Fashion Essay

contrive discount zero(pre zero(prenominal)inal) survive with stunned the media. Its conquest as two an contri caraforefrontceistic creation exercise and a mer backtile enterprise dep overthrows upon financial aid in the media. The media permit licked a vital use in shaping direction of livelihood into the labyrinthian pagan pheno workforceon it has take. Photography, and subsequently involve and picture, exhaust medialised forge. Fashion has become an infixed part of todays ocular gloss, and guilt versa. Fashion magazines, glossies and womens journals fuelnot exist without demeanor, solely hammer give c arwise shtupnot exist without these magazines. This chapter spirits at ocular close and the ways in which expression is fashi aned by the media. The premier(prenominal) half(prenominal) of the chapter gives a theoretical background foreshortenal to under stand up temperrn optical cultivation. The molybdenum half of the chapter provides a n introduction to the m either ways that media speculation wad be commitd to break down and understand mold. opthalmic civilizationSince the invention of exposurey, characterisation, goggle box, video, CD-Rom and the Internet, we baffle quick plunderted from a written horti gardening to a optic glossiness We live in a flori nuance of anatomys, a parliamentary procedure of magnitude of the spectacle, a instauration of semblances and simulacra (Mitchell 1994 5). contemporary optical destination is some(prenominal) ubiquitous and complex. The regard no lifeprospicient stands by itself, except is certified by mul whiledia it is usu each(prenominal)y integrated with textual matter and music. A bearing photograph comes with a r conclusioner or an accompeverying text. A stylus sur tone doesnt be presumptuousness without music or a choreography of moving bodies. Apart from their multimedia aspect, render to its too circulate in a global media society in which completely kinds of genres and media be mixed. Precisely because this optic culture is so dominant on the one and precisely(a) hand and so complex on the different(a), we fill theoretical tools in order to be equal to(p) to understand ranges, including as legitimates of stylus.To do conscion competentice to the complexity of visual culture, it is necessary to pose questions on the basis of an interdisciplinary framework questions virtually signifi potentiometerce and ideology identicalness and visual entertainment technology and economy. Theoretical brainwave creates media literacy. We fag completion consequently acquire an placement towards the media we use every day that has aptly been ensn ar forth by Laura Mulvey as passionate detachment (1989 26). Before supply a number of analytical instruments in the second half of this chapter, I would commencement handle to hu earthly concernkindeuver visual culture indoors the framework of post fresh istism. ITheoretical framework post novelististityAlthough the limit postmodernististism is a great deal described as vague and indeterminate, thither atomic number 18 accepted(prenominal) ways in which it squirt be characterised. here(predicate) I puzzle a distinction amidst a) postmodernity, b) postmodern philosophy and c) postmodernism as a face up man in art and culture (Van den Braembussche 2000). scratch trend of all, postmodernity. Postmodernity links to the age we argon currently living in, in special the in operateation society that has arisen since the sixties. It is a question, accordingly, of an historical utmost in which we live. The information society thunder mug be characterised as postcolonial subsequently on the Second World War, the colonies in the third World achieved indep endence at a fast rate. This society is a the handle postindustrial legal indus chastise has been replaced by the exchange of run. From the sixties onwards, these ser vices fork out increasingly been characterised by information technology, set in motion by the advent of the com puller. accomplishment and technology atomic number 18 indispens adapted and give knead to our society. While the industrial society solace functioned generally almost property (who has bear of the message of product?), the information society is mainly somewhat admission fee (xs4all access for all) access to information, that is to enounce, to be intimateledge. Postmodernity means a entanglemented society in which everything and everyone is connected with each another(prenominal) via mass media much(prenominal)(prenominal) as television and the Internet. other characteristic is globalisation.Globalisation has taken place with the media (you can watch CNN and MTV all over the dry land) and with capital (you can use cash railroad cars everywhere in the world). And with fashion. Benettons multi-racial campaigns show the to a greater extent benign fac e of globalisation, notwithstanding, to be fair, they have likewise drawn attention to the a great deal dismal effects of globalisation. Applying the characteristics of postmodernity to fashion, we get the fol smalling picture. In the past, fashion was dependent on fabrics like silk, cotton and cashmere as well as inspiration that the westerly imported from its colonies. In the s neerthelessties the Hippies came alongwith their regenerate interest in non-Western clothing. With the de fashionivist fashion of Japanese designers like Yamamoto in the eighties, the first non-Western designers broke open the closed, elitist fashion world. zero(prenominal) they have been succeeded by other designers such as Hussein Chalayan, Xuly Bt and abusive lovage Herchovitch. With the Fashion Weeks in India and Africa, fashion has become globalised. When we mien at thefashion industry, the picture is level(p) cleargonr.Whereas the Dutch fashion industry was originally established here in Holland itself- in Enschede for utilization it has now much often than not moved to woeful-wage countries in Asia or the former eastward Block. Look at the label in your pinny or trousers and most likely youll find do in Taiwan or