Surrealism in Fashion Elsa Schiaparelli and Yang Du - Essay Example

Table of Contents Introduction 2 Surrealism 3 The FIAT Modes: Surrealism in Fashion 7 Case Study: Elsa Schiaparelli 11 Case Study: Thierry Mugler 14 Surrealism in the 21st century Conclusion Introduction Since the late 1980s, scholarly attention on post-modernism has focused on forms and functions of ideological production. In his seminal work, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, David Harvey (1987) focuses on the emergence this new realm of aesthetics and social forces, issues of identity formation, and its seeming anti-thesis, "deconstruction," a set of simultaneous, dialectic reactions to the systematic technologies inherent to the powers of global capitalism. By understanding the nature of capitalism and its time and space compressions (i.e. globalization), rationalized forms of modernist aesthetics advanced into an expression of postmodern "fragments" inherent to flexible accumulation, and its response to capital flows. Contemporary theorists indicated that a new round of cultural expression in the form of a renewed interest in aestheticized politics would be common-sense response to the current climate of economic restructuring (Harvey 1990, Maier 1988). If we are to accept historical materialism as the fundamental initiator of ideology production, a history of fashion must look at how inverted notions of base and superstructure have been generated in certain situational contexts through the ideological trajectories of avant-garde movements and reactionary political regimes. In this essay, I will argue that fashion, and its essential interest in fragmentary, hybrid and shifting ideological productions is perhaps one of the most critical vehicles for historiography; and art of mass proportions. It is on the site of the body that fashion finds its canvas, and ultimately engenders the History and its theoretical tenets with an apt bridge between theories of interpretation and practices of expression. Since the nineteenth century to the present, how those tenets are eliminated or reified is largely dependent upon context, the temporal provocations of the 'future' as it is implicated in the more totalized processes of capitalism. The emergence of Surrealism within fashion, for instance, was marked by the birth of parallel aesthetic cultures in commercial advertising, and especially the incorporation of art photography. The first coherent movement dedicated to aesthetic pastiche, Surrealism set the tone for later movements like Deconstruction. The first half of the paper looks at the shift from the manifestation of the 'future' in the historical past to near subsequent dream world of Surrealist response, whereby the future as depicted in Salvador Dal's distorted timepieces in Persistence of Memory, removes the logic of 'progress' prior Modernist movements toward an organic incorporation of technology, rather than mere orchestration of the future. Influenced by both conventions of Italian Futurism and French Surrealist aesthetics, Elsa Schiaparelli's designs in speak to this moment of transition in Inter-War History. The second half of the essay is an examination of current theoretical debates on the cumulative, and necessarily disjunctive quality of cultural productions, or the so-called "crisis of representation." Following Walter Benjamin's notions of 'Ur' history, where things of the past leave their traces for further reproduction in the future, I will draw on the visual technologies of advertising imagery of Europe's inter-war regime(s) to access fundamental links between capital, political ideology, technology and the bodies of fashionistas. Thierry Mugler's work is a candid and cheeky derivative of this history; making fun of fascism whilst promoting its aesthetic as impenetrable, yet sexy. In both of these fashion designers' work, inscription of power on 'the body' through haute fashion culture, serves as a historical trace intended to transcribe the collection of next season's future through the reproduction of historical meanings. In Schiaparelli and in Mugler's thought: 'history literally bodie[s] forth.' If their dictates on fashion as leaders in this field meant that their designs contained a the potential of liberation, encapsulated within the articulation of their designs is a discursive future that must be read, and read again, for continuity and situated interpretation; Ur traces promoting bourgeois, liberal attachments to mass produced 'anarchy.' Surrealism and the Avant-Garde "In a nutshell , the problem of the avant-garde has been, all along a problem of political paradigms. Modernity-at its virtual point of its impossible completion-has always been thought of in terms of totality and fragment, or . . . as the struggle between totalitarianism and anarchy. Consequently, as a weapon against