Fashion in Historical Perspective
On Thursday, September 14, 2023, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest virtually hosted Dr. BuYun Chen, Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore College; Dr. Emanuele Lugli, Assistant Professor of Art History at Stanford University; and Dr. Alexandra Schwartz, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Craft, and Design at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. The three panelists explored the relationship between fashion and history. This panel was moderated by Dr. Timothy McCall, Director of Art History at Villanova University.
Watch the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLSFL2w39g0&list=PL_Z9mt0HJeskBM8nPMx5IMz-WulxN7Ypm&index=3&pp=iAQB
Fashion and history have a complicated, yet exciting relationship. Last week, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest hosted three art historians who provided an entry point for those interested in history who want to think more about fashion, and those in the world of fashion who look to the past for inspiration. At a basic level, history can be defined as the study of the past and of change over time; while fashion is concerned with the customs, styles, and uses of changing clothes and the materials that make them possible. What became evident throughout the event is that fashion speaks to the discipline of history, as much as history helps fashion reflect on our everchanging relationships with the past and thereby make better objects.
First, how might fashion benefit the discipline of history? One way is by making history more transnational. Beginning in the nineteenth century, history was dominated by the category of the nation-state. “History was a study of how a nation emerged and developed.”[i] As Europeans and Euro-Americans believed that they alone had the political system of the nation-state, and because it was so endemic to academic history, they Eurocentrically came to believe that they alone had history; that they alone were changing over time.[ii] More recently, historians have looked “beyond national boundaries and [sought] to explore interconnections across borders.”[iii] Transnational and global history is one recent effort to overturn Eurocentric ways of remembering the past.
Dr. BuYun Chen’s presentation at last week’s event reconsiders history transnationally through fashion. Dr. Chen considers how fashion, like history, has since the eighteenth century been understood by Westerners as something that the ‘modern West’ had and the rest of the world lacked.[iv] She defines fashion simply as the social phenomenon of changing clothes, underpinned by material change. The ‘West’ understood itself to be dynamic and progressive and understood the rest of the world to be traditional and unchanging. As such, the phenomenon of changing clothes over time has long been considered indicative of deeper social and political change.[v]
For Dr. Chen, Western observers’ past failure to attribute both history and fashion to the rest of the world is evidence of their blindness to processes of change beyond their narrow context. Thus, learning to see the change of clothes over time around the globe and attending to the innovations in the materials used in the creation of those clothes can help us understand the past without some of the major “assumptions that have privileged the West as a universal model,” not least the nation-centric mode of analysis.[vi] What in the past may have appeared static, may upon closer examination be whirling with changes waiting to be narrated by historians.
On the other hand, if history has important things to learn from fashion, the world of fashion has a complex relationship with history, as both a discipline and concept. Dr. Emanuele Lugli understands both worlds well.[vii] Today’s world of fashion includes a vast network of designers, marketers, models, institutions, and journalists committed to developing the social practice of changing clothes underpinned by material changes. At last week’s event, Dr. Lugli related how fashion designers look to the past for inspiration for their designs. They frequent vintage shops and fashion museums. And yet, “as much as fashion depends on history…fashion also worships forgetfulness.” He described how “fashion is a nominalist discipline. It does not matter if clothes are new or not.” It only matters that they are called new, often through the influence of fashion’s marketing. Only the fable matters. There is even a sense, perhaps, that fashion designers might wish for mass forgetfulness, so that every design could be perfectly novel.
But, according to Dr. Lugli, “history is a powerful antidote to fables…and forgetfulness.”[viii] By revealing how this year’s designs may reflect last year’s, history thwarts the enchanting claims to novelty of fashion’s marketing.[ix] Thus fashion designers “must cultivate an appreciation of the past,” even as fashion’s professional need for forgetfulness stands contrary to important aspects of the discipline of history.