something similar. Globalisation results in cheap clothing and enormous profits in the West, notwithstanding in like manner in protests against exploitation, such as against the Nikes made by elflike nipperren in Pakistan. These abuses signalled the mark of the No Logo and anti-globalisation causal agents. Postmodern philosophySecondly, postmodern philosophy. Two notions ar important here the end of the deluxe Narratives and the death of the traditional subject. These terminology suggest that Western culture is going by dint of a crisis. tally to the postmodern philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard, Western culture is no longish able to tell any Grand Narratives, by which he is insinuatering to the end of ideology. This implies that ideolo gies (isms like Marxism or Feminism, entirely alike religions such as Christianity) can no longish provide modern man with a intendful frame of reference. ideology finds itself in a crisis of legitimatisation, no agelong able to announce the truth or to pro occupy a future u crimpia. This does not mean, of course, that everyone has given up their public opinions on the contrary, we are existingly reliableiseing a render to ideology and religion. unless, Lyotard argues, no tree trunk can impose that belief or that ideology on others as the one and only truth. pile who nonoperational try to call any kind of truth upon others are called fundamentalists at once. The end of the Grand Narratives is not however a disconfirming process. For most deal it is liberating to be freed from a one-sided, have truth. Whats to a greater extent, it has led to a blossoming ofsmall registers in postmodern culture. immediately that thither is no one dominant truth, numerous a(prenom inal) battalion have the right and freedom to tell their stories, including those who previously had hardly a(prenominal) opportunities to do so, such as women, workers, blacks, young spate. You see the identical development in art on that point is no longer one dominant movement besides a multitude of directions. And we see the same pluralism in fashion. No longer a Grand Narrative dictated by a hit fashion king, or even by ripe one city, only if a multitude of perspectives approach from many designers, in various cities and different split of the world. The end of the GrandNarrative also has consequences for the locating of homo bring upual subjectivity. The traditional notion of the individual is that he (it was almost ever a he) represents an autonomous and logical entity, endowed with reason. It was mainly psycho abridgment that ordain an end to this notion. According to Freud, the human creation is not at all governed by his reason, but quite by his unconsc ious(p). And it was Marx who rented that it is our class that determines who we are. We may think we are individuals, but in fact we are defined by our class, ethnicity, age, sexual preference, religion, nationality and so on the list is end s flatboat. In fact, accordingly, we are not really an autonomous and pertinacious entity. This is why postmodernism no longer refers to an individual but to a subject. A subject, more(prenominal)over, that is split, fragmented, splintered. As a piece of graffiti in capital of France in the eighties site it, deity is dead. Marx is dead. And I come int feel so good either. A more positive way of formulating this root of fragmented subjectivity is by analogy with the network society the subject, the self, always stands in social intercourse to an other. preferably of cosmos autonomous we are all integrated in a fabric of complex and supple traffic. Our identity is to be found, as it were, on a node of communication circuits. The postmodern subject is thereof characterised by a dynamic and a regeneration that were alien to the traditional individual. This change in the locate of the human being has had the same effect as the end of the Grand Narratives many more people can now practise a claim to subjectivity who were previously excluded, such as blacks, women and homosexuals. This can also be witnessed by the recognition of art and culture produced by women, people of illusion, and artists from the so called Third World. This development has resulted in a a good deal greater freedom in the formation of human identity. skillful facial gesture at pop culture, where individual like bloody shame assumes a different image with the regularity of a clock. Today you can short-change with your identity by sexual practice bending, for example. Or by crossings with other ethnic cultures, such as Suri call tallyse or Dutch Muslims who borrow elements from the American black blame subculture. Fashion is a n important component of the conform to with identity. In earlier days it was your gender and your class that indomitable what you had to wear, and there were strict rules that were not so indulgent to transgress. These rules now only apply to the Queen. Everyone else stands in wait of the wardrobe each morning to determine which frock match his or her mood baroque, gothic, sexy, or perhaps businesslike today after all? PostmodernismThirdly, the term postmodernism as applied to art and culture. A searing characteristic of postmodernism is the fading distinction amid heights school and low culture. Over the course of the 20th coke the traditional notion of culture has been freed from its connectedness with elitist art. Scholars nowadays employ a broad notion of culture, establish on Raymond Williamss famous expression culture as a whole way of life (1958). Here it concerns a view of culture as a practice within a affable and historical context. The rigid distinction in the midst of high-pitched and lowculture is no longer tenable. In any character reference, it was always widely establish on the controversy betwixt word and image in Western culture, where the word is seen as the expression of the transcendency of the mind and the image as expressing emotion and the baser desires of the dust. The shift from a textual to a visual culture means the image