The Fashion Businesstheory and history. The dress historian can draw useful methodological
parallels from the way in which authors such as Jane Gaines,^14 Pam Cook^15
and Christine Gledhill^16 take examples of cinema and describe the manner
in which filmic images interact with women’s perceptions of themselves in
terms of fashion, sexuality, maternal and marital duty and work. Gaines
makes the connections with cultural studies’ linguistic and political concerns
explicit:
There is a significant link between the notion of woman displayed by her dress
and woman displayed by other representational systems. In addition, one might
say that contemporary feminists have understood woman’s inscription in the codes
of contemporary representation because they themselves know too well what it is
to be fitted up for representation. We are trained into clothes, and early become
practised in presentational postures, learning, in the age of mechanical reproduction,
to carry the mirror’s eye within the mind, as though one might at any moment be
photographed. And this is a sense a woman in western culture has learned, not
only from feeling the constant surveillance of her public self, but also from studying
the publicity images of other women, on screen, certainly, but also in the pages of
fashion magazines.Recent dress history, predicated on a cultural studies understanding of the
power of the sign, together with film theory, revels in the ambiguity of fashion
and its shifting signifiers, which moves the discipline away from earlier
reductive or moralistic approaches. From Thorstein Veblen^17 through Quentin
Bell^18 to James Laver,^19 historians and commentators from all political
persuasions had perhaps taken too many liberties over their ownership of a
received understanding of female psychology and supposed predisposition
towards luxury, whilst second-wave feminism simply equated fashion with
patriarchal oppression. A similarly puritanical strain in early cultural studies
echoed a mistrust of fashionable or popular consumption. Such a condem-
nation of fashion and fashion history implied a dismissal of the women and
men who enjoyed its possibilities, and ignored what Gaines has termed “the
strength of the allure, the richness of the fantasy, and the quality of the
compensation”, which their consumption of image and object allowed.
- Gaines, Jane and Charlotte Herzog (eds.), Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body,
London: Routledge, 1990. - Cook, Pam, Fashioning the Nation, London: BFI, 1996.
- Gledhill, Christine, Home Is Where the Heart Is, London: BFI, 1987.
- Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution
of Institutions, New York: Macmillan, 1899. - Bell, Quentin, On Human Finery, London: Hogarth, 1947.
- Laver, James, A Concise History of Costume, London: Thames and Hudson, 1969.