the forces of totalitarianism, fragmentation can be valorized in bourgeois theories of the avant-garde: liberalism finds an ally in anarchy." The problem with the avant-garde as Andrew Hewitt (1993) discusses in his work Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, as he reflects on what was to become Elsa Schiaparelli's inter-war Italy, is the conceptual split between economics and political life in. As Hewitt argues, "once the hegemonic homology of ideology and economy is problematized, the aesthetic acquires a new determinant power in the vacuum created by self-absenting monopoly capitalism" (p.8). In other words, rhetoric and spectacle, as well as 'identity' formations, work to fill the void of materially bankrupt power relations in times of economic reordering. In the struggling industrial economies of Italy and Germany as they became nation-states, aesthetics functioned as a mechanism for nationalist propaganda that can be seen most explicitly in the mediation of an iconoclastic form (i. e. charismatic ruler). It is not ironic, then, as Harvey (1987) argues, that world war was only possible when the economic market was sufficiently global, and characterized by the fluidity of border crossing capital. Enhanced transmission of aesthetics and their charismatic impact was made possible in this era with film. Walter Benjamin writing at the time of Schiaparelli's engagement with Surrealism, argues in his work 'Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', that the use film as reproductive technology promoted distraction of the masses by turning them into "absent-minded" critics; supposedly challenging inauthentic versions of life. Fashion connoisseurs also participated in this process by way of the early Modern fashion magazine. Indeed, the convergence of commercial communications with the image making pursuits of surrealist photography by artists such as Dal, forged a new path for the fashion designer (Crawford 2004). Unlike the Internationalist movement which bore Filippo Tomaso Marinetti's Futurism which was disinterested in the metaphysics of presence, Surrealism countered Marinetti's quasi pro-Fascist forum of representation in two modes: 1) the denunciation of temporal acceleration as a model for art and for life; and 2) a radical metaphysics that de-territorialized the image from its taken-for-granted location. If Futurism was busy negotiating nationalist sentiments, Surrealism would push the boundaries beyond political thought to the point that even its pretense to fashion assemblage presented a culture of consumption both obviating and rejecting the marketplace. Led by Marinetti, the so-called Italian 'caffeine of Europe,' sought to aestheticize politics in a way that would weave a tight collaboration between art and the industrial lives of the proletariat masses. While often linked to the rise of Mussolini, Marinetti's Manifesto's and idea - beginning in 1909 as an outgrowth of Symbolism and Cubism - went through various political appropriations between the Left and the Right, across Europe and North America. Characterized by the puritanical slogan of "War, the World's Only True Hygiene," futurism was particularly responsive to the utility of the two world wars. For Benjamin, the futurists focused on the destruction of 'authentic' works of art through mass reproduction. Unwittingly, then, all mass imagery (i.e. advertising) did not emerge as liberation practice, but, rather a mystification of material geopolitics. Parallel to the interests of Surrealist elimination of Time, Futurism in its precedent school of thought was an effort to suppress History in the name of Art. The FIAT Modes: Surrealism in Fashion The futurist movement (as with all modernist avant-garde movements) with its inherent conceptual location as a political alternative, served as a mediator for the dialectic struggles between the becoming of internationalism and the being of nationalism in a period of extreme economic instability. Futurism is implicated in Surrealism and its ideas. Most often noted is the cosmopolitan 'nomadism' of the two movements - nothing seems static. If Surrealism is representative of the waking unconscious, the death of religion and the democratic spirit charged the earlier movement's tendencies. Marinetti's numerous manifesto's such as Electrical War (A Futurist Vision Hypothesis), Tactilism, The Variety Theater, and The New Religion-Morality of Speed were ironically prophetic to Thierry Mugler's era of late capitalism 'when man will be able to externalize his will and make it into an invisible arm, Dream and Desire . . . will master and reign over space and time.' For Marinetti and for Mugler, destruction with courage is the only cure. However, in his 1924 manifesto Tactilism, Marinetti provided the ideological foundation for support for the blending of futurist principles