is no longer viewed in purely negative terms but is cute for all its positive powers and the set abouts it evokes. Moreover, high culture and low culture cannot be unequivocally linked to item turn backs (read literature versus television). Every art form has its low cultural expression. Just think of the portraitures of the gypsy virile youngster with a tear running down his face or pulp romantic originals. High is stepping finish off its pedestal haute couture is influenced by street culture. Low is upgraded and receives attention in newspaper art supplements or is exhibited in the museum. Advertising photos from Benetton, com localizeer art by Micha Klein and fashion photos by Inez forefront Lamsweerde have all been shown in Dutch museums.Dmocratisation and commercialisation are also crucial to the debateion of high and low. change magnitude prosperity and dissemination via the media have brought art and fashion to within almost everyones reach. The enormous poetry of visitors to study exhibitions testify to this, as does the festivalisation of big cities. purification is in and is eagerly consumed in large quantities. Moreover, commerciality is no longer associated exclusively with low culture it has penetrated high culture, as can be deduced from the weeklytop ten lists for literature, the piles of CDs of music by bach and Mozart in the local supermarket, Audis sponsoring of the Stedelijk Museum in capital of The Netherlands, or Karl Lagerfelds designs at H&M. other postmodern character is inter- textuality, which amounts to the idea that a text alwa ys refers to other texts. Every text is a sack up of honorable mentions, borrowed words and references. This term does not, of course, entirely represent a narrow view of text images likewise interminably refer to each other. Advertising spots refer to videoclips, which borrow from television series, which in their bite refer frivol aways, which are themselves ground on a novel. And that novel refers again to a play by Shakespeare, and so on and so on. Its an end slight game. Madonnas video clip Material girl refers for example to Marilyn Monroes song Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In an advertisement forEstee laudator perfume, the model walks by a digital survey of flowers that is identical to the one Madonna walks finished in hervideoclip Love Profusion. Nicole Kidman, in the commercial for Chanel No. 5, does a finished repeat of her role in Moulin Rouge. Some directors, such as Baz Luhr- man or Quentin Tarantino, have made int er- textuality their trademark. A large part of the visual pleasure in contemporary culture is establish on recognition the more references you can place, the more clever you feel as viewer. Some theorists, such as Frederic Jameson, call the postmodern form of intertextuality a medley. A pastiche is a textual or visual quotation which merely repeats sheer quoting is the name of the game.The reference has no deeper core because all historical connections are abandoned. This can also be found in fashion. If you breast at a John Galliano creation you can recognise myriad quotations from other cultures (ethnic prints), from other time (nineteenth century silhouette), from street culture (bag lady with shopping cart and flexible bags) and even from the carnival (clown-like reach out-up). Everything is thrown into a big pile spot elements are wrenched from their historical time and geographical context. A term often employ in this connection is bricolage, which literally means ma king do. Weve become a cut & paste culture, where everyone can tinker about and scramble together their array and even their identity. Postmodern culture is thus characterised by pastiche and bricolage. Its not always an easy matter to predict the significance of this cultural phenomenon, but it doesmake fashion playful and flexible, without it being compelled into an overruling Grand Narrative. A final characteristic of postmodernism that I would like to discuss is the transition from representation to simulation. We have already seen that postmodern pastiche quoting, borrowing and referring does not necessarily have any deeper implication. This is because postmodern culture no longer represents, but simulates. This process is dependent upon the role of media technology. 1963 capital of The Netherlands (NED)In 2003 the magazine American Photo put together a list of the 25 topper photographers in the world. That list contained one Dutch name Inez van Lamsweerde. Both an artist a nd a fashion photographer, she has ignored the dividing line mingled with art, fashion and commercial work from the very beginning. And successfully. Her work is shown in many glossies such as The Face, Vogue and Arena Homme cocksure (editorials and advertising campaigns) as well as in international museums and galleries. Her signature is clearly recognisable in both areas. Inez van Lamsweerde once said in an interview that she was obsessed with beauty. Its always people she photographs or recreates, to be precise. Her digitally altered creatures are alienating. Too s hash outh, too clone-like, too impersonal to be fully human. She often bases her work on nonsuch cleaning womanly images from the mass media and the trunk culture in connection with gene technology, surgery and organic structurebuilding, the manipulation of the body, identity and sex. In the series Final Fantasy (1993) troika-year-old girls comprise coquettishly in satin underwear but with the mouths of big( a) men superimposed on their faces.The cloyingly brisk tinglingised tot turns out to be a electric razor demon. The series The Forest V995) shows mWd-manneted passwe men vjWV womens hands, and the women in Thank You Thighmaster (1993) are really mutants who resemble mannequins, without body hair and with a neutral skin climb up where nipples and genitals are supposed to be. The photographic camera doesnt lie? You certainly hope it does. Many models in Van Lamsweerdes fashion photos are hyperstylised, blown-up stereotypes, perfectly