Cultures, Identities, Historiesto cultural studies, because, as Turner (1996) notes “it is through such
phenomena that it becomes possible to track cultural change”, and also
cultural value and cultural associations. Barthes famously attributed the term
“myth making” to this production of social knowledge and meaning through
the manipulation of the sign, and its cultural and political power is difficult
to over estimate.
Fashion historians have of course been utilizing this power for a long time.
Every time the clothing in a portrait is “read” (for its literary associations,
the symbolic power of its various textiles and elements of decoration, the
value entailed in its material and production that might together offer evidence
of status, nationality, age, sexuality or date) representation is being decoded
as text, associative meanings combed out and cultural systems established.
But the process has rarely been perceived in a self-reflective or critical light.
Culture is often taken as an historical given rather than a constructed system
in which the portrait or the dress plays its constitutive part. Elizabeth Wilson
must take the credit in her highly influential work on the cultural meaning
and history of fashion for questioning and opening up the field.^13 In her aim
to ally fashionable dressing with other popular or mass leisure pursuits she
has taken the graphic and literary reproduction of dress into a system of
mass communication and consumption, hinting at the possibility that more
traditional dress history has been toiling unnecessarily in its efforts to use
fashion journalism, historical advertising and other popular documentary
forms as evidence for actual fashion change or cultural conditions. In her
account of the role of clothing in the formation of normative understandings
of status and gender, and its capabilities in terms of dissent and deviance
from those roles, Wilson has liberated the fashion plate and magazine column
from the narrower, linear readings of established dress history:
Since the late nineteenth century, word and image have increasingly propagated
style. Images of desire are constantly in circulation; increasingly it has been the
image as well as the artefact that the individual has purchased. Fashion is a magical
system, and what we see as we leaf through glossy magazines is “the look”. Like
advertising, women’s magazines have moved from the didactic to the hallucinatory.
Originally their purpose was informational, but what we see today in both popular
journalism and advertising is the mirage of a way of being, and what we engage in
is no longer only the relatively simple process of direct imitation, but the less
conscious one of identification.The conception of fashion as a magical system, which might benefit from
textual or linguistic scrutiny, is an area also well tested in the field of film
- Wilson, Elizabeth, Adorned in Dreams, London: Virago, 1987.