Archive for June 2010
Fashion and Modernity
The Fashion & Modernity project, is a major collaboration with Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and is funded by an AHRB large grant until 2004. Through a range of interlocking collaborative and individual studies resulting in publications, symposia, conferences and exhibitions this project will investigate the relation of Western fashion to modernity from the late eighteenth century to the present by establishing a critical relationship between theories of modernity and contemporary cultural theory and practice in fashion. The project leader is Caroline Evans, Senior Research Fellow, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
The project is focused on the development of consumer culture in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, it aims to scrutinise the relationship of modernity to technology, industrialization and consumption, examining their effects both on subjectivities (raising questions of body and identity, be it national, gendered, posthuman, etc) and on appearances (raising questions of the importance of fashionable appearances in periods of rapid transformation).
The project has two aspects. The first is collaborative work where a large group of individual researchers will come together for a symposium and conference, resulting in two group publications. The symposium will focus on history and theory and the conference will address the interface of history and theory with contemporary practice.
The second aspect involves the work of a smaller group of individual researchers, more specifically focused on fashion, where outputs are books, an exhibition and a practice-based PhD project.
Examples of single-author books to be published by LCF and CSM staff as part of the work of the project include:
Christopher Breward, Fashioning London: Dress, Space and Identity 1750-1970 (Berg Publishers, 2003) accompanied by a major exhibition of the same title at the Museum of London in 2003;
Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (Yale University Press, 2003) and Living Dolls: A History of the Fashion Model 1850-2000 (publisher to be confirmed, 2005);
Alistair O’Neill, Mapping Fashion in Modern London 1870-1995 (Reaktion Books, 2002) and Tommy Nutter and the Disproportionate Suit (2004)
Other projects culminating in chapters in the two published collections entitled Fashion and Modernity (2004) and Fashion: History/Theory/Practice (2005) include:
Andrea Stuart: Queen Henrietta: 17th century masques, self-fashioning and gender;
Caroline Dakers: the development of the retail haberdashery market in the early 19th century;
Kitty Hauser: a critical article and performance based on the work and studio of Degas, in whose paintings women’s participation in fashion is seen as a kind of theatre of the city;
Becky Conekin: surrealist and fashion photography as symptomatic of modernity in the post-war work of photographer Lee Miller;
Andrew Hill: the experience of modernity and of fashion in the film ‘Performance’;
Frances Geesin: on her collaborative work as a textile designer with the electronics firm Philips.
Suzanne Lee: ‘Digital Dress: Fashioning the Future’;
Jamie Brassett: ‘Spaghettification’: the ways in which technoproducts & bodies can interact in order to ensure that subjective & objective entropy is lessened, & emergent possibilities heightened;
and chapters by Judith Clark on curating, Jane Harris on digital technologies, Shelley Fox on design and Sharon Baurley on textile design and new technology.
Funding from the AHRB for the whole project amounts to almost £300,000 over three years.
Contact:
Dr Rob Lutton
London College of Fashion
20 John Princes Street
London W1G 0BJ, tel. 020 7514 7690 email research@fashion.arts.ac.uk
reference
Growing up happens in a heartbeat. One day you’re in diapers, the next day you’re gone. But the memories of childhood stay with you for the long haul. I remember a place, a town, a house, like a lot of houses. A yard like a lot of other yards. On a street like a lot of other streets. And the thing is, after all these years, I still look back…with wonder.
(The Wonder Years quotes)
Wallpaper
A life size wallpaper re-creating the kitchen wall of 23 Southey Road, London. ninachakrabarti
Retro Fashion, Nostalgia and national consciousness: Success of a Revived Shoe Brand from Socialist Hungary
text by Fruzsina Müller
A few years ago the global retro fever appeared, which can be observed everywhere from clothes to furniture trends. Meanwhile, there was another phenomenon in the post-communist countries, the east-nostalgia, called “Ostalgie” by the Germans. Perhaps from these two tendencies has the nostalgia evolved in Hungary for products made under state-socialism, which was capitalised upon by some entrepreneurs trying to revive brands from the former system.
In Hungary, the most conspicuous field of retro is clothing, but there are retro trends in commercial design, architecture or the catering trade as well. An example for the last one is the Jaffa cafe in one of the most frequented streets in Budapest. One should not let oneself be deceived by the red leatherette chairs: the assortment of drinks is much wider than under socialism. The approach of Jaffa‘s owner was to give back the “calmness” of the 1960s, when he was a small boy wearing shorts – a kind of personal nostalgia for his own childhood, which possibly could only succeed as a commercial idea with the help of retro fashion. Another cafe and restaurant with retro feeling is called Menza, which was the denotation of school and working place canteens. However, here you can eat for ‘menza’ prices only one kind of dish at lunch time – coffee, drinks and noble foods never known in socialist times are as expensive as in the neighbouring restaurants in the very frequented Liszt Ferenc square in Budapest.