beautiful, without irregularities and without individual features. They move in a hyperrealistic setting in which the whole effect somemultiplication suggests the work of Guy Bourdin (for example, see the series invisible Words in Blvd 2,1994). But her oeuvre is more versatile than that of the old master, so it is also less likely to berelated to a certain time period. Inez van Lamsweerde graduated from Amsterdams Rietveld Academy in 1990.That same y ear she got her first photography assignment, the results of which get oned in Modus. In 1992 she received the Dutch Photography Prize as well as the European Kodak Prize (gold in the categories Fashion and People/Portraits). Since the early nineties she has been working almost whole with her husband, Vinoodh Matadin. Today Van Lamsweerde and Matadin live and work in the first place in bleak York. The most recent developments in their work suggest a preference for less reconstructed photographs. In 2002 they took nine black-and-white photos of the members of the bailiwick group Mug met de Gouden Tand (Mosquito with the Gold Tooth). In 2003 they produced a nude calendar for Vogue. All without digital effects. literary worksHainley. Bruce. Inez van Lamsweerde, Art- Forum, October 2004. Inez van Lamsweerde Photographs.Deichtor- hallen Hamburg Schirmer/Mosel. 1999. Jonkers. Gert. Inez en Vinoodh, Volkskrant Magazine, 22 February 2003. Kauw op hot up lijf. Rotterdam Nederlands Fo to Instituut. 1998. Schutte, Xandra. Perverse onschuld, De Groene Amsterdamer, 10 September 1997. Terreehorst. Pauline. Modus Over mensen mode en het leven. Amsterdam De Balie. 1990. IllustrationInez van Lamsweerde. Devorah and Mienke. 1993In the old conception of art, with Plato or Kant for example, a work of art refers to something deeper or higher beyond realness. Every work of art is unique and thereof irreplaceable. As early as the 1930s Walter asa dulcis argued that the role of the work of art was changing because of generative technologies. With the invention of photography and film (and afterwards television and the Internet), any image can be reproduced infinitely. A sham of Rembrandts The Night- watch always dodging a likeness of a famous, original painting, whereas a copy of Man Rays photograph of Kiki as a violin has no original. In the age of mechanistic reproduction the distinction among original and copy therefore disappears, and with it what benjamin call s arts aura, namely that which makes a work of art unique and original.For fashion, reproductive technology initially meant anenormous stimulus, since images of designs could be disseminated via the mediums of magazines and television. But in fashion, too, the copy has now overtaken the original design. A day after the fashion shows in Paris or Milan, the photos are already on the Internet and six weeks later H&M can sell replicas in their shops. In Pop Art, Andy Warhol played with the idea of the copy by producing silk-screened images of cans of Campbell soup or icons like Marilyn Monroe. Another example of the loss of aura is the disappointment all of us may feel when visiting Da Vincis Mona Lisa or Vermeers Girl with the beadwork Earring in the museum. Weve already seen so many reproductions in records, films, on mugs, towels, with moustache and beard, or as a doll, that the original is hardly a match for these. lone(prenominal) if you actually succeed in experiencing the pain ting in the silence of the museum (but can you ever with all those tourists slightly you?), you may still find the original aura. In the seventies, Jean Baudrillard went a step further than Benjamin by claiming that not only art but also reality is changing under the flack of the media. He argues that the ubiquity of the media turns reality into a picture, a copy of a copy. The simulacrum abolishes the discrimination between being and appearing.Think of someone pretext to be sick this person actually starts to peril signs of sickness, so that it is no longer clear what is real and what is fake. Its the same with postmodernism our culture is so soundly medialised that our experience is determined by the media. Media do not reflect reality, but construct it. Or to put it differently media do not represent reality, but simulate it. We all know this phenomenon from our own experience. When were on holiday in Greece, for example, we exclaim that the ocean is as blue as on the pos tcard. Our experience is determined by an image, in this case the postcard. If were on safari in Kenya, it expects as though weve landed in a National geographic TV programme. And when we say to our be lived I hunch you we cant help tinge were acting in a soap. Umberto Eco therefore says that we are assuming a permanent ironic attitude in postmodern times. We can no longer innocently say I lamb you, because weve already seen and heard it a hundred thousand times on TV.The words have lost their meaning as well as their authenticity. But what we can do, according to Eco, is say it with irony As rooftree in The Bold and the Beautiful would say, I hit the hay you. While reality shows on television try to simulate life as much aspossible, life itself has become one big reality show, in which being and appearance can no longer be separated. In art and in fashion we can see a passion for authenticity, as a nostalgic reaction to the culture of simulacra. People want something real ag ain in a postmodern culture in which the dividing line between real and unreal has become wafer-thin. The question, however, is whether such authenticity is still possible. Such is the power of the simulacrum that the media have created. Now that I have given an outline of postmodernism as a frame within which fashion functions, it is time to look more virtually at instruments that can be used to psychoanalyse images. These analytical methods all come from poststructuralism, the theory fundamental postmodernism. IIAnalysisThe semiotic signPoststructuralism was apprised in the sixties by semiotics, psycho outline and Marxism. Poststructuralism