Western fashion systems relentlessly re-invent otherness, by references to the past (historical allusions), to non- and pre-industrial cultures (folk costume and ethnic looks), and to previous moments in fashion ... the Western fashion system poaches from other systems and cannibalises diverse influences in reconstituting new techniques of dress and decoration.[1]
This blog has been created to explore, explain, and document the exotic impulse in Western fashion from the 1960s, right up to the present day. Despite the fact that we can all travel these days and witness the ethnic and exotic at first hand, ‘our appetite for both on the catwalk continues undimmed’.
Designers today produce several collections a year and as such need a constant source of creative inspiration for their work. On the one hand, it is inevitable that designers will plunder the world for ideas, as they plunder the past and the history of fashion itself. In this they are only following the example of Western designers and artists since at least the eighteenth century. However, it’s important to consider what the ideological significance of such an impulse in fashion is.
My frame of reference has been shaped by the work of Edward Said (namely his seminal text of literary criticism Orientalism which was published in 1978) and by those who have applied Said’s arguments to other fields of enquiry – Linda Nochlin (nineteenth century French art)[2], Dorinne Kondo[3] (theatre and Japanese fashion), the authors included in a 2003 special Orientalism issue of the highly respected and influential journal Fashion Theory, academic Hiroshi Narumi[4], and writer Mina Kim Park[5], all of whom have written specifically on dress and Orientalism. I also try to keep in mind the alternative point of view offered by John MacKenzie, Professor of Imperial History at the University of Lancaster who has himself examined ‘the extent to which the Orientalist thesis can be revised in more positive and constructive ways’.[6] MacKenzie is right when he declares that there have been positive outcomes from the Orientalist endeavour, and these have been in fashion as well as in art - Colin McDowell, a respected fashion journalist and commentator has written about the rejuvenating properties that an Orientalist approach has brought to fashion. Ultimately, the exotic impulse has produced some of the most beautiful clothing of the 20th and 21st century.
This blog is not about the actualities of dress in China, or Japan, or Kenya, or any other country. What is under discussion is the way in which non-Western cultures, and ‘ethnic’ fashions have been appropriated by the Western fashion system.
The main focus of this blog is the fashion imagery; that is, the way in which the exotic manifests itself as a picturesque backdrop in the pages of fashion magazines. Like exotic clothing objects, these images are often beautiful and seductive.
This blog is a by-product of my masters study into the history of dress. My early posts will be based on my dissertation, and will be more academic in tone (and with references!) than those to follow.
[1] Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion:Cultural Studies in Fashion, Routledge, London, 1994, p. 26.
[2] The art historian Linda Nochlin has taken Said’s theory of Orientalism and applied it to visual art, specifically nineteenth-century painting. In her 1991 essay ‘The Imaginary Orient’ Nochlin argues that the Orientalist genre in art (a genre whose artists are united thematically rather than stylistically) must be read in terms of power structures and of the dual impulses of the West’s dominance over the East, and men’s dominance over women. Nochlin’s analysis of visual imagery will very much inform the third chapter of this dissertation, which discusses exoticism in fashion photography.
[3] Professor of Anthropology and American Studies and Director of Asian American Studies at the University of Southern California. In 1997 she published About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theatre in which she discussed the reception and representation of Japanese fashion and designers in Europe and America. She argued that ‘the world of representation and of aesthetics [of which fashion is a part] is a site of struggle, where identities are created, where subjects are interpolated, where hegemonies can be challenged’. Kondo raised the issue of what she calls ‘self-orientalizing’ or ‘autoexoticizing’ and says that this is one of the most ‘inevitable, poignant, and problematic effects of domination…subaltern peoples reproduce forms of their own oppression’.
[4] Lecturer in sociology at Kyoto University of Art and Design.
[5] contributor to Harvard University journal Perspectives.
[6] John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995, preface, p. xiv.
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