Salar Bil , Forefather of conceptual fashion "Fashion, body, and gender"

Salar Bil Tehran's pioneer in fashion wrote about "Fashion, body, and gender" may shape new eras in my career. An era shaped by mini-collections that involved the concept of the body how it is covered and how gender is performed through clothing. Perhaps fashion is the only discipline that involves directly the body and gender. Therefore, in the new era of my career, I want to examine more these three concepts.
The first concept is fashion. Everyone thinks to wear a beautiful and elegant dress, which means that they have said something about fashion. But the thing is that fashion does not end with clothes. Fashion is a role-playing game that covers everything from clothes to the way you sit and stand up and even the way you talk. But the other two concepts of body and gender are an inseparable part of fashion because fashion wants to find a solution to cover our nakedness and also tries to adapt gender codes on the body in a conventional way or transgress them and reveal a new body. . . In the following, I would like to discuss more about these concepts and argue why fashion is not limited only to sewing a beautiful and fashionable dress. Although many try to connect the tailors of royal clothes to the concept of avant-garde fashion, we know that the Iranian subjectivity is not very familiar with the concept of fashion. Because the Iranian subjectivity is only used to royal and conservative styles and has not been able to expand the concept of fashion as it deserves. Also, another problem is the issue of the body, which, although it has been extensively discussed in literature, it has not had much expressed in other arts, especially fashion, and after the 1979 Revolution, this concept has been distorted and it is not easy to talk about it. An example can be the impact of technology in Iranian fashion, where clothes shown on invisible bodies that walked on the runway. But the question of body connects us to the main contemporary question in fashion industry, and that is gender performance. In fact, our social construction is not very compatible with the fundamental concepts of the current era, and most of the dominant journalistic manifestations do not help us to investigate the main concepts in question: fashion, body, and gender. In general fashion denotes a particular sort of dress-the fashionable or the fashion-related-or a particular aesthetic realm-that of fashion and the cultural forces that create it. It is an exclusionary term containing a sense of forms of dress that are not considered fashion, though the boundaries of these are variably drawn, so that for some, fashion ends at the inner core of cutting-edge designers, and for others it extends to the more style-conscious parts of the mainstream. In general, however, the old are not considered to fall within fashion's orbit, or to do so only weakly or contentiously. As a result, fashion is a somewhat problematic term to deploy in this study, suggesting a field from which older people are largely excluded. The term is also problematic because of the negative sense that attaches to it in traditional academic circles and beyond. Fashion here stands for the trivial and superficial. There is a widespread sense in the Academy that fashion is a shallow subject not meriting serious analysis. As Tseëlon (2001) notes, to engage in research on dress is to place oneself on the fringes of academic respectability. Mainstream sociology indeed inherited many of the prejudices against fashion found in the work of earlier puritan and moralistic writers, who saw it as a species of vanity focused on external surface not inner essence. Sociology, with its bias towards rationality and the masculine-defined worlds of work and the public sphere, carried this negative evaluation forward into its own value system, treating subjects like fashion as lightweight and superficial. These subjects' association with the feminine further undermined their status; and as Entwistle (2000) notes, there are parallels here with the initial disregard within sociology of topics like the body and emotion. More recently, however, with the rise of cultural studies and the shift towards the postmodern themes of identity and agency, and with the new emphasis on the visual, some of the negativity around fashion as a subject has gone. Cultural studies has, however, displayed its own limitations through its emphasis on the edgy and transgressive, reproducing the values of the youthful elite in its own analyses. As a result the range of identities it has explored is limited, and older people are generally excluded from the field. Despite this negativity, sociology has engaged with a concept of fashion, and in doing so, it has given it a distinctive meaning. Fashion, from the time of Simmel (1904/1971), has predominantly been theorized within sociology as the cycle of continual, institutionalized change associated with the development of industrial or consumption-oriented Western societies. Though encompassing novelty and change in relation to all cultural goods, dress has come to exemplify the process, so much so that the word fashion has itself come to denote clothing and the clothing industry. The link between fashion and modernity has