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Abstract
In the last few years, a growing body of scholarship has identified the importance of race to explain and interrogate the power of fashion as a multibillion dollar manufacturing industry and as a strong symbolic force. Race, and more in general the politics of fashion, have never been so openly discussed in the fashion industry and in the media as they are today, as is also the case for labels such as “Made in Italy.” Disrupting the traditional narratives of fashion, a growing awareness among consumers has questioned the ethics of the imagery brands disseminate on the internet and of products that degrade race, gender and religious belief. Following these lines and drawing on fashion and translation studies, I would like to offer a critical examination of the relationship between the Harlem based designer Dapper Dan and the house of Gucci. In particular, the essay highlights the notion of difference inherent in the process of translation as it is practiced by minoritarian groups, which as a result become socially visible. One of the questions posed in the paper is how can cultural translation actually be practiced in order to change existing power relations regulating class, gender and race, rather than consolidate them.
Notes
1 See Gibson. Citation2012. “The new celebrity is a major aspect of just one more configuration of Western Imperialism, and possibly the most profitable yet” (2); For the role of the fashion designer as a celebrity, see the work of Nick Rees-Roberts. Citation2019. Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academics.
2 In this article, the author cites a fascinating example about the different cultural contexts in India and their various draping of the Sari practices.
3 In her 2010 article on “Fashion as a cultural Translation,” Patrizia Calefato applies the critic Rey Chow’s paradigm developed in her book Primitive passion (Citation1995) to fashion. In Chow’s view “to look at” corresponds to the western gaze, while non-western cultures are in the position of being looked at. According to Calefato, this view allows Chow to develop the relation between the “original” or the source and the “translation” among cultures. This supposed “original” is a construction and its “to-be-looked-at-ness” acts, in turn, as an optical unconscious.
4 See Wissinger (Citation2015).
6 Interestingly, this kind of aura is in Michele’s terms brought to the eclectic mixture of streetstyle, reuse of the logos in the form of a postmodern pastiche that in an assemblage and collage is close to a camp sensibility. Gucci was one of the sponsors of the Metropolitan Museum exhibition on “Camp: Notes on Fashion.” The catalogue of the same title was published in 2019 (Bolton, Cleto and Van Godtsenhove Citation2019).
9 See: https://equilibrium.gucci.com/gucci-changemakers-north-america-scholarship-programs/ (last accessed on January 16, 2021).
10 Conversation with the author, March 30, 2019.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Eugenia Paulicelli
Eugenia Paulicelli is Professor of Italian, Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College, CUNY. She is editor, coeditor and author of several books, book chapters, special issues for journals, and articles on the history and theory of fashion, cinema, and literature. Among her publications are: Fashion under Fascism. Beyond the Black Shirt (2004); Italian Style. Fashion & Film from Early Cinema to the Digital Age (Bloomsbury 2016 and paperback 2017). [email protected]