Chic Theory

Joanne Finkelstein

© all rights reserved

Responses to this article have been received from Ruth Barcan and Jennifer
Craik.

In the African Congo, in the 1970s and '80s, anthropologist Jonathan

Friedman (1992) recounts a story of fashion obsession. In this politically
unstable, economically depressed region there developed a cult around
European luxury goods and, in particular, haute couture. At the time, the
capital of the Congo, Brazzaville, was a French colonial outpost, where
there were a few remaining Europeanised food stores merchandising the
exotic tastes of haute cuisine - cheeses, wines, olives, pate, to the dwindling
members of Francophile government officials. Foodstuffs were not the only
foreign products available. European clothes, particularly those of haute
couturiers , Yves Saint Laurent, Versace, Uomo, were also in demand, but
they were not being merchandised through stores. They were the currency
of a subculture of young, mostly unemployed men known as sapeurs , who
valued elegant dress above all else.

The traffic in fashion took place in the 'clubs des jeunes premiers', where
these fashion habitues, young men educated through the state school
system into believing in the promises of French modernity, developed a
common desire to consume the luxuries of European civilisation. The social
and economic differences between Brazzaville and Paris, between an
agrarian-based, exhausted colonial economy and a highly industrialised,
globalised G7 member were not important to the sapeurs . The
irreconcilability of a desire for French luxuries with the dismal economic
future of the sapeur suggests such a degree of irrationality that the practice
seemed almost magical, not unlike a cargo cult 1 . Yet, this imbalance
between desire and realisation, between valuing a particular object and
having the capacity to possess and maintain it, is a fundamental dynamic
of fashion, and not just a feature of the unique sapeur lifestyle.

Despite being poor, mainly from the lower class, and chronically
unemployed, the young Congolese devoted themselves to dressing well, in
the labels of Parisian haute couturiers because these were the symbols of
refinement. In this material desert, clothes had become a currency of
identity. Although the sapeur was black, unemployed, and a discarded
colonial relic, he was existentially equal to his European master if he
dressed in the same style, pursued the same desires and shared the same
sensibilities. Wearing haute couture was not a disguise which allowed
the sapeur to enter the mainstream and pretend to be what he was not. The
desire for fashionable attire was not just a means of gaining the admiration
and recognition of the other. For the Congolese sapeur , clothing was the
essence of identity.

In the lives of these young, unemployed men, a pilgrimage to Paris, to the

source of all things civilised and luxurious, was a necessity. And the final
achievement was the status of parisien or elder. One who had been there
and lived the life. Throughout the long apprenticeship, a sapeur may return
to Brazzaville in order to demonstrate just how far he had come in the
accumulation of 'la gamme'. Such visits were referred to as descentes , a
term suggestive of the colonial history of Brazzaville as well as the life
opportunities it did not afford. During these visits, the sapeur would
display his prizes, the clothes and labels (griffes) of the internationally
recognised fashion houses. After these demonstrations of his identity, the
struggle to return to Paris would begin again.

Friedman's account is not only interesting as an instance of the mystery of

cargo in the context of postcolonial studies, and as an anthropology of the
world of goods in which humanness is inextricably entwined with
materiality, but it is also a reading of fashion that resonates with
contemporary theorising of that enduring phenomenon.

The Look

The novelist Alison Lurie, who wrote the popular non-fiction The Language
of Clothes , has few doubts that we all employ tell-tale details in our dress to
allude to other interior qualities. She writes, 'the woman in the sensible
grey wool suit and the frilly pink blouse is a serious, hard-working mouse
with a frivolous and feminine soul' 2 . Lurie has no trouble with the idea
that when we encounter one another in the anonymous sphere of the
public domain, our clothes become garrulous and disclose desires, beliefs,
even secrets. It makes sense to her to use appearances to mark culture,
gender, class, religion, sexual proclivities. Accordingly, in any crowd such
as that at an airport, American tourists would be immediately recognisable
by their swaddling clothes worn to meet the demands of travel which
seems to infantilise them. Australians would be obvious because of their
beach culture casualness, and Britons by their sandals worn with socks and
the colonial echoes of their inappropriate hats and carryalls. Muslims, Jews,
Hare Krishnas, Catholics, New Agers, all make themselves visible with
obvious religious insignias. The seemingly anonymous stranger is easily
categorised and ranked by the most cursory of glances.