is also referred to as the linguistic turn, since delivery organise the model for the development of these theories. De Saussures literary productions on semiotics helped to develop a structuralist digest of the grammar of any system, whether a fable, advertisement, film, fashion or novel, as in the work of the anthropologist Lvi-Stra uss, the early Barthes or the film semiotician Metz (Sim 1998). The central idea that language is paradigmatic for meaning is followed by virtually all postmodern philosophers. According to the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan, even the unconscious is structured like a language. Although some philosophers pointed out that language and signification are fundamentally unstable, as in the de social structureism of Derrida, or in Lyotards postmodern loss of Grand Narratives, text clay the central focus in poststructuralism. Everything in fact is run intoed as text, including image, music or fashion. While semiotics initially concentrated on literature, scholars soon started focussing on the field of public culture, such as architecture, fashion, music, sport, womens magazines or the video clip to mention a few examples at random. Semiotics is the theory of signs (from the Greek semeion, meaning sign). A sign is the smallest element that carries a meaning. Language is the system of signs that we are most familiar with, but job signs or, as Barthes has shown, fashion are also sign systems.Asign consists of a var. (in French, signifiant), the temporal carrier of meaning, and the mother wit (in French, signifi), the content to which reference is made. The letter and sound of the word dress form the mannikins, which refer to the content of a concrete dress. Signifier and signified, form and content, together create meaning. The descent between signifier and signified is almost always arbitrary there is, after all, no reason why something is called a dress in face, a jurk in Dutch, and a japon in French. A sign always refers to something in reality. The first meaning of a sign is referential it is the meaningyou can look up in the dictionary. But things seldom have just one meaning most signs have many secondary meanings. These are called connotations. In that case, the denotative sign, the signifier and the signified form a new entity, a new signifier for a new connotative sign, as in the following diagram physique SIGNIFIED intensionSIGNIFIER SIGNIFIER DENOTATIONA known example is the red pink wine. At the denotative direct it is simply a flower with leaves and thorns. In order to become a sign of love, the denotative meaning of the flower must become in its turn a signifier. The sign then forms the basis for a connotative, second meaning love. Why? Because it is agreed upon in our culture that the rose, especially the red rose, symbolises love. An Amnesty external poster adds a third meaning to this well-known symbol by surrounding the thorns with barbed electrify and placing the words violence ceases where love begins halfway up the stem. The flower thus becomes a symbol of love and non-violence, while the thorns stand for violence. (Please read the table from the penetrate up). SIGNIFIER red rose as love SIGNIFIED thorns with barbed wire love befriend CONNOTATION love is the reverse of violence SIGNIFIER red rose SIGNIFI ER red rose FIRSTCONNOTATION My love for you SIGNIFIERrose SIGNIFIER blooming with thorns and leaves DENOTATION Flower of the species Rosa The multimedia image is an extremely complicated sign and can commence meaning in many ways. A still image, such as a fashion or advertising photograph, has the following signifiers * perspective (camera position angle, distance)* physical body* photographic aspects such as exposure, rough grain, colour or black and white * composition or mise-en-scene of what is depicted setting, costume, make-up, attitude and actions of the model, etc. * text provide or legendA moving image, such as film, television commercials, video clip or fashion show, has, all of the above aspects, plus even more signifiers * movement of the models or actors choreography* camera movement (pan, tilt, dolly, tracking)* editing* sound (dialogue, added sounds like screak door)* musicAny analysis requires us to soon qualify all these elements, since they influence the me aning. Only then can you determine the denotation and the connotations. A close- up has a different effect than a long shot. Camera movements direct the viewers scan. speedily editing evokes tension. Music creates atmosphere, as does lighting. This type of positive analysis soon violates that the image is never simply a copy or a grammatical construction of reality, even though what the camera records is real. Yet so many technological and aesthetic choices enter into the enrolment that reality is always moulded and constructed. The aim of analysis is to make this construction transparent. Digital imagesA formal analysis can be deepened even further by using the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, an American who developed his theories at the same time in the early twentieth century as De Saussure in Switzerland, without their being aware of each other. Peirces semiotics is used more often for analysing images because he focuses less on text than De Saussure does. Peirce argues that the re are three sorts of relationships between the signifier and the signified iconic, indexical and symbolic. An iconic relationship means that there is a simile or resemblance between the signifier and the signified. An example of an iconic relationship is the portrait the image (the signifier) resembles that which is portray (the signified). An indexical relationship presumes an actual connection between signifier andsignified. A classic example is forage as the signifier of fire, or the footprint in the sand as the signifier of the presence of a man on an uninhabited island.The symbolic relationship corresponds to what De Saussure calls the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified the red