Even so, Dr. Lugli contends for a closer connection between the two. For the fashion world, this must begin with a reformulation of what history is. According to Dr. Lugli, “History is not a reservoir of forms, and colors, and slogans. History is a discipline that asks you to reflect on new relationships with the past.” And as with Dr. Chen, relating to the past — which also means knowing when and where you have perceived change in the past and present — is no benign activity. Relating to the past via the category of the modern nation-state can create nationalist fables. Relating to the past via sensational depictions of historical clothing on show at the catwalks can romanticize and silence the truth of the past and how we imagine it.[x]
Finally, as the last panelist, Dr. Alexandra Schwartz showed, museums displaying fashion have been an important location for thinking about history and fashion’s complex and exciting relationship for longer than either the academy or designers have been interested in that relationship.[xi] From the beginning of the twentieth century, museums have displayed historical clothing, publicly presenting the changing of clothes over time and inciting reflection on different relationships to the past. While not always encouraging the kind of thinking Dr. Chen and Dr. Lugli presented, the history of fashion exhibits clearly demonstrates the importance of the museum for this ongoing dialogue.
What may be inspiration for one, may be a primary source for the other, even as both are served by the preservation of the curator. History will not necessarily help the fashion designer “produce better fashion,” but it will offer the designer a more interesting relationship to the past. That, in turn, may allow fashion to pose more important questions to the past with the objects created. On the other hand, by attending to changing clothes, historians may sharpen and widen their perceptions of what change looks like. Perhaps historians and designers should come together in museum halls to continue to learn from one another as both hone their overlapping crafts.
Endnotes
[i] Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot, 2012), 2.
[ii] Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, (Berkeley, Calif London: University of California Press, 1982).
[iii] Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History, 11.
[iv] For further reading, see Linda Welters, Abby Lillethun, and Joanne B. Eicher, Fashion History: A Global View (London Oxford New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
[v] At the Lepage Center event, Dr. Chen gave the following example: in China, changing from traditional clothing to Western clothes was seen as an indication of the country leaving ‘backward despotism’ and entering modernity.
[vi] For a deeper dive into this way of thinking, see Dr. Chen’s recent article, BuYun Chen, “The Craft of Color and the Chemistry of Dyes: Textile Technology in the Ryukyu Kingdom, 1700–1900,” Technology and Culture 63, no. 1 (2022): 87–117, https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2022.0003.
[vii] For Dr. Lugli’s most recent scholarly historical work, see Emanuele Lugli, “Lavinia Fontana’s Freedom,” Art History 46, no. 2 (2023): 282–309, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12715; For an article on his contributions to the catwalks, see “Professor Emanuele Lugli Discusses What It’s like to Be Credited with Inspiring a Fashion Line That Blurs the Boundaries between Sexual and Gender Binaries | Department of Art & Art History,” March 1, 2022, https://art.stanford.edu/news/professor-emanuele-lugli-discusses-what-its-be-credited-inspiring-fashion-line-blurs.
[viii] Quote from Dr. Lugli at the Lepage Event. For a further reading on the role of the historian in correcting popular memory, see Alan Brinkley, “Historians and Their Publics,” The Journal of American History 81, no. 3 (1994): 1027–30, https://doi.org/10.2307/2081443.
[ix] For further reading on the idea of “enchantment” in modern marketing, see Jackson Lears, Fables Of Abundance: A Cultural History Of Advertising In America (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1994).
[x] In this respect, Dr. Lugli referenced John Galliano’s 2004 designers which used Ancient Egypt for inspiration. See “Dior Couture S/S 2004,” Minnie Muse, accessed September 17, 2023, https://www.minniemuse.com/articles/muse-boards/christian-dior-couture-s-s-2004.
[xi] Dr. Schwartz’s presentation was largely a visual exploration of the history of fashion within museums, and as such is best enjoyed in the video. For more of her on fashion in museums see FIT Authors Talks: Alexandra Schwartz on Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL02sC8XNnA; see also her book, Alexandra Schwartz, ed., Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art (New York: Museum of Arts and Design, 2022).
