issue 22
EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Alexandra Pink Carlin Praytor
BUSINESS DIRECTORS Audrey Linden Belinda Yan
Cover: Travis wears white feathered robe Mercy Vintage, blue sequinned sweater, beaded necklace, pin Down at Lulu's, pearl necklace, medal stylist's own, helmet Title Boxing from Recreational Sports Facility
CREATIVE DIRECTORS
Lieyah Dagan Noah Chantos Sarah Kersting Maddy Rotman
EDITORIAL DIRECTORS
Megan Lee Emma Hager
LAYOUT DIRECTORS Jiani Hou Adrienne Lee
EVENTS DIRECTORS Vanda Saggese Emma Sayiner
MARKETING DIRECTORS
Christine Oh Cindy Chou
WEB DIRECTOR Diana Tu
CONTACT
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SPECIAL THANKS MAC - Modern Appeal Clothing Mars Mercantile Mercy Vintage Down at Lulu’s Lisa Says Gah Berkeley Recreational Sports Vivian Chuang ASUC SPONSORED
Abby Blaine Alexandra Hazell Alexis Tran Andrea Garcia-Ochoa Lee Ava Mora Camilia Kacimi Celestine Griffin Chantal Herrera Charlotte Muth Christina Vaccarello David Potthast Doug Schowengerdt Elaine Cheng Echo Hansen Gillian Rose Grace Moceri Grace Schimmel Hanna Biabani Hannah Rasekhi Isaias Hernandez Issy Salim Jackie Wlodarczyk Jacqueline King Jairo Lima Jake Olshan Jake Trambert John Lawson Josh Perkins Katy Albiani Kylie Cherin Leah Hotchkiss Lian Song Lillian Wedbush Maddy Nimmo Maiah Johnson Maria Morales Reyes Mason Scott Matthew Sater Micaela Stanley Michelle Chen Natalia Baker Natalie Abber Nicholas Garcia Noelle Forougi Olive Curreri Paige Strockis Rebecca Freed Ryan Robson Sheldon Kaplan Sophia Dawn Sophia Swedback Sunny Young Vanessa Yang Yasmina Hoballah
Table of Contents
THE STAFF
06 Surveillance 12 The Atelier and the Encampment 15
Loss of Self
20 American Masculinity in the Hound Dog and the Butterfly 24
Fringe Contender
32
The Runway Heads West
34
American Garage
36 Belongings 42 Immigrants in American Fashion
Editors’ Notes Our past issue of BARE responded to the immediacy of political disarray; we reacted to this quandary by offering plans and protections for our future selves. Issue 22, naturally, reflects upon this strategy by pondering our national identity. Ownership of “our” United States, however, is difficult to diagnose. Americanness is indefinitely reassigned and reconfigured, rendering any attempt to solidify a statement on this country quite futile. Instead, we are using our 22 nd issue to observe this nation and engage with the motifs that have managed to cling to its masses.
Photography: John La swson
In “Surveillance,” we address national paranoia and attempt to capture the feeling of “always being watched.” Here, we are concerned with our rising inability to achieve anonymity in our own spaces and homes. “Loss of Self” depicts a departure from identity— rugged individualism is directly contradicted by a conformist attempt to reach sovereign standards of beauty and self. “Fringe Contender” engages with the ageold romance of American sport. We choose an arena within which the boundary between competitive violence and intimacy is blurred, emphasizing a dimension of masculinity and athleticism that is often overlooked by the pay-per-view masses. “Belongings” customizes the American culture of stuff. Our national pastime of acquiring goods leads us to question why we choose to indulge in physical things. In its essence, this iteration of BARE reflects upon various symbolisms of U.S. identity. For me, the completion of this task has only muddied this country under more layers of contradiction, beauty, exploitation, ambition, and absurdity. Perhaps, this complication is the best way to study something as ineffable as “America,” and Issue 22 itself.
At a meeting with a well-known style editor over the summer, I asked a question that made me cringe as I spoke: what was her favorite part of her job? She responded, “Thinking,” with an unnerving directness that made me shiver. When I began working with BARE two and a half years ago, I felt strongly that at every level and within every team, we should strive to make our magazine reflect the scholarship and rigor that UC Berkeley is known for. We all push BARE to challenge what is expected of a student-run publication. BARE, in its scope and readership, is unlike most commercial fashion magazines. As a university-funded, student-run operation, we acknowledge that our magazine sits just outside the fashion-media industry that we seek to penetrate. As a staff, we are frequently forced to reckon with the reality of our position within the fashion-media industry. That is to say, we are forced to acknowledge our non-position. While at times this can feel like a hindrance to being taken seriously, I have come to view our position as an advantage. BARE is realized by a staff of amateurs: amateur stylists, amateur photographers, amateur graphic designers, and of course, amateur editors. We are not, however, amateur thinkers. We have been trained for the last 15 years to theorize, conceptualize, and question. So, though we are young, it’s not our styling or editing alone that makes BARE stand out. It is our thinking.