In the “ostalgia“ fever a wide range of products of socialist Hungary were revived, like the ‘legendary’ Traubi, a grape soda drink in a green bottle. Picture books appeared about “those nice 60s” or about the “cult objects of an extinct era”. The most popular (and for a long time the only) Hungarian TV-series, launched in 1987 and set in a newly built housing estate, could be watched again on television. However, the most recent – and seemingly most successful – example of retro fashion is the revival of the ‘Tisza shoes’, a Hungarian brand first produced in the 40s, and now getting the status of a cult object. But before telling the story of the Tisza shoes, let’s clarify the connection of retro and nostalgia.
The most recent retro trend appeared in the US around 2000, trying to call back the memories of dream-America of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, when the economy boomed after the victory of the Second World War. Why the most recent trend? Because the rediscovering of the culture and style of former times is not new: just think about the Renaissance and Classicism. The actual retro trend appeared in the 50s of the 20th century.
While retro stands for a kind of fashion trend, the category nostalgia signs a personal feeling. It was first used in the 1970s in the same meaning as today. Since then, it means more than homesickness but less than a psychological case like depression: rather the concepts of ‘beautiful old time’, childhood and yearning can be connected to it. In our case it is important to know that there is not only personal nostalgia but also a collective one. By seeing images in the public sphere, it is possible for many members of society to feel nostalgia for times of which they did not have any personal experiences. The development of collective nostalgia is very likely when personal lifeways are crossed by a large historical event or sudden change in society that evokes similar fears or answers in the people. This makes them feel nostalgic because they notice how different everything was only a few years before. In Hungary, the system change was obviously an event like that, causing collective nostalgia.
Let’s turn back to the Tisza shoes. The memories about them are varied: many people say they were very sticky because, at that time, everybody wanted western brands. Others claim that they became the favourite shoes of many young people.
The fact is that from 1942 a new shoe factory near to the second biggest river in Hungary, the Tisza, produced house shoes. The later well-known logo, a big T with a strip in the middle of it, appeared in 1971, when the production of sport shoes began. This style of sport shoes was revived in 2003 and since then they have been very popular among young people. There is not much difference between the retro models of Tisza and those of Puma. Only the huge T on the side tells the viewer it’s a Tisza. The popularity can’t be explained by the costs either: Tisza are only slightly cheaper than their Western counterparts. Nevertheless, many young people buy them.
What is the reason for this? How far does nostalgia play a role in the popularity of this brand? Or are there any other reasons? First of all, I wanted to know why exactly this brand was revived and spoke to the entrepreneur László Vidák. Vidák is in his 30s and already has experience in the shoe industry as an importer of fashionable shoes from Great Britain. The idea with the Tisza shoes first came to his mind in 2002. He saw a pair of old Tisza shoes in the street, which evoked memories of his own shoes, the ones he liked very much in his childhood. In May 2003 he opened the first Tisza shop in the centre of Budapest and hoped to find a consumer group who would like to explore an individual product for itself, which
“has a past and isn’t camped up”
He wanted to create a Hungarian product with a Hungarian name, because he trusted in the fact that “most people think that Hungarian products are not sticky any more and that not only the goods from abroad are good”.
His assumption proved correct: Today there are seven brand shops all around Hungary, and the number of them is continuously increasing. Vidák’s strategy builds on the so-called guerilla marketing: there are no advertisements for the products, but attention is aroused with small gifts such as lighters with the logo of Tisza or with sponsoring bands and festivals. Vidák believes that in the case of Tisza “less is more”, because the brand became well-known without forcing it. On the other hand he believes that “good products don’t need any advertisement”.
The new Tisza became popular surfing on the actual retro wave. However, Vidák says there is a significant difference between Tisza and other retro brand styles of the world: “At Tisza, there is a much more serious feeling behind the products. Without communicating it, everybody knows it is a Hungarian product, a Hungarian brand, it is produced and planned here”. Is there any relation between the nostalgia of Tisza and the political, economic and social situation in Hungary? Vidák is not sure: “Once I thought so, but I realised that there isn’t any. I thought the buyers would think about the old sheltered times, when we were living in a very different world with a different value system. However, only a minimal proportion of the buyers choose the product because of that.” Now he sees that not many people think about socialism while buying Tisza shoes because they simply did not experience that era. Most of the buyers are between 14 and 22 years old, so they cannot feel personal nostalgia.
In order to find out the reasons for buying Tisza shoes I talked with a few buyers of this product. Some of them had not been alive when the system collapsed, others were a maximum of 15, so that their occurent positive opinion on Kádárism could be rather a sign of collective nostalgia than a personal one. According to their answers, those young people who choose Tisza do not want to wear mainstream shoes “like the mass”. This brand has become the cohesive force, perhaps the symbol of a certain social group. In connection with retro, most of the people I spoke to think that this fashion played an enormous role in the success of Tisza.