To map personal identity and values onto physical appearances in Lurie's

somewhat unmediated manner seems simplistic, yet it is a widespread
cultural practice. Physiognomists from Aristotle to the twentieth century
have argued along similar lines that character is immanent in appearance,
that the physical is highly legible as a form of embodied subjectivity 3 . The
association between appearance and character remains so common, for
instance, in our stereotyping of race and gender, that its ubiquity
naturalises it. The appearances of public figures such as politicians, pop
singers and movie stars are effectively used to characterise them. The
evolution of Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and David Bowie was a
declension of character; the various incarnations of kd lang and Madonna
advertise how easily self-reinvention is accomplished. Once, before a
Federal election, the yet-to-be Prime Minister John Howard was urged by
his campaign spin doctors to have his pointed teeth filed evenly to change
his image; Bob Hawke was effectively repigeon-holed from a bird of prey
to a preening narcissist by a heightened focus on his cockatoo crest of hair.
Menzies' eyebrows, Paul Keating's brown eyes have all been used to
signify character. Various industries merchandise a 'look' and sell their
products accordingly. John Molloy's best-selling instruction manuals on
dressing for success sold a new look femininity 4 ; women's magazines and
the mainstream cinema as well as the publicised habits of the cross-dresser
all provide prescriptive images of the feminine and masculine ideal 5 .
These prescriptive 'looks' contribute both positively and negatively to the
widespread ideological belief that images and appearances are both
revealing and accurate. The position is not new; Lord Chesterfield, in the
eighteenth century, famously instructed his son to understand that while
stylish dress may seem foolish and an expensive vanity, it was more foolish
to dress unfashionably because in one's adherence to the proper codes of
appearance, more important declarations of social acceptability were being
conveyed 6 .

Drag and Fake

Yet despite the wide circulation of these ideas, all fashions are ambivalent
because the question of whether they are meant to be confrontational or
affirmational is indeterminate. When the haute couture gown is paraded in
drag, its original value is hard to discern. This is the point made by Diane
Arbus's photography, and by Jennie Livingston in her documentary
film, Paris Is Burning , which records the drag balls attended by African-
American and Latino men in New York City and Harlem at which fashion
styles selected mainly from the straight 'white' world such as the military,
executive, high drag feminine and Ivy League look are performed and
judged. Judith Butler enquires after the meaning of these performances: do
they subvert the norm or re-idealise it, and how does an onlooker know
when the appearance coincides with what it means? 7 The same problems
exist when any style is imitated; how do we know, for instance, whether
faux-fashion is effective as parody or simply fails to speak? Andrew Ross
rightly asks, does faux-fashion undercut or concretise the fashion
hierarchy 8 ?

When casual street-wear was first smothered in logos it could be read as

mockery of the fashion label but as the inscriptions and insignia on such
items of clothing became more prominent, the iconoclasm lost its impact.
Parading the label (as the Brazzaville sapeur does) no longer exposes the
middle-class fetish of buying symbolic power; it merely announces a new
consumer aesthetic. This is currently illustrated with the popular peaked
sports cap. Was it ever used only to indicate support for a particular sports
team? Has its recent appropriation by non-American ethnic groups,
professional tennis players, weekend rollerbladers, children, subverted its
meaning? Is its meaning anything more than globalised Americanicity?
The sports cap has always been prominent in rural America, but in the city,
and especially when worn back to front, it has recently been read as a sign
of social crisis.

Yet as soon as the reversed cap assumed this meaning, it became part of
middle-class fashion paraphernalia, just as the adoption of fake fur has
done subsequently. The fashion moloch has absorbed yet another attempt
at oppositional dress. Much the same can be said of hair-styles. The shaved
head may allude to a military-style puritanism, and parody of the
institutionalised look, or gesture ambivalently toward the victims of war.
Body-piercing and tattooing can be seen to recuperate the practices of
'primitive' peoples, but they also evoke a technoculture in which semi-
criminalised individuals are identified by numbers and body-brandings.
From these examples, it is apparent that reading appearances to identify
human character remains a dangerous, popular, and cross-cultural
practice. This makes the innocent hobby of 'people watching', so often cited
as a sign of a rich inner life, a tacit admission of failure because it is highly
likely to demonstrate an inability to read the signs of the times except in
cliched and stereotyped terms.
The Power of Fashion

Fashion is an underestimated social force. It functions effectively not only

as an economic colossus but also to engineer social practices. This interplay
of consumer tastes, social habits and personal identity was noted by
Thorstein Veblen in his nineteenth-century analysis of the new American
bourgeoisie and leisure classes. Veblen's position was that the upper
classes invented fashion to distinguish themselves from those below. When
the styles and practices of the upper classes were imitated, when their
fashions 'trickled down' to their social inferiors, the upper classes were
impelled to reconstitute themselves 9 .

The trickle down theory of fashion has been rewritten by twentieth-century

street and diffusion fashions which do not follow the rules of gravity, but
which still function in the same way to designate the identity of the
wearers. The invention of the fashion label or brand name has given the
consumer a sense of social location which promises to neutralise the
oceanic disorientation of a limitless horizon of commodities. This sense of
location is made to seem part of the allure of fashionability and part of the
unexplicated stabilising of identity which accompanies signature goods
such as McDonald's, BMW, Sony.

Goods interpellate us, addressing the notional Marlboro Man, loyal coke
drinker, Nike devotee, and dedicated Donna Karan fan. Without the
fashion label or brand product, there seem to be few pathways through the
crowded field of commodities, but with the label, fashion functions as a
how-to-guide to a rich, material life. The brand invests the everyday
practices of the contemporary fashion lover with the specificities of taste,
social location, and subjectivity. Fashion, in this way, appears to resolve the
performative problem of living amongst strangers by providing the precise
gestures, roles and scripts which Erving Goffman argued we needed in
order to go on each day 10 .

This capacity of fashion to provide a performance script for the

transactions of the everyday also draws upon a physiognomic history of
interpreting the body surface. It is here that the logics of fashion collide
with cartesian precepts of a stable interiorised identity. Fashion brings
emphasis to the obvious, the material, the exterior. A physiognomic
reading makes physical features and appearances seem revelatory of the
secrets of personal identity. Such a view of the body has had a long
Western history of confident useage. And with some justification. As a
methodology, reading the surface as indicative of other, less obvious
knowledges is not always a misleading exercise. The lessons of literary
deconstruction and abstract expressionist art have taught us this.
Nonetheless when applied to the human body, reading the visible as if the
precepts of physiognomy were a text produces the problems of
objectivisation, that is, of regarding the object as if its meaning were self-
evident and obdurate. This is hard to claim with humans.

David Bowie and Madonna A La Mode

Historically, the linkage of character and morality with physical

appearance was significantly strengthened when modern societies
eliminated rigid codes of dress and sumptuary laws (which regulated the
legitimate ownership of goods) and created opportunities for individuals
to construct or fashion themselves as they pleased. Such flexibility of self-
representation, which has been a driving force in the rapid development of
the fashion industries, is also an acclaimed defining feature of modernity in
the West 11 . The linkages between fashionability and modernity are forged
from the shared evaluation of innovation and the pursuit of novelty in
technical, political, social and aesthetic arenas. By emphasising the
seductiveness of the new and deriding the past, fashion becomes
synonymous with the modern. As Douglas Kellner states:

... fashion is a constituent feature of modernity, interpreted as an era of

history marked by perpetual innovation, by the destruction of the old and
the creation of the new. Fashion itself is predicated on producing ever new
tastes, artifacts, and practices. Fashion perpetuates a restless, modern
personality, always seeking what is new and admired, while avoiding
what is old and passé. Fashion and modernity go hand in hand to produce
modern personalities.

This association, not confined to the material and technical world, also
includes the cartesian formulation of identity. Kellner refers to the cult of
celebrity using figures such as Michael Jackson, Prince, Boy George, Cyndi
Lauper, Pee Wee Herman and Madonna to indicate how personal identity
has been commodified. These public figures do much to change the social
conventions around gender classification and to legitimate a polymorphic
sexuality. In so doing, they demonstarte the permeability of identity and
question the stable boundaries of the cartesian self.

Madonna's constant change of fashion, image, and identity promoted

experimentation and the creation of one's own style and identity. Her
sometimes dramatic shifts in identity suggested that identity was a
construct, that it was something that one produced and could be
modifiedat will. The way Madonna deployed fashion in the construction of
her identity made it clear that one's appearance and image helps produce
what one is, or at least how one is perceived... Madonna's hair changed
from dirty blonde to platinum blonde, to black, brunette, redhead, and
multifarious variations thereof. Her body changed from soft and sensuous
to glamorous and svelte to hard and muscular sex machine to futuristic
technobody. Her clothes and fashion changed from flashy trash to haute
couture to far-out technoculture to lesbian S & M fashion to postmodern
pastiche of all and every fashion style 12 .

To regard identity as a commodity capable of being constantly renovated is

to critique the modernist assumptions of the self, which in turn,
precipitates a deeper scrutinising of key cultural constructs such as
humanness and materialism. If identity is a commodity to be fashioned
into a 'look' or equated with a 'cool' lifestyle, what happens to those interior
and conventionally more prized metaphysical qualities such as character
and morality? With these questions Thorstein Veblen's too easy linkages
between consumer practices, social habits and personal identity become
points of critical enquiry. Fuss points out that 'the question of what it
means to be human has never before been more difficult - and more
contested' 13 . The recent theoretical recession of humanism forms the
context for her question 'what has become of the human?', which
incidentally has been an enduring focus of the social sciences and resonates
through a great deal by anthropological ethnography.

