Exchange Policy

 
“Who are you wearing today?” The question is an awards show cliché, asked of every female celebrity making her way down a red carpet. The repeated asking and answering of this question drives and shapes the multi-billion dollar fashion industry that designs, markets, and manufactures the clothes; the stylists who curate clothes and accessories; the television and film industries which seem to increasingly exist in order to create these profitable red carpet spectacles; and the many magazines and websites whose primary content is photos of celebrities in designer garments. These symbioses have existed since the birth of film as a popular medium, but the mutualism has been especially adaptive to our current digital ecology.
 
But really, who are you wearing today? Asked of a cultural critic, the question will get a different reception. Trained to turn such cultural tropes and clichés inside out, we immediately begin to examine their seams and construction. Looking at the question critically, we might show how the question points us to the deeply exploitative labor conditions in which most clothing is produced today (and, truthfully, has been in almost all time periods). We know that the complex stories behind each t-shirt or formal gown are grossly undersignified by the tags that reveal the garments’ country of origin. We might look at the clothing on a celebrity’s body and try to tell the stories of whom she is really wearing—the farmer who grew the cotton, the tanner who skinned the calf, and everyone else who moved the garment from its rawest state into her closet. We’re good at seeing that this is a question worth attention, that it tells us something about the state of a particular commodity fetish in our current moment, that it might lead somewhere interesting.
 
But who are you wearing today? It’s not a question offered up for critical interrogation this time, but rather a real question, meant to make you look down at your body and see what clothes you put on earlier today. For most of us, this is a much more difficult question to answer, since it now becomes a question that cuts through our own individual gender, class, and professional identities, down to our often ambivalent senses of who we think we are and who we wish others to think we are. A December 3, 2012 photo-essay by Stacey Patton in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests the volatile nature of this question among academics. It profiles three scholars who are identified in the piece as “black dandies.” The term “black dandy” is clearly grounded in a scholarly context by the introduction to the photo-essay, which references Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book on the topic, Slaves to Fashion. The piece presents Miller’s argument that African-American “men in particular have ‘styled their way from slaves to dignified human beings.’” (The CHE also offers an ancillary audio interview with Miller in a blog post by Brock Read.) The act of dressing oneself is, we are reminded, a deeply political act in which each one of us participates every morning of our lives. Our clothing choices make our personal identities and politics visible—open to interpretation and misinterpretation by anyone who can see us. The extent to which we remain unaware of this often correlates with the kinds of cultural privilege to which we have access.
 
In the “Black Dandies Fashion New Academic Identities” photo-essay, scholars Hasan Kwame Jeffries (History, Ohio State), Sharon P. Holland (African and African American Studies, Duke), and Ernest L. Gibson (English, Rhodes College) are all photographed in their homes, outdoors, and on campus, modeling their favorite looks. Quotes from each scholar accompany their pictures; these quotes make clear both their keen senses of the complex politics of their sartorial choices and their genuine pleasure in the selection and wearing of carefully chosen clothes. When I first encountered this piece online, I was struck by the bravery of those who accepted the invitation to be part of it. We are used to putting our ideas into wide circulation for critique, but it is another thing entirely for a scholar to offer his or her body up for national critical analysis. The responses to the article in the comments section are laced through with explicit and implicit racism in ways that probably come as little surprise to the participants in the piece. While that deserves attention, what is more remarkable in the comments, to me, is a pervasive acceptance and even excitement about its combination of the personal, the scholarly, and the sartorial. Comments applauding these models far outweigh those denouncing an interest in clothing as frivolous.
 
