Abstract
This chapter investigates the intersection of fashion, place and mood through the work of New Zealand designers James Dobson and Lela Jacobs. Dobson, who launched the label Jimmy D in 2004, has been credited with establishing the “second-generation New Zealand look.” Following in the footsteps of heritage brands such as Zambesi and Nom*d, Dobson and Jacobs, who launched her eponymous label in 2010, have pursued the darkly melancholy fashion for which Aotearoa New Zealand became renowned in the late 1990s. I argue that the presence of this melancholy mood in New Zealand fashion points to the unsettled cultural feelings of this place. Challenging understandings of Aotearoa New Zealand as a bucolic paradise, these designers produce collections that speak to the darker side of New Zealand culture and the anxieties of belonging familiar to colonial settlers. Both Dobson and Jacobs design garments that are androgynous and conceptual, woven with a liminal spirit, including unfinished hems and deconstructed elements. Their campaign imagery, monochromatic and often out of focus, evokes ghostly apparitions. Focusing on the melancholy moods these designers conjure, I suggest that paying attention to feeling can open new ways of understanding the cultural context in which fashion is produced.
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Notes
- 1.
As Lucy Hammonds (2010, 330) has pointed out, the New Zealand brands of the 1990s ‘were not uniformly bound by the dark and moody personality that was fast attaching itself to local fashion. Helen Cherry collections [for example] were more aptly described as celebratory rather than cerebral.’ Similarly, Doris de Pont (2012, 34) has noted the way the idea of New Zealand fashion as ‘dark, edgy and intellectual’ was seized upon and picked up by the media as actuality following the showing of the ‘New Zealand Four’ (Zambesi, WORLD, Karen Walker and Nom*d) at London Fashion Week in 1999 ‘despite the obvious disjunct between that description and the reality of, for example, the WORLD collection.’
- 2.
For Hemmings (2012, 527) ‘any theory of mood needs to take gender into account’ in order to counter the sense that mood is neutral and to challenge the otherwise easy distinction between mood (as sustained) and affect (as transitory). Attending to the gendered character of mood, Hemmings (2012, 529–31) argues, allows us to see the ways in which mood functions as a ‘regulatory regime’ that ‘keeps the public/private divide intact,’ yet also to acknowledge the ‘permeability’ of this divide.
- 3.
This is not to say, however, that the mood-worlds we inherit are the only ones we can inhabit. There are many New Zealand designers, including Trelise Cooper and WORLD, who push back against this cultural feeling of melancholy, instead producing bright, vibrant fashion brimming with optimism.
- 4.
It is important to note that black is also embedded in the cultural identity of Aotearoa New Zealand, perhaps most iconically in the All Blacks and their internationally recognisable black rugby uniform. Thanks to the All Blacks, Ron Palenski (2012, 105) writes, ‘Black has been beautiful in New Zealand since the last quarter of the nineteenth century.’
- 5.
The affective response experienced from viewing or witnessing the wearing of clothes on other bodies is different from how we feel when getting dressed or wearing clothes on our own body (Ruggerone 2016). However, what both experiences have in common is the connection between body and cloth and the affect that this connection entails, both personally and socially.
- 6.
The dress is named after the iconic Massive Attack single released in 1991. Recalling the song’s emotionally resonant vocals, trance beat and poignant, single continuous shot video clip depicting vocalist Shara Nelson walking through downtown Los Angeles, the dress—and this image of the dress—becomes part of a longer lineage of melancholic cultural artefacts.
- 7.
It is worth noting that while the designers I discuss here are all Pākehā designers, in other work I have identified a similar mood in the work of contemporary Māori designers. Bobby Campbell Luke (Ngāti Ruanui), for example, conjures a profound feeling of nostalgic melancholy in his work through engagement with the losses of the past and grappling with what it means to be Māori in a settler colonial present (Richards 2021).
- 8.
Avery Gordon (2008, 7) argues that haunting is a key component of modern life and that, in order to study and understand this social life, we must ‘confront the ghostly aspects of it.’
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Richards, H. (2023). Melancholy Fashion Moods in Aotearoa New Zealand. In: Filippello, R., Parkins, I. (eds) Fashion and Feeling. Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19100-8_14
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