HOW IMPORTANT ARE THE MEDIA IN CONTEMPORARY FASHION?

MODULE TITLE: Fashion and Postmodernism Project

 

 

 

HOW IMPORTANT ARE THE MEDIA IN CONTEMPORARY FASHION?

 

 

How important are the media in contemporary fashion?

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                         To be conscious is not to be in time

                         But only in time can the moment in the rose –garden,

                        The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,

                        Be remembered; involved with past and future.

                        Only trough time is conquered.

 

                                               T. S. Elliot 1920 1

 

The idea is that popular culture signs and media images increasingly dominate our sense of reality, and the way we define ourselves and the world around us. The mass media, for example, were once thought of as holding up a mirror to, and thereby reflecting, a wider social reality. Now reality can only be defined by the surface reflections of this mirror. Society has become subsumed within the mass media.

Moreover, image becomes all-important in competition, not only trough name-brand recognition, but also because of various associations of quality and prestige. Competition in the image – building trade especially fashion becomes a vital aspect of inter –firm competition. Nowadays success is so plainly profitable that investment in image –building (celebrities, fashion shows, store openings, television productions, internet as well as direct marketing) Pict 1 becomes as important as investment in new designers. The image serves to establish an identity in the market place. The acquisition of an image (by the purchase of a sign system such as designers clothes) becomes integral to the quest for individual identity, self –realization, and meaning. Pict3

High culture and popular culture used to be regarded as two separate cultural forms. In today media induced world these two form are increasingly being mixed, both when it comes to production and to consumption.

One of the key predictions of the postmodern condition is the proliferation of signs and their endless circulation, generated by the technological developments associated with the information explosion.pict2

Since cave dwellers began drawing pictures on walls, human beings have been interested in self – representation and have inferred meaning from the pictures that they create and view. In today society not much changed, promulgators of motivation research cheer their ability to shape the consumers unconscious desires trough media images. The visual aspect of fashion, especially the use of photographs and colored could arouse interest, spur associations and instill desire. In this yearning for self-expressions we reach for product, for brands, for fashion, which will be compatible with our schemes of what we think we are or want media wants us to be.

Andy Warhol’s notorious prediction that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes was something more then an off hand remark that made for good copy.

The prognostication was based on two themes: mass media and celebrity. The world we are living now.

This is what fashion senses really is-the ability to register and appreciate and remember the details of the way those around you look and dress and then reinterpret those details and memories itself.

                                                Malcolm Gladwell, ‘listening to khakis’The New Yorker, July 28,1997

The realm of consumption – what we buy and what determines what we buy-is increasingly influenced by media. Consumption is increasingly bound up with fashion as well because fashion increasingly determines consumption. For example, we watch more films because of the extended ownership of VCRs, while fashion advertising, which makes increasing use of popular cultural references, plays a more important role in deciding what we will buy. Implication of this point is that in a postmodern world, surfaces and style become more important, and evoke in their turn a kind of ‘designer ideology’. Or as Harvey puts it: images dominate narrative. 2The argument is that we increasingly consume media images and signs for their own sake rather than for their ‘usefulness’ or for the deeper values they may symbolize, we consume images and signs precisely because they are images and signs, and disregard question of utility and value. This is evident in fashion culture itself where surface and style, what things look like, and playfulness and irony, are said to predominate at the expense of content, substance and meaning. Pict 4

From the postmodern point of view, contemporary fashion is seen to be indulging in nostalgia, living off its past, ransacking it for ideas recycling its images and plots and cleverly citing it in self-conscious postmodern parodies.pict 5 The repeat and the prologue have been part of the way fashion has worked from its earliest stages. Initially it made use of other forms of popular culture like the magazines, billboards and movies, and very soon these media fed off each other for ideas and stories.

French postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard claims that we have reached a stage in social and economic development in which ‘it is it no longer possible to separate the economic or productive realm of ideology or culture, since cultural artifacts, images, representations, even feelings and psychic structures have become part of the world of economics’.3 This is partly explained, Baudrillard claims, by the fact that there has been historical shift in the west, from a society based on the production of things to one based on the production of information trough media. As Best and Kellner write:’ We are now, Baudrillard claims, in a new era of simulation in which computerization, information processing, media, cybernetic control systems, and the organization of society according to simulating codes and models replace production as the organizing principle of society.4

What happens is to according to Baudrillard, the connection between images and simulations and reality’ implodes’ (explodes inward) and as this happens, our sense of the real disappears.5

Models replace real. We see the phenomena, in lifestyle magazines, and fashion shows, where the imitation of models become more important than the reality they imitate.  Baudrillard suggest that the mass media symbolize a new era in which the old forms of production and consumption have given way to a new universe of communication.6

Consider any fashion campaign.  It is simply a succession of surface images for the viewers to experience. It is a collage of fragmented images and each image spawns more, each image is a simulacrum- a perfect copy that has no original. Initially, fashion campaign attempts to reach the greatest audience possible trough the use of the Internet, on-line services, magazines and billboards. Media allows us to watch fashion shows across the world, and have access to more information than ever before. Media has also transformed the fashion essence. The world, it is argued increasingly consist of media screens and popular cultural images-TVs, Videos, adverts and shopping malls, -which are part and parcel of the trends towards postmodern popular culture.

During this period, media culture became a particularly potent source of cultural fashions, providing models for appearance, behavior and style.

Fashion world have always held fascinating thirst for celebrity and models, as result of television and magazines they have now become dominant theme and accessory as such. Followers, once attracted spend millions on fashion items and imaginary life style. Pict 6

Film, TV and Hollywood itself also acted and still plays important role as a showcases for chic and fashionable clothes. Fashion became fasten

between the cinema and big business, and it has been suggested that Hollywood movies contributed in a mayor way to the ‘consumerism that developed in America, ‘A virulent form of movie mania’ 7 was exploited to sell clothes such as Joan Crawford suits, or more recent movie Prêt a Porter (1994) which emphasize style, spectacle and images at the expense of content, character, substance and social comment. Pict 7  TV episodes of Sex ad the City, where Sarah Jessica Parker worn flower brooch on jacket has style influenced many fashion followers as well as street retailers for a whole year. Repetition of Victorian jacket and flower ornament, refers to another cultural reference, and is taken for granted that consumers have the knowledge to recognize this. Intertextuality and visual appeal of series was as crucial to the series as the designer clothes worn by its stars, and the imaginative day and night images of New York. The visual pleasures derived from the style and ‘look’-locations, settings, people, shoes, were a crucial motivation in the making and appreciation of the series and as such blurring of distinctions of High and popular culture (Hermes Kelly bag, designer Manolo Blahnik shoes but a small apartment in Down-town New York.) pict 8

Television has been particularly influential in popularizing retro-chic’ period clothes from the recent past.pict 9 Dramatization of novels, documentaries and plays popularized every recent mode from the twenties to the hippies fashions of a couple decade earlier as a ‘period’ style.

This obsession with pastiche, this ‘nostalgia mode is related to the way in which the dictatorship of Haute couture broke down in the 1960’ and 1970’s.

A single style can no longer dominate in the post-modern period. Instead there is constant attempt to recreate atmospheres. Pastiche is the re-imaging of the signifier; it may be thought of as parody without the periodic dimension. If nothing can be completely original, then it becomes natural to make new versions of old styles. 8

The traditional way of creating fashion is often described as a trickle down process. Fashion houses create haute couture, expensive, unique creations, a new way for what a fashion should look like; these creations are then subsequently imitated and mass-produced. Pict 10,and it continue to exist trough   fashion magazines, magazine have also influenced trickle up process, process in which fashion originate from people ‘ everyday lives’ and from there is picked up by fashion industry, in this instance using media as a tool Moschino destroys the myth that fashion must be original and serialized, it is up front and in your face.pict 11

  After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electronic technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. 

