Quote of the Month

Fashion is inconceivable except as image. Fashion plays out in images, not on the streets. The fashion industry is intimately entwined with the logic of the illustration, the presentation. What stimulates our imagination are the illustrations, far too rarely the clothed individual himself. Less and less do we see the clothed person as an image, but more and more as a two-dimensional interpretation of that image. There is no fashion without the resonance in the logic of the illustration.

Lauwaert, Dirk, ‘I. Clothing and the inner being II Clothing is a thing III Clothing and Imagination IV Democratic snobbery’ in Brand, Jan, and Teunissen, José, Editors, 2006, The Power of Fashion: About Design and Meaning, Arnhem: ArtEZ Press and Terra Lannoo. pp: 183

This month's quote concerns fashion's relationship with images, and particularly the notion that because fashion is mostly perceived through images (such as those in magazine spreads) its aspect s flat. Yet this disconnects fashion from its very real haptic or tactile qualities. In exploring how and why fashion has become so popular as to be used in the promotion of such a wide variety of products, as I attempted to explain in my paper presented at the 2nd Global Conference on Fashion in Oxford, in part this is due to the very tangible nature of fashion. For everyone, the touch-quality of fashion is something that is perhaps very specific to the enjoyment of fashion - while we can all aspire to the images perpetuated through glossy fashion magazines - in ''real=life'' we also experience fashion through touch - with the clothes both in our wardrobes and those we encounter in shops. It is this tangible quality that many non-fashion brands and products seek to emulate in attempting to attach the idea of fashion to enhance the allure of their own products or services. Visible in the car industry, electronics and food. While the image of fashion remains important it is through the physical notion of touch that we perhaps truly experience fashion.

Quote of the Month

We will not be afraid to associate the arts with the most frivolous of fashions, since one ought to find Montesquieu and Racine alongside pom-poms and ribbons on a well-equipped toilet table.

Journal des Dames, 1761

Taken from Roche, Daniel, Trans. Jean Birrell, 1994, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Régime, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Quote cited in Davis, Mary. E. Davis, 2006, Classic Chic: Music, Fashion and Modernism, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. pp 6

I came across this quote while (re)reading the introduction of Mary E. Davis's excellent book Classic Chic: Music, Fashion and Modernism, a thoroughly researched treatment of the connections between fashion and music and their relationship to the emergence of modernism in early 20th Century Paris. Davis traces the links between France's emerging fashion press and its links with contemporary avant-garde music and performance. Famous names such as La Gazette du Bon Ton, Erik Satie, Paul Poiret, Coco Chanel, Igor Stravinsky, Ballets Russes, Jean Cocteau, Vogue, Pablo Picasso and Baron Adolphe de Meyer all play their part in the analysis of the interplay between the the seemingly disparate areas of art, fashion and music.

What intrigued me about this quote, and the book overall, is the realisation that many of today's 'innovations' in the fashion industry were actually made in the early 20th Century, and have now only been re-invented on a grander. more luxurious scale. Fashion brands such as Prada, Trussardi, Cartier, Louis Vuitton and Chanel, who have all become patrons of the arts in one form or the other, setting up foundations, hosting exhibitions or collaborating on product designs with artists, are merely following on from Coco Chanel who helped bankroll Ballet Russes productions or Paul Poiret's own art gallery, Galerie Barbazanges, housed adjacent to his couture house on the avenue d'Antin. At the same time, this quote reinforces how high-end avant-garde fashion magazines have always been dependent, and continue to rely, on the inclusion of content from the complimentary fields of art, music, architecture and film to assist in solidifying and supporting the so-called frivolity of their fashion spreads. Yet, perhaps perversely, as fashion seeks to become intellectualized, these other areas of creative expression seek to become more playful, envying fashion's ability to merge, and thrive upon, the popular with the exclusive.