intro fashion ruling every domain of life, definition of "modern fashion" by Lipov

lipovertsky, simmel..

GENDER

Barthes in his attempt for a semantics of fashion in The System of Fashion, applies the economic system that is brought to the fore by Karl Marx and consisting three categories of production, distribution and consumption to a social institution: fashion. Thus he defines 3 states of clothing: real clothing, represented garment and the used garment. Real clothing is the when the raw material is used and the clothing is first produced as a prototype for its later stages. This real clothing then is provided with a symbolic mise en scène and becomes the represented garment. The image of the cloth performs a mimetic function as well as making the garment into a pleasing sight, or a pleasant arrangement. The used garment is the clothing after its purchase which usually doesn't satisfy the reasons that the represented garment was bought for. Barthes argues that clothes change their meaning and went under transformation at each of these stages. In the case of fashion, the system that Barthes proposes would reveal that these stages of production, distribution and consumption take place all at different locations hence are separated and can take place one after another, moving from one place to other and transform their meanings. However, in the case of architecture, these stages take place all at the same site. There is but one site. After the building is constructed, the "represented building" offers its presence and distributes its imagery to the city dwellers constantly through its outer appearance, envelope and façade. Its façade conveys a statement, an aesthetics and an imagery to the people looking at it. It becomes the signifier of the building for the citizen independent of its inner aspects. While the façade constitutes the represented building, the interior organization of function would be the real building. Hence, the sequenced transformations of meaning in fashion, which happen through external shifters and procedures, are superposed and exist simultaneously in architecture but are realized through different parts of the building itself: the façade, as the shifter, corresponding to its symbolic meaning and the interior organization and structure to its function. Looking at the history of architectural theory, this same division between the two would be found again but in a different context, in the context of gender; not by a mere coincidence but as a result of a complex network of sociological and psychological facts. Diana Agrest explores and describes in detail the question of gender and sexuality of architecture in her essay Architecture From Without: Body, Logic and Sex. She shows through historical analysis and examples the logocentrism, anthropomorphism and phallocentrism existing in the Western architectural ideology. Starting with Vitruvius and continuing in the Renaissance up until Le Corbusier, architecture is considered masculine. In the texts of Alberti and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, the male body is considered to have the perfect proportions of nature thus as the shifter between architecture and nature. Di Giorgio argues that the conception of a perfect temple and city must be based on the proportions of the male body. He also makes it clear that even though sometimes he writes "human body" he means "male body". This phallocentrism of architecture reinforced with the sensual character of woman and her having a less important role in social life, lead in the architectural theory to consider decoration and ornament as a feminine domain while architecture, structure, being a masculine one. If we try to understand this duality in the terms of "the real building" and "the represented building", the feminine symbolic ornamentation would correspond to the façade of the building and the masculine structure to the interior organization. Thus the signification of the building is defined and conveyed through the feminine symbolic façade. Because of the very strong tradition and ideology of phallocentrism clearly showed by Agrest and the impossibility of an architecture without signification argued by Barthes in Semiology and the Urban, we can conclude that the relationship between the signification and symbolism of architecture and the feminine style is one that is very strongly rooted in the western architectural ideology.

In the early 20th century happened a crack between the feminine symbolic façade and architecture. Loos wrote his book "Ornament and Crime". He considered the feminine ornamented façade as a crime because of the cultural and national signification that it possessed. Even though he was considered as a dandy by his contemporaries that in the Architectural Review was published an article titled "Adolf Loos and the English Dandy" in1983, he had one idea that was completely in opposition with the modern fashion: durability. In his book "Why a man should be well-dressed", he clearly states his desire for objects having a long-life term. He also states that a woman can seduce a man through transient fashionable clothing however this won't be a natural love, for love to be natural the woman should be naked. Towards the end of the book he goes even further by saying " Why we have to dress-up architecture is something that I do not understand." It would seem that with Loos's Ornament and Crime and Le Corbusier's Le Modulor based on the masculine body, the interior organization considered masculine was prevailing over the feminine symbolic façade and that architecture was emancipated from the feminine style and ornamentation. However, through the critical response of Adorno to Loos and Simmel's detailed explanation of fashion's structural strength, one can conclude that this movement was not an hyper-masculination of architecture, on the contrary, it was the modern fashion's prevalence over architecture and the bridging of feminine and masculine fashion. Adorno criticized Loss by saying that stylelessness is also a style. According to Adorno, anything considered to be purely functional such as airplanes would gain a symbolic meaning and the society would assign them a signification. Hence, the exterior appearance of a completely naked architecture would also have a signification. Adorno's criticism is further strengthen as one looks at Simmel's ideas on how fashion rules every domain of life. According to Simmel, both the dandy who accepts fashion to which he becomes a slave and the bohemian who opposes fashion and rejects every aspect of it, reveals the inevitability of modern fashion since the members of both groups receive acceptance and recognition through imitation and individual differentiation. ..

TIME AND SPACE

With the birth of modern fashion in post-revolutionary Paris, time prevails over space. Laver names it as "The Triumph of Time" and points out as the reason of his interest in fashion. Laver writes that in the pre-revolutionary cultures, the clothing was time resistant but fragile to geography supporting his argument with the folkloric european clothing which almost never changed in time but changed completely from place to place. This argument of Laver which rather stayed ambiguous as many of his ideas because of language as Michael Carter states, was further developed and structured by Lipovetsky. He names the fashion in Europe between the 14th and the 19th centuries as the primitive fashion. In primitive fashion clothing represented an hierarchical statue and thus it was able to endure time. At a larger scale, it represented the cultural values of that particular community. Même charge de fantasies, l'apparence, dans les âges de tradition, restate dans la continuité du passé, signe de primauté de la légitimité ancestrale. Whereas in the fashion of post-revolutionary Europe, which Lipovetsky calls as the "modern fashion", the founding principle is the negation of the ancestrale and desire of recognition through imitation of the contemporaries and not ancestors. He explains this transformation in the perception of time and space through fashion as such, Il y a eu uniformisation mondiale de la mode sous l'égide parisienne de la Haute Couture, homogénisation dans l'éspace qui a eu pour contrepartie one diversification dans le temps, lié aux cycles réguliers des collections saisonnières. Thus, in the modern western society time replaces the parameter of space and location. Loos also explains how in the primitive societies people walk slow and how the level of culture of a country can be understand from the pace of things. This new reparametrization of life according time and not space show itself in daily activities as well as architecture. In the societies of primitive fashion, architectural style endured time, differentiated geographically and represented strongly traditional and cultural values of the nation. However, in the societies of modern fashion starting from the 19th century, time becomes the transforming factor of architectural style. In the post-revolutionary period, we observe a diversification of style in arts and architecture and homogenization in space. (examples) art déco

In a society in which fashion has become the principle organizing system through the redefinition of the role of time in the western society, pace also ... Bibliography:

Sigmund Kracauer, The Mass Ornament
Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime
Adolf Loos, Why A Man Should Be Well-Dressed?
Gilles Lipovetsky, L'empire de l'éphèmére
Roland Barthes, The Fashion System
Roland Barthes, S/Z
Roland Barthes, Semiology and the Urban
Michael Carter, Fashion Classics From Carlyle to Barthes
George Simmel, Simmel on Culture
James Laver, Fashion and Taste
James Laver, Style in Costume
Neil Leach, Rehthinking Architecture - A Reader in Cultural Theory
Theodor W. Adorno, Functionalism Today
Diana I. Agrest, Architecture From Without
Kate Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture