Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion

NANCY J TROY

Couture Culture: A inquiry in Modern Art and Fashion

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pres 2003 438 pp; 150 b/w ills. $3995

In 1863 Charles Baudelaire located a locate of markers for modernity in the fugitive aspects of fashion and urg the present artist "to extract from fashion the numbers that resides in its historical case to distill the eternal from the transitory." (1) Since that date, Baudelaire's modernity has been make subordinateed to relentless critical rethinking as discussion about modernity, modernism, and their relationship to a recognizably "modern" art in the 19th and 20th centuries has been profoundly reshaped through ideological struggles within, and without, academic institutions, particularly after World War II. (2) Although the universal of modernism, at least since the 1960 has provided a (sometimes controlling) framework end which to evaluate and assess certain aspects of 20th-century cultural production, its exclusions, as Peter Wollen and others have remarked, have become legendary. (3) Notable among those exclusions is fashion, displaced from the central position Baudelaire assigned it and typically dismissed in dominant accounts of early-20th-century art as, in Nancy Troy's words, "superficial, fleeting and feminized" (p 2) Marginalized in histories of present art, when not ignored altogether, the research of fashion has largely been left to style of dress historians (except where artists took up its design and/or production), style of dress institutes, and museum exhibitions that many times reinforce a narrow linking of art and fashion around "garments designed through artists or clothing that qualifies as art" (p 3) (4)

Since the 1970 poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and sex studies have contributed important archetypes for exploring fashion as a cultural and performative expression of the female control as well as a site for renegotiations of sex and sexual identity. The publication in 1993 of historian Mary Louise Roberts's groundbreaking essay "Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Fashion in 1920 France" expos the abysmal ideological and political effects of social debates that implicated late fashion in representations of sex sexuality, and nationalism. Roberts's essay, part of a larger close attention of gender in post-World War I France, has informed a number of art historical investigations into relationships between fashion, sex sexuality, and modernity in Europe and in Russia during the interwar period, including novel work by Tag Gronberg, Maria Makela, Christina Kiaer, myself, and others. (5) a great deal of of that work on the post-World War I period has focused upon the 1920s, when modern art and recent design shared a distinct and discernible stylistic vocabulary and the so-called fresh woman emerged to stake without a territory that included the representation of the novel lesbian. This emphasis has take care ofed to deflect attention away from the historical significance of the French clothing industry and its commercial interests in shaping discourses of modernity in the period before and during World War I, the make submissive of Nancy Troy's new book

Troy's work is not about gender through se, though gender is everywhere inscribed in the particulars of her investigation. Instead, Troy maps a place of previously unexplored parallel manner of makings that existed between modern fashion and novel art in the years before and during World War I. The be the effect is a welcome addition to a growing material part of literature that addresses the discursive character of modern fashion in shaping the cultural landscape of modernity in early-20th-century Europe and North America. (6) More than that, in shifting the emphasis away from the more easily recognizable figure of speechs of modernity embedded in a wide range of artistic and design practices in the 1920 it exhibits a pioneering attempt to make bare a deeper structural relationship between present art and modern fashion during a formative period in the consolidation of vanguard culture

The title of Troy's work Couture Culture: A Study in late Art and Fashion, situates her investigation of an alternative conceptual archetype linking the domains of art and fashion (one not necessarily accessible end even a rigorous formal analysis). Setting aside the conventional linking of artists and couturiers (Salvador Dali and Elsa Schiaparelli, for example), she instead concentrates upon the commercial practices of Paul Poiret, the greatest in quantity successful leader in the field of innovative fashion design before World War I, and the artistic practices of Marcel Duchamp, the "father" of the readymade. Her intention is to unveil a logic shared through both modern fashion and present art: the tension between adoration for the unique original and a growing ne for mass-produced copies. The contradiction that come ups at the heart of the fashion a whole when the "(supposedly) unique and auratic phenomenon ... is subjected to the conditions of mass consumption in an industrialized economy" finds a parallel in the question at issue faced by the modern artist who embraces uniqueness and originality on the other hand whose market depends on establishing the work in relation to others like it, and distinct from everything other (p. 334). For Troy, one as well as the other fashion and fine art in the fresh period require "an audience, a discourse, a profile in the public sphere," and her interest lies in their formation and elaboration across a range of cultural practices (p 335) In her search to locate and explicate the sources of these defining constitutions her intellectual journey ranges widely as she investigates relations between elite and popular tillages the professional theater and the fashion display the couture house and the art gallery, the fashion industry's mass-produced patterns and the artist's reproductive copies.