LCF MA Fashion: Culture, History, Psychology Book 2016

FASHION: CULTURE, HISTORY, PSYCHOLOGY

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LCFMA16

London College of Fashion, UAL

4 INTRODUCTION 8 JANA MELKUMOVA-REYNOLDS 11 ELLIE FODEN 15 PAUL BENCH 18 FENELLA HITCHCOCK 22 SARAH HARRISON 25 REBECKA FLEETWOOD-SMITH 28 LAUREN DE’ATH

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33 SHANAYA BAJAJ 36 LISA STRUNZ 40 LEONI SCHWANDT 44 JEMMA BEVERIDGE 47 CHRIS HILL LILLEY 50 FELICIA SCICLUNA 55 SHIRLEY VAN DE POLDER

Introduction Shaun Cole, Course Leader, MA History and Culture of Fashion Carolyn Mair, Course Leader, MSc Applied Psychology in Fashion and MA Psychology for Fashion Professionals

This publication, which accompanies the MA16 exhibition, showcases the pleasingly varied work of students completing Masters Courses at London College of Fashion, UAL who have opted to write a traditional dissertation. The students on MA History and Culture of Fashion are encouraged to investigate fashion, dress and style within culture and society as material objects, representation and practice, both historically and in contemporary contexts.

On MA Fashion Curation, students explore both the theoretical aspects and practical challenges of curating contemporary fashion and historical dress in a wide range of formats and locations. Lastly, the scientific study of human behaviour was introduced at London College of Fashion, UAL in 2014. Students on the British Psychological Society’s accredited programme, MSc Applied Psychology in Fashion, and the MA Psychology for Fashion Professionals, all apply concepts and theories from psychology to a particular context within the fashion industries in order to make a positive difference in terms of increasing knowledge, improving performance or enhancing wellbeing.

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The essays here - and the longer final Master’s Projects they synthesise - bring together theoretical work from a variety of strands of scholarship, woven together with quantitative and qualitative methods including ethnographic, close textual and visual analysis methods and archival research. The topics so carefully explored in the following pages are wide-ranging in their cultural, geographical, historical and psychological explorations.

The students’ work examines fashion, dress and identity through different historical and geographical spaces and across the many facets of contemporary visual cultures and human behaviour. While the topics here are diverse, reflecting how students are encouraged to select topics and research in relation to their chosen master’s course, they nevertheless reflect several common concerns and areas of thematic interest. These are: feminism and women’s identities, male identity and appearance and masculinities, social class and dress, ethnicity and fashion, the workings of the fashion industries and - lastly - the complex relationships between human behaviour, fashion, display, promotion and consumption.

Questions of publicity and fashion promotion need proper theoretical analysis. While this work is often carried out within marketing and management studies, there is a real need for the kind of historical, cultural and psychological theoretical scrutiny we see in the work here. In the last decade, social networking sites have become a major communication tool. While Facebook is still the most popular and frequently used, Instagram has shown that ‘pictures speak louder than words’. With 400 million active users every month, it has exceeded other social networks and is currently the fastest growing social networking site. Because of its recent introduction, research on Instagram is limited. The study presented here addresses this issue from a psychological perspective.

The fashion show as a form of promotion and publicity has been predominantly considered in terms of the spectacle, with a concentration on the still image of showpieces from catwalk shows. However, the catwalk show is reliant on movement and space and in an investigation of Alexander McQueen’s 2004 show Deliverance (based on the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) the construction of a political narrative is explored alongside the way in which a particular fashion show is deconstructed in the media. The catwalk show is also considered alongside fine art, experimental theatre and fashion exhibitions through the lens of the ‘uncanny.’ Proposed in relation to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s writings on the uncanny and drawing on the writing of art historian, collector and theorist Aby Warburg, the ‘uncanny’ is considered within temporary experiences in which the viewer takes on an engaging physical or mental role when considering the presentation.

While the catwalk show and fashion media are important to the dissemination of fashion, there are particular cultural intermediaries and roles within the fashion industries whose role needs to be considered. Many high street stores offer the service of a personal stylist

who is trained in how to dress a client based on their body shape and on colour analysis.

Personal stylists believe in educating their clients in how to dress appropriately for their body shape while still reflecting their identity. Despite the obvious psychological implications, the work of a personal stylist has not previously been explored from a psychological perspective. The role of the model and the practice of modelling, and its relation to the catwalk show, has been examined in recent years, from a socio-cultural perspective, addressing at issues of race, gender and sexuality as well as perceptions of the profession, but there has always been a focus on the West. Here concerns around modelling within the Jordanian city of Amman are considered to understand how the values and infrastructures found in traditional Bedouin and Jordanian cultures lead to a particular approach to modeling within fashion imagery for the Jordanian T-shirt brand Jobedu.

The area of attachment to clothing has received great interest within the fashion industry and there are many websites, books and artworks that explore the notion of clothing attachment. Experts within sustainable design have discussed the relationships we have with our clothing, suggesting designing according to the framework of emotionally durable design. In psychology, a well-known theory of attachment is applied to enable understanding of human relationships.

The paper presented here applies this theory in a completely novel way, in the context of fashion, in order to understand individual attachment to clothing. It is well understood that colour plays an important role in various areas such as food, space, environment and clothing. Despite this, an in-depth understanding of the effects of colour on clothing preferences is lacking.

Unlike previous research in this area, the study presented here uses a qualitative approach to

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enable participants to discuss their responses broadly and describe reactions towards colour preference during semi-structured interviews.

Changes in the fashion industry across time and in relation to changing social and economic factors are also raised within work presented here. The British women’s fashion footwear industry, particularly, was affected by a number of factors relating to technology, mechanisation, production techniques and retailing in the period following World War Two and here the ways in which these factors came together to result in a decline of this strand within British fashion industry is considered, utilising interviews with key players and previously unexplored

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discussions from footwear trade press and literature.

The range of intellectual activity here augurs well for the continuation of investigation of fashion related subjects on Master’s courses at London College of Fashion, UAL on the relatively new postgraduate courses in psychology at London College of Fashion, UAL and for the more established MA Fashion Curation and its important balance of theoretical and practicebased approaches. Whilst this is the final year of MA History and Culture of Fashion, the course has now developed and combined with the former MA Fashion and Film under the overarching title of MA Fashion Cultures: one course but with two discrete pathways.

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I like to think of my leg as a fashion accessory: Prosthetics and phantom limbs in contemporary style media Jana Melkumova-Reynolds MA History and Culture of Fashion

Viktoria Modesta photographed by Philip Trengove fur Numero Russia, September 2015

Fashion and prosthetics may appear at first glance to be unlikely bedfellows. Yet a tiny number of pioneering fashion scholars, who are by definition interested in the body and its decoration (Vainshtein 2012; Hall and Orzada 2013), have begun to extend the concept of adornment beyond recognised forms of dress and examine items that were hitherto perceived as belonging specifically to the medical domain. This dissertation embraces a similar outlook and expands upon the currently available research. Aiming to be an interdisciplinary project, it sits at the intersection of fashion scholarship, gender theory and disability studies.

The approach of this study has been informed by the work of anthropologist Joanne Eicher, who argued that any attachment or extension of the body can be seen as part of the ‘visible self’ (Eicher, Evenson and Lutz 2000).

Drawing on her ideas, fashion theorist Ingrid Loschek postulates: ‘As long as clothing and accessories – however outrageous they may be – are connected to the body, they belong to a fashion system’ (2012, p.26). Following these frameworks, this dissertation regards prosthetics as a form of dress and adornment.

The body is seen as ‘socially constructed, always situated in culture and the outcome of individual [fashioning] practices’, according to sociologist Joanne Entwistle (2000, p.11).

Dress, for Entwistle, is a ‘practice’, a result of active clothing choices made by the individual (2000, p.11). For this reason, this dissertation considers not only prosthetics but also an absence thereof as a form of dress; when an amputee appears without prostheses, this look is a result of his or her decision not to wear them, and thus is just as relevant to this study. Unadorned stumps that are deliberately made visible are as much part of the fashioned body as prosthetics.

The aim of this dissertation was to unpack the constructions around prosthetics and

amputee bodies in contemporary fashion media, to determine how amputee bodies are ‘fashioned’ and how – and if – they are gendered. To achieve this aim I executed a close reading of representations of amputees that have appeared in the media in recent years and compared them to sources from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In addition, an in-depth interview with the female amputee model Viktoria Modesta (Figure 1) helped to triangulate the research and add a personal dimension to the narrative.

The key sources of this enquiry included photographs of amputees and prosthesiswearers in contemporary glossy magazines, perfume advertisements, catwalk shows, music videos, and images in social media, as well as verbal narratives. The majority of these sources were less than two years old at the time of writing and had not yet been studied academically. The ambition of my study was to shed new light on the way in which the disabled body is fashioned in twenty-first century media, and to determine how contemporary cultural and gendered connotations of disability differ from those seen in earlier eras. To enable this comparison, I turned to Victorian, Edwardian and midtwentieth century texts (in the broadest sense of the word) concerning disability and their critiques by scholars from various disciplines, from history of medicine (Ott, Serlin and Mihm 2002) to visual studies (Smith 2006), before applying similar frameworks to contemporary sources.

One of the key arguments of this dissertation is that, in the twenty-first century, prosthetics are increasingly constructed as identity tools and desirable consumer items, and thus being relocated from the stigmatised domain of assistive technology, with its connotations of necessity and work, into that of pleasure and choice. Through these practices amputee bodies are becoming visible in the media as ‘the finest consumer objects’ (Baudrillard

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1998: 129). Images of amputees wearing ‘covetable’ prostheses do the symbolic work of integrating disabled bodies in the mainstream visual narratives. Throughout my research, however, it became apparent that such ‘consumerisation’ only occurs within the images of female amputee bodies; men’s disabled bodies, I found, are excluded from the system of fashion, even when they appear in fashion media, and are constructed instead through tropes of productivity, efficiency and patriotism, invoking Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘docile bodies’ – ‘subjected, practiced, trained bodies’ (1995, p.136), ‘body-weapon[s], body-tool[s]’ (1995, p.151), that are produced by ‘entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down, and rearranges it’ (1995: 141).

This study underwent a number of permutations over the course of its development. In one of the earliest drafts, its provisional title included the terms ‘posthumanism’ and ‘postgenderism’ because, at the preliminary research stage, I had assumed that ground-breaking contemporary prostheses, and emerging discourses around disability as super-ability, would constitute a new type of body. I had expected to find a body that transcended the gender binary and extended beyond its own ‘(hetero)normative,

References Baudrillard, J. (1998 [1970]) The consumer society: myths and structures. Nottingham: The TCS Centre, Nottingham Trent University.

Bordo, S. (1999) The male body: a new look at men in public and private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Braidotti, R. (2013) The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Connell, R. (2005) Masculinities. 2nd edition.

Cambridge: Polity.

Eicher, J., Evenson, S. L. and Lutz, H. (2000) The visible self: global perspectives on dress, culture and society.

New York: Fairchild Books.

Entwistle, J. (2000) The fashioned body: fashion, dress and modern social theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Foucault, M. (1995) Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York: Hall, M. L. and Orzada, B. T. (2013) ‘Expressive

prostheses: meaning and significance’, Fashion Practice, Vol. 5, Issue 1, pp. 9-32.

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(re)productive function’ (Seely 2013: 22); a body that would need to be explained through Donna Haraway’s (1991) and Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) cyborg and posthuman theories, rather than classic texts on gender.

What I found instead was the opposite; when it comes to recent representations of amputees in fashion and lifestyle media, the gender binary is stronger than in the images of ablebodied models. This study has demonstrated that within contemporary visual culture the male disabled body is conceived of as being functional, productive and, in some instances, patriotic – an incarnation of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 2005); conversely, the female disabled body is a body of pleasure and consumption. This vision reiterates the traditional ideas of masculinity as ‘hardness and power’ (Bordo 1999, p.55), and femininity as leisure and display. If the discourse of fashion de-medicalises disability for female amputees, for their male counterparts it is the discourse of patriotism and self-control that has achieves such de-stigmatization. A reaffirmation of accepted gender patterns – ‘men act, women appear’ (Berger 1972, p.30) – revalidates disabled bodies, allowing them to enter the mainstream visual culture and become socially acceptable.

Haraway, H. (1991) Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge University Press.

Loschek, I. (2009) When clothes become fashion.

Oxford: Berg.

Ott, K., Serlin, D. and Mihm, S. (eds.(2002) Artificial parts, practical lives: modern histories of prosthetics.

New York: NYU Press.

Smith, M. (2006) ‘The vulnerable articulate: James Gillingham, Aimee Mullins, and Matthew Barney’ in Morra, J. and Smith, M. eds. The prosthetic impulse: from a posthuman present to a biocultural future. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Vainshtein, O. (2012)’ “I have a suitcase just full of legs because I need options for different clothing”: accessorizing bodyscape’, Fashion Theory, Vol. 16, Issue 2, pp.139–170.

I have the face of a vampire, perhaps, but the heart of a feministe: Why the image of Theda Bara haunted fashionable visual culture from 1966 to 1973 Ellie Foden MA History and Culture of Fashion

In the 1966 countercultural newspaper, the International Times adopted a publicity photograph of silent film actress Theda Bara for its logo and a year later photographs of her appeared on two psychedelic posters produced in the United States. The first was designed by David Adickes for The Love Street Light Circus, a nightclub operating in Houston, Texas, while the second, by commercial psychedelic artist Peter Max, appeared on the cover of US-based literary magazine, Evergreen Review.

Analysis across a range of psychedelic posters contemporaneous with these two examples suggests they in fact corresponded with a wider trend for intertextual references to the femme fatale archetype in this medium, a figure to which the origin of Theda Bara’s cinematic vamp persona is frequently traced (Keesey 1997). While many of the cinematic and art historical femme fatales quoted in psychedelic poster art appeared in an oriental

guise, all images of Theda Bara were derived from either Cleopatra or Salome, films in which she played an orientalised and historical femme fatale. This trend can be considered a reflection of the renewed Western interest in the Orient, which characterised the 1960s and 1970s, as Simon Reynolds notes ‘the vocabulary of late-sixties fashion was based either in exoticism through time or exoticism through space’ (2012, p.185). Theda Bara, as an orientalised silent era cinematic vamp, stood at the intersection of these trends.

