10.06.2009

scavenger hunt


[photo from garancedore.com]

Fashion designers have the luxury of taking inspiration throughout the eras without falsifying history. This means that historical references of the past can be scavenged and looped back to the present to give it contemporary meaning. Even though innovation and novelty are seen to be at the forefront of fashion, it is still a ‘network of historical constellations in which past and present are telescoped together.” (Evans, 22) These liberties designers can take are reminiscent of the character of the 19th-century ragpicker in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall appropriate no ingenious formulations, purloin no valuables. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not describe but put on display.” (Benjamin, 860)

Since fashion imagery is inherently mutable, it can be seen as semiotically unstable, using select images of the past that are recontextualized for the present. Coherent narratives do not exist as the genealogy of the object keeps on being rewritten with temporal retracing influenced by current issues. Fragments of the past are articulated through the marketing and iconography around the physical product itself. Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory speaks of how objects are message and emotion bearing entities. This is the same method that contemporary fashion images can stimulate ideas and meanings beyond the object, and relate to the values, beliefs, attitudes, and relationships of the past.

In Writing and Difference, Jacques Derrida quotes Aldo Rossi speaking of the city as a skeleton “haunted by meaning and culture” and how contemporary fashion can act like these urban building types, as “skeletons of history into armatures for ideas.” (Derrida, 3). This is the defining characteristic of luxury fashion advertising today: that ‘in order to become the new, fashion always cites the old – not simply the ancient or classical, but their reflection within its own sartorial past.” (Lehmann, xx). But this pillaging is more of a reinterpretation of the range of ideas about spectacle and lifestyle, rather than a proper re-visit to previous aesthetics. And our society marks and loves these differences in citations, because, as Susan Sontag put it: “industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies.” (Sontag, 24)

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