with advanced scientific method; and excursion into the 'true essence of matter.' Pointing to the invention of the X-ray later utilized as a 'methodological' vehicle for dissemination of Surrealist thought by Photographer Man Ray, Marinetti proclaims 'some people can already see inside their bodies. Others dimly explore their neighbors' bodies. They all realize that sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste are modifications of a single keen sense: Touch, divided in different ways and localized in different points' (Flint 1971, p.112). The biological body, then, assimilates ideology into its rubric toward a third term that is Art. Man Ray furthered the malleable role of art through the body of fashion designer, Elsa Schiaparelli, and by removing her name as title to the work, the image entitled 'Untitled' negotiates the dictates of classical knowledge through the instigations of resemblance. Vogue magazine found erudition in the work of Surrealist photographers like Dal and Man Ray, and the imagery quickly informed the lexicon of metaphoric transference beyond description that would stand the test of time in the fashion world. Writers like Andr Breton also created a lineage of inscription within the language and historiographic renderings of fashion's progressions within the fashion magazine genre, and in his essay 'Picasso dans son element' written for vanity press, Minotaure's inaugural edition, was meant to reconfigure Picasso as Surrealist (Crawford, 2004, p.224). With the mixture of high brow representation of artistic thought and commercial circulation, the market had found its dream. The comingling of forces within the mid-twentieth century fashion press is well expressed in Peter Wollen's (2003) work on the concept of fashion, 'From Baudelaire the torch passed to Stphane Mallarm, who actually edited a fashion magazine, La Dernire Mode, and from Mallarm, via Guillaume Apollinaire's The Poet Assassinated, to the surrealists-Andr Breton or Max Ernst, with his lithograph FIAT MODES-pereat ars. We should also remember that Breton himself worked for the great couturier Jacques Doucet, just as Man Ray worked for Paul Poiret, and both Salvador Dal and Meret Oppenheim worked for Elsa Schiaparelli' (p. 133). Wollen's analysis self-consciously reflects Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History, and directly links the Modern pursuit of leisure and surrealist ideas in Baudelaire to Marx whereby History collapses into the moment and the momentary as a Tigersprung dialectic with the past, 'ancient Rome as fashion quotes a past attire [and] fashion has the scent of the modern' (Benjamin, p. 132). For Benjamin, it was a 'differentiation between dandy as hero, commissioning clothes to order, and the unheroic consumer, who buys ready-to-wear' (Wollen 2003, p. 135). Echoing the priorities of 'reach' in contemporary advertising early advertising is often cited as 'touch' as the goal of conveyance in mass advertising. According to Karen Pinkus (1995), early advertising was also rendering the body as proxy to the market by way of creating a 'metonymic equation between the body and the body politic' (p. 92). In magazines like Vogue, a complete execution of Surrealist' composite was achieved. Fashion advertising found its extension in the psycho-physical narrative. As Pinkus effectively shows, this transparency is furthered through the initiation of fantasies of the immense potential of technology, and especially the X-ray. For instance, images of rays penetrating out of eyes of a woman's beautiful face are not only for promotion of a facial soap to clean the skin away, but to illuminations intended to penetrate the mind of the consumer. In retrospect, even prior to the circulation of fashion press, is the coterminous history of Europe's arcades, or shopping promenades. The Konvoluts or notebooks written by Walter Benjamin (1927) Das Passagen Werken, focus on the articulation of the tensions between capitalism and communism, or the financial markets and labor. A record of Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris as a Modern capital, Benjamin's work is succinctly articulated through his examination of the nineteenth century Arcade; promenades of consumer capitalism and leisure (Eiland & McLaughlin, 1999, p. 144-147). In between the early nineteenth century world of the arcade and Haussmann's design for a militarized republic exists Baudelaire's Flaneur. The products sold by fashion houses in these spaces mirror the architectural illuminations of the early arcades in a perspective that lastingly reserve 'the nave of the church;' outside the rigors of statist patrimony (Benjamin, 1927). Here, we see Benjamin's Marxist roots. Yet we also informed by his premonitory observance of the ideological drift of civil society toward what he argues is a phantasmagoria: a dream world of market based consumer-citizenship, that at once and the same time, the teleological mechanism by which authoritarianism is obscured. Evoking the physical debris of mass culture, Benjamin's arcade project is a 'materialist philosophy of history' that argues against the ideology functions (i.e. and even art movements) of history, in that all such notions mis-configure the present. Much like a fashion designer himself, Benjamin's contemporaneous approach to history during the Futurist and Surrealist moments looks rather to the discarded cultural contents for philosophical truths. Remnants are seen as a source of critical knowledge - and revolutionary consciousness informed through historical memories. According to Susan Buck-Morss (1991), Benjamin argued for a critical analysis of material history, by which an axis point served to initiate a political will to change. The continuity of his insights can be witnessed in work of Elsa Schiaparelli and Thierry Mugler. The politics of fashion are in their very source mobilized through an interpretive 'dialectics of seeing.' Case Study: Elsa Schiaparelli Elsa Schiaparelli: Apollo of Versailles cape, silk, metal and paste,(Image) photo The Metropolitan Museum of Art Source: Grove Art Online An Italian born French designer, Elsa Schiaparelli's work is best known for its Surrealist period in the 1930s, yet precedent to this period in the 1920s during the earlier movement acknowledged in this essay, Futurism. Her collaborative efforts energized work with Surrealist artists like Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Salvador Dal and Marcel Verts. Characteristic of the Modernist tastes of her avant garde following, Schiaparelli's work must have reflected their interests. Her simple and sharp designs parlayed their modern lifestyle in tailored suits and almost column evening dresses; and her witty persona esteemed her original designs with embroidery and complementary colors fit for an active clientele (Bryan 2010). Schiaparelli's training was greatly informed by a cosmopolitan upbringing, and subsequent married life. Born to an intellectual family in Rome, she was later educated in Switzerland and then Britain. Her marriage to Theosophist Wilhelm Wendt de Kerlor in 1914 encouraged a bohemian existence that led to encounters with a broad circle of international avant-garde artists and thinkers including Dada artist Francis Picabia and surrealist photographer, Man Ray. In 1925, Schiaparelli exhibited her work in Europe for the first time, albeit unsuccessfully. By 1927, Schiaparelli was showing her first collection under her own name at her apartment in Paris entitled, Display No. 1. The show included her initial entrance into signature sportswear. Within a year, Schiaparelli had registered her company and found her work touted in Paris Vogue. Responsive to growing demand, Schiaparelli's studio was opened at 4 Rue de la Paix under 'Schiaparelli, Pour le Sport' By the 1930s, Schiaparelli was well received as an artist, and exploited her talent on both sides of the Atlantic. Her work now recognized within both fashion and artistic circles, found a vehicle of representation through the work of photographer Cecil Beaton. In 1934, they traveled as the sole representative of Paris couture at a show in the Soviet Union. Back in Paris, she moved her boutique to 21 Place Vendme; the site where Jean-Michel Frank designed the interiors. Work was commissioned from Dal, Giacometti, Verts and Brard for the interiors. A modern designer in every sense of the word, Schiaparelli retained the ideological tropes of political jest in her first collection at Place Vendme: 'Stop, Look and Listen.' Schiaparelli was also engaged in the development of perfumery, and launched several successful ventures that included: Shocking (1937); Sleeping (1939) in collaboration with designed by Verts; and Le Roi Soleil (1947) in collaboration with Dal. In the mid-thirties, Schiaparelli's designs were avidly sought after for their influences from a range of contemporary artworks, and 'she in turn became their liaison to the world of haute couture' (Bryan 2010). Collaborative efforts with Dal were beyond perfume, with designs such as the 'Circus,' 'Shoe Hat,' 'Skeleton Dress' and 'Tear Dress.' In short, Schiaparelli was Surrealist even before the height of Surrealism became Populist through exhibition in Paris in 1938. Schiaparelli spent most of World War II abroad in the United States, but with equivalent vigor and humor employed in her designs. War was in the becoming, and she joined the troops through incorporation of military motifs into her work. Upon return to Paris in 1945, her 'Talleyrand' silhouette announced a new post-war era in fashion. Elsa Schiaparelli: Suit, wool, Autumn/Winter 1938-1939 (New York, Metropolitan Museum (Image) photo The Metropolitan Museum of Art Source: Grove Art Online While Schiaparelli never regained her artistic cach as a haute couturier her efforts continued with mass production into the 1950s until filing bankruptcy in 1954. True to her Surrealist roots, Schiaparelli turned toward another medium of artistry, and published her autobiography that year where she articulated her philosophy of fashion through writing. Case Study: Thierry Mugler The denunciation of the past in Thierry Mugler's futuristic designs in the late twentieth century provides a critical locus for the shift from modernist to post modern culture, and supports the foregoing argument about the assent of the avant garde as distinct from popular culture, yet highly derivative in distortion. His collections were marked by 'high camp' fantasies, organized by incorporation of material tropes; 'mix[ing] S&M with 1930s chic, space age with stone age, and angels with insects, creating a hard-edged 'glam' look[s]' (Widmayer 2010). Subversive elements played with during Schiaparelli's Surrealist era, are now circumscribed to an erasure, for the 'shock of the new' to be born again (Crane 2004). Mugler's talent was cultivated early. Born in 1948 in Alsace-Lorraine, France, Mugler received a classical education, with focus in the Arts, typical of European continental expectations. While at the Ecole suprieure des Arts dcoratifs de Strasbourg he joined the corps de ballet of the Opra National du Rhin. Mugler's training in dance, and its emphasis on the body, would further his career for years to come. His love of performance is reflected in his subject matter, in that he always chose 'dramatic-Valkyries, catwomen, Amazons, biker chicks and dragon Empresses-which would add to the theatrics of his spectacular catwalk shows starring porn stars, transvestites, supermodels and pop icons' (Widmayer 2004). Sex and its capacity for inversion was the 'outed' element of his work, and constitutes a distinct break from the earlier Surrealist pastich artists and still quasi forthright politics of Futurism. By 1968, Mugler relocated to Paris where he interned as an assistant boutique designer on the Rue de Buci. In the 1970s, he advanced his career through practice at fashion houses in London and Milan, and by 1974 had launched his first salon. In the 1970s, Azzedine Alaa also designed for Thierry Mugler's house which proved to be a significant step in his high profile career, promoted by icon singer's like Tina Turner and Grace Jones. Mugler's antidotal renderings of the 'moment' reflect his early ultramodern approach to building collections that could be ready-to-wear for a mere season. Nevertheless, Mugler's uncanny projects attracted high caliber clientele with a portfolio of celebrity and political afficionados. Mugler saw his zenith in the 1990s with his first haute couture collection. He also knew how to conduct an immediate recuperation on 1980s masculine power through enhancement and changes to his menswear line, and release of the perfume Angel in both Europe and the United States proposed new directions in his marketable worth. He also expanded to music video direction, with George Michael's song 'Too Funky,' and including well known motorcycle corset piece. The gender inversion was complete. Upon the closure of his house in 2003 due to a shift in consumer market interest, Mugler redirected his energies into photography, and contribution to theatrical productions such as Cirque du Soleil's Zumanity through costume design and artistic direction. A resurgence of interest in his work more recently, prompted the 2008 revival of his work following the exhibit, 'Superheroes: Fashion & Fantasy' Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. Surrealism 21st century The question of surrealism in the 21st century is not one of introduction to a discreet set of terms within fashion design, and in culture in general, but one of continuity and material knowledge within the training of the designer, and his or her dreams. For Elsa Schiaparelli, Surrealism was an actual School of Art or movement as it is perhaps best said, and those creative impulses found a current of dialectic amongst other creative intellectuals vested in the dynamics of change. Like all avant garde movements since that period, Surrealism and surrealist artists served as a critique of Modernity, and its logics of authoritarian, class stratified, patriarchal, and rationalist determinants. Within the History of Surrealism, as we see, commercial and popular forms are approached gingerly. Contrary to the precedent Futurist movement that found energy in rationalist and scientific aesthetics and discourses so inherent within the temporal interests of early 20th century modernist thought, Surrealism was truly avant garde in its nascent stages, as it claimed no overt political agenda beyond the movements 'manifesto' and