Surveillance
Jonte wears gloves, top, shoes stylist’s own, pants Mercy Vintage Ayomide wears dress Lisa Says Gah, cape stylist’s own, shoes Mercy Vintage
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Photographers: Maddy Rotman, Lieyah Dagan Production: Michelle Chen, Kylie Cherin, John Lawson, Abby Blaine, Gracie Moceri, Jackie Wlodarczyk, Yasmina Hoballah Makeup: Kylie Cherin, Gracie Moceri Models: Ayomide Adeduro, Natalia Garban, Jonte Grant, Rachel Kim
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Natalia wears top, dress, earrings stylist’s own Rachel wears top, cape stylist’s own, dress Lisa Says Gah
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Jonte wears top, dress, gloves, shoes stylist’s own Ayomide wears gown stylist’s own
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Anyone who thought “homeless chic” could be left behind in the early 2000’s along with low rise denim and Juicy Couture tracksuits underestimates the willful amnesia of the fashion world.
The Atelier and the Encampment
The homeless often find themselves navigating a complex bureaucratic system to secure assistance from a government that sometimes seems to set up for people to fail. “They don’t make it easy and there is a lot of waiting,” explains Heather Freinkel. Freinkel is intimately familiar with this system. Since 2011, she has been an attorney at the Homeless Action Center, a nonprofit that provides free legal representation to the homeless. It’s a chilly Friday afternoon and the center is closed to the public. On a typical day, it is usually crowded with clients and lawyers. Freinkel wears a hoodie, a t-shirt and black Converse— nothing conspicuous or flashy. She spent most of the morning at the DMV helping a client get a replacement I.D. card, a requirement to apply for government programs. The work is neither glamorous nor lucrative, but Freinkel speaks about it passionately, in an upbeat, friendly voice. In Oakland, where the organization is based, economic inequality has left many low-income people without homes. In just two years, the city has seen a 39% increase in its homeless population. The majority are unsheltered. Supplemental 12 • fall 2017 • baremagazine.org
N.Hoolywood Fall 2017 (Look 1), 2017. Vogue.
O
n any given night, more than half a million people in the United States won’t have a stable place to sleep. A quarter of those people will be children. The lucky ones will have subsidized transitional housing, others will try to find space in a shelter. But shelters are often overcrowded and even those fortunate enough to have a spot may be forced to sleep just a foot away from the person next to them. Those leftover will be turned away and will struggle to stay warm through the night while sleeping in cars, parks, under freeways, or in alleyways. In the morning, finding food, a job, mental health care, housing, dental and medical services are daily trials.
Security Income and General Assistance doesn’t cover the cost of rent in the Bay Area, according to Frankiel. That wasn’t true even 15 years ago, she said, but public benefits haven’t adjusted to meet the rising cost of living. “Many people live in the neighborhoods where they used to be housed,” she added. The Homeless Action Center has an inconspicuous exterior. Only a small sign, partly covered by graffiti, denotes its presence. Inside, linoleum floors line a bustling office space, the back end of which is still an undeveloped garage with exposed ceilings. It is a long way from the velvet and gold-studded ateliers of high fashion houses. There is nothing glamorous about homelessness. Fashion houses couldn’t be further from homeless shelters. The two represent a dichotomous world–a growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots. One might assume that the homeless are an unlikely source of inspiration for high fashion designers. But “homeless chic,” as the trend has been called, is all too common on the runways of New York, London, Paris and Milan. Some trace it back to 2000, the year John Galliano produced one of the most controversial fashion shows in recent memory. Allegedly, Gallia-
no had taken to jogging in the morning by the River Seine. On his runs, he began to notice the homeless people living there. He was awestruck by their fashion—so much so that he returned to Dior, an icon of Paris fashion, for which he had been designing for 7 years, and came up with his infamous spring-summer couture collection. The premise? A line entirely inspired by the homeless. Galliano printed newspapers onto silk fabrics, created jewelry from discarded silverware and empty whiskey bottles, and meticulously layered dirtied, tattered and distressed clothing items to create a resemblance to those who sleep on the streets. It was a fashion line embarrassingly out of touch with everyday life. For the people of Paris, it was akin to Marie Antoinette declaring “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.” Let them eat cake! Naturally, the fashion world was set ablaze. If stirring up media attention was Galliano’s truest goal, he was undoubtedly successful. Every fashion reporter with a semblance of ego scrambled to submit op-eds. Some were unsure whether to call Galliano genius or tasteless. Many went with the former, espousing his disregard of tradition—his ability to rewrite the codes of fashion. People outside of the fashion industry were not so enthused. Mary Brosnahan, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, told the New York Times, “...the fact that this is a matter of life and death seems lost on Galliano and his Eurotrash following.” Anyone who thought homeless chic could be left behind in the early 2000’s, along with low rise denim and Juicy Couture tracksuits, underestimates the willful amnesia of the fashion world. That “history repeats itself” is a dull platitude that the industry can’t shake. Years later, designers are apparently still finding it hard to resist the alluring pull of aestheticizing homelessness.
But why? The answer might lie in fashion’s tendency to court controversy. In a saturated market, controversy can often be a designer’s most valuable asset. Provocative statements and irreverence are almost always rewarded with disproportionate attention. In February of 2017, Japanese designer Daisuke Obana garnered notoriety when he debuted a menswear line fashioned off of American homelessness. Obana, in his own words, was inspired by the ingenuity of the “so-called homeless or street people” who used space blankets as coats and plastic bags as waterproof boots. He layered oversized materials and even went so far as having some models carry trash bags. American streetwear upstart VFiles showed up at this year’s New York Fashion Week with another questionable homage to the homeless. The show, part runway, part rave, featured four unique designers. The final looks were designed by Christian Stone, who used materials like bubble wrap and tin foil messily cut and glued together. In addition, his models wore makeup that resembled dirt. He was praised by Vogue for attempting to redefine traditional fashion codes through “unconventional” constructions, but he ended up with a collection that largely amounted to stitched together trash. These scenes are eerily familiar. Déja vu is another cliché the fashion industry knows well. Not only did these designers shamelessly aestheticize the homeless, they committed a cardinal sin of fashion design—failure to be original. Guy Trebay defended Obana in a piece for the New York Times, saying, “...the glass of fashion is mostly a reflective device… it served as a reminder of an often invisible population.” Trebay assumes no difference between fashion and other forms of art, but to do so fails to recognize a paramount issue 22 • baremagazine.org • 13
distinction: fashion is a commodity. It is a cultural commodity, but it is still a commodity, one that generates trillions of dollars globally.
inequality. In the case of homeless-inspired fashion, the industry takes society’s most vulnerable and turns them into a spectacle for the wealthy.