While the revival in orientalism was driven by a fascination with, rather than a fear of, the ‘Other’, it was also strongly associated with the hippie quest for enlightenment, as typified by the widespread western interest in Eastern mysticism. Everything about the composition of the Theda Bara images quoted in the countercultural context contributes to a sense of the mystical, from their age, to her

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strange deathly appearance, and languorous or malevolent return of the gaze, which in turn suggests the vengeful or protective aspect of a deity. On the Love Street Light Circus poster she appears in a headdress reminiscent of the Great God Pan, while her serpent bra and headdress evokes the image of the ancient Minoan snake goddess, identified as an example of the ancient mother goddess to whom Pam Keesey (1997) traces the femme fatale archetype.

Woman has long been associated with nature, De Beauvoir recalls how the mysteries of childbirth and agriculture in the ancient world gave rise to the worship of the ancient mother goddess and when technological developments enabled mastery over the land, she was usurped by patriarchal religion (1987 [1949], p.108). Bram Dijkstra describes how, in the second half of the nineteenth century, technological and scientific developments saw ‘woman, the feminine principle of nature’ positioned as ‘the thief of progress’ which gave rise to the nineteenth century incarnation of the femme fatale (1996, p.26). The 1960s were also a period of technological progress, but this was accompanied by an underlying countercultural disaffection with the present.

The counterculture nurtured a utopian vision of the future (Gastaut and Criqui 2005, p.5), based on the belief that the world really could be a better place; however this was not to be achieved through unchecked progress, but by looking to perceived ‘primitive’ cultures, to nature and the ancient past. Reynolds identifies this yearning for the ancient past as ‘radical nostalgia’, conceived in the spirit of revolution, which was characterized by ‘disaffection with the present, which generally means the world created by the Industrial Revolution, urbanisation and capitalism’ (2012, p.xxvi).

As an example of radical nostalgia, Theda Bara’s image in the countercultural context presents what, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s

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notions, Caroline Evans might describe as a ‘tigers leap’ into the ancient past (2002, p.9).

As a descendent of the mother goddess, Bara was invoked by the counterculture, not in fear of a perceived threat to progress or the hegemonic order as the art historical femme fatale and early cinematic vamp had been, but in hope for a utopian vision of the future, and in this respect her image was imbued with oppositional meaning. However, this utopian vision was by no means assuredly feminist.

While ‘some feminists believe in a lost primordial matriarchy…free of domination and exploitation, with humankind placidly at one with itself and with Mother Nature’ (Reynolds 2012, p.xxvii), De Beauvoir argues, this notion is a fallacy, ‘Earth, Mother, Goddess – she was no fellow creature in man’s eyes…Political power has always been in the hands of men’ (1985 [1949], p.102).

The various countercultural experiments in commune living which took place in the 1960s and 1970s only served to demonstrate the exploitative reality of the hippie dream, as women were reduced to the drudge of domestic chores with the dual bind of being sexually available to male commune members. Even those less extreme attempts to get back to nature saw men’s escape from the alienation of modern society won at the expense of women’s freedom. For example, when pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth retired to the country to live the hippie dream it was Haworth who was gave up her art and career to raise children and take care of the home while Blake continued to work (The Other Story of Pop Art, 2014).

The wider visual culture of the counterculture consistently positioned women, particularly nude or sexually available women, as symbols of the sexual revolution and in a Foucauldian sense (1978), these depictions specified ‘true’ female sexuality as passive and available.

The sexual revolution, like the hippie vision of utopia, by no means spelled automatic

Theda Bara T-shirt, designed by Marshall Lester, circa.1970.

Purchased from Ebay 2014, Researcher’s own collection.

liberation for women. Instead, the new discourses on sex, which emerged along with the introduction of the contraceptive pill, saw control of female sexuality wrestled from one generation of men to another. While Germaine Greer, proponent of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and International Times contributor, wrote in 1999 that men won the sexual revolution because the sex which was liberated was male (1999, p.7), feminist activist Ellen Willis recalls that lots of sex was encouraged, but if a girl became pregnant, it was her problem alone (She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, 2014). Writing in 1970, radical feminist, Shulamith Firestone describes how women who were uncooperative with the demands of sexually liberated males,

References Beauvoir, S. (1987 [1949]) The second sex. London: Penguin.

Dijkstra, B. (1996) Evil sisters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Evans, C. (2003) Fashion at the edge: spectacle, modernity, and deathliness. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Firestone, S. (1972) The dialectic of sex. New York: Bantam Books.

Foucault, M. (1978) The history of sexuality. London: Penguin.

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were branded ‘‘fucked-up’, ‘ball breaker’, ‘cockteaser’, ‘a real drag’, ‘a bad trip’ - to be a ‘groovy chick’ is the ideal’’ (1970, p.135), and it was precisely this specification of female sexuality, in an inversion of the Madonna/whore dichotomy, which rendered it controllable.

Theda Bara’s revival, infused with radical nostalgia, may have seen her image repurposed as a symbol of hope, however, from a feminist perspective her countercultural appropriation cannot be considered empowering. Instead it betrays the androcentric nature of the movement and the continuation of discourses on the control of female sexuality, which persisted amid the rhetoric of the sexual revolution and individual libertarianism.

Gastaut, A. and Criqui, J. (2005) Off the wall. London: Thames & Hudson.

Greer, G. (1999) The whole woman. New York: A.A. Knopf.

Keesey, P. (1997) Vamps. San Francisco, Calif.: Cleis Press.

Reynolds, S. (2011) Retromania. London: Faber & Faber.

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry (2014) Directed by Mary Dore [Film]. Glendale, Calif: Cherry Sky Pictures.

The Other Story of Pop Art (2013) BBC Two Television, 9 May.

Queer Subjectivity, Self-Presentation and the Photographic Image: Stephen Tennant and Cecil Beaton 1918-1939 Paul Bench MA History and Culture of Fashion

In 1927 the Honourable Stephen Tennant posed for a photographic portrait taken

by Cecil Beaton. Eight years later in 1935, Beaton posed for a photographic portrait taken by Gordon Anthony, a photographer internationally renowned for his images of Royal Ballet performers and theatrical celebrities. These photographs survive as vintage prints held in the National Portrait Gallery’s, London. These extant images provide a nexus from which to identify the impact of queer subjectivity inherent in their production, which was the focus of Chapter one of my dissertation ‘Queer Subjectivity, Self-presentation and the Photographic Image’.

In the photograph taken by Beaton, Tennant appears as Prince Charming. The image is divided horizontally by a continuous line tracing the profile of Tennant’s recumbent figure in conjunction with the lustrous cloth upon which he lies. Tennant’s pose and

costume is of primary importance to the image’s reception. His jeweled doublet and shallow ruff are an approximation of Tudor stylistics. Within the historic tenor set by his costume, Tennant’s pose is that of an effigy.

In accordance, the slanting beam of light that falls on him is beatific and reminiscent of a chapel. This reading would locate Tennant as raised upon a catafalque and therefore level with the viewer. A tone of intimacy, reverence and silence is thus suggested.

By repositioning and restyling the Prince Charming costume, previously worn at a party, within the aesthetic tone chosen for the photograph by Tennant as subject and Beaton as photographer, fairytale narrative is conflated with religiosity of memorial sculpture. The Prince Charming figure is also subverted. Famously, the character wakes Sleeping Beauty from her slumber and discovers Snow White in her glass coffin.

In both cases Prince Charming is a symbol

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of masculine virtue that precipitates female awakening from an enforced state of chaste stasis. Though dressed as Prince Charming, Tennant appears to adopt the sleeping pose of the female archetype. This position is regarded as passive in masculinist culture but is described by Susan Bordo as ‘receptive’ (2000, p.190). Tennant’s self-presentation/ representation thus implies a narcissistic, circuitous narrative contained by the image and Tennant’s subjectivity, whereby Tennant is both lover-saviour and the awakened. This represents a binary opposition that equates to passive/active as well as masculine/ feminine. Tennant and Beaton’s queer negotiation of this cultural construct creates an ambiguous image of simultaneous and complex identification with both gender roles. This relates to the implications of the gaze, specifically explored in terms of a queer perspective by Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman. They address Jacques Lacan’s proposition, explaining ‘that looking itself is split between sexual objectification and narcissistic identification’ (1995, p.34).

Beaton’s photograph of Tennant may represent a Lacanian desire bound up with identification that for Tennant is manifested in both the feminine and masculine gender roles of Prince Charming and Sleeping Beauty. This forms what Evans and Gamman describe as ‘destabilize[d] subject positions…[that move] towards a model of gender as simulacrum’ (1995, p.49). This simulacrum is manifested in the image as ambiguity.

obscured features of images using shadow to evoke a surrealistic and mysterious narrative (Wilcox, 2014). It also provides a metaphor of oscillation between emergence and retreat in which Beaton is upon the threshold.

The image surface of Gordon Anthony’s photograph of Beaton is shared equally by the organic motifs of textiles and shadow. The plain, lit surfaces of Beaton’s head and hands are thrown into contrast with the exaggerated shade and the dancing animation of the patterns surrounding him. The effect is theatrical and disquieting. An atmosphere of menace at odds with the exuberant patterns is projected. This recalls techniques of 1930s fashion photography, which frequently

As Christopher Reed has shown in his study of art and homosexuality, queer practitioners and the impact of their subjectivities was ‘crucial…to the production and reception of avant-garde art’ (2011, p.136) in the early twentieth century. It is within this milieu that Beaton and Tennant circulated. Reed proposes that as with fancy dress, the products of artists such as Jean Cocteau had to be coded or hidden. For Reed, ‘homosexuality, inscribed by sexology as the secret status of the artist

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The viewer seeks resolution in Beaton’s extra-diegetic stare, but receives none. His direct gaze and inscrutable expression is a barrier presenting both challenge and shield. This is what Bordo would term a ‘faceoff’ stare in an act of assertive masculinity (1999, p.188). This assertion is at odds with Beaton’s more passive leaning pose. In conjunction with his costume, this constructs the images as queer. The conflict between the signifiers of shadow and ebullient pattern is replicated in an unresolved tension between interior and exterior, and between Beaton and the backdrop. By adopting on his body a surface congruent with the tapestry background, Beaton’s direction of the image destabilises the relationship between the two for the viewer. His clothed body is thus simultaneously absorbed into the backdrop and thrust forward by the light.

This effect posits his head and hands as the only stable, known and fixed anchors within the image. This uncertainty is reinforced by the assumption of studio lighting but the equally constant reference to outdoor space within the decorative themes of the textiles. The tapestry backdrop reiterates this interior/exterior instability by its trompe l’oeil mimicking of a framed painting.

as a “type”, became the paradigmatic secret of avant-garde art’ (2011, p.137). It is this secrecy, that is exposed ambiguously and publically in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as the ‘open secret’ (1990, p.22).

This provided a fragile veil of protection from prosecution for queer producers as well as the tantalising appeal of their products for a public consumption.

Tennant and Beaton may therefore be described as enacting a queer identity for the camera both performatively and as performance. There is certainly reflexive agency on the part of both subjects, but whilst the photographs may evidence the gaps permitted by the performatively and constantly made subjectivities espoused by Judith Butler (1990), they may not constitute dissidence. This is predicated on their reading as protest, which is doubtful. Rather, they may represent a creative historical and queer flashpoint as in Alan Sinfield’s (1998) suggestion. It is the control offered by photography that may appeal to the queer subject. The absence of sound, movement

References Bordo, S. (2000) The male body: a new look at men in public and private. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

Butler, J. (1999 [1990]) Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge.

Evans, C. and Gamman, L. (1995) ‘The Gaze Revisited,

or reviewing queer viewing’, in Burston, P and Richardson, C. (eds.) A queer romance: lesbians, gay men, and popular culture. London: Routledge.

Goffman, E. (1959) The presentation of self in everyday life. London: Penguin.

and colour is used productively in the photographs in question. This constitutes an attempt to eliminate the potential for failure that Erving Goffman (1959) explains is present in all symbolic interactions. Beaton and Tennant also harnessed the pre-established pose of the aesthete. This archetype, though precariously connected with homosexuality by its historical confluence in the maligned figure of Oscar Wilde, maintained some cultural credence in the interwar period as Reed (2011) has shown. He elaborates that distance is a prerequisite for queer cultural production, and that this distance is achieved within products either by purposeful ambiguity or by the aloof pose of the aesthete-producer.

Beaton and Tennant are thus positioned as deploying both strategies in the production of the photographs. They are found to express a level of queer subjectivity tentatively by repositioning their self-presentation and their use of the photographic medium to gain license in response to potential prosecution, which was palpable beyond the pathos of the photograph and the boundary of the classes they occupied.

Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. (1990) Epistemology of the closet. London: Penguin.

Reed, C. (2011) Art and homosexuality: a history of ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sinfield, A. (1998) Gay and after. London: Serpent’s Tail.

Wilcox, C. (2014) ‘The aura of glamour: couture fashion’, in Brown, S. (ed.) Horst: photographer of style.

London: V&A publishing.

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Artistry, Performance and Afterlife: Deconstructing the Dandyism of Sebastian Horsley Fenella Hitchcock MA History and Culture of Fashion

Scant few live lives as decadent and compelling as Sebastian Horsley’s. Born in 1962, Horsley was an artist and writer who lived the majority of his life in London. Initially seeking acclaim as a painter, Horsley’s artistry increasingly extended beyond the canvas, eventually permeating all aspects of his life in true bohemian fashion.