There’s nothing conclusive to be drawn from a single article, let alone from the comments it elicits, but a wider look suggests that scholars are growing more enthusiastic not just for scholarly approaches to fashion, but also for attempts to tether that scholarship back to identity in a personal way. Among several recent academic publications focusing on fashion, the four volume Habits of Being seems to anticipate a new epoch in the study of dress. (The first two volumes of the series have been released so far, Accessorizing the Body (2011) and Exchanging Clothes (2012)). The series consists primarily of essays published since 1995 in the Italian cultural studies journal Abito e Identitá: Ricerche di storia letteraria e culturale (Clothes and Identity: Research in Literary and Cultural History). In the book series Paula Rabinowitz, a contributor to Abito e Identitá, partners with Cristina Giorcelli, its editor, to make this work more accessible to an English-speaking audience. Most of the essays originally appeared in Italian and are now translated for the first time, though a handful were initially published in English. Each volume also includes several newly commissioned pieces.
 
Taking a pool of eighty journal essays and creating four distinct, cogent books out of them isn’t an easy task. The preface of each book proffers the phrase “habits of being” as a way of redefining identity: “Identity is perhaps little more than a matter of habit, of what is put on every day, to construct one’s being” (xv). The argument that identity and dress are constitutively linked is widely accepted after having been developed in such well-regarded and diverse critical works as Roland Barthes’s Système de la Mode (originally published in 1967, translated into English in 1990), Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1989). But in the preface to the Habits of Being books, the idea that identity is reducible to one’s habits of dress overreaches, as the hedge word “perhaps” immediately acknowledges. The much looser argument actually driving Exchanging Clothes makes this clear in the introduction: “exchanging clothes shapes identity—a habit of being otherwise, something imperfect and complete” (Rabinowitz 14). The overreach and hedge in the first presentation of the organizing concept may be a symptom of the challenge of binding together essays that are more diverse than those in a typical academic collection. Exchanging Clothes reads as already-published essays that have been yoked together under a capacious theme, rather than essays that were developed in response to a pre-existing theme. This potential strength of the book may frustrate some readers, especially because it is treated with ambivalence in the prefatory material. For example, Rabinowitz’s Introduction to Exchanging Clothes briefly explains each essay in the book, covering one or two per paragraph. But there is also a final concluding paragraph in which Rabinowitz runs through each essay again quickly, pointing out their points of contact; the paragraph ends up seeming intriguing and inconclusive at the same time. I couldn’t help but think of a fashion show in which looks supposedly in keeping with a certain theme are sent down the runway for our initial inspection, one or two at a time. The audience begins to build a sense of whether the collection coheres. Then there is the final parade of all the looks together, on the catwalk at once, with the designer onstage to claim them. Rabinowitz narrates both the first look and the encore, trying to convince us that it does indeed all belong together.
 
The circulation of clothing is both the collection’s theme and its method. The editors seem to hope that by presenting these essays on the same catwalk, they might inspire readers to put some of them together in interesting new ways. The essays in Exchanging Clothes demonstrate extreme variety in methodology, style, and argument, as well as differing degrees of relevance to the theme of exchange and circulation. It is difficult to imagine the academic reader who would be interested in both a close reading of the literary symbolism of the ring in James Merrill’s poetry (Andrea Mariani’s “Rings in James Merrill’s Poetry”) and in an ethnography of a contemporary thrift store in Minneapolis (Katalin Medvedev’s “An Ethnography of the Savers Thrift Department Store in Minneapolis”), but I think this series wants to hail those readers into existence and provide a location where they can congregate. In fashion parlance, the imagined wearer of a certain collection or label is called its “girl”—the “Versace girl” and the “Chanel girl” call to mind very different images for those familiar with each brand’s semiotic history and style. I think that the Habits of Being series might exist in part to call into being a new “girl,” though the actual gender identity of the critics it wishes to hail may or may not be feminine, of course. (Two of the thirteen essays in Exchanging Clothes are written by men.)
 