Obana sold his designs for upwards of $500, far more than homeless people can expect to receive in monthly assistance from Alameda County. The homeless people Obana ripped off received none of his profits.
“It is exploiting someone else’s aesthetic and profiting off of it without asking permission and without compensation,” Freinkel said. “If [designers] did it and took all the money from it and used it to buy a building and put 50 homeless people inside then awesome, but until that happens it is just exploitation.”
Style is more intentional among the homeless than most realize. “Homeless people also express themselves with fashion,” Freinkel said. She sees little difference between these homeless chic designs and the appropriation of Black and Native American culture. In America, poverty often falls along ethnic lines so sometimes they are one and the same.
Loss of Self
Josh Perkins
Designers are not critiquing society when they put homeless-inspired fashion on the runway, nor are they making homelessness more salient. Few need a reminder of the homeless problem in the United States. Anyone who lives in a major American city witnesses homelessness every day. For Freinkel, mass apathy toward egregious levels of wealth inequality and purposeful marginalization of the homeless are the roots of the problem.
Fashion is a hybrid—both an artistic endeavor and a consumer industry. Like art, fashion can be a mirror of society. It can reflect the triumphs and ills of contemporary culture through the medium of clothes. Often, the result is beautiful and transformative. At its best, fashion challenges our conceptions of ourselves and our world. At its worst, fashion trivializes and exploits people and upholds
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VFILES Spring 2018 Ready-to-Wear (Look 58), 2017. Vogue.
“Housing fixes homelessness. It’s not rocket science... we have the tools, we have the strategy, we know how to do it, we have the money to do it—there is no political will…. It is not important to people who have power.” Freinkel said. “People know they’re benefiting from economic inequality.”
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Photographer: Lieyah Dagan Production: Noelle Forougi, Natalie Abber, Chantal Herrera, Olive Curreri, Hannah Rasekhi Models: Andrea Garcia-Ochoa Lee, Christian Park, Jairo Lima All clothing stylist’s own.
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American Masculinity in the Hound Dog and the Butterfly
T
he first boxers in America were black slaves on Southern plantations. The first professional boxers in America were black freemen in Northern cities. The best boxer America ever saw was Muhammad Ali, a black man from Kentucky. And he once said that boxing was just “a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up.” Of course, he was right. The modern sport of boxing was created for two express purposes: to distance men from the specter of femininity, and to act as a stand-in for colonialism. When Englishmen in the late 18th century saw their colonial empire beginning to fall apart, they searched for a new way to solidify themselves in their (fundamentally male) feelings of dominance; scholars and commoners alike saw the physical violence of close-quarters boxing as a solution to this fear of national effeminacy. The British, then later the Americans, convinced themselves that fist-fighting was inherently democratic: not every man had a good sword, but nearly every man could throw a good punch. However, those absorbing the punches were most often of a different skin color than those paying for tickets. Through boxing, traditional masculinity was reclaimed by white men, even as its most brutal and destructive elements were devolved onto black men. Boxing’s denial of black personhood occurred even as black cul-
ture was being stolen from black artists and repackaged for white audiences through the work of white performers. The most prominent of those performers was Elvis Presley. When Muhammad Ali and Elvis Presley first met on Valentine’s Day 1973, they didn’t know what to do with each other. Elvis had long secured his status as sex symbol of his era, and Muhammad Ali—who once called himself “The Elvis of Boxing”—was in the prime of his career. The pretense for their meeting was a photoshoot in which Elvis would present Ali with a gift: a $3000 Elvis-esque silk robe emblazoned with “PEOPLE’S CHOICE” on the back in bright blue rhinestones. But after the gift presentation and photo-op, neither man was quite sure how to act. Ali’s assistant said of the meeting, “Both of them looked at each other like good-looking women would look at each other to appraise how they look.” They talked in Ali’s hotel room for just half an hour before parting ways. At the time of this meeting, Elvis’s musical popularity was in a renaissance of sorts after a long, long drought. All through the 1960s and early 70s, the King of Rock and Roll’s career was increasingly dependent on film rather than music, and he starred in many, many awful movies. These were mostly family friendly musicals, excuses for Elvis to look handsome next to a beautiful woman in an
Muhammad Ali and Elvis Presley February 14, 1973.W
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Americans fill the gaps in our collective history by building the modern American Male hero twice as high, and, in the process, setting up those heroes to fall twice as far. exotic location. He always played a strong male lead in some daring profession: Elvis as race-car driver, Elvis as war hero, Elvis as sailor, Elvis as whatever. Elvis, of course, was none of these things. Masculinity, as is true for all performance of gender, is a categorization affirmed and reaffirmed into existence, and Elvis’s movies reaffirmed his masculinity many times over. Despite this monotony, he did star in some some gems, and by far his most passionate and true-to-self performance was in a movie titled Kid Galahad. The movie was a remake of an old boxing flick from the 30s, schlocky fare with a feel-good ending, but one particular scene stands above the rest both in its quality and in its relation to the masculine myth-making found in all of Elvis’s movies. The scene takes place on Elvis’s first day of fight training, when his inexperienced character agrees to spar with a professional boxer. As the sparring begins, Elvis takes punch after punch after punch to the face, never once punching back even as he begins to bleed. Onlookers gather to gawk at the one-sided fight, yet still Elvis patiently endures the pain of dozens of impacts. After a grueling two minutes, Elvis’s stoicism suddenly cracks, and he throws one single punch. It’s a vicious right hook to his opponent’s head, and it knocks the pro boxer out immediately. The onlookers are comically astounded at the knockout, a bug-eyed coach quickly takes Elvis aside, and the movie is entirely predictable from that moment onwards.