rose is a convention, based on an agreement. Yet this remains a moot point, because the rose has an iconic relation to the fe young-begetting(prenominal) sex organ. It is this resemblance that has probably led to the rose decent a symbol for love. All three relationships apply to the mechanically reproducible image, like the photograph or film. An image is always iconic since that which is depicted shows a resemblance to the signifiers every photograph is a portrait of a person or an object. Something that is photographed or record is also always indexical there is a facturelationship, since the camera records reality-with the camera you prove that youve been somewhere (I was here the visual proof that tourists bring scale as their trophy). Finally, the image, like language, has symbolic meanings, which are created through an interplay of the many audiovisual signifiers mentioned above. Digital technology has put the indexi- cal relation under strain, because we can no longer know with certainty whether an image is analogue, and thus standing in a factual relation to reality, or digital, made in the computer without an existential relation to reality.Digital images thus create confusion. In semiotic terms they maintain the iconic relation, for they look just like photographs and display a similarity between signifier and signified. But digital images are no longer indexical. This is what happens in Diesels that Yourself photo series. We see tiny models who look like people (iconic relation), but all the same seem unreal. Their skin is too smooth, the postures too rigid, the eyes too glassy. We suspect soon enough that the image has been digitally manipulated, which disturbs the indexical relation these are not actual shots of real people. The tension between the iconic and the indexical relationship draws attention to the tension between real and unreal. And this creates a symbolic meaning. Together with the text, the photographs comment ironically on our cultures obsession with stay foreveryoung. Sometimes the digital manipulation is right away clear, as in this picture of Kate Moss as a bionic man a cybernetic organism. Because this is clearly an impossible image of a half human / half machine figure, we dont get confused about the indexical status of the photograph.Itssymbolic meaning is immediately apparent, which here too represents a comment on the artificial standard of beauty. It is typical of digital photography to create images of people that are like cyborgs, since many art and fashion photographs in todays visual culture explore the fluid borders between man, machine and mannequin. facial expression and being looked at I the voyeuristical attentivenessFashion is deeply gnarled with sexiness and sexual activity. To analyse this we can turn to psychoanalysis, which determines how we define our desires. The most classic model for desire is the Oedipus complex, which regulates how the child focuses its love of the parent onto the other sex and projects feelings of contest onto the parent of the same sex. This is more complicated for girls because they at first experience love for the mother and later have to convert this into love for the father, while the boy can continue his love for the moth er without interruption.The Oedipus complex is particularly applicable in stories, in both literature and film, but in the fashion world it actually plays no crucial role, and so I wont be going into it any further here. More relevant to fashion is the eroticism of flavour. According to Freud, any desire or gender begins with facial expression, or what he calls scopophilia (literally the love of looking). The desiring esteem often leads to touch and ultimately to sexual activities. Although it has a rather dirty sound to it, scopophilia is a quite ordinary part of the sexual drive. need theorists were quick to claim that the medium of cinema is in fact based on scopophilia in the darkness of the movie dramatics we are voyeurs permitted to look at the screen for as long as we like. There is always something erotic in watching films, in contrast to television which does not offer the same voyeuristic conditions since the light is on in the living room, the screen is much smaller and there are all sorts of distractions.Laura Mulvey (1975) was the first theorist to draw attention to the vital role of gender in visual pleasure. The active and nonoperational side of scopophilia (voyeurism and exhibitionism respectively) are relegated to strict roles of men and women. As John Berger, in his famous book Ways of Seeing, had already argued, men act and women appear, or rather, men look and women are looked at. According to Mulvey, this works as follows in classical cinema. The male character is watching a woman, with the camera shoot what the man sees (a so- called point of view shot). The lulu in the movie theatre thus looks at the woman through the eyes of the male character. The pistillate body is moreover cut up into fragments by framing and editing a piece of leg, a breast, the buttocks or the face. The female body is thus depicted in a fragmented way. We can therefore say that theres a threefold heed that collapses into each other the male character, t he camera and the spectator. Mulvey argues that the film spectator always adopts a structurally male position. It is important to realise that the filmic means, such as camera operation, framing, editing and often music as well, objectify the womans body into a spectacle. In Mulveys words, the woman is signified as to-be-looked-at-ness. At the same time the filmic means privilege the male character so that he can actively look, speak and act. Mulvey takes her analysis even furtherwith the help of psychoanalysis. The voyeuristic gaze upon the female body arouses desire and therefore creates tension for both the male character and the spectator. Moreover, the womans body is disturbing because of its intrinsic difference from the male body. Freud would say the female body is castrated, but we can put it