashion for hourglass figures and the return of conventional notions of femininity post-WWII. While the glamorous films of the ’40s (which generally depicted wealthy society folk whose extravagant lifestyles were left suspiciously unaffected by the war raging in the real world) were the inspiration in the early 1950s, films of that mid-century decade placed their own indelible stamp upon the collective fashion ideals, shifting the trends from genteel aristocrat to slightly bawdy Everyman (or Everywoman as the case often was), creeping toward the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Marilyn Monroe simultaneously shocked and delighted audiences by going braless on and off sets, a kind of prelude to the feminist-organized bra burning episodes of the ’60s without the overt politics. Elizabeth Taylor wore a custom made slip for much of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and the sizzling posters of her call girl character in BUtterfield 8 (1960) depicted her with a heavy fur coat draped over her body-hugging slip, heightening the impact of her near-nakedness:

Liz Taylor in BUtterfield 8 poster. Note the "suitable only for adults" disclaimer!

Galliano similarly pairs outdoor coats with slips:

In Anatomy of a Murder (1959) attorney James Stewart is forced to request his client’s wife wear a girdle in court to make her appear respectable and decent — though he admits with embarrassment that the young woman doesn’t need one to control her “jiggle” (more to the audience’s discomfort than to the precocious sex kitten character to whom he is speaking).

BEFORE: Lee Remick in sandellous pants early in Anatomy of a Murder

AFTER: Lee Remick deliberately dowdy in courtroom in Anatomy of a Murder. Though unseen, she presumably wears a girdle under her deliberately dowdy tweed skirt.

Here we see the girdle on the model, who, like Lee Resnick above, does not actually require such a supportive garment to mold her shape:

In Rear Window (1954), Costume Designer Edith Head ensconces Grace Kelly’s socialite character in a dress of layered tulle, a transparent material that is traditionally used as an underlayer to provide volume to outerskirts. While this dress hardly screams “vulgar,” it’s definitely a wee bit risqué:

The see-through wrap Grace Kelly dangles is just one layer of the same material used for her skirt, typifying the deliberately impractical, beautiful glamour popular post-WWII (a transparent wrap not only doesn't assist modesty, it doesn't shield from the cold either).

And here is a Dior creation:

This skirt has fewer layers of tulle than the example above, drawing attention to the sheerness of the material which is more commonly used in lingerie.

The steamy Streetcar Named Desire (1951) is set in humid New Orleans where characters languor in states of semi-dress. In a poignant-though-subtle twist, Kim Hunter’s ferociously monogamous character Stella walks around the apartment in a slip, in stark contrast to the false prudery of Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois whose extreme, inconvenient modesty (three adults are living in a tiny one bedroom apartment) belies her previous promiscuity. Marlon Brando’s T-shirts are downright mundane to us now, but at that time T-shirts were strictly male underwear and Brando’s brutish, uncouth character was conveyed in part by the absence of a proper button-down shirt over his. He compounds his simmering sexuality by changing shirts in front of the camera, and in the famous “Stella!” scene, his shredded T-shirt actually peels off him lewdly, testament to the fragility of the undergarment:

In Rebel Without a Cause (1955), James Dean and his gang flouted conventions and, like Brando’s character, used dress (or rather, the state of near undress) to signal their outsider, somewhat misfit communal status, with all the sexy implications the forbidden carries.

As the posters for Liz Taylor in BUtterfield 8 did, the T-shirt or undershirt is paired with an outdoor coat for heightened impact.

Even in recent years, there is an increasing backlash to men displaying their underwear. This latest effort by some citizens and politicians to enact laws forbidding sagging jeans that expose boxers is tinged with a distinctly racial tone, as it’s primarily young black men who follow this trend (conceived in minority-heavy prisons where inmates may not wear belts) and who are therefore targeted with the desired sartorial censorship.