Horsley described himself as a dandy (2007), a term within men’s fashion that cultural historian Christopher Breward notes as not only contentious but also possessing a multiplicity of meanings (2003, p.7). Texts that deal with dandyism within a present day context note that the term is sometimes misaligned and often highly evocative (Cicolini 2003, 2007; Adams 2013). This dissertation is not concerned with attempts to prove or disprove Horsley’s claims to dandyism, believing it to be far more fruitful to accept this identification, but instead focus on understanding the appeal of the historic tradition to Horsley as an individual and how this impacted upon the way he

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dressed. It seeks to understand Horsley’s dandyism in relation to his own biography and how his identification intersects with his own artistic practice and celebrity culture within a contemporary context. Throughout the chapters of the dissertation, Horsley’s dandyism is deconstructed through a comparison with three dandy archetypes, as identified by Breward (2000): the Brummellian consumer, the Baudelairian artist and the Wildean celebrity.

While Horsley continued to exhibit paintings into the final years of his life (he died in 2010), later exhibitions also included items of clothing presented as artwork (Viktor Wynd Fine Art 2012, The Outsiders Gallery 2013).

The inclusion of garments in these exhibitions can be seen to signify the solid fusion of Horsley’s life, art and dress and indeed, those who knew him have claimed that his greatest work of art was in fact Horsley himself (Wynd 2015). Chapter One examines the ways in which Horsley dressed (and undressed) as a self-identified dandy and practicing artist,

Detail of Painting Suit Worn by Sebastian Horsley, Museum of London Fashion and Decorative Arts Archive.

drawing comparisons between Brummellian and Baudelairian types. After detailing Horsley’s consumption habits, the chapter traces the emergence of Horsley’s dandyism through media records and personal notebooks, drawing focus on the suits Horsley wore whilst painting as a significant item in the synthesis between Horsley’s dress and art.

The chapter concludes with an examination of Horsley’s later move into what we may consider to be performance art, focusing specifically on his crucifixion piece, where he travelled to the Philippines in order to partake in an annual ritual where members of the local community are crucified in imitation of Christ in order to ask to forgiveness for their sins. In this work, which was also documented through photography and film, Horsley relinquished his usual style of dress in favour of a loincloth and the dissertation argues that this act of undress should be understood as a test of his dandyism, which in some respects Horsley considered to be a form of religious faith.

In 2007, Horsley’s memoir Dandy in the Underworld was published, offering a subjective retelling of the most scandalous details of his life, as well as more philosophical reflections on his three main passions of sex with prostitutes, the consumption of class A drugs and bespoke tailoring. Horsley kept all of his press cuttings from and during this period and the collection shows a dramatic increase in the volume of media attention he received around this time, which is also a period where Horsley’s personal style became progressively more theatrical, eventually solidifying in a set of signature styles worn for public appearances. The second chapter of the dissertation deals with the years following the publication of this memoir, the final years of Horsley’s life and ‘peak’ of his fame. Considering Horsley not only an artist but also a public figure, the chapter seeks to determine an appropriate position for him within the taxonomy of

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contemporary celebrity. Photographic images used for promotional purposes and that detail outfits worn for public appearances are used as a means of understanding the message that Horsley sought to communicate with his audience through dress. Author Clayton Littlewood, a friend of Horsley’s, recalled that Horsley offered him advice on promoting his writing, stressing the importance of interview preparation and having ‘a set of really eye catching photographs’ to accompany your work (Littlewood to Hitchcock 2015). Littlewood observed that Horsley’s promotional images not only caught the eye but also ‘matched [his] book’ (Littlewood to Hitchcock 2015) and in his autobiography, Horsley concurs that his ‘dandy’ image was designed in order to communicate his personality to others, with his appearance acting as ‘a leaflet thrust into the hands of astonished bystanders, evidence that what [he] had seen was interesting’ (Horsley 2007, p.183). This communication occurred in a series of ways, including surface embellishment, colour, textile choice and cut of garments. As his autobiography offered a record of his various acts of transgression, Horsley assembled a selection of outfits that would complement and communicate these deeds to his audience. Suits worn during the last years of Horsley’s life are identifiable by a unique feature – a small customisation that allowed Horsley to carry six pre-filled syringes in the lining of his jacket, a task which was undertaken by Soho tailor John Pearse (Powell to Hitchcock 2015). As justification, Horsley claimed that one should ‘never offend people with style when you can offend them with substances’ (2007, p.263).

Similar additions, such as the rock star cliché of the ‘stash pocket’ (Powell to Hitchcock 2015), are design features that deliberately hide the illegal substances carried by the wearer, but Horsley’s modification allowed him to literally wear his heroin addiction as a marker of identity, to shock his audience and draw further attention to himself. The

chapter concludes by considering whether we should consider Horsley’s Wildean displays of dandyism and self-promotion as performance or performative.

Three years after its release, Dandy in the Underworld was adapted for the stage, opening at the Soho Theatre in London on 15th June 2010. Horsley was found dead at his London home on 17th June 2010, following an overdose of crack cocaine and heroin at the age of forty-seven. Shortly after his death, Horsley’s surviving partner donated numerous items of his clothing to the Museum of London, Contemporary Wardrobe Collection and members of his social circle.

Through interviews with two individuals (writer and self-identified dandy Dickon Edwards and author Clayton Littlewood) who were given garments by Horsley’s partner, the dissertation’s final chapter which considers how Horsley’s dandy identity has influenced the way these men perceive and utilise the garments in their possession, as mementoes of the deceased, items to be

References Adams, N. (2013) I am dandy: return of the elegant gentleman. Gestalten.

Breward, C. (2000) ‘The dandy laid bare: embodying

practices of fashion for men’, in Church Gibson, P. and Bruzzi, S. (eds.) Fashion cultures: theories, explorations, and analysis. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 221-239.

Breward, C. (2003) ‘21st century dandy: the legacy of

Beau Brummell’, in Cicolini, A. (ed.) 21st Century Dandy.

London: British Council, pp. 2-5.

Choo, M. (2009) ‘Measuring soul’, Vestoj, volume 2, Fashion and magic, pp. 94-7 Cicolini, A. (2003) 21st century dandy. London: British Council.

Cicolini, A. (2007) The new English dandy. London: Thames and Hudson.

Duane, P. (2015) Interview with Paul Duane, by Fenella Hitchcock for Art, performance and afterlife: deconstructing the dandyism of Sebastian Horsley, August 2015.

Edwards, D. (2011) ‘Fix up look sharp: Dickon Edwards

meets Turbonegro’s English gent.’ Interview with Dickon Edwards and Tony Sylvester. Interview by Luke Turner for The Quietus, 20th October. Available at: http://thequietus.com/articles/07224-dickon-edwardstony-sylvester-turbonegro (Accessed: 31st October 2015).

worn and important objects in remembrance rituals. Dress can be perceived as a means of extending the life of an individual (Choo 2009) and the interviews conducted with Edwards and Littlewood both revealed a desire to offer Horsley some kind of ‘life after death’.

Both men have appeared in public wearing the items as well as being photographed in them and Edwards has also worn the item when being interviewed about his own style of dress and conception of dandyism (Edwards 2011, Adams 2013, p.44). ‘I like to think that I’m keeping his memory alive’ said Edwards, ‘I’m keeping him alive too, in a weird way and I know that’s what he would have wanted’ (Edwards to Hitchcock 2015). Interviews conducted with other acquaintances of Horsley concur that he took pleasure from being discussed and they also believe that he would have wanted this to continue after his death (Duane to Hitchcock 2015, Norris to Hitchcock 2015). The dissertation concludes that we may also understand Horsley’s decision to publish an autobiography as a desire for a form of immortality.

Edwards, D. (2015) Interview with Dickon Edwards,

by Fenella Hitchcock for Art, performance and afterlife: deconstructing the dandyism of Sebastian Horsley, July 2015.

Horsley, S. (2007) Dandy in the underworld: an unauthorised autobiography. London: Spectre.

Littlewood, C. (2015) Interview with Clayton Littlewood, by Fenella Hitchcock for Art, performance and afterlife: deconstructing the dandyism of Sebastian Horsley, January 2015.

Norris, D. (2015) Interview with Dee Norris, by Fenella Hitchcock for Art, performance and afterlife: deconstructing the dandyism of Sebastian Horsley, August 2015.

Powell, M. (2015) Interview with Mark Powell, by Fenella Hitchcock for Art, performance and afterlife: deconstructing the dandyism of Sebastian Horsley, February 2015.

Sebastian Horsley: a reliquary (2012) [Exhibition] Viktor Wynd Fine Art, London. 16th June - 5th September 2012.

The whoresley show (2013) [Exhibition]. The Outsiders Gallery, London. 2nd August - 29th August 2013.

Wynd, V. (2015) Email with Fenella Hitchcock, 8th August.

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Lace 1860s-1900s: The Duality of Modesty and Eroticismin Dress Sarah Harrison MA History and Culture of Fashion

With an ever growing and intensifying debate and analysis forming around the broad and dynamic topics of fashion and dress, from an ever-increasing array of disciplines, the value of investigating clothing is only gaining in academic legitimacy and popular interest.

The particular focus of this dissertation is the material of lace with particular emphasis on the relevance of lace in women’s dress.

Being situated within the extremely broad topic fashion, this material in itself presents a multitude of potential, valuable research concepts which have yet to receive full analysis or understanding. The area which has been focused on most previously is the history of lace’s production and the impact of the associated industry on contemporary social history (Mason, 1994; Briggs-Goode and Dean, 2013). Whilst this history provides important context for this dissertation, the focus of this research will be the comparatively under-investigated historical cultural meaning of lace itself, to both the individual wearer and within the context of society.

Taking the late Victorian period as an exemplar case study, this dissertation

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specifically analysed the relationship between lace and the concepts of modesty and eroticism within the latter-half of the nineteenth century, broadly covering the period 1860-1900. Throughout this analysis the perceived oppositional nature of these two concepts is challenged, with lace being demonstrated as deriving its symbolic meaning from the discourse between the two. This is established through a joint focus on both the physicality of lace’s use within garments, and the cultural representation of lace’s function within contemporary publications. In order to demonstrate these conclusions both object analysis and textual analysis methodologies were employed.

Each aspect of lace’s function within Victorian society is evaluated from the two apparent extremes of the modesty-eroticism dynamic in order to dispute the discrete, oppositional categorisation of the concepts and instead identify the overall relationship between the two. Modesty is defined in relation to theories regarding social structure, and in particular the habitus (Bourdieu, 2010), resulting in a focus on three key aspects of

modesty particular to the contemporary Victorian society under investigation; class, sexuality and gender. Modesty and eroticism are also found to interact within the medium of lace, relating to and defining each other in a multitude of ways. This key principle can therefore be extrapolated and applied to the dynamic of modesty and eroticism within dress behaviours as a whole, showing them to exist in a more complex dialectic than has previously been identified.

My research focus has been conceived by working back from the apparent stereotyping and separation of associations between lace and traditionally ‘modest’ garments such as wedding gowns, as well as in a seemingly opposing sense to those garments traditionally viewed as sexualised or ‘erotic’ such as underwear. This dissertation therefore explores these stereotypes and, more importantly, demonstrates how these concepts have come to be oppositionally stereotyped within one material. This also includes a critical consideration of these concepts being more than simply oppositional, with their dual association with lace demonstrating the dialectic complexity of modesty and eroticism in dress as a whole.

In this sense, the focus on lace within this dissertation can be seen as a case study, exemplifying some of the broader concepts of the dressed-undressed and modestyeroticism dynamics which, to a certain extent, underpin clothing behaviours. In order to explore these ideas, focusing on this lateVictorian period provides the opportunity to analyse in detail the individual and social effects of lace at a time when its incorporation into garments was highly fashionable and accessible, as well as when social attitudes emphasised the importance of morality and modesty. My analysis constitutes the initial evaluation of lace’s role in symbolising modesty and eroticism in dress. The questions that initiated this research included the consideration of why lace has come to be

symbolically understood as representative of both modesty and eroticism, and what is the nature of the relationship between these two concepts.

The late-Victorian period under examination in this research provided an exemplar sample of lace’s use in garments, and its position within wider cultural representations of the two concepts of modesty and eroticism. This dissertation can therefore be considered as providing a joint historical and cultural analysis of lace’s symbolic meaning within dress. Although perhaps cliché, the past can provide us with unique insight into the continuing nature of humanity, particularly in regard to concepts now considered traditional or stereotypical, as they have become socially embedded over time. This is therefore particularly true of the history and culture of dress behaviours, which have been demonstrated within this dissertation as being dependent on habitual social interaction. Both modesty and eroticism are clearly identifiable within garments which contain lace, and visual representations of lace from this period.

While it was impossible, in a dissertation necessarily limited in scope, to include all of the wealth and breadth of resources and material available, it was, however, possible to establish the key principles of the discourse between these two concepts as it exists within the symbolic medium of lace using a small selection of garments and printed sources.

Nominally, concepts of modesty and eroticism have been found to not be contradictory or binary opposites; rather they interact, particularly within a medium such as dress. The combined aesthetic nature and social communicative function of which leads to the inescapable visualisation, and hence emphasis, of social expectation; both good and bad, covered and nude, in a dialectic continuum. Overall, the use of lace in the expression of modesty and eroticism can be seen as representative of the nature and role

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of dress itself. As was argued at the beginning of this dissertation, modesty may not be the only factor which is used to rationalise why we wear clothes, but it is clearly significant. Lace’s expression of the modesty-eroticism dynamic as shown in this research has therefore been demonstrated as a microcosm, representative of the broader dynamic of concealment and display which underpins why we wear clothes.

Throughout human history, developing

References Bourdieu, P. (2010) Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge.

Mason, S. (1994) Nottingham Lace 1760s-1950s.

Ilkeston: Sheila A. Mason.

Briggs-Goode, A. and Dean, D. (eds.) (2013) Lace: here: now. London: Black Dog Publishing.

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social structures have powered the evolution in how we express and derive meaning in social interactions from the basic elements of human understanding. Throughout this evolution, lace has become just one aspect of the complex dressed system of communication we now subconsciously interact through, and hence can help us unpack and understand the nature of clothing.

Exploring Clothing Attachment using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Rebecka Fleetwood-Smith MA Psychology for Fashion Professionals

The area of attachment to clothing has received great interest within the fashion industry and there are many websites, books and artworks that explore the notion of clothing attachment (e.g., Spivack, 2013, Heti, Julavits, Shapton & Mann, 2014, Fletcher, 2015). Experts within sustainable design have discussed the relationships we have with our clothing. For example, Fletcher (2012), Niinimäki (2011) and Chapman (2009) have suggested designing clothing using the framework of emotionally durable design.

Chapman (2009) discussed increasing longevity of ownership through designing to create a connection between the wearer and their garment. However little is known about the phenomenon from a psychological perspective. Although literature on possession attachment exists, evidence on attachment to clothing is rare.

Many modern societies are characterised by a strongly held belief that ‘to have is to be’ (Dittmar, 1992). Individuals often define themselves and others in terms of their possessions. A founding father of psychology,

William James (1890), posited that ‘a man’s self is the sum total of all that he can call his’.

Thus things can be considered extensions of the self (Belk, 1988). Our relationship with possessions starts from a very early age.

Children at 2 years of age understand the notion that we can possess something as if it were a part of ourselves (Jarrett, 2013).

Lurie (1981) suggested that when adolescent girls share clothes they also share identities.

Additionally, Sontag and Lee (2004) theorised that clothing is a medium through which the self is realised. Thus, Sontag and Lee (2004) and Lurie (1981) suggest the importance of clothing to the concept of self. Belk (1991) described possessions as magical vessels of meaning, connecting individuals to unarticulated aspects of life. Our possessions become external repositories for particular events within our lives (Jarrett, 2013).

Possessions that seemingly act as connectors to nostalgic memories suggest a level of appropriation (Kleine & Baker, 2004), that the objects possess a greater value than that of their utilitarian function. Notably Masuch and Hefferon (2014) presented a eudaemonic

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dimension of fashion through participants’ nostalgic attachment to certain garments.

They suggested that the garments held symbolic meanings containing meaningful memories and so, despite in some cases the items of clothing no longer being worn, the clothing was kept as it had transcended its utilitarian function. Attachment has been studied between adults and their special possessions, and although attachment is seen as multifaceted and complex, many of the existing studies suggest a one-dimensional construct (Kleine & Baker, 2004). Myers (1985) deciphered that the degree of attachment to a specific object can change over time.

Therefore, throughout life a person may develop new attachments and dispose of old ones as the self develops. Solomon (1986) conducted a case study to explore possession attachment to Levi 501 jeans and found that personal meanings surrounding a particular item may be established as the clothing is representative of a singular experience.

The phenomenon that an item of clothing can be imbued with a particular symbolic meaning was exploited in the work of Adam and Galinsky (2012) in which the term ‘enclothed cognition’ was coined. Using a socially constructed symbolic resonance, they argued that enclothed cognition is the effect on the wearer’s cognitive processes through the physicality of wearing a particular garment and the belief in the garment’s symbolic significance (Adam & Galinsky, 2012). The term symbolic resonance refers to the symbolic meaning a particular item of clothing has to its wearer and is the focus of the study reported here.

A qualitative methodology was employed using interpretative phenomenological analysis to generate rich data and explore details of the experience. A homogenous sample of five was recruited and each participant asked to wear to interview a garment that they felt emotionally attached to.

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The rationale for this was to encourage them to concentrate on their experience, feelings and the symbolic meaning surrounding their chosen item, rather than practice introspection. Semi-structured interviews were designed based on the literature and were used to allow for flexibility and elicitation of rich data.

In support of the literature, findings demonstrated that clothing attachment is a multifaceted and rich phenomenon. Six themes emerged: Symbolic Resonance, Emotional Investment, Authenticity of Clothing, Clothing as a Living Memory, Anthropomorphism of Clothing and Anchors Sense of Self.

One of the most prominent findings was that participants imbued their attachment clothing with a symbolic resonance as defined by Adam and Galinsky (2012). This indicates that a garment can have symbolic significance that is unique to its wearer. In addition, the symbolic meaning of the attachment garment demonstrated strong appropriation, which was interpreted as attachment transcending utilitarian function.

Results showed that participants were emotionally invested (Kleine & Baker, 2004) in their attachment pieces. Thus the attachment item has been singularised and consequently becomes irreplaceable, generating a strong emotional bond to the attachment piece.

The finding of authenticity of clothing explains the notion that participants wanted to preserve their attachment piece. An exact replica of the attachment piece would not be the same. Within participants’ accounts it became apparent that the physical qualities of the attachment garment seemed key to perceived authenticity. The ‘wear and tear’ of the attachment garment was vital to its authenticity. The perception of authenticity was subjective as it was due to the resonance that the attachment item held for the individual.

The theme clothing as a ‘living memory’ was a finding that referred to the way in which participants viewed their attachment pieces as actively tracing time. Participants suggested that their attachment items gave physicality to the intangible. Furthermore this theme also emphasises the way in which the clothing seemingly needed to be nurtured to ensure preservation.

accounts suggested fluidity between an internal and external anchor. The finding expressed the intimacy between the owner and their attachment clothing.

A further theme was that attachment pieces seemed to not only act as an extension of the self (Belk, 1988), but also anchored and helped maintain a sense of self. Participant’s

The novel study provided findings that were rich and exploratory, contributing to the literature in the under-researched area of clothing attachment. The approach sought to link the worlds of fashion and psychology through an interdisciplinary study, highlighting not only the importance for more studies of this nature, but also the importance of permeating boundaries to generate exciting findings that impact different disciplines. Due to the small sample size generalisations cannot be made for the wider population, yet the findings could be used to challenge literature within sustainability that discusses emotionally durable design. The study implies that clothing attachment is a rich, multifaceted construct that is unique to each individual and therefore cannot be predetermined.

References Adam, H., & Galinsky, A. (2012) ‘Enclothed cognition’ Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(4), pp.918-925. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.008 Aggarwal, P., & McGill, A. (2007) ‘Is That Car Smiling at Me? Schema Congruity as a Basis for Evaluating

Anthropomorphized Products’, J Consum Res, 34(4), pp.468-479. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/518544 Ball, A., & Tasaki, L. (1992) ‘The Role and Measurement

of Attachment in Consumer Behavior’, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 1(2), pp.155-172. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp0102_04 Belk, R. (1988) ‘Possessions and the Extended Self’, Journal of Consumer Research, 15, 139-168.

Belk, R. (1991) ‘The ineluctable mysteries of

possessions’, Journal of Social Behavior & Personality, 6, pp.17-55.

Chapman, J. (2009) ‘Design for (Emotional) Durability’, Design Issues, 25(4), pp.29-35. http://dx.doi. org/10.1162/desi.2009.25.4.29 Dittmar, H. (1992) The social psychology of material possessions. Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Fletcher, K. (2015) Craft of Use - Home. Craftofuse.org Retrieved 27 September 2015, from http://www.craftofuse.org Fletcher, K. (2015. Local Wisdom - Homepage.

Localwisdom.info. Retrieved 27 September 2015, from http://www.localwisdom.info/ Fletcher, K., & Grose, L. (2012) Fashion and sustainability. London, England: Laurence King.

Heti, S., Julavits, H., Shapton, L., & Mann, M. (2014) Women in clothes. London: Penguin.

Jarrett, C. (2013) ‘The Psychology of Stuff and Things’, The Psychologist, 26, pp.560-565.

Kleine, S., & Baker, S. (2004) ‘An Integrative Review of Material Possession Attachment’, Academy Of Marketing Science Review, 1.

Lurie, A. (1981) The language of clothes. New York: Random House.

Masuch, C., & Hefferon, K. (2014) ‘Understanding the links between positive psychology and fashion: A grounded theory analysis’, International Journal of Fashion Studies, 1(2), pp.227-246. http://dx.doi. org/10.1386/infs.1.2.227_1 Myers, E. (1985) ‘Phenomenological Analysis of the Importance of Special Possessions: an Exploratory Study’, Advances In Consumer Research, 12.

Niinimäki, K., & Hassi, L. (2011) ‘Emerging design strategies in sustainable production and consumption of textiles and clothing’, Journal Of Cleaner Production. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. jclepro.2011.04.020 Solomon, M. (1986) Advances in Consumer Research.

Deep-Seated Materialism: The Case Of Levi’s 501 Jeans, 13.

Sontag, M., & Lee, J. (2004) ‘Proximity of Clothing to Self Scale’, Clothing And Textiles Research Journal, 22(4), 161-177. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0887302x0402200402 Spivack, E. (2014) Worn stories. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Anthropomorphism occurs when people imbue objects with human traits. In partial anthropomorphism, individuals may not view the entity as human (Aggarwal & McGill, 2007). The expression anthropomorphism of clothing explains the way in which participants attributed human or life-like characteristics to their attachment pieces.

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Sartorial Assimilation: Vestiary Processes and Practices of British Chinese Migration, 1880-1980 Lauren De’Ath MA History and Culture of Fashion

‘Man [woman] is the most plastic of all earth’s creatures’ (Thayer 1975, p.237) and since time immemorial has exhibited a remarkable ability in negotiating the adversities of their social and cultural environments.

The modern phenomenon of migration is no exception and the mass movement of individuals across borders presents many issues that require, and elicit, responses as part of cross-cultural adaption; a process that ensures ‘the necessary competence to function satisfactorily’ within unfamiliar settings (Kim and Gudykunst 1987, p.8). Dress, as a key motif of cross-cultural knowledge, has been largely ignored by both dress and cross-cultural theorists as an important tool in assimilation and cultural learning, here termed ‘sartorial assimilation’.

This dissertation lays bare the individual vestiary processes and practices of migration through the lens of the ‘cultural stranger’; a person for whom a new host society remains alien and uncharted, and host culture, ‘as the rules of the game’ (Kim 1988, p.92), unlearnt.

As a response to their absence within academia the ‘cultural stranger’ and empirical

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focus here are first-generation Chinese who migrated to Britain throughout the twentiethcentury. The emphasis in this dissertation was on the experiences of ethnic Chinese women who migrated from Cantonese-speaking communities in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia over the post-war period between 1966-1983. They now reside in various cities and towns in the UK, including - but not limited to - Leeds, London and Warwick and have worked as seamstresses, cooks and take-away owners.

Applying cross-cultural theory and concepts of postmodern identity construction, this dissertation considered everyday ‘dress’ - in the sense of the ’total arrangement of all outwardly detectable modifications of a person’s body’ (Roach et al 1980, p.68) to ‘express principles and value structure’ (Lynch 1999, p.4) as a cross-cultural negotiation.

According to semiologist Roland Barthes human clothing ‘flatters our modern curiosity about social psychology’ (2006, p.21) and their materiality alludes to worn stories; exacerbated in diaspora by not only the crossing of borders but also the crossing

Reverend W.J. Simmons with two of his Chinese acquaintances outside Sing Quong Juen grocers, Pennyfields, London, 1927.

Tower Hamlets Archives Reference Number: P18735/410 Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Archives

of cultures. Through the examination of dress and style this dissertation aimed to tell those stories of diaspora, as well as querying the tangible relationship between clothing and migration and how crosscultural movements affect dress and style.

The study posed ambitious questions relating to the dressed body as a symbol of local identity and sought to unpack what happens to dressed appearance and, by extension, sense of ‘self’ and identity when exposed to a foreign social environment. To analyse this, the perceptions, experiences and anxieties of Chinese before and after they migrated to Britain were examined, and how dress was used as a process, product and tool in cultural communication and self-expression was explored.

The study reinforced theorist Alison Lurie’s concepts of dress as a non-verbal means of communication possessing its own colloquialisms and grammar (1992 [1981], p.4) that are race, place and space-specific, thus constituting a cultural knowledge that must be managed, understood and interpreted to permit satisfactory mobility within a social environment. Significantly, it highlighted the importance of dress as a critical factor of cultural assimilation and stressed that dress processes and practices are inherently caught up in social integration. In particular for diasporic Chinese throughout the twentiethcentury, dress has played an important role in the resettlement process in that the majority of respondents had been compelled, wittingly and unwittingly, to adopt westernised attire over the course of their settlement. The necessity and extent of sartorial assimilation was intrinsically linked to migrant age, gender, temporal social factors and host receptivity.

Negative reception gave rise to behavioural and vestiary parroting, and positive or ambivalent reception allowed for greater sartorial freedoms, albeit within the confines of hegemonic culture. There was a positive correlation between youth and assimilation.

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The younger the respondent at the time of migration the more likely they were to exhibit acculturational values but also experiment with dress and style.

During initial waves of Chinese migration to Britain (1880-1939), dress - and assimilation thereof - acted as a protective, objective tool to circumvent negative attention in the wake of anti-Chinese racism and ‘Yellow Peril’ hysteria (Seed 2006). As these waves of Sinophobia lapsed over the next fifty years, the cultural climate permitted a more constructive, personal use of dress for migrants. For first-generation second-wave Chinese women this was doubly significant in that migration afforded them more comparative social and cultural freedoms than their hometowns. Chinese women responded largely positively to the socio-cultural opportunities afforded them by ‘egalitarian’ Britain. This included incorporating aspects of contemporary anglicised dress systems that correlated to their newly acquired social independence. Dress subsequently reflected burgeoning individualism, including the creation of an intercultural BritishChinese style that drew upon their ‘archive’ of migratory practices and processes of migration to Britain.

These resulting emerging dress and style identities constitute a cultural dialectic born from both a Chinese and a British sentiment, emerging as homage to acculturational efforts in forging a life in Britain. This research found that financial and occupational hardships meant that British Chinese did not dress in luxury or designer brands, abstained from wearing make-up, and deigned practicality and elegant sobriety over glamour in both every-day and occasion wear. The aversion to ‘flashy’ garments simultaneously appealed to Confucian upbringings that refrained from vanity and display, and to the Chinese desire to blend rather than extend into British social life for fear of objectifying their

Ping Lee (4th from groom) wearing “western-style� striped dress, 1960.