“Older” buyers (between 25-32) tend to connect Tisza with nostalgia for childhood. This can be combined with nostalgia for the Kádár-era, especially for their flavours like “shelter”, “safety” and “order”. On the other hand, these are, irrespective of the political system, traits of a protected childhood. In their imagination, nobody censured the socialist Hungary, nobody said it had been a dictatorship. Moreover, a number of them mentioned what they had seen was the “moderate end”. With the words of a 32-year-old teacher: “I know that the system was insupportable, and I was very happy as a 15-year-old girl that the republic was proclaimed. But:
that was my childhood and I adored it.
I feel by all means nostalgia for it. We were children at the moderate end and that did not seem to be depressing for a child.”
It is very hard to make a clear borderline between nostalgia for childhood and for the system. Certainly, many young people know that it is not appreciated today to talk positively about socialism. A 30-year-old communication manager is not the only one who’s a bit confused when asked about his opinion on Kádárism.: “The feeling about it is ambivalent. I think the most appropriate definition is »the most cheerful shed of the socialist camp«.” This expression is wide-spread in the minds of Hungarian people. It is like a mystical expression, which refers to the weakening dictatorship and the increasing affluence up to the ‘70s that is called “consumer socialism” as well. According to sociologists people’s disappointment in the present (missing existential safety, shelter and well functioning common security) results in the re-evaluation of the Kádár-era in their minds. An example of this is the opinion of a 28-year-old musician about Kádárism: “That was a clown world, in which people were taken for stupid. But there was an order that doesn’t exist any more.”
Most of the younger people have already talked about Kádárism with relatives or friends and have a positive attitude towards it, although most of them are unsure because they feel they do not have the ‘right’ to judge it. Only a 14-year-old girl is willing to tell her opinion about the Kádár-era: “It was politically not the luckiest thing, but in that system it was probably better to be a child. There wasn’t anything like picking at each other at school because someone was wearing the newest Adidas, because everyone was equal… But the same model projected to the whole society must be a bit brutal.” She thinks, that in the former system, people had more social rights, but she can not completely appreciate it as an obviously positive factor.
For the buyers of Tisza the fact that through their Hungarian origin they offer identification seems to play a larger role than nostalgic feelings. The aim of the brand’s owner and the needs of the buyers meet at this point: According to Vidák the revival of Tisza was an initiative for the amplification of national pride. And apparently most of the buyers appreciate that the shoes are manufactured in Hungary. This fact can be inserted into the series of “self-documentation” achievements started by István Bibó, whose characterisation of the small Eastern European countries is astonishingly true still 60 years later. He called the following phenomenon “national materialism” in his 1946 written essay: “the [Eastern European] nations, who were thrown into a fever by constituting themselves, did not notice that the greatness of the achievements of the western nations are composed exactly of the fact that they live their national lives with a self-evident calmness, without willing to show off something as a nation by any means.”
I found this kind of national pride when asking buyers of Tisza shoes. Nearly all of them were impressed of the Hungarian origin of the shoes, some of them even seemed a little bit touched. For a number of persons, Tisza appears as a kind of counterpoint opposed to the multinational sports shoes firms like Adidas or Nike. These buyers talked about a pleasant surprise when reading on the label of the shoes
“Made in Hungary”
For some of the people, Tisza means a refreshing change in the globalised fashion world. The 28-year-old musician would be very happy “if there were many things like Tisza“ and if he “would not see the label »Made in China« everywhere.” An 18-year-old high-school girl answers the question why she opts for the brand Tisza: “I liked it and anyhow, deep in their hearts people feel homesick. After all, it’s a Hungarian product.” The 29-year-old communication manager says it is like the “Hungarian orange, but it is ours”-feeling.
A 14-year-old girl explained: “By choosing Tisza, I protest against the capitalist 80,000 Forint shoes – which are shit, anyway.” With this statement a new aspect appears which refers to the buyer’s consciousness: the support of domestic products against those from abroad.
The opinions were divided as I asked whether Tisza should become available in other countries as well. One part of the people would be proud of a Hungarian product which succeeds abroad, while others protest against the “globalisation” of Tisza.
Some products and brands can be stylized to symbols of whole regions or nations. The owner of the new Tisza recognised the facilities of retro fashion, but only a part of the political messages of this brand met the buyers’ demands. Although the Kádár-era seems to be a living part of the collective memory, still, it is not appreciated as positively as the brand owner had expected. If the choice of the buyers is influenced by positive feelings from the past, then it is mainly a nostalgia for childhood, not for the system. Nevertheless, the other political message of Tisza – the Hungarian origin – found a good way to succeed with the help of the so far unexploited national identity consciousness.