been widely theorized by, among others, Lipovetsky (1994), though the association has been criticized for being less uniform or direct than he and others suggest. Many historians of dress indeed argue that the origins of fashion lie earlier, in the emergence of court society in Burgundy in the late Middle Ages (Steele 1997); and some have questioned the perception of fashion as a distinctively Western phenomenon, suggesting that it is found in other cultures too (Craik 1994). Fashion can also be understood in terms of the complex of material and cultural production which forms it and in which economic, technological, commercial and aesthetic influences all operate. Fine and Leopold (1993) conceptualize this as the Fashion System, the nexus of commercial, design and media influences that together provide the principal sources of changing aesthetic judgements about clothes, determining choices available in the market and providing the goods to satisfy these. This system, Entwistle (2000) argues, provides the raw materials for most everyday dress, both in the sense of the garments themselves and in the discourses and aesthetic ideas about them. All aspects of dress in the West are to some extent influenced by it. It is, however, not the only source, and other socially entrenched ideas, including ones in relation to age, mediate its influence. As a result, the sources of meaning in dress are more plural and complex than the classic sociological model of centre and periphery suggests. Recognizing this, Polhemus and Proctor (1978) developed the concept of 'anti-fashion'. They pointed to the range of dress that does not aspire to be part of fashion, and indeed rejects overt connection with it, pointing to fixed or slowly evolving forms of dress that are outside its realm and that uphold tradition and symbolize the values of the social order. Davis (1992) extended the term to express the rejection of fashion, whether from the perspective of opposition or studied neglect; and he outlined cultural styles such as 'feminist protest', 'countercultural insult' and 'conservative scepticism'. The last he regards as the blandest form of anti-fashion, though also the most economically significant because it is so pervasive. Crane (2000) quotes a survey that reported that half of American women said they were not interested in fashion; and of the third that said they were, the majority were young. Lack of interest in fashion is, therefore, fairly widespread, especially among the middle-aged and older. Anti-fashion is, however, not a wholly satisfactory term because it mixes up oppositional subcultures and conservative elites disengaged from and feeling superior to the realm of fashion. But the point that lies behind it is well made, and is particularly relevant to groups like older people, especially men, who largely inhabit this conservative world of anti-fashion. Fashion writing itself has traditionally ignored older people. The fashion literature, like the fashion industry, is concerned with spectacle, display and creativity; it celebrates the edgy, the fashionable, the erotic and the transgressive. And it disproportionately focusses on elite forms of dress like haute couture or the work of cutting-edge designers (Evans 2003). The bulk of mainstream, day-today clothing receives relatively little analysis. This is all the more so in relation to older people's dress, which is almost wholly ignored in writing about fashion. Part of the reason for this relates to the values of the fashion world itself. Fashion is strongly-perhaps inherently-youth-oriented. It is beautiful, young bodies that designers aspire to dress and that are featured throughout the Fashion System. It presents an idealized world in which age does not feature, or in which it represents a dereliction, a corruption of the vision, a falling-off and failure, something to be excluded and ignored. Ageing here takes on the character of Kristeva's (1982) abjection, something to be feared, repelled, cast into darkness. From the perspective of mainstream fashion, age is simply not attractive or sexy; and comments from the editor of Vogue, as we shall see, confirm and naturalize this sense. Fashion is indeed closely linked to the erotic-so much so that for some theorists the constant play of eroticism is the engine force of fashion and the key to its meaning and deep appeal. Older people, particularly women, are regarded as beyond the erotic, indeed, particularly in the eyes of the young, beyond sex itself. Their clothing choices are, therefore, deemed of little interest to students of fashion: indeed to extend the analysis to this group would, in the eyes of many commentators, degrade the essence of fashion itself. Social anthropology, by contrast, has a long history of taking clothing and dress seriously. Dress here is understood as encompassing more than simply clothing, extending to the wider assemblage of items into looks. The ways in which clothing is worn, the body styles deployed, as well as the dress objects themselves, have been the subject of a considerable literature within anthropology, reviewed by Hansen (2004) and Crane and Bovone (2006). The tradition has received further impetus from the wider material turn in anthropology and sociology in which clothing and dress have been part of the creation and attribution of symbolic values to material culture. Miller and others have explored the ways material objects like the physical surroundings of the home become significant in meaning-making, representing aspects of distributed personhood (Miller 1987, 1998; Küchler and Miller 2005; Guy et al. 2001; Weber and Mitchell 2004; S. Woodward 2007). Dress can be part of this. The emphasis on clothes as material objects finds echoes in museum-based dress studies which has similarly treated garments or accessories as concrete texts (Taylor 2002, 2004; Beaujot 2012). Such object-based scholarship focusses on how the cut, styling and fabric reveal aspects of their meaning-the ways they have been abraded by work, shaped around the body and its changes, adapted and recut for pregnancy or age. In this 'pathological' approach (Breward 2003: 64), garments are no longer the pristine objects of the museum tradition, but living evidence of the embodied physicality of dress. Though this study does not attempt to engage with clothes in quite that way, such approaches serve as reminders of the significance of the materiality of dress and its interrelationship with the body. The cut and d r.a.p.e of clothes reflect assumptions about the sorts of bodies that will inhabit them, so much so that these can be read across from the physical objects to those who will or did occupy them. An example of such an approach is found in work of the Finnish design academic Iltanen-Tähkävuori who used the concrete reality of a series of garments as a starting point to interrogate assumptions made by designers about the individuals-in her case older people and those with dementia-who would wear them (Iltanen 2005; Topo and Iltanen-Tähkävuori 2010; Iltanen-Tähkävuori et al. 2012). Designers in the study initially asserted that age did not matter in their design practice, but as they handled and analysed the concrete garments, the implicit assumptions they held about age began to emerge. Clothes designed for the mainstream older market do reveal themselves through their cut and fit; indeed one of the ways it is possible to identify retailers who are addressing this market is through examining the cut of their clothes. Those aimed at the older market tend to be cut more generously, longer and looser, and for women, with lower bust seams and for men, higher rise in the trousers. The nature of dress is thus shaped by the bodies and lives of the people who wear it. This understanding helps to shift the focus of analysis away from the abstract, mind-centred accounts that have typified much fashion theory, which shares a bias towards abstraction characteristic of postmodernism and its influence on body studies more generally, and towards a more concrete engagement with the lived, material reality of dress as worn by the majority. The textiles used can also be significant. The garment industry is itself a very material field, centred around the production of physical objects in the form of clothing and rooted in the developments of the textile industry, which has, particularly during the twentieth century, developed a range of new, scientifically based textiles (Handley 1999; Hibbert 2001; O'Connor 2005, 2011). Some of these-Crimplene, Spandex-have particular symbolic resonance in relation to age. Crimplene, developed by Du Pont, was originally part of the scientific miracle of the 1960s, but by the 1970s it had become a byword for unfashionability. As Schneider (1994) shows, it was held in particular distain by young middle-class Americans who, as part of the wider turn to nature in the 1970s, became enchanted by the virtues of natural fibres and were repelled by its bright 'plastic' qualities. With its indestructible washability, it has become inextricably associated with elderly women in care homes. As a result, for many women in the study, it has become the fibre to dread (though such is the ever-shifting nature of fashion that Crimplene recently experienced a minor revival in the youthful avant-garde). Lycra, also developed by Du Pont, by contrast retained its positive associations. O'Connor (2011) has explored its distinctive role in the bodily experiences of the baby boomer generation where it emerged initially as part of the dancewear and aerobics trend of the 1980s, but was borne forward into later decades by its role in allowing stretch and give for figures that began by the 2000s to age, losing their firmness and welcoming more elastic, forgiving fabric. The anthropological tradition of reading the meaning from the object, reflected in O'Connor's account, allows me in a similar way to explore some of the unarticulated links that lie between forms of dress that are thought appropriate for the very old and the very young. The dress of the very young and the very old is similar in terms of materials, colours and fastenings, with bright pale colours, easy-clean fabrics and elastic cut. Clothes can also be theorized in terms of consumption culture. Early analyses of consumption were dominated by Marxist approaches that saw it as epiphenomenal, something secondary to production, resting on the stimulation of false needs and unauthentic desires and undermining true feelings and real experiences (Aldridge 2003; Paterson 2006).
‏In the writings of the Frankfurt school in particular, consumers were presented as cultural dupes manipulated by capitalism; and there are links here with second-wave feminism and its identification of fashion as inauthentic and distorting. More recently, however, work on consumption has taken a more neutral approach, treating it as an everyday act within modern culture
‏Work by Douglas and Isherwood (1979) took forward analyses that present consumption as a symbolic practice, a form of expression that makes visible and stable the category of culture. Miller (1998) in particular has reasserted the tradition whereby objects are recognized as having cultural significance as well as use, so that consumers, rather than being cultural dupes, are agentic beings actively engaged in fashioning self and identity through material things, and in this way recovering the object from the alienated process of production (Dant 2007)
This approach is particularly relevant for accounts such as this that focus on the lived reality of dress. Consumption rests on the stimulations of new desires; and fashion through its origins in competitive emulation acts to deliver this. Clothing has thus played a central role in the development of consumption culture. At a historical level, the textile industry is one of the engines of the Industrial Revolution that produced consumer society. Clothing and dress are also central elements in the planned obsolescence of consumer society; indeed they epitomize these processes, for without the systematic institutionalized change exemplified in fashion, there would be no impetus to buy more goods, particularly in areas like clothing where in the wealthy West most people already possess more than is sufficient for their material needs. These processes of planned obsolescence and the material resources needed to support them are, however, at the heart of the growing critique of the world economy in ecological terms, something that is itself reflected in growing uneasiness in the fashion industry around ecological issues, evidenced in Marks & Spencer's recent campaign encouraging the return of garments as a basis for new purchases. At the heart of the rhetoric of fashion is the language of renewal and rebirth. Clothes offer the possibility of constant renewal of the self; indeed part of the excitement and joy of fashion comes from this capacity. Fashion provides what one of the journalists in the study called 'a lift . . . a bit of a tonic'. This sense of renewal, resting on the re-presentation of the self, underlies the way people use shopping as means to enhance themselves and their mood, as well as to extend their sense of self through the acquisition of material goods (though this also has malignant versions in the form of compulsive buying (Lee and Mysyk 2004)). The language of the seasons that permeates the fashion system and around which it is structured reflects this sense of constant renewal, the capacity of fashion to promise how consumers might, in Larkin's words, 'begin afresh, afresh, afresh' (1988: 166). But this intersects with the experience of age in complex and ultimately discouraging ways, as changes in the body and appearance mean that the processes of renewal begin to falter. Each new season presents new modes, but increasingly ones that may not flatter or fit. As Featherstone and Hepworth (1991) note in their celebrated account of the Mask of Ageing, the body as it ages finds it increasingly difficult to enact a youthful inner self. As a result there is a growing discordance between the processes of fashion renewal and the physical basis for them in the form of the ageing body.
‏The discordance is not total, and the promised renewal continues to work, but to a lesser degree and with disquieting subtexts. These influences, of course, only operate for those interested in engaging with fashion, which many older people, especially men, are not
‏For them, what is more significant is the attraction, not of new, but old clothes, and of established forms of dress that leave the individual free not to engage with the realm of consumption. This sense of disengagement underlies much of the conservatism that marks the dress of the old, where the changes of the fashion cycle have ceased to exert their cultural pull. Indeed, many older people give up buying clothes to any great extent because they feel that they already have enough to 'see them out'
This encourages the widely held view among marketers that the old as a group are relatively uninterested in consumption and are, as a result, a poor focus for marketing. Clothing is intimately linked to the body. As Entwistle notes, no culture leaves the body unadorned, so that clothes are one of the means whereby bodies are made social, given identity and meaning. Dress needs to be understood as, in Entwistle's words, 'situated body practice' (2000: 11).