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This scene, however over-the-top, wasn’t mere fantasy; it was almost identical to the very real technique that Muhammad Ali used throughout his career. Ali dubbed it the “rope-a-dope” strategy, so-called because he’d sit on the ropes of the ring and allow himself to be hit over and over again, enduring brutal punches until his opponent was so exhausted that Ali could knock him clean out with minimal effort. It’s a genius strategy, banking entirely on the opponent’s masculine folly in relying on violence without considering consequence. But the “rope-a-dope” technique also implies another key trait of masculine senselessness in Ali’s own actions: his willingness to endure dangerous amounts of pain just to secure a small advantage. As should be obvious, this strategy was extremely self-destructive. Taking thousands of hits over decades of boxing did no favors to Ali’s ever more damaged brain, and soon he developed signs of Parkinson’s disease. He started making irrational decisions, fighting against doctors’ orders, threatening his opponents’ lives in dead seriousness. At one point he agreed to a fight with a Japanese martial artist who beat Ali so badly that Ali nearly needed to amputate his legs after the fight. Ali went in and out of retirement, unable to truly leave behind the sport that was leaving him physically broken and mentally unstable. Actor Sylvester Stallone, after watching one of Ali’s matches during this period, said “It was like watching an autopsy on a man who is still alive.” It was around this very time that Elvis Presley was struggling with his own self-destructive and violent tendencies. The King was becoming more and more obsessed with karate, delving into long cocaine-fueled rants during his live performances about the merits of the martial arts, even demonstrat-
ing awkward karate moves on stage for his fans. Then, without warning, Elvis’s wife left him for his karate instructor. This sunk Elvis into paranoia and anger, and he felt so deeply wronged that he briefly looked into sending a contract killer after his ex-wife’s new beau. A fan rushed the stage at one of his shows and Elvis assaulted him, paranoid that the stage rusher was an assassin sent by his old karate instructor. Rather than taking time to recover from the new stressors in his life, The King scheduled and played more shows that year than any other year in his career. Elvis held pride in enduring punch after punch to his psyche; ramping up his touring schedule was his stubborn, masculine punch back. But the punch didn’t land, and things only worsened for Elvis. The former star was a mental and physical shell of his former self. In an attempt to regain his sense of stability, Elvis sought solace in an old acquaintance he’d met years earlier, one who was suffering a similar downward trend in fortune. At 4 a.m. one chilly autumn morning, sometime in late 1975, Elvis Presley arrived at Deer Lake training camp in Pennsylvania to meet his old friend, Muhammad Ali. “He told us he didn’t want nobody to bother us,” said Ali about Elvis’s time living at his estate. “He wanted peace and quiet, and I gave him a cabin in my camp and nobody even knew it. When the cameras started watching me train, he was up on the hill sleeping in the cabin.” The pair spent days of one-on-one time together, discussing their mutual love of martial arts, visiting a local antique shop, and eating vanilla ice cream by the lake. The two heroes, both rapidly deteriorating as a result of their
own stubborn, violent, masculine tendencies, found simple comforts in their plain, quaint, and decidedly unmasculine time spent together in the Pennsylvania woods. If only for a while, all was well and peaceful for them. When Elvis left Deer Lake, he returned immediately to a grueling touring schedule and also—tragically—back to his festering drug addiction. He died two years later. Muhammad Ali, a shadow of the fighter he once was, retired from boxing just a few years after. **** The American Dream was always a masculine dream, one of untempered expansion and brutality. Patterns of action, speech, and violence create the male archetype - the masculine standard. Each quality is deemed either masculine or not, and thus desirable for men or not. Any man’s deviation from the standard threatens the very foundation of the carefully structured male. Perhaps the American emphasis on maleness is just overcompensation. Unlike other, older nations, the United States has no unified cultural background or deep collective history from which one can pull stories of great men to hold up as masculine exemplars. Americans fill in this gap by building the modern American male hero twice as high, and, in the process, setting up these heroes to fall twice as far. Just as the categorization of masculinity is itself a fragile construction, so fragile, too, are those who have been extolled as embodiments of the male category most completely. When Elvis and Ali, these two paragons of maleness, were burdened with the weight of two centuries of this male American Dream, the Dream crumbled and crushed them. Matthew Sater
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Fringe Contender Photographer: Lieyah Dagan Production: Douglas Schowengerdt, Sheldon Kaplan, Alexandra Hazell, Leah Hotchkiss, Celestine Griffin, Arny Chang, Ava Mora, David Potthast, John Lawson Models: Travis Arenas, Mark Brinker, Evan Yoshimoto
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Evan and Travis wear boxing helmets Title Boxing from RSF
Evan wears dress Comme des Garçons from MAC, boxing glove Ringside from RSF Mark wears trousers Dries Van Noten from MAC
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Mark wears top, necklace Mercy Vintage, rings model's own, boxing glove Ringside from Recreational Sports Facility
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Travis wears PVC glove, fanny pack stylist’s own, beaded necklace Down at Lulu’s, earrings model’s own
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Mark wears top Mercy Vintage, wrestling jersey Down at Lulu’s Travis wears swimming briefs stylist's own
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Mark wears boxing helmet Title Boxing from RSF, top Mercy Vintage
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Evan wears Evan arm wears bracelet arm bracelet WalterWalter van Beirendonck van Beirendonck from MAC from MAC Mark wears top, necklace Mercy Vintage Travis wears earrings model’s own
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The Runway Heads West
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Anna Sui Spring 2017 Ready-to-Wear (Look 7), 2016. Vogue.
