Cultures, Identities, HistoriesThough to follow recent cultural theory on the instability of the sign to its
illogical limits presents a particular set of problems that both cultural studies
and fashion history have had to address. As Gaines states: “the more extreme
contention of post modernist theory – the idea that the image has swallowed
reality whole – obliterates the problems endemic to comparisons between
images and society. If the image now precedes the real, engulfs it and renders
it obsolete as a point of comparison, do we any more need to show how
representation is ideological?” (Gaines 1990).
The artificiality of fashion texts and representations would certainly seem
open to similar interpretation, so how can they in this sense be tied in to any
discussion of inequality, power and manipulation, or the simple actions of
consumers themselves? Here the poststructuralist approach of Gaines and
others and the broader concerns of cultural studies, with the argument that
the image of fashion and femininity is a construction, a textual product of
its society, relying only on the reality of the moment, allows for a clearing
up of any confusion. The constructed image can be held up for further
scrutiny, the construction made clear and the seventeenth-century broadside,
the nineteenth-century fashion journal or the twentieth-century film revealed
as representational systems. In this way fashion and its associated publicity
can be shown to rely on current ideologies, and the “obliterated” problems
of image and society reinstated for discussion. The arising affinity between
fashion and textual analysis has probably constituted cultural studies’ major
contribution to the discipline of dress history or, more precisely, dress
studies.^20
I choose the term “dress studies” over “history” because that contribution
has remained largely within the field of twentieth-century and contemporary
concerns. The incursion of cultural studies methods into historical discussions
of dress has remained more circumspect, and where examples of a converg-
ence between dress, history and the focus of cultural studies on theory and
discourse exist, the texts lie on interdisciplinary boundaries, largely on the
peripheries of social, literary and art history, and are by authors who often
find it necessary to stress their distance both from traditional forms of their
own disciplines and from dress historians themselves. The relationship
between cultural studies and history has never been a straightforward or
easy one, but some of the crossovers have produced interesting studies of
historical clothing practices. The source of the disparity between historical
and cultural approaches lies in the necessity of the latter to frame itself within
a broad theoretical structure. The problem of conceptualizing the social
relationships that make up popular cultures is that it defeats contained
- Craik, Jennifer, The Face of Fashion, London: Routledge, 1994.