Fashioning The Funnies

the relationship between fashion and comedy

Being ill prepared for the polar vortex of 2012 put me in a very precarious position. It was my first winter in the extreme cold of climate change, and as native Floridian, my only understanding of winter clothing included layering a bunch of (for lack of a better term) decorative sweaters. I had purchased them at thrift stores, and sometimes H&M, cobbling them together in a bulky pastiche of outfits. The colder it got, the more polyester blend pull overs I needed. I stuffed the dark floral pilled sweaters underneath a long vintage fuchsia 80’s coat that featured giant shoulder pads and then topped the whole outfit off with a knitted trapper hat that I had been gifted by a coworker. I looked a mess, a geriatric working girl of a mess. On one particularly frigid day I boarded the N train to Long Island City to find a little boy looking at me, perplexed, laughing and pointing as his father also stifled a laugh. I was a big woman in a big pink coat with small black pom-pom on my head straddling between the styles of an eccentric-homeless-artist woman and confused-cold-stuffed-fat child. He laughed. I smiled, and we went on our separate ways.

Something about my personal style didn’t translate well in the serious coldness of a NYC city winter, and some people found it funny. That little boy was not the first person that had ever laughed at my sense of style, and he probably won’t be the last. And as you’re reading this, you may also start to remember a time when what you wore elicited laughter from yourself or strangers around you — or maybe you’re lucky, and only do the laughing. In actuality, what we wear can be very funny, and a costuming has always been a very important part of denoting comedy.

Let’s take a brief, and sad, look at minstrelsy for two seconds. Unfortunately, part of our comedic heritage in America comes directly from making fun of the way that people of color, specifically black people, have sartorially pronounced themselves. The trope of the Zip Coon arose out of tensions between free, and impeccably dressed, black men in the North and their poor Irish and Jewish neighbors (and sometimes friends) — an offensive remixing of the black dandy that had audiences laughing from New York City to the Pacific Rim for hundreds of years. These mocking and uber racist imaginings of black dress are part of a larger way in which the re-costumed and deconstructed idea of SELF plays an important part of in our understanding of humor.

Look at old pictures of Chaplin. His bowler hat, cane, and billowy trousers are now an iconic part of filmed physical comedy. Or better yet, take a gander at the whimsical and silly Parisian mimes and their striped shirts. They have most definitely informed a specific entrée into how people (mostly young women) perceive a kind of lighter French fashion. (google: mime fashion) But honestly, there is no better place to explore fashion and comedy than by looking at the fashioned bodies of funny women on TV.

I have been spending a great amount of time taking in the white noise of Sex and The City. I sit at my desk, or lie in my bed, with the episodes playing over my activities. Though most people would listen to soothing music while they work, I listen to the fictional and comedic musings of this millennium's favorite, “fabulous,” oversexed, Manhattanites — -cringing at the passively racist, homophobic, and class/ist one liners while eating a large heaping of Carrie’s starry eyed neediness. When one moves away from the pure awe or ridicule of the show, you encounter, in all it’s glory, Fashion. The characters are constantly name dropping brands. So much so that I wonder how many times Carrie slowly says Gucci in each season.

The presence of fashion in the show isn’t just another leg of the copious amounts of product placement that is usually a large part of the American television system. Fashion is also a vehicle for a lot of the comedy that is both relayed and digested in women’s television shows. When Miranda takes Carries and Charlotte to buy vibrators, they gawk at the $100 price, but Miranda reminds them that they have been more than happy to spend hundreds of dollars on the fleeting pleasure of on trend designer shoes.

In season four, Carrie is asked to be a “normal” in a NYFW show. As a normal, she’s booked to be a non-model and minor NYC celibrity who wears Dolce & Gabbanna down the runway. In that scenario, we get to experience the comedy of fashion on multiple levels. There is the tragicomedy of Carrie feeling like she isn’t good enough to walk next to Amazonian women like Heidi Klum on a fashion runway. There’s also the vapid and aggressive nature of the fashion set being played out for Sex and the City’s informed audience in the most garish ways. Alan Cumming guest stars as the insufferable and demanding stylist who tastelessly puts the middle aged Carrie in pair of nude panties, while Margaret Cho is the foul mouthed fashion show director whose ennui is assuaged by sour aggression that pressure Carrie to do the show. Fashion’s belligerent hold on women’s lives is played up for laughs through the whole episode. Like the characters of SATC, women fall short of its perfectionist glory.

These cliched tropes lead to gleaming and pure nuggets of comedy. The seam that holds this episode together, and the concept that literally elevates the episode, is Carrie, a thirty-five year old woman, being asked to wear a pair of sparkling nude colored panties down the runway. Those panties are where the locus of the joke in the episode. They come to symbolize all of Carrie’s worries, as they interact with fashion industries ridiculous and disjointed concepts and demands. They sparkle, but they are nude. Can’t you just hear the comedian ask, “What is that about?” By the end of the episode, Carrie ungracefully takes a nose dive into the runway, and I laugh hard in my own moment of pure schadenfreude. She had it coming.

Who says that the fashion industry itself doesn’t have a healthy sense of humor? One doesn’t have to look far into the distant past to locate great moments where fashion and comedy combined to the gleeful delight of modern audiences. The fashion elites who sat on the front rows of Valentino’s Paris Fashion Week show last season were very delighted to have Derek Zoolander and Hansel McDonald have a strut off down the runway, ending the show in the rapture of their uproar. Both the characters and the audience were very aware of how important and hilarious it is for an ultra-luxurious brand like Valentino to open itself to ridicule. There, the embroidered silk of Ben Stiller’s dark-blue silk pajamas, was his characters infamous Blue Steel starring back at us through the camera.

Questions arise: why would Valentino, a classic and ultra-respected name in fashion, a brand that symbolizes opulence and glamour, willingly let the Zoolander 2 spectacle — the same one that makes fun of the vapid excess that the brand tries to uphold — on its runway? Fashion and humor, may seemingly be worlds apart, but designers, creators, and brands are no stranger to naval gazing and it’s ridiculously silly effects. Brands spend millions of dollars every year enticing people that will never be able to afford their wares just to have the same clients at their door over and over again. Comedy is of the zeitgeist. Like fashion, comedy’s goal is to always be aux courrants. The idea being the funnies is to connect what we find trendy to what is timeless, and then to bare the contradictions for everyone to see. A joke, even at one’s own expense, is about truth, and that’s a virtue that the industry loves to say that to uphold. Paris Fashion Week is about real design, real talent, and true luxury.

Costuming comedy is a very difficult thing to do. Though countless scholars and writers have attempted to pin down it’s meanings, reading the language of fashion usually leaves us with hits or misses. Every Halloween, we learn that one man’s clown costume may be another’s traditional dress. This has not stopped comedians and comedic shows from employing costumes and clichés about the fashion industry to make great comedy. Honestly, it may be good for the industry to look itself in the mirror and grimace.