With permission on Ping Lee

ethnicity in white, Anglo-Saxon Britain. By proxy, this included the almost unanimous rejection of the wearing of Chinese-style clothing and ‘traditional Chinese’ attire, for example the cheongsam, in both public and – curiously - private spaces, implying that Chinese assimilation has even extended to reserved personal spheres. These attitudes to pervasive acculturation are perceived as being particular to ethnic Chinese who consider innate ‘Chineseness’ as an ancestral connecting tissue, to be something spiritual, rather than physical. This may account for why the Chinese are more readily assimilable than other migrating peoples (Kwok-bun 2005, p.18), yet also perhaps explains why tangible items of clothing are not revered as nostalgic cultural artefacts, as for other minority

References Allman, J. (ed.) (2004) Fashioning Africa: power and the politics of dress. Bloomingdale and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Barthes, R., 2006. The language of fashion. Oxford: Berg.

Kim, Y. Y., 1988. Communication and cross-cultural adaptation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Kim, Y. Y. and Gudykunst, W., 1987. Cross-cultural adaptation: current approaches. California: Sage.

Kwok-bun, C., 2005. Chinese identities, ethnicity and cosmopolitanism. New York: Routledge.

Lurie, A., 1992 [1981]. The language of clothes. 2nd ed.

London: Bloomsbury.

Lynch, A., 1999. Dress, gender and cultural change.

New York: Berg.

Panayi, P., 2014. An immigration history of Britain: multicultural racism since 1800. 2nd ed. Oxford: Routledge.

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groups in Britain such as South Asian or West African communities (Allman 2004, Tarlo 1996, Tulloch 2004). These sartorial concerns expose the flaws in the British model for anticipated migrant assimilation; which does not emphatically permit cultural pluralism (Panayi 2014, p.x) and promotes total cultural and social integration to the host country at the expense of greater cultural diversity and visibility. British Chinese have particularly been affected by this and remain something of an ‘invisible minority’ within mainstream British life and culture.

This research was made possible with the kind funding and support from the Pasold Research Fund Ltd and the 2015 Costume Society Jubilee award

Roach, M. E., Musa, K. E. and Hollander, A., 1980. New perspectives on the history of western dress. New York: Nutri-Guides.

Seed, J. (2006) ‘Limehouse blues: looking for Chinatown in the London docks, 1900–40’, History Workshop Journal, Issue 62 (1), pp. 58-85.

Tarlo, E. (1996) Clothing matters: dress & identity in India, London: Hurst & Company.

Thayer, L., 1975. ‘Knowledge, order and communication’, in: B. D. Ruben, B.D. and Kim, J. Y. (eds.) General systems theory and human communication. New Jersey: Hayden, pp. 237-245.

Tulloch, C (1994) Black style, London: V & A Publications.

Perception and experience of colours in relation to people’s clothing choices.

Shanaya Bajaj MA Psychology for Fashion Professionals

A casual observation led me to conduct a research project that explored the role of colour in formulating experiences and perceptions influencing the selection of clothing. People in tube stations and on streets were seen wearing black coloured clothing more than any other colour. After researching the dominance of colour black in fashion, I noticed that there seemed to be a bigger picture. The perception and importance of colour as a whole in individuals’ clothing choices looked like an untouched area of research. Thus, I designed a study that explored the effect of clothing colour on the self. The study aimed to gain in-depth data from participants’ accounts regarding their perception of colour in relation to the clothes they wear.

The objectives of this project are: • To generate a thought process regarding the importance of colour as an attribute of clothing and have more qualitative evidence for it.

• To explore various feelings and experiences of colour that people have for decisions related to choice of clothes.

• • •

To contribute to the developing theoretical framework regarding colour and its importance as an attribute of clothing.

To understand the cognitive and emotional connections we make with colour through clothes.

To understand experiences, feelings and values attached to the colour of the preferred clothes.

The present study was informed by previous research that suggests colour plays an important role in various areas such as food, space, environment and clothing. Despite the importance that colour seems to have, an indepth understanding of the effects of colour on clothing preferences is lacking. Whitfield and Wiltshire (1990), identified the gap concerning lack of investigation on individual colour preferences. Previous research has in fact relied primarily on quantitative research methods, has been conducted in research laboratories, and has used, for example, digitally formatted surveys with limited choice of sensory emotions or preselected ideas and colour chips as a reference for coloured

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objects (Eckman, Damhorst, & Kadolph, 1990; Whitfield & Wiltshire, 1990). It may have thus restricted the potential of participants to discuss freely their experiences with colour and obtained knowledge about colour that may not be generalised to real-life setting and individuals’ daily life. Unlike previous research, the current study used a qualitative approach and allowed participants to broadly discuss their responses and reactions towards colour preference during interviews. It generated evidence supporting the importance of colour that was not limited to group level preferences or to sterile research laboratories.

To allow the participants to comprehensively reflect upon their experiences while making a choice or adorning a piece of colour clothing, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was adopted. Participants demonstrated their experiences with colour effectively along with highlighting the concept of colour perceptions being influenced by their emotional state of mind (Zelanski & Fisher, 1999).

In order to establish an understanding on a qualitative level and find meaning in participants’ experiences, IPA was selected as the most appropriate methodology.

Participants’ subjective experiences were at the core of the study in an attempt to examine the impact of colour in making daily decisions for clothing. Seven female participants aged between 18 and 50 years contributed to the findings of the research by taking part in semi-structured interviews conducted in person in a convenient comfortable setting or via Skype. They were recruited through platforms available on social media. The interviews followed flexibly an interview schedule which focused on the importance of colour for participants’ life in general and clothing in particular, effect of clothing colour on emotions and cognitions (including perception of one’s physical appearance), colour preference in relation to negative

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and positive experiences, role of colour in impression formation, and factors (e.g., weather, mood) affecting participants’ selection of clothing colour. All interviews were audio recorded.

The necessary resources for gaining knowledge about implementation of IPA were easily available through lecture slides and the books present in the LCF library. Using these resources, I established accomplishment deadlines. They were necessary in order to keep the momentum going and reflect back on the progress done on each day. Initially, finding participants interested in the research seemed daunting. However, there were responses from a number of people, more than anticipated. There were some who were interested in giving Skype interviews as well due to geographical and time zone limitations.

The study unveiled some valuable findings discussing four main higher order themes: harmony with socio-cultural surroundings, control over emotions, colour facilitating emotional remedy and acting as a nonverbal communication tool. In particular, participants reported that their choice of colour when it came to clothing was influenced by several factors, including their surroundings (they tried to adapt mainly to secure social acceptance and avoid undue attention), weather (they reported wearing different colours in different atmospheric conditions), and emotional state (their choice of colour could be based on the intention to reflect their current emotional state or, alternatively, change it – for example to uplift their mood). More than half of the participants reported an attachment to certain colours, highlighting the element of repetition in colour choice. For many, colour was a tool for displaying and understanding emotions expressed by self and others, thus influencing impression formation and serving as a visual communication tool. Results thus were in line with previous research discussing notions like

social acceptance (Leary et al., 2001), sense of belonging (Hagerty et al., 1992), emotional regulation (Gross, 1999), self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977), and impression formation (David & Lennon, 1988).

Although the evidence on the impact of colour on clothing choices is limited, the current study suggests that this impact is significant as the participants actively discussed their efforts for harmonising self with the environment, regulating personal emotions, and successful visual self-presentation – all relative to colour. They described the important role of colour during selection of clothing, giving an in-depth insight regarding self and socially motivated colour choices in clothing.

This research presents interesting implications for designers, stylists, and colour consultants.

Devising cognitive values relating colour and clothing could seem beneficial for garment industry in satisfying consumers’ specific colour clothing needs (Jiang et al., 2009), although it has been noted that individuals

References

Bandura, A. (1977) ‘Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying

theory of behavioral change’, Psychological review, 84(2), p.191.

Davis, L., & Lennon, S. (1988) ‘Social cognition and the

study of clothing and human behaviour’, Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal, 16(2), pp.175-186.

Eckman, M., Damhorst, M., & Kadolph, S. (1990) ‘Toward a model of the in-store purchase decision process: Consumer use of criteria for evaluating

women’s apparel’, Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 8(2), pp.13-22.

Gross, J. (1999) ‘Emotion regulation: Past, present,

future’, Cognition & Emotion,13(5), pp551-573.

Hagerty, B. M. K., Lynch–Sauer, J., Patusky, K. L., Bouwsema, M., & Collier, P. (1992) ‘Sense of belonging:

A vital mental health concept’, Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 6, pp172-177.

are becoming more and more aware of their personal preferences (Wilson et al., 2001).

This study may serve as a foundation for future explorations on the psychological elements involved in colour-clothing choices. Future research could use qualitative methods to attempt to replicate the findings of this study or quantitative methods to explore clothing colour decisions with larger groups of people.

This study could also serve as a benchmark to study cultural differences in experiences with colour clothing choices and may inform future research into how individuals express themselves through colour and use it to evaluate others.

To conclude, this study was an important learning experience for me. Exploring the existing literature on colour and putting in efforts actively as a researcher helped me recognise my abilities and improved my confidence. It was not only a constructive knowledge generation process, but also a deeply enriching personal experience.

Jiang, X., Qin, F., Wang, S., & Liu, G. (2009) ‘The influence of the value changes on the perception of costume colour’, Journal of Fiber Bioengineering and Informatics, 2(1), pp.36-40.

Leary, M., Cottrell, C., & Phillips, M. (2001) ‘Deconfounding the effects of dominance and social acceptance on self-esteem’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(5), pp898-909.

Whitfield, T. W., & Wiltshire, T. J. (1990) ‘Color psychology: A critical review’, Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs, 116, pp.385-411.

Wilson, J., Benson, L., Bruce, M., Hogg, M., & Oulton, D. (2001) ‘Predicting the future: An overview of the colour forecasting industry’, The Design Journal, 4(1), pp.15-31.

Zelanski, P., & Fisher, M. (1999). Colour. London, England: Herbert Press.

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Instagram - A place for the happy and narcissistic?

Lisa Strunz MSc Applied Psychology in Fashion

In the last decade, social networking sites (SNSs) have become a major communication tool. While Facebook is still the most popular and frequently used SNS (Duggan et al., 2014), Instagram has proven that ‘pictures speak louder than words’ (Lee et al., 2015; p. 552). With 400 million active users every month, it has exceeded Twitter and other SNSs (Chaykowski, 2015), and is currently the fastest growing social networking site (Lunden, 2014).

Instagram was launched in 2010 and is a mobile photo-sharing application that allows users to take photos or videos, beautify them with digital tools and filters, and instantly share them with friends and followers. Unlike Facebook, Instagram thus focuses solely on imagery and does not allow the creation of pure text content. Every day, users upload an average of 80 million new pictures on Instagram (Instagram Stats, 2015). Most of the photos show snapshots of themselves (Hu et al., 2014) or of their everyday life, predominantly in a positive and beautified way. First and foremost, this is due to the concept behind Instagram, which is marketed as a ‘fun and quirky way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures’

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(Instagram, 2015). Further, the content on Instagram is highly controlled by algorithms.

Any disturbing pictures are removed or can only be seen after a warning (Fischer, 2015).

Overall, 53% of the users are between 18 and 29 (Duggan et al., 2014), and spend almost 30 minutes a day on Instagram (eMarketer, 2014).

Despite the increasing popularity of Instagram and the fact that people present themselves today in the digital sphere as much as in real life (Lindahl & Öhlund, 2013), little is known about the active Instagram users (meaning those who actively share content rather than passively consume it). Until now, no work has yet investigated the following three aspects, which are possibly related to an active Instagram use: narcissism, the sense of self and subjective well-being.

Narcissism is characterised first and foremost by excessive self-love (Bleske-Rechek et al., 2008).

Buffardi and Campbell (2008) claim that presenting oneself on SNSs can reinforce or create narcissistic tendencies. McKinney et al.

(2012) argue that it is rather narcissists who seek a form of technology that allows them to be the centre of attention. Indeed, individuals

high in narcissism tend to use SNSs more often than those low in narcissism (Panek et al., 2013), post manipulated photos of themselves (Mehdizadeh, 2010; Wang et al., 2012) and use personal pronouns such as ‘I’ and ‘me’ along with them (DeWall et al., 2011).

The sense of self is defined as the extent to which an individual knows who he or she is (Flury & Ickes, 2007). To develop a welldefined self is regarded as a core project of each individual (Oyserman et al., 2012), however, the increasing individualism in Western cultures and the resulting pressure to succeed has made this process more and more difficult (Gergen, 1991; Giddens, 1991; Côté, 1996). Although research on the sense of self is rather scarce, several findings make it reasonable to predict that individuals with a weak sense of self seek Instagram as a tool to strengthen it. For example, being aware of an audience can reinforce personality claims (Gonzales & Hancock, 2008), communicating with oneself can confirm one’s own perspectives (Kimmel, 2005), and narrating one’s life can help to better understand the self (McLean, 2005).

Subjective well-being comprises high life satisfaction and pleasant emotions. Early research on the Internet has reported that depressed and lonely individuals show a higher preference for online interactions (Morahan-Martin & Schumacher, 2000; McKenna et al., 2002). Newer studies in contrast provide evidence that individuals high in extraversion – positively associated to subjective well-being – use SNSs more actively (Wilson et al. 2010; Pornsakulvanich & Dumrongsiri, 2012). Further, happy people seek ways to maintain their happiness (Liberman et al., 2009), and are motivated to share positive experiences with others (Rimé et al., 1992).

In line with previous research, it was thus hypothesised that individuals who are

actively using Instagram show high levels of narcissism, have a weak sense of self and report subjective well-being.

A total of 400 participants completed an online questionnaire which contained the Facebook Intensity Scale (Ellison et al., 2007) applied to Instagram as well as to further questions about their Instagram use, followed by the Sense of Self Scale (Flury & Ickes, 2007), the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985), the Scale for Positive and Negative Experience (Diener et al., 2009), and the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (Ames et al., 2006). Among the 400 participants, 200 stated that Instagram is the SNS where they share pictures the most, therefore the data analysis focussed on them. Participants included 45 males and 155 females, who ranged in age from 17 to 48 years (M = 25.85, SD = 5.49). The sample was a convenience sample recruited by the researcher through her social network, whereby participants were asked to recruit further people from their social network. This ensured that the sample contained a diverse selection of people.

To analyse the relationships between Instagram use, narcissism, sense of self, satisfaction with life, positive affect and negative experience, one-way and two-way ANOVAs were performed. As predicted, Instagram use was significantly related to narcissism and subjective well-being.