Anthropologists, like Friedman studying the Congolese sapeurs , have long

understood that goods are always culturally coded for communication, yet
their capacity to carry subtle metaphoric inflections makes them difficult to
decode. Ironically, they are at once transparent and opaque.
Anthropologists have employed material goods to excavate a society's
practices; culturally contextualising goods gives some assurance of their
meaning 14 . Thus, following anthropology, analyses of modernity have
frequently examined material goods and the physical appearances of
individuals as illuminating encodings of the culture.

The Origins of Cool

In the early years of the twentieth century, Georg Simmel argued that the
rapid growth of city centres changed the way people related to one
another. He described the city as a noisy, highly stimulating background
against which people attempted to transact their business and maintain a
private life. 15 The intrusive urban background influenced the individual's
sense of identity and singularity, as well as the modes of conduct, the
postures and demeanour regarded as appropriate in the public arena.
Urban fashion provides a means of acquiring multiple lives. It works best
in a social climate saturated with commodities, each of which is infused
with promises of new sensations and new opportunities. The
transformative properties of fashion, then, are an expectation of every new
purchase 16 .

The city changed the way people related by affecting how they saw
themselves - according to Simmel, as diminutive and undistinguished, and
how they saw others - as potentially affronting and the source of
unanticipated demands. In response to the pressures of metropolitan life,
Simmel argued, individuals assumed a blasé attitude, that is, a sense of
social detachment, a coolness, which provided a buffer between themselves
and the rush of the everyday. But this was not entirely satisfactory, and to
ameliorate the loss of identity and sense of submergence which the city
engendered, individuals exaggerated their singularity through the use of
fashionable status symbols.

The World according to Vivienne Westwood

In the urban West, Simmel interpreted appearances and specifically fashion

as a means of protecting individuals from a sense of being ground-down,
levelled out and overwhelmed by the overarching socio-technological
mechanism that is the metropolis. The British fashion designer Vivienne
Westwood also interprets fashion this way. In her public pronouncements
on the fashion industry and its social significance, she has declared fashion
to be dead and that in its stead there is couture creation . By this, she means
that the regimentation provided by conventional fashions (such as gender
and class proscriptiveness) no longer appeal because the desire for a stable
interiorised sense of identity has ruptured. In order to survive the city now,
Westwood's position suggests that people struggle toward extreme
subjectivism, performing and asserting themselves to recuperate a sense of
individuality in an environment marked by indifference. Styling
appearances into idiosyncratic statements of character and individuality
(that is, couture creation ) is a way of repudiating the urban anonymity.

Historically, there are instances of using appearance as billboards for

identity politics. Declarations of serious social unrest have been invested in
stylised appearances. Various utopian rebels and social reformers have
used costume and dress styles as public announcements of their alternative
outlooks 17 , and counter-cultural dress has long been a device for
publicising social malaise and political critique. This is in much the same
way that conventional dress codes signify an acceptance of the status quo.

However, the original problem of interpreting fashion as confrontational or

affirmational remains; the interpretation of any fashion style, counter-
cultural or otherwise, is equally limited because the visual nature of
appearances cannot be confined to specific messages. Radical politics are
more varied and subtle than any T-shirt display can acknowledge. And
Vivienne Westwood's iconoclasm has been hijacked and mainstreamed into
a British export industry.

Street Cred and Catwalk Chic

Given the scepticism provoked by interpretations of fashion and style such

as offered by Alison Lurie, it is ironic that a desire to read the obvious as if
it were self-revealing still endures. This is exemplified in the persistent use
of fashion hierarchies to reflect class, status and conventionality, even
when the mutual cannibalisation of fashions from every position on the
political spectrum continues as part of the sartorial cycle. For instance,
when street-stylists have lost the ability to shock, and the most audacious
styles have become elements in mainstream costuming (such as the
absorption of S/M fetish wear into haute couture , and the prevalence of
cross-dressing on international fashion house catwalks), a belief still
endures in the authenticity of appearances, and in the ability of the
costumed body to speak and act as both a manifesto of rebellion and a
mirror to convention.

The basic irony of fashion is that it cannot succeed in marking the

individual as truly different. While fashions may be touted as a means to
be distinguished, the pursuit of fashion is more effectively a means of being
socially homogenised. The historic success of being fashionable has been to
provide a sense of individualism within a shared code, since individuals
can look acceptably distinctive only within a restricted aesthetic. When
they purchase fashionable goods that will distinguish them, they do so
only from a range of goods already understood to be valuable.