Getting up and dressed is thus a process of preparing the body for the social world, both an intimate experience of the body and a public presentation of it. But when we get dressed we do so within the bounds of a culture and its particular norms. We even see the body through the conventions of dress, as Hollander (1978) showed in her historical analysis of the n.u.de in painting, in which she showed how the shape of the n.ud.e body is determined by the clothes that it is not wearing: nu.des representing dressed bodies, but without their clothes. Dress thus works on the body, imbuing it with social meaning; while the body is a dynamic field that gives life and fullness to dress. The two operate dialectically (Entwistle 2000: 327). Dress lies on the margin of the body, marking the boundary between self and others, individual and society. This boundary is intimate and personal, yet also cultural and collective, structured by social and moral pressures. Though the intersections between the body and its social presentation are relevant to all ages, they take on particular significance in relation to age. To a large extent we experience our own and others' ageing through changes to the body; and these intersect with norms about dress. As such, it can be interpreted in Foucauldian terms, forming one of the ways bodies are discursively produced and made subject to the exercise of bio power, made subject to forms of governmentality. Dress acts on the body, rendering it meaningful. We can see this very clearly through dress codes of the workplace or uniforms in hospitals or prisons (Ash 2010) whereby bodies are disciplined and rendered docile and productive. In relation to age, similar modes of disciplinarity apply, in particular through the imposition of codes that express and shape ideas about what it is to be old. Dress, thus, forms part of the micro social order. As such it is subject to discourses of morality, frequently spoken of in moral terms: good, bad, faultless, correct, vulgar, tarty, cheap. Like food, dress attracts a language that reaches beyond the phenomena being described, encompassing a powerful moral charge. There is an overdetermined quality to these descriptions that d raws strength from the ways clothing, like food, is a cultural field concerned with the body, its expression and control. How we look is linked to how we will be judged; and bodies that do not conform to the rules of dress flout the conventions of a culture, risking exclusion, scorn and ridicule (Entwistle 2000). Being correctly dressed is thus an element of engaging successfully with the social world. Entwistle (2000) notes the unease and anxiety that attach to failing to meet the standards required by the moral order of the social space; and individuals feel vulnerable and embarrassed if their dress lets them down through laddered tights, drooping hems or other failures of appearance. This moral ordering in dress bears down on older people in distinctive ways. We can identify three of these. The first relates to the threat of dereliction that attaches to later years. Here, lapses of dress can take on new and threatening meanings. Stains, visible food marks, gaping buttons, marks and tears become not just offences against performance norms of the social space, but signals of a larger social and moral decline. If ignored they can threaten the standing of an older person and his or her capacity to remain part of mainstream society. The bodies of older people are thus judged more strictly and more negatively than those of the young. There is no longer the possibility, in the context of age, of Herrick's 'sweet disorder of the dress': the erotic possibility of the disorder celebrated by the poet evaporates with age, to be replaced by untidiness-or worse-dereliction. Older people thus find themselves caught within a harsher moral climate in relation to dress-harsher that is, if they want to resist the reduced and changed identities that such failings signal. Remaining well-dressed, or at least acceptably so, thus becomes part of maintaining an acceptable presence as an older person. Disciplinary discourses also operate differentially in the forms of dress thought appropriate-or more significantly inappropriate-for older people to wear. It is a gendered phrase only applied to women: like many sorts of sexual condemnation, there is no equivalent for men, once again reinforcing the ways age, gender and sexuality intersect. There is a third and additional way in which the bodies and dress of older people are made subject to disciplinary discourses, and this relates to new demands around bodily presentation and appearance. The body in the West has increasingly become, in Shilling's (2003) words, 'a project', a source of personal identity and focus for disciplinary practices aimed at this-worldly forms of meaning, displacing the older disciplinary and ascetic practices of religion. We can observe this in the slim, toned, fit body ideal (as well as in malignant versions in terms of eating disorders and widespread body anxiety, notably among young women (Bordo 1993; MacSween 1993; Gimlin 2002). It is reflected also in consumption practices. As part of this, new moral demands are placed on older people in regard to their appearance. As a result, however, it is no longer acceptable simply to be and look old. Increasingly the requirement is to discipline the body in ways that show commitment to resisting age, through such strategies as strenuous dieting or beauty practices. Clothing and dress can be part of this, with the spread of new expectations that older people-women especially-will remain up to date and fashionably dressed, and with that part of the mainstream.

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Active in the fashion industry

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