here has always been chatter about the future of New York Fashion Week. Mainly, if it has one. Over the past two seasons, in terms of big names at least, the answer seems to be no. First it was Proenza Schouler’s move to Paris, where they would align their ready-to-wear collections with the couture calendar, beginning with their spring 2018 collection. Then it was Rodarte, Thom Browne, Joseph Altuzarra off to Paris, too. Mind you, these aren’t the only names on the roster—in fact, New York Fashion Week is showing more collections than ever. But most of the younger brands, whose work is relied upon to drive the stateside industry forward, have left. It’s like the fashion world’s version of the moving-to-Canada-joke; a timely disenchantment with the nation’s way of being. Or something. And it begs the question: what’s up with American fashion?
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We may not have an answer, but designers are posing the question often, and in interesting ways. For his Spring 2018 collection for Calvin Klein, creative director Raf Simons paid the query mind and in a way that pulled it out of its industry-specific context. “It’s about American horror and American beauty” the show notes read. And how literal his interpretations! The show began with a series of satin pieces, most notably western-style shirts with accentuated, multicolor yokes. These shirts were paired with slim-fitting trousers, also in satin, and, as you might imagine, cowboy boots. When in bubblegum pink and taupe, the tops scream “Welcome to Dollywood!” When in murky brown and burgundy, something more sinister. And I could go on about the 1950s-style evening gowns erected in body-bag material, or the tank imprinted with a woman who looked to be the tragic Sharon Tate. Horror, beauty, you get the point. But it is, really, the idea of those opening looks—tough and earnest, rendered
in delicate fabric—that is most striking to me. Indeed, they seemed to be an homage to our nation’s sweeping sentimentalism for the American West. A sentimentalism that transforms the conquering of lands and bodies into the glory of rugged individualism.
Perhaps the proliferation of western wear — specifically the cowboy iconography — will force the industry to ask who all of this is really for.
Whether or not Simons was trying to invoke a fraught history—identifying “good” and “evil” is one thing, acknowledging complexities, even erasures, another—is unclear. But his use of the iconographic, near-mythologized tropes of American dress is enough to get one thinking about the symbolic underpinnings of a garment. Of course, Calvin Klein was not the only house to show western wear—or cowboy clothes or rodeo regalia, whatever you want to call it—this season, or in the few seasons prior. And there’s something to be said for that, too. There have been, over the past year, cowboy clothes at Rodarte, Ralph Lauren and Anna Sui. At Elie Saab, Margiela and Adam Selman. At Coach, Acne Studios, and Alexander Wang. If three is a trend well, then, western wear is that a few times over. The simplest explanation of this runway trend is that western wear just looks good. Even in their souped-up, rodeo-style versions (more tassels! more piping! more metalwork!) that classic shirt still exudes an attractive steadiness. Western silhouettes will always be clean, timeless, flattering. And there isn’t much to argue with when it comes to a pair of well-fitting bootcut jeans; the first time I ever wanted sex was when I watched a denim-clad Paul Newman traipse around his cattle ranch in HUD (1963). But clearly, this proliferation is being driven by mechanisms beyond those of aesthetics. In a time of such renewed political urgency (and divisiveness and fervor), most designers are hesitant to make collections that are merely innocuous displays of clothes. Because really,
what do “just clothes” matter when Britain is dealing with Brexit, when Germany is fighting off populism, when America is dealing with Trump? As ‘alternative facts’ swirl, the old fashion-as-escapism adage tastes newly bitter. In this regard, the cowboy thing almost makes sense: by nature, the clothes are tough and timeless and by practice, they’re inherently American. And because they’re inherently American they are, at this juncture especially, deeply existential. But within the parameters of nationhood, the who am I question inevitably bumps into the who are we. If the Cowboy— stoic, manly, independent—is some national mascot then, like our history, it’s a fraught one. In his singularity and machismo and whiteness, he’s hardly the face of a nation, much less an actual industry. Indeed, the history of the “American” cowboy is the history of the Mexican vaquero and the history of Texas blacks who, born into slavery, eventually became cattle ranchers. According to archival work put forth by the Smithsonian Institution, one in four cowboys in the Wild West was black. And so the thin veil of John Wayneian representation—thinner than the saloon facades on a Warner Brothers backlot—evaporates. The Cowboy-as-icon is violently white in its misrepresentation; the cowboy-as-historicalfact is a grave and complicated, but nevertheless diverse, institution. Fashion has always had a (mis)representation issue.Weight, skin color, wealth, appropriation— these are constant and endless points of runway blunder. And so maybe designers’ renewed preWoccupation with trying to capture, or comment upon, Americanism is a necessary invitation into the tackling of its industryspecific issues. Perhaps the proliferation of western wear—specifically the cowboy iconography—will force the industry to ask who all of this is really for. Emma Hager
Ralph Lauren Fall 2016 Ready-to-Wear (Look 2), 2016. Vogue.
