Radical Chic Redux

by

Danielle Scully

 

Fashion designer, Junya Watanabe sent models down the catwalk in Paris dressed in military garb, (camouflage and army green,) mixed with punk-inspired bondage clothing. An abundance of rips, tears, and shreds gives the outfits an aura of having been worn at a torture scene or a war site. The materials appear to have been cremated from head to toe.  Dresses, pants, jackets, sweaters, shirts, worn with studded boots and shimmering gold socks that simulate sand, are all dominated by haunting, zombie-like, blackened faces.  The masks themselves made of PVC are wrapped around the head, cut haphazardly, and adorned with chains, safety pins, metal rings, and hair braids, all of which damage, constrict, and obscure the face.  The rings might suggest the ease with which the wearer can be, is about to be, or already has been tied down and performed upon in some manner. 

    Sometimes, an occasional eye or nose pokes out, sometimes the face is entirely obscured with the model’s hair, but the effacement is always sordid. The sadomasochistic appearance of the mask emphasizes the submissiveness of the wearer, forced or otherwise. Hands, obscured by the over-long arms of sweaters, give the impression of amputation. There is little evidence of flesh. It is glimpsed only slightly through a tear, or through thinly woven and translucent sweaters. The mask takes on the look of a gas mask, a form of protection, behind which each wearer is eradicated through the ferocity of the overall construction and design; one which delights in accentuating a beaten down and passive body.  This is not the look of the military in action; it’s more like the passivity embraced by the tortured and dead ghosts of warfare.  The walking dead: the models embody no body.

    If we disregard the extremity of the masks in the collection, any anti-war political statement made through the overbearing army symbolism is obscured by the appropriation of dissent overlaid onto the high-price peg. The designer tosses politics into the usually frivolous world of the catwalk fashion show. But when we consider the recent popular comeback of the military look worn by people on the street in recent years, the same appropriation of vestiary sloganeering is in effect. The outfits confound a reading of the purely military, pure bondage, purely sadomasochism.  They are chopped up and transformed through collage, reference and citation, into a patchwork aesthetic. Unless a soldier is wearing camouflage or army green, the look is appropriated, short-circuiting the need to see only military insignia adopted as a hip, ‘bourgeois’ fashion trend.

     Watanabe’s designs derange any particular message through their reconstructive style, and that is their strength. Known for making provocations in the world of fashion, from “techno couture” to “surgical chic”, his latest designs continue along this trajectory. Beyond the notion of the fashion fad, and bearing in mind the violence implicit in these designs, why make models look like torture victims? Further, what does it mean to do so, and what would it mean to wear this look? Watanabe has turned a season’s collection into a freak show, but to what effect? The unmarketability of the masks themselves points to the theatrical nature of the fashion show. The collection further emphasizes how fashion exists more powerfully as photographs — as images, caught between desire and attire, circulating in newspapers, magazines, and over the Internet, and within the same cultural dominance of the media and its complementing cameras.
 
    On the runway, an appropriation of political dissent must mean something in the larger socio-political consciousness and one has to assume it is being used precisely for that purpose. The fashion show, and by extension fashion itself, is effected by bringing the larger realm of politics into it. The end result is that an explicit political reading that fashion usually tries to distance itself from, is already complicating the aesthetic. The aesthetic becomes subjugated by the political discourse and the political discourse is impacted by fashion’s use. This process occurs through the other forms and channels that are available to the fashion show, and for which the show is ultimately staged: shot by photographers and circulated as images, rather than fashions being sold and worn as clothes. The context in both these situations is wide, diverse, and expansive — neither contained nor local — and covers the entire public domain. The “site” for fashion, then, is definitively and always beyond the realm of the runway show. This brings high fashion into a discourse, from which, until recent years, it has been excluded. It is a site where all the differing contexts co-exist, in effect infusing the design with their meanings.
 
    Once these looks are photographed and disseminated throughout the media, the fashions are thrown once again into an entirely different context, one that inscribes these images in a way that is separate from the theater of the runway and revolves around the way images are received in an image-based society. The media and its mass of images have turned culture into a performance-based one. Cameras are everywhere and they change the way people behave. Susan Sontag, writing about the Abu Ghraib tortures, shows how pictures of torture are linked to the dominance of cameras and images in society. Fashion photographs belong to that same image landscape — one that does not distinguish between images. Simulated and performative activities, acted out for the camera become unsubstantiated from the real thing. Fashion photographs belong to a mass of imagery that produces desire and changes human behavior because any one image can no longer be distinguished as “real.”

    Watanabe’s designs become as real or unreal as any other image disseminated through the media. As such, the radical nature of the dress is normalized. And because of the specific look of these designs, assimilation into the norm through the media makes them acceptable to a mass audience. Or, at least, and as Sontag points out in the context of images of torture and violence, the violence of their look is flattened out and drained of its potentially threatening quality. The images sanitize and normalize the dissent and look of opposition, or of the victim, dead or tortured.
 
    Seen through this image landscape, Watanabe’s designs may be normalized through it, but they also seem to comment on it because of their apparent political radicality. The outfits can be seen as critiquing the very apparatus of fashion and the photographic world as they simultaneously form a part of it and create it.