Obviously the idea of the forbidden, the secret, the hidden, still offends and titillates today, and Galliano’s collection is testament to this enduring tension. With a self-conscious nod to vintage lingerie, the prominently featured seamed stockings are an erotic, romantic reference to outdated style. No longer deemed essential for respectability, girdles, garters, and conical bullet bras are relegated to pure camp and arousal, which some women choose to wear as a provocative statement that we all understand to be vintage. Dior’s collection reclaims the dampened vulgarity by exposing the contraptions that hold stockings up, that support and distort the body for added curious eroticism, and perhaps even a sense of uncomfortable indecency, a feat in this desensitized age of exposed bra straps, halter tops and micro miniskirts. Though there are grumbles relating to the appropriation of underwear worn as outerwear even today, this is not a new phenomenon by any stretch. Attitudes toward the naked body and sexuality, notions of privacy, discretion and sexual identification are constantly changing and fashion changes with them. Return for Part Deux next week for more on underwear as outerwear, this time as a political statement….

FURTHER READING:

• “Are Your Jeans Sagging? Go Directly to Jail.” NY Times, 8/30/07
• 20^th century silhouette and support timeline
• Fashion, Desire and Anxiety, by Rebecca Arnold
• 1950s underwear and ads at Fashion-era.com

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An update to my earlier post about the much anticipated V&R online show “Funny Face” (a.k.a. “Shalom”), here is the link to the Spring / Summer 09 show itself: http://www.viktor-rolf.com/index.htm

As previously stated, I love me some Viktor & Rolf. Though this was not my favorite show of theirs by far, I still thought they explored some interesting concepts.

Repetition:

V&R have always loved exaggeration by duplication (their multi-collared shirt, cascading lapel jacket, etc.). They have also incorporated this theme into their runway models before (fall 2003 RTW collection), painting them all with the same dramatic, wan complexion and ginger-red hair of their fabulously eccentric friend and muse Tilda Swinton. Though unusual in the fashion world, this concept was famously used in the 1937 classic Shall We Dance where Fred Astaire, missing his paramour Ginger Rogers, insists that his backup dancers all wear masks with her image. Deliciously creepy, non?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq0CQdjrA5s]

Geometry:

I enjoyed V&R’s black and white striped pattern, featured in fabric, shoes and tights. It reminded me a bit of England’s flag motif:

Ensembles sporting the long, sharply angled lines were set against pieces embracing more organic, flowing shapes where the fabric was cut in waves and allowed to drape in a less structured manner. Interestingly, these softer shapes obscured the body’s natural shape even more than the rigidly geometric ones, like a shell hosting a soft snail.

Spirals abounded throughout the collection with various levels of subtly, perhaps referencing seaweed and more snails (the second V&R ensemble below actually resembles a snail’s proportions of exterior-to-flesh).

Technology:

I watched the show several times over the course of several days, and the website’s quality was oddly inconsistent. The final time I viewed it, the screen was distractingly grainy — I don’t know if that’s because there was a website traffic jam or what, but I had difficulty making out the details. These are the drawbacks of using images rather than live action.  However, there were several close-ups of the garments that I appreciated, the details of which never would have been possible from a non-front row seat at a live show.

I enjoyed the deliberate liberties that were taken in the filming style  — sometimes the same 2 second image was looped for emphasis, and there were a couple slow motion shots of Shalom striding down the virtual runway. I liked that attention was drawn to this being a video, not even attempting to duplicate a runway video that might’ve been taken of a live show (there were no virtual audience members either, making it feel a bit like a dress rehearsal rather than a final product– and perhaps that’s what it was in the grand scheme of things). And in case you still missed the digital / technological aspect, the show concluded with all 21 Shaloms applauding as the oversized puppet masters Viktor and Rolf literally lorded over them, watching as the Shaloms’ pixels broke down and they disintegrated into virtual space like confetti.

All in all, I enjoyed the concept of the “Shalom” show — democratizing high fashion by presenting on a universally accessible platform and all that rot– but the designs themselves fell a bit short for me, as did the quality of said technology. I wonder if V&R, or perhaps another fashion house, pursue digital options in showcasing….

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