that's a real book. it was spyed by a passenger on a bus my mother was taking, who relayed the title to her during a failed attempt to be charming.
my first reaction was disbelief. i quickly transitioned to skepticism of my own shock. why should i be so surprised? asininity and capitalism go hand in hand. i decided that, handed a batch of such exquisitely rotted lemons, it was time to make some very offensive lemonade.
if we can study fashion during the time of the guillotine, then why can't the same concept be applied elsewhere? what about fashion under the khmer rouge? i hear that they did some excellent things with blood-stained rags and bone shavings. like the fireman orgy of old, i see a goldmine, and buncha toothless cretins ready to pounce on it.
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You're pretty bored, aren't you, Lion. I imagine that in probably the most famous clash between peasants and aristocracy in human history fashion could well have played a non-trivial role.
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ReplyDelete*reposted due to a typo in the first version*
ReplyDeleteAssuming Sol isn't being sarcastic, I'm inKLEINed to agree with him. I love fashion, which I know makes me a huge capitalist, but one reason why I love it is because the way it has reflected and provided a way to study human civilization, growth, and development.
I would say that the French Revolution was a pretty major cultural turning point in Western history, so why not write a book about it? Hell, I would read it. I would imagine that it's in the context of this major cultural shift that the book is intended, rather than as part of a series that includes a book on the killing fields and one on fashion and clothing in the gulag.
Using clothing and physical appearance to distinguish oneself from one's enemies. What better way to immediately distinguish who is with you and who against in the struggle for freedom or whichever cause you support? By the same token, forcing fashions upon a particular marginalized group to differentiate them from the general population has been a very popular tactic even before the use of the yellow star.
Given that throughout history, different regimes have adopted particular fashions as a way of demonstrating their commitment to the militant overthrow of capitalism, the martial lifestyle, or even their dislike and therefore oppression of specific ethnic groups, studying the history of fashion doesn't always mean buying into the evil capitalist system.
So the book itself may well be completely stupid; I don't know. But please don't automatically assume that because it has "fashion" in the title it's a piece of asinine drivel. It's just another facet of social history, and say what you will about that, not everyone has the capacity, drive, or desire to study the "right" kind of history.
I would probably read a book about fashion in the gulag, though.
To clarify, I was not being sarcastic.
ReplyDeleteI think, Sarah, the problem here is that "fashion" is only very loosely attached to what you're referring to. Yes, visual style serves a number of social functions and yes, those social functions can serve explicitly political roles, but beyond general statements like that there isn't too too much to be said.
ReplyDeleteThere's a very famous anthropological study that was conducted in the 1920s (I cannot remember the name of the dude who ran it... Sol?) in which a enterprising researcher ambitiously collected years and years of field data on skirt length in North America (he walked around and measured the skirts of those who would let him). While he did notice a trend within the data (skirts fluctuated incrementally from short to long and back), he was entirely unable to correlate the data to any other social metrics available. Beyond that, the women he interviewed themselves no explanation for the changes - they simply said they were wearing what was "in fashion". The conclusion that the intrepid anthropologist reached was that a large chunk of style is isochrestic - random, a product of enculturation rather than any intended meaning, and adopted unconsciously. Now, that kind of conclusion is very, very frustrating for an archaeologist, because the arguments you've made for studying fashion in material culture are the same ones archaeologists have always used to justify making pretty wacky assertions about the stuff they dig up. But there's a whole subfield of archaeology - ethnoarchaelogy - which was designed to test these kinds of assumptions, and like the skirt experiment they've come to the same conclusion: style has elements of purposive, active symbolism, but its mostly just lines and doodles.
So while I don't begrudge a social historian for zeroing in on one element of a time period to illuminate the rest of it, I frankly don't think that the fashion of the French Revolution is going to tell us anything we don't know already.
I think that my point is mostly that during a watershed in European history such as the French Revolution, when untold thousands were being killed in street fights or executions, when the aristocracy was being murdered, when bankruptcy and starvation were the rule, that fashion seems a little, I don't know, trivial. What about the fashion of the Rwandan genocide? Does it matter what floral patterns were worn, when the women wearing them were having their arms and legs slashed off with machetes? Maybe I'm too oldschool.
ReplyDeleteI have to admit that my gut reaction to Lion's post developed into a comment that was written rather hastily. I didn't mean to suggest that I think the forced wearing of yellow stars constitutes following fashion trends. However, I do think that "fashion" is used as a cover-all term to describe modes of dress the changes therein. I haven't read the book to which Lion is referring, but I'm getting a little sick of the assumption that fashion and clothing have no place in "serious history" and that either a) fashion always = capitalism and b) being interested in it - either academically or purely because one likes it - means that you are fluffy, asinine, and not worthy of being taken seriously.