real political confrontation was, in the last instance, in the technical means of production. Throughout the twentieth century, the market then becomes the dynamic influence on fashion, and its expansion into ready -to-wear took mass consumer commodification into a realm previously unseen. Surrealism was there for power that was ephemeral. Dialectics of desire and consumer-citizenship were no longer the exclusive provenance of interpersonal exchange nor the sovereign allegiance to the state, but could be purchased for a price on the market. As we have seen in Walter Benjamin's seminal contribution to the topic, from which most theoretical inquiries into the period are in reference to, fashion beyond all other forms of creative production, moved masses who found a flexible instrument for the reconfiguration of personal identity amongst parallel social identities. As late capitalism forged new relationships of flexible accumulation through market expansion and contraction, fashion responded with a new Future-tradition that was at once and the same time, deconstructionist. Thierry Mugler's late modern work initiates a discussion on Surrealism by way of emphatic 'surrmontage.' Although not deconstructionist in the Eastern sense, as in Japanese Designer, Issey Miyake's work, Mugler's approach is clearly European, yet self-consciously post-modern in its overture to hard core whimsy. Have market forces bred new eras of creativity, or do they simply cultivate what Benjamin articulated as Ur knowledge in the present The coexistence of Futurism and Surrealism in the earlier part of the 20th century, is perhaps relevantly revisited in the 21st, as Art has a convention all its own. The impact of consumer consciousness derived from fashion marketing may give us some clue. In the post-modern moment, it is not surprising that something as mundane as fashion marketing research has taken to deploying semiotic methodologies toward comparative textual (read: textile) analysis. Conclusion In Ernst Simmel's (1905) The Philosophy of Fashion he provides Walter Benjamin with the 'general general condition' of ready-to-wear consumer identity. Benjamin's work on the Arcade project and its attendant market of fashion products denotes that current analyses on design as evidence of his theories on historical materialism and its relationship to the formation of capital, serves as a roadmap for inquiry into the investigation of colleague Schiaparelli's work, and the European lineage that informs the late capitalist designs of Thierry Mugler. Even if post-deconstruction cannot seem to find its way back even to the anti-aesthetics of Frederic Jameson's (1983) revisionism of subversive aesthetics in movements such as Punk and its precursor, Situationism, toward a definitive post-modern (and this is unthinkable) school of aesthetic capital, inquiry into the material traces of our current ideological production are fun. If bourgeois liberalism fragments the skin of the mass for more efficient capital implantation, we automatically look to material forces and their relation to the construction of temporality for insight and inspiration. Throughout this paper I have argued that the aestheticization of social life is a politics that is dependent to the demands of the marketplace and its capital flows. David Harvey's (1987) work on this topic has been particularly informative toward explanation of the episteme or productive force contributing to the constellation of knowledge known as 'postmodern' theory. Surrealism cannot be studied in a vacuum. Only fashion is available to differentiate the bourgeoise individual from her surroundings as the progression of design takes the 'wearer from the norm or, through imitation' to assimilation into a group. And now we know the technology of imitation and copy so present in Surrealism and the 'false luxuries' of the working class so explicit within the pauperism of deconstruction. Anything can furnish Simmel's general condition; resolv[ing] the conduct of every individual into a mere example (Wollen 2003). Trompe l'oeil becomes our template. Fashion as Self. Surrealist thought requires a Self that is sublime, and available for escape into an array of ideo-tropic dreams. Surrealism invites us to reinterpret ourselves if we only succumb to our true calling: our authentic identification in the sublime and subliminal beckoning of fashion advertising; metaphysics of consumer consciousness. Bibliography Ades, Dawn and Gale, M., 2010. Surrealism. Grove Art. Oxford Art Online. Available at: http://www.oxfordartonline.com Baker, Brian, 2000. In the Post: or, the Work of Art in the Age of Digital Simulation. Muse Project. Benjamin, Walter, 1992. 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The Concept of Fashion the Arcades Project. Boundary, 2, 30:1. Durham: Duke University Press. . Read More