One key innovation of the series is that each book begins with two essays from non-academics, the first from a female psychoanalyst and the next from a female fashion designer. Exchanging Clothes opens with an essay by Italian psychoanalyst Laura Montani and moves on to a piece by fashion designer Mariuccia Mandelli. Montani’s essay, “Accessory Questions,” ranges around, investigating the psychoanalytic view of accessory; to many American readers, it will seem like a working draft, generative but unruly. She starts with a quick scroll of dictionary definitions of “accessory”—a classic strategy of the writer who isn’t sure where to start, but perhaps also of an analyst scanning symptoms—pointing out briefly that the very existence of the fashion accessory reveals our “structural incompleteness.” She then leaves any sustained interest in clothing behind, and offers three mini-essays on (1) how the concept of accessory fits into “part-object theory,” (2) female pain (nominally in the context of piercing), and (3) female desire and fetishism (but not fetish culture). Montani’s writing is theoretical, abstract, dense, intertextual, and suggestive. By contrast, Mandelli’s essay, “Krizia and Accessories,” is written in simple and direct magazine prose and from personal experience; Mandelli references zero sources in comparison to Montani’s twenty-nine. Mandelli writes like a businesswoman accustomed to the value of clarity in communication. Her essay moves through various accessories made by her fashion line, Krizia, and describes her own idiosyncratic first-person view of each type of accessory. She makes claims such as: watches and shoes reveal who someone really is; we should commit to one pair of spectacles until they break; ties are okay for women and are often dreary nooses for men.
 
Having encountered these two essays with vastly different styles, purposes, and forms, the reader may be surprised to find that the next three essays are relatively traditional examples of literary criticism. Anne Hollander’s essay turns a perceptive eye toward the depictions of clothing in Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Ariosto, drawing out the major similarities and differences in how clothing is (and isn’t) depicted by these influential writers. Andrea Mariani, as mentioned earlier, looks primarily at how the figure of the ring functions across James Merrill’s poetry. Cristina Giorcelli offers a close reading of Kate Chopin’s short story “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” historicizing the symbolic and economic value of the titular stockings in late 19^th century America. The essays are all valuable individually, but to someone reading the whole book, they may feel disappointingly traditional after such an adventurous opening. Also disappointing is the fact that although many disciplinary methodologies are represented in the rest of the book, there is very little work that is methodologically interdisciplinary. After the literary analysis essays, the collection marches through different approaches to dress and identity, offering an essay each from the perspective of history, film studies, cultural studies, fashion studies, sociology, anthropology, and ethnography. The topics covered in these essays range broadly, from the symbolism of French hats in mid-century American cinema to the circulation of symbolic jewelry in Algerian culture. As one completes the book, one wonders, does the “Habits of Being girl” exist? Can we imagine the reader who can take in such diverse essays, which do not seem to be at all in conversation with each other, and work to put their ideas, methods, and styles into exchange?
 
Historians and anthropologists have traditionally paid special attention to dress. The cultural studies turn made possible new kinds of scholarly work on fashion, the body, and identity, but the kind of transdisciplinary critical fashion studies that Exchanging Clothes may wish to promote is still an unfulfilled project. Fashion Theory, a journal that began publication in 1997, represents the more traditional scholarly approach, studying the culture of fashion. Exchanging Clothes and the series of which it is a part want to study the fashioning of culture. As Giorcelli explains in the final “Coda” to Exchanging Clothes, “clothes and accessories are treated in these essays as a means of delving into, exchanging and circulating, an identity: psychic, ethnic, and social, including gender identity” (259). In this series, the preface reveals, most of the authors are distinguished scholars writing about “clothing here for the first time in their careers” (xiii). It remains to be seen whether new academic programs such as the Parsons Fashion Studies M.A., new journals such as Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, and new books such as this one will produce and sustain scholars who are willing and able, in our scholarly marketplace, to spend entire careers traversing traditional disciplines and looking at the “social and economic processes of dress as well as psychic and ontological aspects of identity” (xii). Though many, many factors impact what kinds of work future generations of scholars will do, I return now to the point I made earlier: our individual willingness to critically confront our own sartorial choices is a necessary precondition to valuing the kind of work Exchanging Clothes seems to want to elicit from its readers.