To be fashionable involves having specific knowledge about the value of

goods. It is not sufficient to desire goods because of their utility. Fashion
goods have more symbolic and cultural value than use-value. Hence, when
individuals, in a self-conscious manner, use specific dress styles - pants for
men, skirts for women - they are making claims on social conventions.
Even with the ubiquitous T-shirt smothered in logos of the most banal
nature such as 'Just Do It', 'Get a Life', or 'The Hard Rock Cafe', claims to
social recognition are being made. Although it is always possible (but
never unequivocally so) that these familiar surfaces are bracketed for
purposes of irony and satire, and that the uniform is also a platform for
enunciating messages which invite aesthetic challenge and social scrutiny,
still the opaqueness of the wearer's intentions robs the performance of
much of its subversive thrust.

The Meaning of Fashion

The emphasis that city life gives to appearances concentrates attention on

the fashionable. This makes fashion a disciplinary power in Foucault's
sense, in that it coerces the body to shape and rearrange itself in accordance
with ever-shifting social expectations. The skills required to do this
including the ability to diet, apply facial cosmetics, arrange clothes, and
wear ornamentation, are in the service of aesthetic innovations that
continually reinvent subjectivity. Foucault's notion of the docile body
shows how elements of a fashionable lifestyle - which include the urban
habits of reading fashion magazines, engaging in body-sculpting practices
such as dieting, gym work-outs, cosmetic surgery and periodic internments
at health and fat farms - are techniques for transforming the body into a
commodity 18 . The body becomes a site of aesthetic innovation, much like
the family car, and subject to periodic upgrading. To redesign the look of a
commodity is to give it a new lease of life, specifically by submerging its
use-value into its appearance-value. 'Looking good' adds value: those who
cannot achieve the fashionable 'look' fail the appearance test, and their
social status declines. Urban life, which constantly exposes everybody to
the scrutiny of strangers, emphasises the need to monitor and update one's
self-performance. This imperative to be self-conscious is a distinguishing
feature of modernity, and is so naturalised that each of us plays multiple
roles and has various styles of appearance on the understanding that the
assertion of identity through appearance is a matter of constant urgency.

If personal identity is one of the problems of modernity, then it is equally

true that the fashion industries are deeply implicated in the manufacture of
'personality'. Fashion provides a short cut by which we enter another
identity and join a subculture that insulates us from contamination by
other styles. Dick Hebdige calls fashion goods 'weapons of exclusion' 19 .
As the fashion industries segment the marketplace and localise certain
social groups by their tastes and desires, it is simultaneously advertising
identity as a commodity - as the youth fashion houses Stüssy and Benetton
have done with their marketing invention - global tribe memberships.

It is too simple to explain the success of fashion by saying that human

beings have a chronic need to belong, or by referring to clever marketing
and consumer exploitation. Ted Polhemus, a media anthropologist and
curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum's fashion exhibition, Streetstyle,
From Sidewalk to Catwalk, 1940 to Tomorrow , gives an account of fashion
similar to that offered by Alison Lurie; fashion is an inherent feature of
human sociality, it is a means of securing a social identity:

... the tribal imperative is and always will be a fundamental part of human
nature. Like our most distant ancestors we feel alienated and purposeless
when we do not experience this sense of belonging and comradeship. It is
no coincidence that the decline of traditional social groupings, which has
intensified so markedly since the Second World War precisely parallels the
rise of a new type of social group, the styletribe. Hipsters, Teddy Boys,
Mods, Rockers and so forth arose to satisfy that need for a sense of
community and common purpose which is so lacking in modern life 20 .

Such views on fashion are popular and amusing, but they also function to
conceal the more critically interesting complexities of the phenomenon:
how, for instance, fashion draws us into the cultural practice of reading the
surface yet does not resolve the constant ambiguity of whether a look is
affirmational or confrontational; how the fashion industries are the tip of
an economic colossus that has global implications; and how the
physiognomic assumptions embedded in the fashionable look conceal a
quaint history of how appearances and identity have been mapped onto
one another as if they were accurate mirror reflections. When these nuances
of the fashion experience are spoken of with as much assurance as the
excitement and amusement derived from each season's look, then
enslavement to chic will have become interesting.

Joanne Finkelstein teaches in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and

the Centre for Cultural Studies at Monash University.
Her latest books are After A Fashion, Melbourne University Press, 1996,
and Slaves of Chic: An A-Z of Consumer Pleasures, Minerva, 1996.

Responses to this article have been received from Ruth Barcan and Jennifer
Craik.