However, there was no significant effect of the sense of self on Instagram use, meaning the initial hypotheses that these two constructs are related was not supported.

The fact that people high in narcissism are likely to actively use Instagram is not surprising. After all, Instagram perfectly meets narcissists’ concerns and needs. The act of sharing and maintaining pictures on Instagram offers narcissists a medium of extending themselves, which is considered to be their major fascination (McLuhan’s, 1994). Further,

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they can live out their excessive self-love without being perceived as bizarre. Moreover, the popular act of sharing selfies on Instagram allows narcissists to look at themselves, which corresponds to research which has found that narcissists are exhibitionistic and vain (Vazire et al., 2008), tend to overestimate their attractiveness (Bleske-Rechek et al., 2008), and enjoy watching themselves in the mirror (Robins & John, 1997).

Results further showed a significant relation between Instagram use and subjective wellbeing. There are several explanations for this result. First, research has found that people high in subjective well-being are extraverted, sociable and creative personalities (Costa & McCrae, 1980; Emmons & Diener, 1985; Diener et al., 1992; Lyubomirsky et al., 2005).

An active Instagram use requires quite some extroversion, as the main purpose of Instagram is to share rather personal aspects of ones live with friends, but also with complete strangers.

Hence, active users are probably rather extroverted and consequently also report greater subjective well-being. Another way of explaining the finding is with the occurrence of homophily on SNSs, which means that happy people tend to bond with others who display a similar level of happiness (Bollen et al., 2011). Instagram represents a rather positive environment, therefore it is to assume that people high in subjective well-being feel attracted to it. A third explanation is that happy people tend be more motivated to immediately share positive experiences (Rimé et al., 1992),

References Ames, R., Rose, D., Anderson, P., & Cameron, P. (2006).

The NPI-16 as a short measure of narcissism.

Bleske-Rechek, A., Remiker, M., & Baker, J. (2008).

Narcissistic men and women think they are so hot – But they are not.

Bollen, J., Gonçalves, B., Ruan, G., & Mao, H. (2011).

Happiness is assortative in online social networks.

Buffardi, L., & Campbell, W. (2008). Narcissism and Social Networking Web Sites.

Chaykowski, K. (2015). Instagram Hits 400 Million Users, Soaring Past Twitter. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.

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often even with strangers (Rimé, 2009; Reis et al., 2010; Dibble & Levine, 2013), and to find ways in which to maintain their happiness (Liberman et al., 2009). Instagram offers an ideal medium for these objectives. The act of uploading photos allows users to instantly share their experiences, connects them with strangers, and enables them to archive their happiness in their personal photo stream.

The hypothesis that there is a relation between Instagram use and a weak sense of self was not supported by the results.

Probably those individuals who lack an understanding of who they are simply do not know what kind of pictures to share, and are more likely to use Instagram only passively.

In conclusion, Instagram is with 400 million active users monthly considered to be the fastest growing social networking site.

Yet, research on it is limited. This study contributes to the understanding of how the frequency of Instagram use is related to people’s personality characteristics, moods and feelings. Although it may be a common assumption, the results provide the first evidence that an active Instagram use is associated with narcissism as well as with subjective well-being. While this study is not proposing that everyone who uses Instagram is happy or a narcissist, the medium appears particular attractive to these individuals.

More research is needed to further disentangle the psychological factors that lead people to engage in Instagram.

com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2015/09/22/instagramhits-400-million-users-soaring-past-twitter/.

Costa, T., & McCrae, R. (1980). Influence of extraversion and neuroticism on subjective well-being: Happy and unhappy people.

Côté, J. (1996). Sociological perspectives on identity formation: the culture-identity link and identity capital.

DeWall, C., Buffardi, L., Bonser, I., & Campbell, W. (2011). Narcissism and implicit attention seeking: Evidence from linguistic analyses of social networking and online presentation.

Dibble, J., & Levine, T. (2013). Sharing good and bad news with friends and strangers: Reasons for and communication behaviours associated with the MUM effect.

Diener, E., Emmons, R., Larsen, R., & Griffin, S. (1985).

The Satisfaction with Life Scale.

Diener, E., Oishi, S., & Lucas, R. (2009). Subjective wellbeing: The science of happiness and life satisfaction.

Diener, E., Sandvik, E., Pavot, W., & Fujita, F. (1992).

Extraversion and subjective well-being in a U.S. national probability sample.

Duggan, M., Ellison, N., Lampe, C., Lenhart, A., & Madden, M. (2014). Demographics of Key Social Networking Platforms. Retrieved from http://www. pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/demographics-of-keysocial-networking-platforms-2/ Duggan, M., Ellison, N., Lampe, C., Lenhart, A., & Madden, M. (2014). Social Media Update 2014.

Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/ 2015/01/09/social-media-update-2014/eMarketer (2014). Younger Users Spend More Daily Time on Social Networks. Retrieved from http://www.emarketer.com/ Article/Younger-Users-Spend-More-Daily-Time-onSocial-Networks/1011592 Ellison, N., Steinfield, C., Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook ‘ friends’: Social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites.

Emmons, R., & Diener, E. (1985). Personality correlates of subjective well-being.

Fischer, T. (2015). Instagram-Leaks. Retrieved from http://blog.neon.de/2015/07/instagram-leaks/ Flury, J., & Ickes, W. (2007). Having a weak versus strong sense of self: The Sense Of Self Scale (SOSS).

Gergen, K. (1991). The Saturated Self: dilemmas of identity in contemporary life.

Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-identity: self and society in the late modern age.

Gonzales, A., & Hancock, J. (2010). Mirror, Mirror on my Facebook Wall: Effects of Exposure to Facebook on Self-Esteem.

Hu, Y., Manikonda, L., & Kambhampati, S. (2015). What We Instagram: A First Analysis of Instagram Photo Content and User Types.

Instagram Stats (2015). Retrieved from https://instagram. com/press/ Kimmel, A. (2005). Marketing Communication: New Approaches, Technologies, and Styles.

Lee, E., Lee, J-A., Moon, J., & Sung, Y. (2015). Pictures Speak Louder than Words: Motivations for Using Instagram, p. 552.

Liberman, V., Boehm, J., Lyubomirsky, S., & Ross, L. (2009).

Happiness and memory: Affective significance of endowment and contrast.

Lindahl, G., & Öhlund, M. (2013). Personal Branding Through Imagification in Social Media: Identity Creation and Alteration Through Images.

Lunden, I. (2014). Instagram is the fastest-growing social site globally, mobile devices rule over PCs for access. Retrieved from http://techcrunch. com/2014/01/21/instagram-is-the-fastest-growing-socialsite-globally-mobile-devices-rule-over-pcs-for-socialaccess/ Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., Diener, E. (2005). The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?

McKenna, K., Green, A., & Gleason, M. (2002). Relationship formation on the Internet: What’s the big attraction?

McKinney, B., Kelly, L., & Duran, R. (2012). Narcissism or Openness?: College Students’ Use of Facebook and Twitter.

McLean, K. (2005). Late adolescent identity development: Narrative meaning making and memory telling.

McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, p. 41.

Mehdizadeh, S. (2010). Self-Presentation 2.0: Narcissism and Self-Esteem on Facebook.

Morahan-Martin, J., & Schumacher, P. (2000). Incidence and correlates of pathological Internet use among college students.

Oyserman, D., Elmore, K, & Smith, G. (2012). Self, SelfConcept, and Identity.

Panek, E., Nardis, Y., & Konrath, S. (2013). Mirror or megaphone? How relationships between narcissism and social networking site use differ on Facebook and Twitter.

Pornsakulvanich, V., & Dumrongsiri, N. (2012). Personality traits and demographic profile predicting social networking sites usage in Thailand.

Reis, H., Smith, S., Carmichael, C., Caprariello, P., Tsai, F.-F., Rodrigues, A., et al. (2010). Are you happy for me?

How sharing positive events with others provides personal and interpersonal benefits.

Rimé, B. (2009). Emotion elicits the social sharing of emotion: Theory and empirical review.

Rimé, B., Philippot, P., Boca, S., & Mesquita, B. (1992).

Long-lasting cognitive and social consequences of emotion: Social sharing and rumination.

Robins, R., & John, O. (1997). Effects of visual perspective and narcissism on self-perception: Is seeing believing?

Vazire, S., Naumann, L., Rentfrow, P., & Gosling, S. (2008).

Portrait of a narcissist: Manifestations of narcissism in physical appearance.

Wang, J.-L., Jackson, L., Zhang, D.-J., & Su, Z.-Q. (2012).

The relationships among the Big Five Personality factors, self-esteem, narcissism, and sensation-seeking to Chinese University students’ uses of social networking sites (SNSs).

Wilson, K., Fornasier, S., & White, K. (2010). Psychological predictors of young adults’ use of Social Networking Sites.

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Models just wanna have fun: An analysis of the informal fashion modelling practices of the Jordanian T-shirt brand Jobedu Leoni Schwandt MA History and Culture of Fashion

In the contemporary fashion world models often attract admiration for their assumedly ideal bodies – surrounded by glamour, glitter, and animosity, they make their way to fame by looking above-average pretty in front of a camera (Wissinger 2015, p.8). Simultaneously, fashion modelling as a profession is often connoted with superficiality, a lack of seriousness and respectability. These stereotypical and facile perceptions are reflected in the so far limited state of literature on fashion modelling from a socio-cultural perspective. Particularly qualitative research about fashion and fashion modelling and its bodily dimensions can be precarious topics, as they are deeply intertwined with conceptions of gender and sexuality. Within the past one and a half decades modelling has attracted attention only of few sociological and anthropological researchers specialising on fashion and the body, like Joanne Entwistle (2004), Elizabeth Wissinger (2015) and Ashley Mears (2011). However, as a topic of

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scholarly interest, as well as a profession, fashion modelling remains marginalised, especially in regions outside of the so-called ‘West’, perpetuating a significant academic Eurocentrism.

Jordan’s capital Amman, as a city, culture and urbanized society is widely under-researched.

In comparison to other Arab cities like Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, Jerusalem or Dubai, the capital of the Hashemite kingdom has been rarely looked upon within fashion research and hence documentation of its cultural, social and sartorial life is scarce (Ababsa and Daher 2011, Sundelin 2015). In Amman, modelling is regulated by impacts uncommon within other fashion businesses, such as religious restrictions or familial pressures. Consequently, Amman’s modelling industry is modest in size and provides limited opportunities for individuals aspiring to model in front of the camera or on a catwalk. Models who do carry out the job and are registered

with a model or media agency tend to verbally and practically conceal their activities from their direct familial and social groups, as well as professionally in order to streamline their work into the surrounding normative system.

Even calling oneself a model is negatively charged to a degree that the term model itself is often avoided or ridiculed. Despite, or rather because of the barriers professional and semiprofessional models encounter in Amman, fashion designers and brands develop methods to recruit and employ models on a voluntary basis and thus avoid unwanted derision.

is framed with the Arabic verb ‘itsauwar’ (to be photographed), which carries no direct connection to fashion or negative stigmata of superficiality. These natural models are advised to do nothing much but be as they usually are in front of the camera, while wearing Jobedu attire.

Secondly, images of models in Jobedu T-shirts, hoodies or tank-tops, which are regularly published on the official brand website and its social media accounts, constitute the primary source of the brand’s advertising and are expected to appear as natural as possible. They are hardly Based on data collected during an retouched and digitally enhanced and seem anthropological research project undertaken to be depicting the spur-of-the-moment: a over three months in Amman in 2015, my guy in T-shirt and jeans with uncombed hair, dissertation ‘Models just wanna have fun’ explores how the T-shirt fashion brand Jobedu, leaning against a wall, seemingly not caring about the happenings around him, turning popular amongst the affluent urban Ammani youth and skater-scene, offers its staff members his face away; a group of youngsters happily engaged in conversation and laughter, and customers opportunities to model in an completely disregarding the presence of the a protected informal environment. Jobedu’s photographer; another girl sitting casually on intriguing brand culture – the Jobedu tribe – a public staircase, playing with her phone. is comparable to the idea of a brand culture as identified by sociologist Michel Maffesoli These are few examples of images which (1996), based on sociality and the formation undermine the perceived naturalness and of neo-tribes. However, the community of spontaneity of Jobedu-modelling, which friends and family of the Jobedu tribe further thus eludes itself from the usual criticism of rests upon values, like hospitality, equality, and inclusiveness, as well as the infrastructures the modelling industry as artificial, vain, and found among Jordanian Bedouin tribes. Within dubious. Subsequently, being photographed for the brand enjoys great popularity among this tightly-knitted brand community, tribe Jobedu employees, fans and customers. To members rely on different justifying strategies them, Jobedu supplies opportunity to try to circumvent the usual challenges faced by themselves out in new roles in front of the Jordanian fashion models. lens and to engage with other members of the Jobedu community. Thus, it creates a kind of Firstly, through verbal concealment of their modelhood well-adjusted to the socio-cultural modelling activities, such as the exclusion of context of Amman. the term ‘model’ from the brand’s common jargon, Jobedu models and brand members The deviation of terminology employed for distance themselves from regular modelling.

Jobedu-modelling, as well as the difference During photo shoots, which are held rather of the produced fashion images and spontaneously and in consciously relaxed settings, participants aren’t ask to model but to displayed bodies easily lead to the conclusion that Jobedu-modelling is merely taking simply be photographed in a natural manner. spontaneous snap-shots of ordinary people in In oral and written conversations ‘to model’

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ordinary clothes. Modelling thus carried out

by Jobedu is at first sight barely comparable to the highly regulated, institutionalised and labour intensive professional modelling businesses of London or New York (Mears 2011, p.30-31, Wissinger 2015, p.162), since Jobedu models are neither officially employed as models, nor do they receive a direct monetary wage. On closer inspection, however, this research demonstrates that the very naturalness and ordinariness emphasised within Jobedu-modelling is a crucial element to maintain a highly crafted ‘natural’ image. The very selection of models based on their embodiment of naturalness resembles the same hazy criteria of having the right look which professional model bookers in, for example, London regularly use to describe a model’s qualification for the job (Entwistle and Slater 2012, Entwistle and Mears 2013). Both, Jobedu brand officials and professional model agents are

References Ababsa, M. and Daher, R. (2011) Cities, urban practices and nation building in Jordan. Beirut: Presses de l’Ifpo.