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American Garage
“For all it contains, that garage just might be a scale model of the Universe – God knows both
Materialism, Granny and the American Dream
are full of mysteries.” berries and peach trees. Further, its residents are faced with quintessentially American problems: regular, hard-working people strive to stay afloat against the tide of poverty, fear and systemic racism. Many dream of money they never had, of things they never could buy. Dreams of Americans, American Dreams.
“So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies and walked off to look for America” -America by Simon & Garfunkel n the wall hangs a stop sign, two chairs suspended by wire, a pair of antlers, part of a Chevrolet grille cover, an elephant kite, shelves with spice tins and silver utensils far older than me. Also, an assortment of posters including a Wayne Thiebaud print of saturated cake slices, an image of the Golden Gate Bridge under construction, movie posters for Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the first Pokémon movie, and a Lichtenstein-style print with sexual connotations I never understood as a child.
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Stockton is a city with a complex history, settled during the California Gold Rush. It is a port city, although nearly 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean. It has been diverse since its founding, home to a range of ethnic groups, and originally inhabited by the Yokut peoples. Victorian mansions and run-down tract houses stand in age-worn equivalence and architectural juxtaposition. Stockton has seen hard times, filing for bankruptcy in 2012, plagued with a methamphetamine problem and high crime rate.
The American Dream is a notion to contend with, so sweet it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
Objects clutter the floor, save a small aisle between the garage’s two doors. These include an exercise machine that turns the user upside-down, an easel stained with paint, shelves overflowing with large books and jars, a large shovel, gardening shears, a bucket full of Country Home magazines, and a wicker basket containing wooden dowels, a simple cane, and a flimsy yellow umbrella. Amidst all of this, paintings. Paintings wedged together like books on a shelf and stacked in plastic bins.
Despite the tough reality of such a city, Stockton granted my grandmother freedom and space to lead the individual life of her choosing. Nancy’s attention was a scale, tipping its balance from side to side: she would drop everything to read a book, spend a whole day contemplating, take hours at a museum to read every single placard. An introvert, she often chose not to reveal her thoughts. Driving in her car, the journey trumped any destination, as smoke plumed off the cigarette she dangled out the window, far more enamored with the Redwood trees out the window than the road ahead.
Despite her contemplative tendencies and humble lifestyle, Granny appreciated the beauty of material things. She had a natural eye for value, and reveled in yard sales to look at the things people had accrued. She would trek around town to investigate garbage heaps for little treasures. She transformed plain things into special objects—a seed planted grew into fruit, a painting filled a blank canvas, a weathered antique was restored to its original beauty. If her house was a work of art, her garage was the used palate: beautiful without intending to be, splotches of color on a circle of wood.
These are some highlights from the garage of Nancy Lawson, my grandmother. I omitted a plethora of objects for two reasons: my words and time are limited, and I admit that for many, I haven’t the foggiest notion of their name or function. A walk through this garage is a hazy dream of materialism: every time you focus on one item, you notice something new, a part of the space, meaning abstracted by multitude, shrouded by a delicate veil of cobwebs. My grandmother was an eccentric, independent woman, a candidate for the American Dream in Stockton, California, and the pioneer of a truly American Garage. Esther Nancy Duchardt always went by Nancy. She was the middle child of three daughters. The eldest—Georgeanne—had blonde hair and blue eyes; the youngest—Florence—had brown hair and brown eyes. Nancy was a redhead with green eyes and skin so fair she glowed, overexposed in old photographs of her as a girl. Her family moved from Chicago to the rural California town of Stockton in 1943, when Nancy was two years old. 34 • fall 2017 • baremagazine.org
She was a talented oil painter in the plein air style, capturing rural scenes of California’s Central Valley. Scenes that recede year by year from reality to memory, fields razed to make way for outlet malls and housing divisions. She married a tall, gregarious electrician named Jackie Duane Lawson in Mexico and bore the first of three children at my current age of nineteen. Their personalities proved ill-matched, and upon their separation and divorce, Nancy went back to school to receive a college degree in Criminal Justice. She then worked long and late hours at a Juvenile Detention Center until her retirement. Upon the birth of my cousin, Lauren, Nancy became a grandmother. We always called her “Granny”—a humorous moniker given her young age and natural beauty. In the hot summer, she rarely wore more than a tank top and shorts. She smoked a pack of Marlboro Reds every day and
In many ways, the American Dream seems like a child’s image of a successful adult life. Children do not daydream about financial stability and a moderate lifestyle: rather, they picture material possessions, physical objects that they can use, look at and own. Hard work leads to success, leads to wealth, leads to more stuff, better stuff, so much stuff that you can fill a garage with it.