ReplyDeleteI do think that learning about the fashion of a particular period can advance knowledge about that period - although maybe not the French Revolution. At the same time, I don't think that that is the only reason people should be studying history. People can study something purely because they are interested in it.
I guess what I wasn't clear about that in my original comment. What I objected to more than anything was the tone (although maybe not the spirit) in which the post was written.
And Lion, in response to your comment above mine, I would point out that there is a difference between specific events and broader context, i.e. no, even I'm not trivial enough to suggest that fashion plays a role in that slightly gratuitous image you provided us with.
ReplyDeleteBut especially when studying less recent history, dress and appearance, even in contemporary images, provide some idea of the broader social context for events and can also serve as a useful piece of evidence when other kinds of historical evidence doesn't stand up to the passing of time.
Finally, even if it is trivial, who cares? Who are we to pass judgment on what aspects of history people find interesting? So some kinds of history are more trivial and some are more worthy than others. That's not necessarily an argument I want to get into but even acknowledging that that may be true, it doesn't really make the field welcoming to people who may be less well-read than you but who still feel like learning something about the past, no matter how they choose to go about it. It would be difficult to study fashion in the French Revolution without learning, along the way, about what actually happened while people were moving from wearing breeches to trousers, or donning the tricolore, or whatever the hell fashions during the French Revolution actually dictated.
I don't want to step in the way of Lion as he arms his hyperbolic mega-cannon for another round here, but I agree with you, Sarah, that there is nothing wrong with putting a book out on fashion during the French Revolution, and there could be many things right about it. I also stand by my statement that there isn't much in my mind we can learn about the Revolution from fashion that we don't know already - in my mind, the things we already believe about the French Revolution may circle back on us and slant our interpretations of their fashion sense. Especially when visual style is such a tricky thing to dive into. That said, I don't think it trivializes the event to talk about the fashion of the time, as long as the book doesn't divorce it from its context.
ReplyDeleteI think what Lion is criticizing is the profit-driven popularization of historical writing right now, where authors (and publishers) are obsessed with putting out books with snappy hooks or quirky takes or whatever. There are advantages to the catchy/snappy approach, such as the fact the obvious benefits of a larger reading public, but there are disadvantages too. The biggest example in my head would be the works of Jared Diamond, the Homer Simpson to prehistory's Frank Grimes, but there's also Amy Chua, who wrote Day of Empire, and whoever the fuck is out there writing all those books about how Scotland "invented" the Modern World or how China actually discovered America. They're out there making decent to good money by hammering all the complexity out of the historical record to make an appealing narrative or a commercially attractive/provocative statement.
Of course, we have no idea whether the book is a fluffy cash-grab or a deep analytical probing of style and politics or somewhere in-between. Maybe we should all order it and read it, and square off some section of the blog to keep a running commentary?
Dave, I can't remember who the guy was either, but I'll try to find out. However, I think you're missing the point. This book, I'm quite sure, is not archaeology, it's history. There are tons of written materials from the French Revolution. Yes, fashion is isochrestic, and ebbs and flows basically just because it does. But that doesn't mean either that all fashion choices are made unconsciously, nor that fashion is not consciously noticed by people. Obviously the clothes that French aristocrats and peasants wore were completely different, and it is not a stretch to state that clothes probably came to embody to a certain extent the differences between the two groups, not to mention the clothes of the clergy, the bourgeousie, and any number of other groups who played a role at the time. All it takes is one political cartoon with clothes as the subject for a simple thesis, somthing along the lines of "during the French Revolution, the fashion of the aristocracy became a rallying point around which certain members of the peasantry gathereed in order to amass support for the Revolutionary movement," to be born.
ReplyDeleteAnd why can't someone write a book about the fashion of the Rwandan genocide? Maybe factions differentiated themselves through clothing. Maybe American or Western clothing played some role as visible markers of class, ethnicity, or national background. Who knows? Writing a book about fashion during the Rwandan genocide is not necessarily trivialization. If someone wrote a book saying that the million dead are nothing compared to the crimes against fashion committed during the years, then yes, that would be pretty out there. But to take a scholarly look at how fashion might or might not have played a role during the genocide is just another way of explaining how it happened.
... which is why I said "visual style serves a number of social functions and yes, those social functions can serve explicitly political roles" and not "that all fashion choices are made unconsciously" or "that fashion is not consciously noticed by people". You're stretching my point beyond where I was willing to take it - I'm not averse to this whole idea at all, I'm just skeptical that, given all the problems that exist (both in pre-history and history) in discussions of style, that there is much that can be said that hasn't been said before or, worse still, isn't influenced by what's been said before.
ReplyDeleteI think everyone is missing the point that I just wanted to be an asshole about something. You think I'm bored? This post has more comments than any on the blog, ever.
ReplyDeleteHere's the next topic: Jews. Why do we still have them? Thoughts?
Talk about fashion crimes! What's with those curlies?
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