Patriotic feelings in connection with Tisza seem to be stronger than nostalgic ones. This may help Tisza survive the end of the current retro wave.
memory, a code inside fashion
From vintage to 80s, based on many research and individual talks with tutor in the first three months, the answer has emerged finally – I am interest in the topic of fashion and memory (it was inspired by the individual talk with tutor Arjen on last November). Now I am pleasently surprised to meet an special issue – fashion project # 3: on fashion and memory, it just launched this February, the little booklet provides quite some different angles of fashion and memory. Like the quotes below-
In thinking of clothes as passing fashions, we repeat less than half-truth. Bodies come and go; the clothes which have received those bodies survive. They circulate though secondhand shops, through rummage sales, through the Salvation Army; or they are transmitted from parent to child, from sister to sister, from brother to brother, from sister to brother, from lover to lover, from friend to friend.
(Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things” The Yale Review 1993 vol. 81. no. 2, pp. 35-50)
The idea of dedicating an issue of Fashion Projects to the topic of fashion and memory started while reading Peter Stallybrass’s “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things,” an engaging and lyrical essay on the author’s remembrance of his late colleague Allon White through the garments White wore.
Stallybrass’s piece elucidates people’s intimate relations with clothes—i.e. their materiality, their smell and creases—and the inextricable relations between clothes and memory. It traces the way in which clothes retain “the history of our bodies.” Wearing White’s jacket at a conference, the author describes the way clothes are able to trigger strong and vivid memories: “He was there in the wrinkles of the elbows, wrinkles that in the technical jargon of sewing are called ‘memory’; he was there in the stains at the very bottom of the jacket; he was there in the smell of the armpits.”
My interest in the topic was then piqued while sitting in on a class on fashion curation taught by Alistair O’ Neil at the London College of Fashion, where a number of students curated a fashion exhibition comprised of used gowns and top hats, their main value resting not in their design or historical relevance to fashion in history, but in their being second (or maybe third or fourth) hand, thus retaining intricate yet irretrievable history in their signs or wear, their stains, their scents. This lyrical exhibition, titled “A Walk in the Wardrobe” and staged in an old and seemingly abandoned space, was a reminder of the importance of reconnecting with the materiality of cloth and clothes.
This issue’s focus on clothes and memory dovetails with attempts to promote sustainability within the fashion industry. It invokes a counter-tendency in contemporary fashion which reinstates the importance of materiality and emotional connections to our garments in the hope to slow down the accelerated cycles of consumption and discard promoted by current fashion models. As Stallybrass points out, moments of emotional connections with clothes and cloth become, in fact, rare in the accelerated rhythm of contemporary societies: “I think this is because, for all our talk of the ‘materialism’ of modern life, attention to material is precisely what is absent. Surrounded by an extraordinary abundance of materials, their value is to be endlessly devalued and replaced.”
The various contributors to Fashion Projects explore this theme in disparate ways.
Sarah Scaturro, textile conservator of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, revisits, together with photographer Keith Price, the museum’s textile collection and her intimate relation with it. She also discusses curatorial practices with Judith Clark, whose exhibition “Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back”—based on Caroline Evans’s theories—is an exploration of the complex temporalities of fashion.
Tamsen Schwartzman interviews Tanya Marcuse on her photographic work in fashion archives, while fashion designer Shelly Fox discusses her own design and textiles practice.
Erica Weiner recounts her use of other people’s memories via old photographs and human hair for the making of her jewelry, while fledgling designer Eugenia Yu tells Erin Lindstrom of her collections based on her family memories.
Finally, Lisa Santandrea revisits North America’s industrial past and obsolete technologies, as they remain embodied in knits produced by the now-defunct Ohio Knitting Mills.
A Walk in the Wardrobe
“A Walk in the Wardrobe” is a suggestive exhibit recently organized by the MA in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion. (The group that put it together goes by the name Glasscasecuration.) The exhibit, which was unfortunately up for only a week, at the Ada Street gallery, explored the intimate relationship between fashion and memory.
Trying to go beyond the visual, it set out to trigger lost and forgotten memories through the sense of sound and smell. A soundscape comprised of muffled noises—of what seemed to be people walking and rummaging through closets—was paired with bygone scents (the smell of moth and lilac) reminiscent of one’s grandmother’s wardrobe.
The exhibit is comprised of two rooms: One is dedicated to the “masculine” wardrobe, with walls lined by black top hats. The other is dedicated to the “feminine” one, featuring a number of white dresses from different eras hung from the ceiling through a system of fishing wires.
The color of the dresses, combined with the eerie and ghostly quality that empty clothes evoke, seem to perfectly illustrate Peter Stallybrass’s perceptive assessment that: “There is, indeed, a close connection between the magic of lost clothes and the fact that ghosts often step out of closets and wardrobes to appall us, haunt us, perhaps even console us.”
Francesca, March 27th, 2007
linger 