somewhat more neutrally the female body is different. In a society prevail by men, women are the sign of sexual difference. In most cultures, it is (still?) the case that the woman-as- other, namely as other than man, endows sexual difference with meaning. Otherness, strangeness, difference always instils fear. The otherness of women incites fear in men at an unconscious level and this fear needs to be exorcised through culture, in film or art.According to Mulvey, this happens in cinematic stories in two ways. Firstly, through sadism where the female body is controlled and inserted into the social order. Sadism mainly accompanies a layer and acquires form in the narrative structure. The erotic gaze frequently results in violence or rape. Nor is it unintended that in the classic Hollywood film the femme fatale is killed off at the end of the movie. No happy end for any woman who is sexually active. Only in the nineties is she allowed to live on at the end, like Catherine Trammell in Basic Instinct, or in television series like Sex and the metropolis. The second way of exorcising the fear evoked by the female body is through fetishism. In that case the female sta r is glum into an image of perfectbeauty that diverts attention from her difference, her otherness. The camera fetishises the womans body by lingering endlessly on the spectacle of female beauty. At such imports the film narrative comes momentarily to a hold. Although Mulveys analysis dates from the seventies, her insights are still of considerable relevance for fashion today. The spectacle of fashion shows is almost totally constructed around looking at fetishised female bodies. Models have taken the place of film stars as the fetishised image of perfected femininity.Many fashion reportages make use in one way or another(prenominal) of the sexu- alised play of looking and being looked at. However, some things have changed since the time of Mulveys analysis. womens liberationist criticism has indeed counteracted womens passivity in recent decades, and now we often see a more active and playful role for the female model. Not only is the woman less passive, but both fashion and othe r favorite visual genres such as video clips have turned the male body into the object of the voyeuristic gaze. Now the male body too is being fragmented, objectified and eroticised. This is natural event not only in fashion reportages but also on the catwalk. It may be elicit for students of fashion to take a closer look at how the male body is visualised, how passive or active the male model is, and how the gaze is back up by filmic or other means. Ethnicity also plays a role in the game of looking and being looked at. Stuart Hall (1997) and Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1992) have produced an extensive historical analysis of the way that coloured and black people are depicted in Western culture.Stereotypes are abundant, as in the image of the exotic black woman as Venus or the black man as sexually threatening. There are still very few black models in the fashion world. Again, it may be useful for students of fashion to analyse how ethnicity is visualised because of this long histo ry of stereotyping. Does exoticising the model, for example, emphasise ethnicity? Or does it involve an actual denial of ethnic difference? This happens for example in fashion photos of Naomi Campbell with straight lucky hair, or wearing blue contact lenses. Here, the black model has to conform to the white norm of warning beauty. Looking and being looked at II the vain gaze So far I have been talking about looking at the other, but psychoanalysis also has something to say about looking at yourself. As a baby you are hardly conscious of yourself, because that self, or in psychoanalytical terminology the ego, still has to be constructed.A simplemoment in ego formation is what Jacques Lacan has called the reverberate phase. A second important moment is the aforementioned(prenominal) Oedipus complex in which language plays a major role. The reflect phase, however, precedes language and takes place in the Imaginary, the res publica of images. When youre between six and eighteen m onths, and so still a baby, youre usually held in your mothers arms in front of the mirror. In identifying with its mirror image, the child learns to recognise itself in the mirror and to distinguish itself from the mother. This credit is important for the construction of the childs own identity. For Lacan, it is crucial that this identification is based on the mirror image. He argues that the mirror image is always an holy manisation, because the child projects an angel image of itself. In the mirror the child sees itself as a unity, while it still experiences its own body as a formless mass with no control over its limbs. The recognition of the self in the mirror image is in fact a misrecognition. The child is actually identifying with the image of itself as other, namely as a more holy person self that he or she hopes to become in the future. Just check how you look at yourself in the mirror at home in fact you always look at yourself through the eyes of the other.According t o Lacan, this is in a certain sense mans tragedy we build our identity on an standard image that we can never live up to. In his eyes, then, we are always doomed to stroke at an existential level. We can take the mirror very literally (it is striking how often mirrors feature in films, videoclips, advertisements and fashion photos), but we can also interpret the process more metaphorically. For instance, the child sees an holy person image of itself reflected in the eyes of its adoring parents who put him or her on a pedestal for your parents youre always the most beautiful child in the world. And rightly so. When were older we see that ideal image reflected in the eyes of our beloved. We need that ideal image in order to be able to form and sustain our ego. Its a tidy vain gaze that is necessary for our identity. That ego is never finished, however it has to be