Entwistle, J. (2004) ‘From Catwalk to Catalogue: Male

Fashion Models, Masculinity, and Identity,’ in Thomas, H. and Ahmed, J. (eds) Cultural Bodies. Ethnography and Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. pp.: 55-75.

Entwistle, J. and Mears, A. (2013) ‘Gender on Display:

Performativity in Fashion Modelling’, Cultural Sociology, vol. 7, pt.3, pp. 320-335. Entwistle, J. and Wissinger, E. (2006) ‘Keeping up Appearances: aesthetic labour and identity in the fashion modelling

industries of London and New York’, Sociological Review, 54(4), pp. 774-794.

Entwistle, J. and Wissinger, E. (2012) Fashioning models. Image, text and industry. London, New York: Berg.

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commonly unable to clearly verbalise what it takes to achieve a natural or right look.

Hence, justifying strategies concerning their professional or semi-professional modelling activities applied by Jobedu and professional ‘Western’ models overlap with each other, as the element of being naturally suited for the job reoccurs.

This shows that modelling in varying cultural contexts poses challenges which models, agents or brands then tackle with similar approaches, yet in socio-culturally fitting ways. Therefore, within the slowly growing body of literature on fashion modelling the socio-cultural and religious settings surrounding the models have to be looked at closer. This dissertation highlights the need for in-depth research to comprehend the finely-tuned particularities of fashion modelling practices within various cultural, social, religious and/or political contexts.

Sundelin, G. (2015) Amman has Potential to be region’s fashion capital. [Internet]. Available from: [Accessed 06 April 2015].

Maffesoli, M. (1996) The Time of the Tribes. The decline of individualism in mass society. London: Sage Publications.

Mears, A. (2011) Pricing Beauty: the making of a fashion model. Berkeley et al.: University of California Press.

Wissinger, E. (2015) This year’s model: fashion, media and the making of glamour. New York and London: New York University Press.

Jobedu models taking a spontaneous selfie during a photo shoot.

Image by Leoni Schwandt.

It’s not only about the fashion.

It’s a very personal service Jemma Beveridge MSc Applied Psychology in Fashion

An image consultant is a self-employed trained professional whose service includes restyling their clients’ whole life not just their wardrobe. This service is not available on the UK high street because it takes a lot of time and comes at a high price. However, many stores on the high street offer the service of a personal shopper who works with a customer helping them select and purchase the items.

Personal shoppers usually lack any specialised training and their customers are often high profile. Conversely, a personal stylist is trained in how to dress a client based on their body shape and colour analysis. Personal stylists believe in educating their clients in how to dress appropriately for their body shape while still reflecting their identity. The work of a personal stylist has not previously been explored from a psychological perspective and as a result, the human characteristics of the job are not well understood.

into their profession in terms of training, challenges and job satisfaction associated with being a personal stylist on the UK high street.

The study described here provides grounds for the need of psychology within fashion retail, specifically in the role of high street personal stylists. Interviews with six personal stylists, one male and five female, working at a high street department store, were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and provided a rich and deep insight

The influence of clothing and other factors external to ourselves is known as embodied cognition. It is the reciprocal influence of cognition on the body and external environment. Embodied cognition enables us to understand the world around us through the interaction of cognition and bodily responses to environmental stimuli

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The personal stylists that were interviewed were trained to dress their clients based on the requirements provided by the client. For example, a holiday, work or a wedding. During an appointment the personal stylist explains the process to the client in order to educate the client about the style and fit of clothing best suited to his or her body shape. The personal stylist creates a rail of clothing from the shop floor and the client is encouraged to try on each item of clothing. The stylist explains why certain cuts may fit and suit the client better than others and demonstrates other ways the garment can be styled and combined with items on the rail or potential items already at home in the wardrobe.

(Lakoff, Damassio, Niedenthal, 2007). This is crucial in the work of personal stylists because it underpins the client’s behaviour encompassing both cognition and emotion as a factor of the environment. When the personal stylist is knowledgeable about embodied cognition s/he is more likely to be able to ‘read’, through body language, how the client feels in particular garments beyond what suits his/her body shape and colouring.

If the personal stylist is unresponsive to changes in the client’s body language, the result will be suboptimal for the client and the stylist. Even if the garments are purchased, they may not be worn and the client would be less likely to use the service in future.

Embodied cognition tells us that the environment impacts on human behaviour; enclothed cognition (Adam & Galinsky, 2012) tells us that clothing can affect not only a person’s behaviour, but also their cognition. However, in order for changes in cognition to occur, the clothing must have symbolic meaning as well as being worn. Personal stylists could exploit this knowledge by expressing to their clients that they are wearing the same item, style, or brand as a particular celebrity that the client values. People use clothing as a form of communication, therefore both embodied and enclothed cognition are central to a personal stylist’s successful partnership with the client.

The typical clientele of a personal stylist, according to Bryson and Wellington (2002), are middle aged women who are at a turning point in their life. For example, they may be starting a new job or relationship, getting a divorce or experiencing the empty nest syndrome. This may encourage them to seek advice on how to present themselves to be more appealing and successful. The interviews in this study suggested that clients came for many other reasons including bereavement, illness, pregnancy and weight loss. These events affect a person psychologically.

Knowing how to dress according to a new body shape following long-term stress, illness or weight loss may be difficult and individuals may seek out guidance and advice from professionals trained to help in such situations.

Unsurprisingly, the interviewees stated that their clients reported leaving happier and with a better understanding of how to dress. The personal stylists reported this as the best part of their job because they believed they were able to teach their client how to accentuate their best features through their clothing and they understood that this created confidence in their client. The darker side of the job that the team reported was that sometimes a personal stylist is sought because of a bereavement. They felt that they had not been prepared during their training for such an emotional scenario. Consequently, and understandably, they felt unprepared to deal with these situations when they arose.

The study suggests that providing training for personal stylists that included even basic psychological understanding would be of benefit as it could help them communicate better with their clients at all times. In addition, it would also equip the personal stylist with some protective coping mechanisms when appointments became emotionally charged.

Although the outcomes point to the value of applying psychology to the work of personal stylists, the study has many limitations.

For example, using a qualitative approach means that the work is not generalisable, but does enable a deeper understanding of the phenomena under study. Further work could interview more stylists and generate a quantitative measure from the qualitative findings that would enable generalisable results. In addition, interviewing clients would enable an understanding of their experience while in the shop and afterwards when wearing

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the garments the personal stylist helped them select, stylists reported. This could be achieved in further work. Notwithstanding these limitations, the study has highlighted an area of fashion retail which could benefit greatly from psychological input.

References Adam, H. and Galinsky, D., A. (2012) ‘Enclothed

Cognition’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48, pp.918–92 Damasio, A. R. (2000). The feeling of what happens: Body, emotion and the making of consciousness.

Random House.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. Basic books.

Niedenthal, M., P. (2007) ‘Embodying Emotion’, Science

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Down at Heel: Accounting for the Decline of the British Women’s Fashion Footwear Industry Post World War Two Chris Hill Lilley MA History and Culture of Fashion

Taking the period 1945 to 1975 as the timeframe, this dissertation explores why the British women’s fashion footwear industry went into deteriorating economic decline in the second half of the twentieth century. It aimed to demonstrate that, despite intense and growing penetration from low cost foreign imports, the actual causes for what was seen by 1975 as a crisis in the industry, were more complex and diverse.

Footwear manufacture has suffered from a deficiency of broadly focused academic study.

The available literature is almost exclusively concerned with the design of women’s fashion footwear or the allure and power of the designed object within the context of its cultural or gender significance. To date no systematic investigation has considered how, for example, technological advances in footwear construction and materials after the Second World War have affected footwear fashion, design and its manufacturing

industry. Nor has there been any focused consideration of the production, distribution and retailing of fashion footwear and its subsequent affects upon the marketplace and consumption. This study intends to redress this omission.

Interest in this subject arises from personal experience. I entered the industry in 1977 as a junior designer/pattern cutter, unaware that it was in decline. There were still major manufacturing centres, with supporting material and component industries, across the country. These ranged from small cutting and closing units in Lancashire’s Rossendale Valley to the massive British Boot and Shoe Corporation in Leicester. There were still shoemaking towns, such as Norwich, where most of the population were employed by the trade. But this was soon to change. Once a major home and export industry, by the mid 1970’s British women’s fashion footwear manufacturing was struggling and factories

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over the country were closing. I began my career in the 1970s clocking in to a large Northampton factory at seven o’clock in the morning with the rest of my fellow British workers. I ended it in the 2000’s working in Italy, where a manufacturing base still (just) exists, and in the Far East, for UK import companies. Only a handful of factories were left in Britain making ladies fashion footwear, why had all the rest disappeared?

It was publically acknowledged on the 1970s that the industry in general was suffering from a deteriorating trade balance, increasing unemployment and low profitability. In 1975 officials from the Department of Industry and MPs met for the first time with representative of the footwear industry, their research associations and trade unions. Together they formed The Footwear Industry Study Steering Group with a remit, from the Department of Industry, to ‘consider ways of improving the efficiency and international competitiveness of the UK Footwear Manufacturing Industry, and of ensuring its viability, and to make recommendations’ (Marriott 1979, p.15).

The Steering Group’s concern was that this situation might seriously jeopardize the footwear industries ‘ability to combat rising imports, improve its exports, and indeed survive in the long term in anything like its present form’ (Baynes 1979, p.15). There was no obvious over-riding factor to explain the poor state of the footwear industry in 1975, or answer to its problems. The decline of the British footwear industry had not happened overnight and the ensuing ‘savage international competition’ (Baynes 1979, p.9) from cheap imports appeared to be both symptomatic and causal.

The assumption that cheap imports undercut the market, resulting in a mass move to manufacturing off-shore, addresses only one element of the problem. I propose that there were several factors contributing to the decline of British women’s fashion

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footwear manufacture, which have never been juxtaposed, compared or analysed.

These factors include the lack of government support and investment for the growth of the home industry. Lack of import controls and a continued governmental disinterest in footwear fashion (indeed the whole of the fashion industry) was an important contributor to the British economy during this period.

Changes in technology and the response of a deeply conservative and traditional industry also contributed. Key, previously unconsidered, factors were the speed of change of women’s footwear fashion and the expectations of consumers. After the Second World War the footwear manufacturing industry grew steadily and successfully; a growth which peaked for many companies in the late sixties to early seventies. The scope and variety of footwear products and markets was broad and not all manufacturers and retailers were struggling by the mid-seventies.

The focus for this dissertation is on women’s fashion footwear, because linked to changing modes in dress; like fashion, it constitutes the most competitive and fast moving market.

Fashions in women’s footwear began to evolve rapidly after the war and consumer profiles changed dramatically. Revealingly, the challenges raised by rapidly changing fashion trends were not an area considered by The Footwear Industry Study Steering Group; but it is proposed in this dissertation that the culture of fashion had a profound effect upon the fortunes of the British women’s footwear fashion trade.

Given the complexity of the subject matter, a chronological approach to the study has been rejected in favour of a thematic approach with three chapters. Taking an over-view of the industry during and post wartime, Chapter One, ‘Context’, considers how Italy became established as a world leader in women’s fashion footwear. The question of ‘why Britain was so reliant upon outside design influence,

particularly that of Italy’ is explored within the framework of attitudes towards design as is the changing industrial landscape, the influence of Trade Unions and the state of the footwear industry by the 1970s. Modern advances in technology and materials all had a profound impact upon the development of the post war UK shoe industry. Chapter Two ‘Process’, explores how the development of plastics, new moulding techniques and synthetic materials led to modern, innovative silhouettes. The effects of the simplification of both footwear machinery and making techniques upon the industry will be explored.

In the third chapter ‘Production & Retailing’, manufacturing methods, distribution and retailing is considered, as focus shifted from bespoke makers to independent traders to vast multiples. The emerging teenage market, boutiques and the rise of the ‘designer shoemaker’ is explored as is the effects of the centralisation of buying and distribution upon import penetration.

The Footwear Industry Study Steering Group’s report was published in 1979 and its broad ranging recommendations reflected the scope of the problem. The general election of that year brought a new Conservative government to power. Whatever impetus the report might have generated before a shift in political ideology it was not sufficient to halt the decline of British women’s fashion footwear manufacturing into the 1980s. It is highly probable that even with greater government trade protection and rigorous implementation of all of the Steering Groups’ recommendations the decline was irreversible. Nevertheless this dissertation examines all of the factors that led to the eventual disappearance of the UK’s women’s fashion footwear manufacturing base and the move to offshore production for many companies. It proposes that although imported footwear exacerbated the situation, there were many other equally complex contributory historical and cultural issues that opened up the UK market to external penetration.

References Baynes, K. (ed.) (1979) The shoe show: British shoes since 1790. London: Crafts Council.

Marriot, G. W. (1997) Report of the footwear industry study steering group. London: Department of Industry

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The Mythology of the Spectacle: An Exploration in the Production and Representation of the Political Narrative in the Catwalk Show.

Felicia Scicluna MA History and Culture of Fashion

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 work Laocoon: An essay upon the limits of painting and poetry argued that painting is an art of space, unlike poetry, which is an art of time.

He argued that poetry must be read in time and through a sequence, while viewing a painting provides a holistic understanding of the relation between the objects in space: [I]f these signs must indisputably bear a suitable relation to the thing signified, then signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one another can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive (Lessing 1984 [1766], p.475).

