The Invisible Manto those found in literature than to those of the vestimentary artefact.^30 When
fashion is embraced by academic discourse, its meanings are subsumed into
an intellectual framework with which they may or may not be congruent.
One designer whose work has been the subject of a great deal of academic
analysis is Martin Margiela. He features in no fewer than four articles in
Fashion Theory to date, and it is easy to see why: garments designed by
Maison Margiela depart radically from, or even overturn, accepted conven-
tions in the design, construction and presentation of fashionable clothes.
Alison Gill for example associates Margiela’s work with ‘deconstruction
fashion’ and considers the parallels this style has with the ‘influential French
style of philosophical thought, deconstruction, associated with the writings
of Jacques Derrida’.^31 The essay is an invigorating intellectual ‘workout’
but the author is not concerned with clothes, so much as words or ideas
triggered by them. Gill states that:
In that deconstruction has been defined very generally as a practice of ‘undoing’,
deconstructionist fashion liberates the garment from functuality, by literally undoing
it. Importantly here, through this association dress becomes theoretical, only by
exemplifying a theoretical position developed in philosophical thought and brought
to fashion in order to transform it. Yet, clothes are not liberated or released from
functionality because of deconstruction as casual force coming from somewhere
outside fashion, for the liberation of clothes from functionality is something realised
as a complex interaction between bodies, clothing and the various settings in which
they are worn.^32The text’s deliberations lead to various conclusions of a philosophical kind,
whose meanings lie in the words that have been used to compose the text.
Without questioning the academic significance of such discourses, I would
argue that the very wordiness of their arguments eclipses the extraordinary
potential of their subjects to convey powerful meanings, without the use of
words. Just as Derrida refused to define or translate the word ‘deconstruction’
on the grounds that to do so would alter or destroy its meaning, Margiela
maintains a rigorous muteness about the meaning of his clothes, leaving them
to “do the talking” through their use and wear, as Gill concedes in a footnote
to her essay which claims to have been gathered around examples ‘loosely
- Barthehs, R., The Fashion System translated from the French by M. Ward and R.
Howard, London: Cape, 1985, p. 8. - Gill, A., ‘Deconstruction Fashion: the Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Re-
assembled Clothes’Fashion Theory, vol. 2, issue 1, Oxford: Berg, 1998, pp. 25–49. - Ibid.