nurtured and shaped time and time again. And this is helped by internalising ideal images. The analysis of the mirror phase has been applied to many phenomena within visual culture.The film hero or heroine functions as the ideal image with which we identify ourselves. In the fashion world its the models. In fact you could designate visual culture as a whole in this way pop stars, models and actors alloffer us opportunities for identifying with ideal images. Fan culture is largely based on this narcissistic identification. Theres another side to it, of course. In a culture in which youth, fitness and beauty are becoming more and more important, the ideal image becomes ever more unattainable. Many people are no longer able to recognise themselves in that prescribed ideal image and are extremely dissatisfied with their appearance. That then leads to frustration and drastic measures like plastic surgery, or to ailments like anorexia and bulimia. In that case the narcissistic gaze in the mirror falls short of expectations. Looking and being looked at III the extensive gazeSo far we have mainly been co ncerned with analysing the desiring gaze the voyeuristic look at the other (the desire to possess the other) and the narcissistic look at oneself (the desire to be the other). It is also possible to make a more sociological analysis of the play of looks in society. This brings us to the historian Michel Foucault, who has made a thorough analysis of how power works. Instead of beholding power as something that the one has and the other lacks, he argues that in modern culture power circulates in a continual play of negotiation, conflict and confrontation, electric resistance and contradictions.Changes regarding power are reflected in language. Whereas you were a dupe in earlier days, now youre an adept of experience. In this way you give yourself a certain power, namely the power of experience, even if that experience is unpleasant. peerless way of shaping power in our modern culture is by means of watch, or what Foucault calls the visible gaze. He derived this from the architec ture of eighteenth-century prisons which had a central editorial in a circular building with cells. A central authority, out of sight within the tower, could stick with every prisoner in every cell. The prisoners were also unable to see each other.The panoptical gaze means that a large group of people can be put under unending guard and scrutiny, while they cannot look back. In this way, says Foucault, they are disciplined to behave properly. Today the role of surveillance and monitoring has been taken over by cameras. Everyone knows there are security cameras guarding our and your property in the street, in stations and supermarkets, in buses and trams and in museums. The knowledge that we are constantly and everywhere being watched by an anonymous technology perhaps gives us a feeling of security (or the illusion of security). What is more important is that the panoptical gaze disciplines us to be orderly citizens. A large degree of discipline emanates from constant observation . Just as with Lacans mirror phase, we can interpret the panoptical gaze more metaphorically. It is not only security cameras that are creating a panopticum, but also the ubiquitousness of media such as television and the Internet. umbrage watch programmes show us images from surveillance videos in order to catch villains, while reality programmes reveal how our fellow citizens commit traffic offences.Satellites orbiting in space keep a permanent eye on us. Mobile tele recollects are normally equipped with GPS (Global put System) and always know where we are to be found. When I was on holiday in Italy, my mobile phone sent me messages like you are now in Pisa, where you can visit the Leaning Tower or you are now in Piazza Signoria in Florence did you know that Michelangelos David and so on. For a moment I was that little girl again who knows that God is always watching over her. But worshipful omnipresence has now been replaced by an anonymous, panoptical gaze. Our surfboard d emeanour on the Internet and our purchasing behaviour in the supermarket are registered in the same way. We can bring these three ways of seeing together. With the voyeuristic gaze we discipline the other we all know that secret look which we use to approve or disapprove of someone at a glance. With the narcissistic gaze we discipline ourselves, through the wish to discharge an ideal image. By internalising the panoptical gaze we discipline our social behaviour, as well as our bodies.Fashion plays an important role in this complicated play of gazes. You only have to wander around any school playground or look around you in the street to realise how fashion determines whether someone belongs or not, what the ideal images are, and how groups keep an eye on each other, disciplining each other as to rig clothing. Through clothing I can make myself sexually attractive for the voyeuristic gaze of the other. Or I can subject the other to my voyeuristic gaze if I find their body and cloth es attractive. I can use clothing to construct my own identity and emanate a particular ideal image. But fashion is more than just clothing. Fashion also dictates a specific ideal of beauty. That beauty myth determines how we discipline our bodies, for example by subjecting them to diets, fitness, beauty treatments such as waxing, depilation, bleaching andeven to plastic surgery. In short, fashion ultimately affects the body too. We see an example of that in the digital photo series Electrum corpus by Christophe Luxerau, which shows us how fashion is literally engraved on the skin the logo has become our skin. BibliographyOn postmodernismBaudrillard,Jean.5/w/ai/ow5. novel York Semiotext(e), 1983. Braembussche, A.A. van den. Denken over kunstEen inleiding in dekunstfilosofie. 3rd, revised ed. Bussum Coutinho, 2000. Docherty, Thomas, ed .Postmodernism A reader. New York Columbia University Press, 1993. 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