Photographer: Lauren Lawson
kept a large garden, teeming with wax beans, persimmon, blackberries, and rogue neighborhood cats with whom she seemed to have a mutual understanding. Sometimes she would have a horrendous bruise on her leg or arm, explained with little more than a shrug: “I fell in a hole in the backyard.” I remember the smells of her house: sharp turpentine and oil paint in the kitchen, sweet, rotting fruit in the backyard, and cigarette smoke that had a particular tendency to soak into my fine, blonde hair. Every morning when we would visit, I would bring her coffee in bed, with a spoonful of sugar and a splash of half-and-half. Each time, she would take a sip, a moment to consider, and send me back to adjust the proportions (“Too sweet! Add more coffee!”). For nearly four years now, Nancy has only visited us in our dreams, her spirit departed from Earth, her body gently lowered into the ground of Stockton’s cemetery. Stockton is a veritably American city. Quite literally, it is a city in America, the 62nd largest to boot (the 61st being St. Louis & the 63rd, Pittsburgh). It is pastorally picturesque: rather than “amber waves of grain,” Stockton is ensconced in a valley with green acres of almonds, straw-
At a glance, anyone would be justified to flippantly write off this space as a hoarder’s den. Nevertheless, perusing that garage was always one of my favorite parts of trips to visit Granny. For all it contains, that garage just might be a scale model of the Universe—God knows both are full of mysteries. Like the contents of the world, every object in that garage exists as an individual, placed in the space at different times. Everything has a story, although it may not have a reason. While my Granny might have filled this garage without intention, there is meaning in this display of materialism: within her American Garage, there are countless stories. Through these stories, Esther Nancy Duchardt lives on. Charlotte Muth
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Belongings
Yasmina
Photographer: Maddy Rotman Production: Yasmina Hoballah, Camilia Kacimi, Grace Schimmel, Ismail Salim, Maiah Johnson, Nicholas Garcia, Sunny Young Models: Yasmina Hoballah, Sara Boutorabi, Lieyah Dagan Clothing model's own
Where do you find your clothes? My mom works in Newport Beach, where everyone is rich with a vengeance and has really excessive closets, so sometimes her sweet clients will send me vintage pieces that they’ve outgrown or don’t want anymore. Some of my favorite outfits come from them. I also go to secondhand stores and Etsy sometimes if I’m looking for something specific. What is your favorite piece? My favorite piece is a pleated pink shirt I have. It looks sort of two dimensional and flat and the fabric is really stiff so the shirt doesn’t change shape with the body and always looks the same. It’s cool to see something on a hanger and know that it’s going to look exactly the same when you put it on. What was a major turning point purchase? Five years ago my mom gave me her high school prom dress; it’s an orange mini dress with a plunging, tulle-lined neckline. I’ve been three times my mom’s size since I was eight, so the dress does not at all fit me and never has, but it probably sparked my obsession with obnoxious 80s garments (which comprise 70% of my closet). Do you think, if you lost all your clothes, you would lose a big part of yourself? I don’t think so. It’s fun always having something to wear to a costume party and getting to share with friends, and being dressed in something vibrant definitely brings me joy, but I don’t think I’d be losing a part of myself. (As long as I got to keep my square dancing dress, my pink pleated shirt, my off-white shorts and a few other things. Those are a part of me and I would certainly die without them.) 36 • fall 2017 • baremagazine.org
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Clothing model's own
Sara
When did you start collecting? Why? I started collecting the Forrest Gump tapes three years ago. It started as a joke. I’ve never seen the film Forrest Gump, a fact that floored my roommate, largely because I am a film major and also, of course, because it’s a classic. So my roommate bought me a VHS tape for my birthday, and ever since, whenever she happens upon “a Gump”, she buys me one (you can find at least one at any Goodwill without fail). I add to the collection as well, and slowly we have amassed about 40 copies. I have no intention of ever seeing the film Forrest Gump, though I have heard great things.
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Lieyah
Additional Production: Michelle Chen, Inbal, Tal, and Chia Dagan Clothing model's own
How do you decide which cameras to purchase? I would end up buying the cameras that confused me the most; I almost never bought a film camera that I knew how to load or use. It was really exciting to figure out how they actually worked, though honestly there are still many cameras I have no idea how to operate. I don’t buy that many film cameras anymore, but it’s exciting to remember that I still have this archive of puzzles I can come back to at any point. What’s your favorite camera? My favorite camera is the Polaroid SX-70. A family friend gave it to me in mint condition, so I actually used it quite a bit. You wouldn’t know it’s a camera because it’s got a folding body. When I was younger, I would sometimes just open and close the body over and over again. It’s kind of like a magic trick. Aside from the Polaroids, I also really love the Canon Photura—it was one of Canon’s flops in the ‘90s. It looks like some futuristic gadget and a lot of people ask me if it’s a camcorder, but it shoots film like any other point and shoot. Why collect the film too? In the past few years I’ve mostly shot with my digital camera because of how expensive film is. A few months ago I lost most if not all of the photos I’ve taken with my digital camera in the past four years. When I was frantically searching my apartment for my hard drive, to see if I had backed anything up, I remembered I still had two boxes full of negatives and CDs from the past eight years. I never actively thought I was collecting them, but I’ve kept my negatives and CDs because they make my images tangible. I’m obviously also a hoarder for sure, but there is something really comforting about being able to physically hold an image in my hand, knowing that it can’t go anywhere. As told to Grace Schimmel 40 • fall 2017 • baremagazine.org
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Immigrants in American Fashion
D
