Second Wave Constructivism in Fashion / Re-Materialising the Simulacra The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true. Ecclesiastes1
The word fashion comes from the Latin term faction- meaning the act of making, from facere to make. What has happened to the aspect of making in the world of fashion? This realm has long been removed from the physical clothing that populates it, replaced by a preoccupation with the act of dressing. Participants exalt this, creating a discourse with each other on 'who' they are wearing, what they are wearing, or more painfully, why. This conversation is not new, but a recycled, trend-based rehashing of ideas we had all forgotten due to the freakish pace of the industry. This conversation justifies an analysis of fashion that verges on the ridiculous. We commentate a created, separate world with such intensity and seriousness that players lose contact with the physical fabric on their skin. The fashion world has slipped over the edge of reality. Hyper-reality refers to a situation where objects no longer exist, only our selfimposed reflections and perceptions of them. Our consciousness is becoming increasingly unable to distinguish the real from the fantasy, and we are living in a dome of shaped and manipulated events and objects. In Baudrillard's 1981 Simulation and Simulacra, the idea is introduced that the image has gone from an obvious artificial representation of the object, to a preferred substitute. We exist in a depthless reality, a world that manifests as a series of unfolding signs, reflecting and folding in on themselves to reveal only the same: appearances leading only to other appearances. Our surroundings are repeated and twisted until reality reflects back on itself to a form a hyper state consisting only of surfaces. There exists a point at which the reason that apprehends and shapes the world becomes representation. The attempt to understand the world becomes the world itself; analysis has overtaken object. There is only the simulacrum, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept. (Hegarty, P. 2004). To simulate implies absence. The simulacra manifests in a complete lack of reality as an infinite loss of the tangible. I no longer interact with the objects that sit closest to my skin in any visceral manner, but instead imagine them as members of an ungraspable referential. Fashion has ceased to be material, instead re-imagined as a cheap metaphysical construct. Clothing has become disconnected from the perceptions which are bestowed upon the consumer by an exterior machine. The customer is lead by the media, by the internet, by misguided magazines with intentions only to sell. The industry is guided by social machines that construct stories to relay to each other every season. Roman Polanksi recently portrayed a psychiatrist mentally fucking a fur coat to sells Prada2. The lusty eyes of Sir Ben Kingsley sell more in this individualistic era than the garment they are focused on. They do not sell the coat, they sell the name. 1 Baudrillard's paraphrasing of Ecclesiastes 1.16. 2 I refer to Prada's Autumn / Winter 2012/13 advertising campaign, in which Helena Bonham Carter and Sir Ben Kingsley star in a short film entitled 'A Therapy'.
It is this emphasis on a name which must be addressed in order to disrupt cyclical reality. The designer is no longer instrumental in construction. The industry is defined by a wave of useless names that do not participate. The do not connect with a garment, but instead with a corporation, an audience, a controversial filmmaker and a bank cheque. The process of creation has been severed from the construction of clothing and hyped individuals no longer present physical collections, but slightly altered images of themselves each season. What was once an industry, a craft, a trade has become superficial to the point of existing only as in a simulation state. The fashion designer is not visible in clothing (we may call it the physical manifestation of the fashion world, but i'm not so sure). What do they contribute? What I wear today was not a result of the work of individuals, but of thousands of years of evolution, refinement and reinvention by a workforce. Fashion is a trade, an act of making which has been lost to a superficial shadow world. The designer is a vital occupier of the fashion hyperreality, but is redundant in the material state. We, the consumer, have excused this occupation for too long; the future of fashion does not need a designer. Making is the most powerful way that we solve problems, express ideas and connect with our world. What and how we make defines who we are, and communicates who we want to be. To shape material into form is the ultimate design, and the maker only gains full understanding of their creation when they maintain full control. The objects that populate our existence have evolved through thousands of years of quiet refinement. Our clothing fits us because of a union of workers repeatedly made something. Ultimately, what we wear serves as a map of construction, and making clothing invites a far greater 'discourse' than why it was chosen or who had their name sewn into the neckline. How does one supply their name without ever even touching that garment? The fashion world needs to be re-materialised, and the designer is not required to realise this. It is only through an open embrace of process that we can cease imagining our clothing and begin to properly interact with it. Second Wave Constructivism refers to the act of re-materialisation. The original term itself would be coined by the Russian sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo, who developed an industrial, angular approach to works strongly grounded in a utilitarian vision. Constructivism concerned a pure modernist principal of an outcome being determined by the process undertaken to achieve it. Traditional roles of artist and observer were discarded, with the players manipulating mundane materials and industrial technique to sever creations from that 'bourgeois dynamic'. It was the art of the industry; of the maker. The movement was announced Gabo and Pevsner's Realist Manifesto (1920): “The realisation of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic art. In them we do not measure our words with the yardstick of beauty, we do not weigh them with pounds of tenderness and sentiments. The plum-line in our hand, eyes as precise as a ruler, in a spirit as taut as a compass... we construct our work as the universe constructs its own, as the engineer constructs his bridges, as the mathematician his formula of orbits. We know that everything has its own essential image; chair, table, lamp, telephone, book, house, man ‌they are all entire worlds with their own rhythms, their own orbits. That is why we in creating things take away from them the labels of their owners... all accidental and local, leaving only the constant rhythm of the forces in them.â€?
The Constructivists dissociated themselves from the traditional role of the artist, removing titles and signatures from their pieces. The art manifested itself as the industry so revered by the new Bolshevik government: sculptures became machines and paintings became architectural plans. The artist became the technician as the movement pushed forward with an unfailing belief in the power of making. Second Wave Constructivism maintains an unconditional appreciation of process, but replaces the machine aesthetic with that of the handmade. The machine represented revolution, independence and power to the European Avant Garde, but experience proved the uncontrollable, wild technology championed by Modernist movements ultimately destructive. 3The machine era created an unstable discourse between the creator as an original entity and a reproduced, 'democratised' industry that was fed by the production line. Of course, a machine is integral to our industry, but the emphasis must be on the operator. Fashion will not reflect the dislocated designer or the dehumanised production line, but an evolutionary workforce, whose pure humanity informs every aspect of their creations. Innovation will be born out of touch, sight and sound, of our undeniable sensory experience. To re-materialise the simulacra, we must engage with a unique tactility. The designer must hold the cloth, attach it to it's partner and join a historical but evolutionary workforce that creates the most personal art of all.
Baudrillard, J. 1981. Simulation and Simulacra. France. Editions Galilee. Baudrillard, J. 1998. Simulacra and Simulations. Stanford University Press English, B. 2007. A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th Century. Berg Publishers. Gabo, N and Pevsner, A. “The Realistic Manifesto.” From Gabo. Hardvard University Press. 1957. Gamber, W. 1995. ' “Reduced to Science”: Gender, Technology and Power in the American Dressmaking Trade, 1860-1910', Technology and Culture, Vol. 30, No. 3, p. 455-482. Hegarty, Paul (2004). Jean Baudrillard: live theory. London. Continuum. 3 I refer here to the widespread disiullion that overtook the European Avant-garde after the First World War. The machine became associated with the loss of millions of lives (ironically including those of prominent Futurist and Constructivist artists), spurring the critical responses of The Dadaists and the Surrealists. (Hughes, R. 1980).
Hughes, R. 1980. The Shock of the New. Random House. Zabel, B. 2001 ' The Constructed Self: Gender and Portraiture in Machine Age America' in Sawelson-Gorse, N. (ed.) Women In Dada. MIT Press.