The element of space and time has been developed to analyse performance as an amalgamation of the two; the understanding that performance incorporates within it the ‘art of time’ and also the ‘art of space’ formed the basis of this dissertation. By

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understanding the catwalk show as a form of performance, a new understanding was created around the way in which the dominant fashion ideology, in analysing the fashion show, is a static, image-based one. Studies around the fashion show have focused predominantly on the way in which the show translates into an image, rather than taking the entirety of the show as the basis of the analysis. Caroline Evans argues that the fashion show in the late nineteenth century came to embody movement and modernity, ‘at a time when modernity became particularly associated with speed and acceleration’ (2013, p.3). While Evans recognises the importance that movement had within the emergence of the fashion show, its element within the contemporary catwalk show has been overlooked. The aim of this dissertation was to challenge this dominant idea that the fashion show is to be examined and analysed through a fixed image, one which does not incorporate movement and time.

Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2004 show, titled Deliverance, was structured around a clear narrative, which was communicated through the styling and the dancing, choreographed by Michael Clark.

The main inspiration for the show was the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

(Pollack, 1969) and the show recreated the dance marathon that the film was based upon.

McQueen’s work has been hailed for being thought-provoking and artistic. His collections have been analysed through different aspects within fashion studies, but this specific show has almost been overlooked. The garments in the collection were relatively pared down compared to his usual style, and did not translate into the spectacular images usually expected from McQueen collections.

The paring down of the garments can be attributed to the fact that the show followed the clear narrative that was adapted from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; the existentialist plot being reflected in the show. The lack of “Show Only” pieces led to Deliverance being overlooked in both academic and popular discussions around McQueen’s work.

By approaching the show as a form of adaptation of the film, the first chapter of the dissertation created an understanding of how the catwalk show as a form of performance can convey a political statement. This chapter focuses on the idea of the political element being constructed through the ‘art of time’ rather than the ‘art of space’. By adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, a new understanding was developed to address how the catwalk show can challenge the fashion industry’s normative conventions through the ‘art of time’ rather than the ‘art of space’.

This notion of the political being embodied through the ‘art of time’ was argued through Julia Kristeva’s theoretical work on the abject (1982); and how the abject within Deliverance was constructed through the sequence of the garments in the show. The journey into abjection accumulated in the finale of the

show where a dress featured in the first scene was reworked to appear torn in order to symbolize the existentialist narrative of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

The second chapter aimed in producing an understanding of the way in which the art of time in the fashion show is represented in the media. This exposed how socio-cultural environments and conditions come into play when a fashion show is interpreted by both traditional and new forms of media. The political element, being woven within the ‘art of time’ rather than the ‘art of space’, led to two distinct ways of interpretation. The familiarity of the American press with dance marathon culture led to the political element being represented in the American media.

Alternately, fashion’s ideological concept of the fashion show as primarily an ‘art of space’ led to its depoliticisation. This dual system of press interpretation of Deliverance led to the uncovering of different ideological systems that come to play in the interpretation of the catwalk show. The ‘art of space’ element being dominant within fashion ideology has further uncovered the other aspect that fashion is preoccupied with: that of the spectacle.

Fashion’s preconception with the ‘art of space’ leads to the ideal condition for the emergence of the spectacle as ‘the spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance’ (Debord, 1994:14). The fashion world is fascinated and entranced by the myth of the spectacle.

The exhibition ‘Savage Beauty’, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum 14 March – 2 August 2015, reinforced the static image ideology as it was predominantly concerned with displaying the spectacular element within McQueen’s collection. The focus on the showpieces led to the exhibition becoming a clear understanding of how fashion’s dominant ideology is concerned with the ‘art of space’, leading to the ‘art of

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Screen Grabs from the first and final scene of Alexander McQueen’s Spring Summer 2004 collection Deliverance

Finale dress from Deliverance exhibited in the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ section of the exhibition Savage Beauty at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2015

time’ being overlooked. This in turn led to the depoliticisation of the finale dress from Deliverance. Displaying the finale dress separate from the context of the show and thus the ‘art of time’ element meant the dress was emptied of all its abject meaning.

Furthermore its positioning within the Cabinet of Curiosities section of the exhibition, juxtaposed amongst the spectacular and the visually abject pieces, the dress came to signify the spectacle, further reinforcing the press’s fascination with the concept of the spectacle. This emptying of the political meaning within the spectacle context in the exhibition, reinforced the creation of the myth around McQueen as an artistic genius. The depoloitisation of the Deliverance show by the press in 2003 led to the perfect conditions for the romantic myth to emerge.

References Barthes, R. (2009 [1972]) Mythologies. London: Vintage.

Debord, G. (1994 [1967]) The society of the spectacle.

(Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books.

Evans, C. (2013) The mechanical smile: modernism and the first fashion shows in France and America, 19001929. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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As Roland Barthes argues: Now myth always comes under the heading of meta-language: the depoliticization which it carries out often supervenes against a background which is already neutralized, depolitized by a general metalanguage, which speaks of things, much less easily (2009 [1972], p.170).

As this dissertation explained, dominant fashion ideology is preoccupied with the image-based representation of the spectacle. The idea of the catwalk show as a form of performance that incorporates time and space was adopted to challenge the static image based approach that is predominantly adopted in analysing and representing the catwalk show.

Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of horror: an essay on abjection. Translated by L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lessing, G. (1766/1984) Laocoon: an essay upon the limits of painting and poetry. Translated by E. McCormick, Trans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Looking at / Joining In: On the afterlife of the uncanny in (near) contemporary experimental theatre, catwalk shows, fine art and fashion exhibitions Shirley van de Polder MA Fashion Curation

Encounters with the uncanny are strange experiences in which abstracted thoughts, memories and emotions create a sense of discomfort through the interplay between recollection and alienation. Describing uncanniness is a difficult task, explaining it appears to be nearly impossible. The peculiar experience of being confronted with something, someone or somewhere strangely familiar and distant at the same time requires longer exposure and (psycho)analysis in order to make more sense. Only after a closer look into our own psyche, it becomes possible to see that the abstracted features are in fact staged props, distracting us from the (sub) conscious mechanics behind the familiar and alienated elements.

readers with different flavours of uncanniness, leaving out its ingredients. He not only did this to demonstrate that the uncanny can manifest itself in numerous ways, but I believe that Freud was also aiming to trigger the imagination and associative thinking of his readers, for the sake of the future of psychoanalysis. Freud understood that his intellectual capacities were historically and culturally constructed and therefore limited.

He left us a collection of temporally fixed but inspirational writings with intentionally open endings so that future generations could take over and continue exploring the riddles of the mind. This makes Freud an equal to a German contemporary, namely art historian, cultural theorist and collector Aby Warburg (1866-1929).

Throughout his career, Austrian neurologist, psychoanalyst, writer and founding father of psychoanalysis Dr Sigmund Freud (18561939) wrote extensively on the concept of the uncanny in various works. In these writings, Freud (2203, 2005) provided his

Warburg was born and grew up in Hamburg, but travelled and therefore lived most of his life in Europe and America, mainly studying renaissance painting and tribal artefacts and rituals. The main subject of Warburg’s work involved imagery from classical antiquity and

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his research was devoted to the transmission or afterlife of classical culture in later Western culture (Michaud 2004, p.81). Especially during the last years of his life Warburg worked on the crown of his research, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, or atlas of images.

The Bilderatlas is a construction of wooden panels covered in black cloth displaying thematically ordered sets of images from different disciplines and ((art) historical) periods representing the afterlife of classical antiquity in later Western culture. The images are a seemingly arbitrary collection of newspaper cuttings, advertisements, maps and photographs of artworks (Michaud 2004, p.277). The panels, which Warburg called ‘tafeln’ (tableaus) are always open to changes; images can be added, discarded and/or rearranged (Didi-Huberman 2010, p.20). Warburg offers the viewer his evidence in order to undergo the same process of exploring he went through. Furthermore, Warburg hoped that the images would make the viewer go even further and inspire them to explore individual associations. Looking at the images separately may make them look arbitrary at first, but it is the ‘tafeln’ as a whole that triggers the imagination. Like a constellation of stars, it is the hidden meaning between the images that provides new findings. The point of this project was not to provide an overview of artistic development, but to allow room for asides, the thoughts that pop up, can go back and forth in time and cut across different subjects and disciplines. Similar to Freud’s intention to inspire exploring instead of explaining the human psyche, Warburg aimed to inspire associative thinking about art historical and cultural history rather than explaining it.

Warburg’s and Freud’s findings are uncannily similar. However, the two never met and never before has there been any research that combined the work of both.

The research in this final project concentrates on the afterlife on the uncanny in (near)

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contemporary experimental theatre, catwalk shows, fine art exhibitions and fashion exhibitions. After an examination of Freud’s findings on the uncanny in his writings, a closer look at case studies from the earlier mentioned disciplines show that the uncanny nowadays is not (as Freud describes) present in the interaction between a subject and an object, but a subjective experience taking place within spectatorship. The (near) contemporary notion of the uncanny is embodied within an intangible transitory experience, in which the viewing subject (the spectator) has taken on a more physical and/or mentally engaging role of interaction in order to be presented with sometimes confronting knowledge about the self or the immediate environment. This knowledge was stored in the unconscious and has now become consciously available through the preconscious. Furthermore, the presentation of the preconscious self-knowledge has been made possible through the ‘reveal’ of deceit by the own mind. Whether through selfreflection, immersion or shock and discomfort, the participant becomes aware of something that he or she did not realize before the experience. In all of the analysed case studies it becomes apparent that the revealed knowledge usually relates to an experience which the participant would rather have kept concealed in the unconscious.

In the second part of this project, this type of associative and active spectatorship is linked to the field of fashion curation, in which a similar form of spectatorship seems to have taken a turn that in museological terms can be seen as radical. Recent fashion exhibitions have placed emphasis on the associative power of exhibition design over the ‘mere’ presentation of objects. Although this development is not directly related to Freud’s notion of the uncanny, a closer look at this recent development in fashion curation in relation to Freud’s thoughts on biography demonstrates another Freudian

link. According to Freud, biographers do not understand to purpose of their work if they attempt to understand their subject by trying to collect and know every moment of his or her life and career. Biographies degrade their subjects, as they are monuments to the idea that lives can be understood by knowing (Phillips 1999, pp.74, 91). As psychoanalysis aims to explore the riddles of the mind, Freud did not believe that it was possible to understand someone, as understanding implies a certain kind of finiteness, which would barricade the future of exploring. Freud was used to not focus on what was present, but on what was absent. For Freud, writing a biography had to become more like writing on and practicing the discipline of psychoanalysis; exploring the gaps in a non-linear way, allowing to change, add or discard findings along the way and/or creating more questions that can inspire future research (Yale Books 2014). Relating this notion of biography to recent fashion exhibitions and their emphasis on exhibition design, it seems that fashion exhibition making has become Freudian.

References Clark, J. (2014) Judith Clark Professorial Lecture [Lecture] University of the Arts London, London College of Fashion. 9 June. Available at: https://replay. arts.ac.uk/index.php/video/363 (Accessed: 16 November 2015).

Didi-Huberman, G. (ed.) (2010) Atlas. How to Carry the World on One’s Back? Travelling exhibition [Exhibition catalogue].

Freud, Sigmund. (2003) The Uncanny. Translated by D. McLintock. London: Penguin.

Freud, Sigmund. (2005) The unconscious. Translated by G. Frankland. London: Penguin.

Professor and exhibition maker Judith Clark raises the question whether we can talk about fashion without objects (Clark 2014).

If this means that the objects will be replaced by attributes, the tangible signifiers of the absent objects, we once more return to Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne and pose the question: can we evoke context by exhibiting attributes? Does this bring the same or maybe even better outcomes than exhibiting objects on their own? In an article on the popularity and perception of thematic exhibitions, art historian Debora Meijers claims that the associative connections are only visible to the more cultivated and/or better educated visitors (cited in Greenberg 1996, pp.8, 10).

Meijers rightly makes us aware of the fact that in order to provide the visitor with new ways of seeing, more explorations on fashion exhibition making and the perception of looking at attributes are necessary. For now, the answer to the question how far the fashion exhibition maker can go in the utilisation of attributes as objects remains a riddle, awaiting further interaction and exploration.

Greenberg, R. (ed.); Ferguson, B. (ed.); Nairne, S. (ed.) (1996) Thinking about exhibitions. London/New York: Routledge.

Michaud, P. (2007) Aby Warburg and the image in motion. New York: Zone Books.

Phillips, A. (1999) Darwin’s Worms. London: Faber and Faber.

Yale Books. (2014) An interview with Adam Phillips. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RbQSH2YgswM (Accessed: 24 November 2015).

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For more information see: http://www.arts.ac.uk/fashion/courses/graduate-school/ ma-fashion-cultures http://www.arts.ac.uk/fashion/courses/graduate-school/ ma-psychology-for-fashion-professionals/ http://www.arts.ac.uk/fashion/courses/graduate-school/ msc-applied-psychology-in-fashion/ http://www.arts.ac.uk/fashion/courses/graduate-school/ ma-fashion-curation/

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CONTRIBUTORS

JANA MELKUMOVA-REYNOLDS jana.melkumova@gmail.com ELLIE FODEN e.foden@fashion.arts.ac.uk PAUL BENCH pbench@hotmail.com FENELLA HITCHCOCK fenella.hitchcock@gmail.com http://showtime.arts.ac.uk/fenellahitchcock SARAH HARRISON sclharrison@gmail.com REBECKA FLEETWOOD-SMITH rebeckafs@hotmail.co.uk LAUREN DE’ATH lauren_de-ath@hotmail.com http://showtime.arts.ac.uk/LaurenDeAth

SHANAYA BAJAJ shanayabajaj92@gmail.com LISA STRUNZ lisa.strunz@me.com LEONI SCHWANDT leoni.schwandt@gmail.com JEMMA BEVERIDGE jemz410@hotmail.com CHRIS HILL LILLEY chris@chrishill_tales.com http://showtime.arts.ac.uk/chrishill FELICIA SCICLUNA felicia_scicluna@hotmail.com SHIRLEY VAN DE POLDER svdpolder@gmail.com

FASHION: CULTURE, HISTORY, PSYCHOLOGY. Edited by: SHAUN COLE, CAROLYN MAIR Designed by: NIKOS GEORGOPOULOS Printed in England by: PUREPRINT Published by LONDON COLLEGE OF FASHION, UAL ARTS.AC.UK/FASHION

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