Marshal Mcluhan “Understanding media” 1966 9

 

Mass media is a powerful factor, which influences our beliefs, attitudes, and the values we have of ourselves and others as well as the word surrounding us. Media does not merely communicate and reflect reality in a more or less truthful way. Instead, media production entails a complex process of negotiation, processing, and reconstruction similar process to this in fashion. It not only offers us something to see, but also shapes the way in which we see by creating shared perceptual modes. Media messages are used and interpreted by audiences according to their own cultural, social, and individual circumstances, which as such affect contemporary fashion today.

Post modernism, whatever form its intellectualizing might take, has been fundamentally anticipated in the metropolitan cultures of the last twenty years; among the electronic signifiers of cinema, radio, television and video, in fashion and youth styles, in all those sounds, images and diverse histories that are daily mixed, recycled and’scratched’together on that giant screen which is contemporary city.10

That the cascade of mass media communications technologies introduced over the course of the 20th century has had far-reaching effects in shaping our social worlds and personal identities is an indisputable fact,

but Postmodern media it is more concerned with the cultural representations of the fashion than any qualities or impact fashion may have in the outside world, a trend in keeping with supposed collapse of ‘reality into popular culture. The stylish look of media images, their clever quotations from popular culture and art, their concerned with the surfaces of things, their self-conscious revelation of the nature as media constructions, and their blatant recycling of the past, are all said to be indicative of the emergence of postmodernism today.

All styles are now self-caricatures. It is no longer possible unreflectively to be the perfectly dressed person whose dress never calls attention to itself; we have all become so sophisticated about performance that recognize the attempted sleight of hand that aimed to suggest the absence of effort or impression-creation. No longer do any fashion seem normal or ‘natural’

In postmodern worldview, there is no such thing as an essential “me”, no centering identity no inborn character. There are only roles, images we take up in imitation of other images, nevertheless contemporary fashion today.

Baudrillard speaks once more: “caution: Object in this mirror may be closer than they appear.11

 

Notes

1.     Elliot, T.S. Whispers of Immortality-Poem (New York: A.A Knopf 1920)

2.     Harvey, D. The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) pp234-348

3.     Baudrillard, J.  Simmulations(New York:semiotix (e) 1983) p 2

4.     Best, S. and Kellner D. Postmodern theory: Critical Interrogation (New York 1991- Guilford Press) page 118

5.     Baudrillard, J. The Mirror of Production (St. Louis: Telos Press 1975) page 33

6.     Ibid. page 27

7.     Eckert, C.The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window’ (Quarterly Review of Film studies 1978)

8.     Berger, A.A.The Postmodern Presence, Readings by Kratz C and Reimer, B. (Sage Publication, London 1998) page 201

9.     McLuhan, M. Understanding Media: The Extension of man (New York 1966) p 62

10.                        Harvey D.The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) 60-61

11.                        Baudrillard, J. America (New York, Verso 1989)

 

Bibliography

Curran, J. and Gurevitch, M: theoretical the Study of the media approaches (Culture, society and the media London, Methuen 1982)

Denzin, N. Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary cinema(London, Sage 1991)

Featherstone, M. In pursuit of postmodern (London, Sage 1988)

Fiske, J. Television Culture, (London and New York, Methuen 1987)

Lyotard, J-F. The postmodern Condition, (Manchester, Manchester University Press 1984)

Collins, J Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Postmodernism (New York and London, Routledge 1989) 

 

Photographic credits

Moschino(London -Thames and Hudson Ltd 1997)

Vivienne Westwood (London, Carlton Books LIMITED 1999)

POP magazine September 2001

ID magazine October 2001

Various popular culture, celebrity magazines

 

Web pages researched

www.hollywood.viritualave.net

www.pathfinder.com/planethollywood

http://www.interscience.com

 

 

 

 

Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com