The body and dress operate dialectically: dress works on the body, imbuing it with social meaning, while the body is a dynamic field that gives life and fullness to the dress.
Joanne Entwistle, “Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as Embodied Practice,”
Fashion Theory 4, no. 3 (2004)
Each of the essays in this volume addresses the body/dress dynamic. For Anne Bissonnette and Sarah Nash in their article, “The Rebirth of Venus: Neoclassical Fashion and the Aphrodite Kallipygos,” the body is an ancient statue that arranges her scant garments to expose delectable bits of her figure, especially her curvaceous buttocks. This statue was copied over the centuries, and came to have special significance in the late-eighteenth century when quoted in many portraits and paintings. At the same time, neoclassical fashion allowed admirers to view a woman’s lower body through her sheer gown. This is a chicken-and-egg conundrum: did fashion in dress encourage the re-fashioning of the Venus statue, or did the statue herself influence fashion? Bissonnette and Nash will attempt to convince us of the latter. Either way, this article presents an in-depth examination of the new embodiment practices that emerged in French fashion at this time, and the rise of a new erogenous zone: the buttocks. Aphrodite Kallipygos has offered up both her body and her dress for analysis.
In their detailed look at one woman and her garments: “Fashion from Commodity Bags—Case Study of a Rural Seamstress in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” Jennifer Banning and Jenna Tedrick Kuttruff analyze the source, layout, cut, and fit of each of Rosa Keller Aucoin’s 35 articles of dress. This information is interesting in itself, but the authors go on to extrapolate on the significance of the data. They discover how Rosa fashioned her dress to fit with the social reality of her mid-twentieth-century farm life, and also how her own body dictated some of garments’ construction. There is a fair body of work on the remarkable twentieth-century phenomenon of recycling feed bags into household goods and garments. What this study brings to that scholarship is the careful and respectful examination of an important collection and its maker.
In Ingrid Mida’s essay, “Animating the Body in Museum Exhibitions of Fashion and Dress,” we have another dress/body conundrum: how do you satisfactorily display clothing without a body to animate it? She evokes Freud’s concept of the uncanny to describe how strange it is to view garments divorced from the intimacy of the body that once inhabited them. At first curators allowed clothing to be modeled on real bodies, but more recently, as Mida tell us, curators have come up with innovative ways to suggest the body without putting the artifacts at risk. Some museums allow audiences to see real bodies in designer clothes, but only those not in the museum’s collection. Showing non-museum garments alongside museum artifacts presents many philosophical problems: what is worthy of preservation and what is not? I hope that some museum scholars in the future will pursue this question.
This issue includes a special “Viewpoint” on the study of dress. Pravina Shukla presents her vision of dress scholarship from the point of view of her discipline as a folklorist in her article, “The Future of Dress Scholarship: Sartorial Autobiographies and the Social History of Clothing.” She acknowledges the importance of object-centred formal analysis of fashion: materials, construction, aesthetics, and symbolism. However, she wants to put the body at the heart of it all, and calls for a person-centered approach: the collecting and study of complete repertoires of all the individuals involved in producing and wearing a particular wardrobe. She critiques our sometime dependence on the study of fashion of the powerful, rich, and famous over the ordinary clothing of non-Western people of varying socio-economic situations. Here we have a view on two continuums: body/clothing and fashion/dress.
My hope is that this Viewpoint essay will inspire responses and more reflections on the future of dress scholarship and the body/clothing; fashion/dress dialectic. Readers, please think how you could contribute to this discussion—from a letter to the editor ([email protected]) to a full essay. Hope to hear from you soon!
Tina Bates
Editor-in-Chief