iane von Furstenberg, Jonathan Saunders, Helmut Lang, Stuart Vevers, Laura Kim, Fernando Garcia, Prabal Gurung, Thakoon Panichgul, Sander Lak, Somsack Sikhounmuong, Joseph Altuzarra, Carolina Herrera, Tadashi Shoji, Naeem Khan. These are the names of only a fraction of the immigrant designers currently leading American fashion houses. Today, American fashion is led by many who exist within the lineage of American fashion history. This lineage includes designers from immigrant parents as well as notable emigrants who developed iconic pieces of American culture. The most influential—Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and Ralph Lauren—are each the children of Jewish American immigrants; Levi Strauss came from Germany to invent the iconic blue jean. By understanding where America has been and how fashion has developed, consumers can recognize the attempts of contemporary designers to remind audiences of fashion’s political importance. The narrative of who occupies America, both past and present, is vital to the understanding of American fashion. This narrative is more complex than the simplified versions of American history we’ve grown accustomed as it emphasizes the role of the immigrant in being the shaper of American ideas and not simply a beneficiary of the American experience. In fashion, the way that these ideas don’t melt entirely into an archetypical American status quo makes them works of nuanced art with something to say. The individuality of identity and heritage creates and inspires collections, and enhances the diversity of fashion as a medium of art. Therefore, to accurately describe the American branch of fashion culture, one must come face to face with the task of defining what it means to be American. What does it look like? How is it worn? Who is wearing it? The answers will be subjective and diverse, reinforcing the notion that American fashion cannot be truly represented by one fashion
even as the colors and shapes are fairly familiar. The hiring of Simons at one of America’s most prominent brands speaks to the quality of work he is trusted to produce, but is also a deliberate gesture by the brand to expand the narrative of what they stand for. As he states on his website, “I don’t want to show clothes, I want to show my attitude, my past, present and future.” Simons uses his work in fashion to draw attention to larger social issues. Calvin Klein, being cognisant of Simon’s personal beliefs, has let him represent the brand artistically, but also politically, in the hopes of attracting audiences who are looking for their beliefs and frustrations to be professionally articulated.
The narrative of who occupies America, both past and present, is vital to the understanding of American fashion. house or designer, but by the way in which many work independently, but in a symbolic cohesion, to make American fashion an ever developing concept. In 1962, Jacqueline Kennedy wore her first dress designed by Oscar De La Renta. The orange ensemble perfectly captured Kennedy’s refined elegance, a style that was carefully crafted to present her as the symbol of American femininity. De La Renta, originally from the Dominican Republic, soon became a notable figurehead of the intersection between fashion and political and social influence. His designs, worn by every American first lady since Kennedy, send the message that what defines American fashion is not geographical identity, but beauty and quality. His pieces serve to speak for the character of the women wearing them, but he has also used clothing as a way to represent American women as a whole. What is classy, smart, and practical, and how he could create pieces that accentuate these characteristics.
In the past year, political commentary has become a usual fixture of the prints and themes on American runways. At the joint Monse-Oscar De la Renta show, immigrant co-designers Laura Kim from South Korea and Fernando Garcia from the Dominican Republic and Spain, made their designs the center of the immigrant’s story. While the models walked, the voice of Robert De Niro told the story of an immigrant. The narration gives no name to the immigrant, but relates a first person perspective of the tribulations of his journey. In this way, the story became a ghost, a looming presence designed to represent the immigrant as vital to the collection’s existence.
We see this infiltration of immigrants in spheres of cultural American influence repeatedly in the current world of fashion, most recently at the New York shows. In his fall 2017 collection for Calvin Klein, Belgian designer Raf Simons did not shy away from commenting on the state of American politics. As the models emerged on the runway, the melancholic funk of David Bowie’s “This is not America” played eerily in the background. The juxtaposition of Bowie’s song to the pieces in Simons’s collection suggested anger; the unique perspective of an immigrant designer who is beginning to notice that America could become unrecognizable,
Prabal Gurung, an American designer from Singapore, sent his models down the runway in shirts that declared a bellicose social and political status. Ranging from “I am an immigrant” to “The future is Female,” the shirts textualized the sentiments surrounding Spring Fashion Week in New York, which took place only a couple weeks after the Women’s March. The tone was that of a collective fear, followed closely by an agitation that causes a desire to create work that contributes to the retaliation against the source of this fear.
It makes sense why a community of artists would be so affected by current politics, and so inclined to make political clothes. This community is one that not only needs diversity in order to thrive, but also needs immigrants. The lack of recognition of the minority and artistic communities in the current political era is creating tension, and by asserting their visibility in the face of a political atmosphere they can’t control, designers are using their work for personal catharsis. It’s also important to understand that immigrants in American fashion, or in any aspect of American culture, are not radically political in themselves. The talent of these individuals is what has made them the sources of power and influence they have become, and it is the failure of others to legitimize their existence that has made their success a radical statement. The presence of these individuals can be most starkly conveyed by their absence. In the absence of foreign influence, there is no American fashion to speak of. If you took away immigrants from its landscape you would find that there is so much missing from fashion history. Without immigrants, so many key components of what we now accept as American staples would simply not exist. It is not the role of immigrants to adapt to meet these constructs of national identity, it is the responsibility of American culture to provide the recognition and commendation immigrants deserve. We don't gain anything by being insularly nationalist, but we do gain much by challenging, and making more inclusive, our notions of what it is to be American. Fashion has not only recognized the importance of this progression, it has incorporated this outlook into its very identity, allowing belief in representation to become intrinsic to the creations of the fashion community. Micaela Stanley
Illustration: Jiani Hou
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