Abstract
Postmodernism, or the Postmodern,1 is often brought forward as a challenge to ‘totalising’ explanations of the world, and as the chance for various ‘Others’ to find a voice.2 It is presented, too, as the opportunity to re-evaluate popular, kitsch and ‘low’ aesthetic and cultural forms, and to break down the distinction between high art and popular culture.
For the elaboration of the discussion on fashion in this article see Wilson, Elizabeth (1985), Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and modernity, London, Virago.
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Notes and References
Foster, Hal (1985), Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, differentiates between the postmodern, which ‘plays with literal and pastiched references to art history and pop culture alike’, and postmodernism and postmodernist art, which is ‘posed theoretically against modernist paradigms’, and ‘question[s] the truth-value of representation’, p. 214, note 13. I have not distinguished the two words in this precise way.
Huyssen, Andreas (1984), ‘Mapping the Postmodern’ in New German Critique, Number 33, Fall;
and Owens, Craig (1983), ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and postmodernism’ in Foster, Hal, (ed.) (1985), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Port Townsend, Washington, Bay Press.
Bell, Quentin (1947), On Human Finery, London, The Hogarth Press, discusses the way in which sartorial behaviour gets conflated with moral worth.
Mukerji, Chandra (1983), From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism, New York, Columbia University Press.
Baldwin, Frances Elizabeth (1926), Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press.
Huxley, Aldous (1955), Brave New World, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Orwell, George (1948), 1984, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Sennett, Richard (1974), The Fall of Public Man, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Strong, Roy (1987), in The Independent, ‘Revive the Royal Rule of Taste’, 21 August 1987.
Laver, James (1969), A Concise History of Costume, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Charles-Roux, Edmonde (1975), Chanel, London, Jonathan Cape.
Warner, Marina (1985), Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of The Female Form, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
White, Jerry (1986), Campbell Bunk: The Worst Street in North London, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Ibid., pp. 191–2.
Ibid.
Quoted in Wilson, Elizabeth, op. cit., p. 89.
Warhol, Andy and Hackett, Pat (1980), POPism: The Warhol ‘60s, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Burger, Peter (1984), Theory of the Avant Garde, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, sees this collapse as a hallmark of the avant garde.
Lurie, Alison (1981), The Language of Clothes, London, Heinemann.
Hebdige, Dick (1979), Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London, Methuen.
Veblen, Thorstein (1899), The Theory of the Leisure Class, London, Allen and Unwin.
Silverman, Kaja (1986), ‘Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse’, in Modleski, Tania, (ed.) (1986) Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.
Flugel, J. C. (1930), The Psychology of Clothes, London, The Hogarth Press;
and see also Burman, Barbara and Leventon, Melissa (1987), ‘the Men’s Dress Reform Society’, Costume, No. 21.
Wollen, Peter (1987), ‘Fashion/Orientalism/The Body’, in New Formations, No. 1, Spring.
Moers, Ellen (1986), The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm, London, Seeker and Warburg;
and Laver, James (1968), Dandies, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Woolf, Virgina (1938), Three Guineas, Harmondsworth, Penguin, p. 23.
Baudrillard, Jean (1981), For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, St Louis, Mo., Telos Press.
Freud, Sigmund (1949), Civilisation and Its Discontents, London, The Hogarth Press, p. 54.
Barthes, Roland (1957), Système de la Mode, Paris, Éditions du Seuil.
Devereux, Georges (1978), Ethnopsychoanalysis, Berkeley, University of California Press.
quoted in Wilson, Elizabeth, op. cit., p. 10.
Jameson, Fredric (1984), ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, number 146, July/August, p. 65.
Dior, Christian (1957), Dior by Dior, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Jameson, Fredric, op. cit., p. 67.
Hollander, Anne (1975), Seeing Through Clothes, New York, Avon Books.
Foster, Hal, op. cit., (1985), pp. 122–3.
Proust, Marcel (1981), Rememberance of Things Past, Volume I, London, Chatto and Windus, p.460.
Fraser, Kennedy (1985), The Fashionable Mind: Reflections on Fashion, 1970–1982, Boston, David R Godine, p. 238.
Silverman, Kaja, op. cit., p. 150.
Lacan, Jacques (1949), ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’, in Lacan, Jacques (1981), Écrits: A Selection, London, Tavistock.
Newton, Stella Mary (1974), Health, Art and Reason: Dress Reformers of the Nineteenth Century, London, John Murray.
More, Thomas (1965), Complete Works, Volume IV, New Haven/London, Yale University Press.
Morris, William (1980), News From Nowhere and Selected Writings and Designs, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
König, René (1973), The Restless Image, London, Allen & Unwin.
Foucault, Michel (1970), The Order of Things, London, Tavistock, p. xxiii.
Emberley, Julia (1988), ‘The Fashion Apparatus and the Deconstruction of Postmodern Subjectivity’ in Kroker, Arthur and Kroker, Marilouise (eds) (1988), Body Invaders: Sexuality and the Postmodern Condition, London, Macmillan.
Silverman, Kaja, op. cit.
Foucault, Michel (1977), Discipline and Punish, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Foucault, Michel (1979), the History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
McRobbie, Angela (1986), ‘Postmodernism and Popular Culture’, in Appignanesi, Lisa, (ed.) (1986), ICA Documents 4 London, ICA.
Huyssen, Andreas, op. cit.
Kroker, Arthur and Kroker, Marilouise, op. cit., p. 45.
Lash, Scott and Urry, John (1987), The End of Organised Capitalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, Ch. 9.
Huyssen, Andreas, op. cit., p.48.
for a further discussion on women and postmodernism, see Wilson, Elizabeth (1988), ‘Rewinding the Video’, in Wilson, Elizabeth (1988), Hallucinations, London, Radius/Century Hutchinson.
Foster, Hal, op. cit. (1985), p. 213, note 27, where he cites a feminist writer, Jane Weinstock in defence of this view, which he qualifies by adding: ‘I take this not as a call to any essentialism as such but as the need, in “the post-natural world of late capitalism” (Jameson) in which patriarchal structures are continually recoded, to move beyond the opposition nature/culture to a genuine order of difference’. This argument is unclear to me, since I do not understand what is meant by a ‘genuine order of difference’. How is the genuine to be distinguished from the essential? It seems merely to substitute some sort of ethical in place of the biologically based definition.
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© 1990 Elizabeth Wilson
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Wilson, E. (1990). These New Components of the Spectacle: Fashion and Postmodernism. In: Boyne, R., Rattansi, A. (eds) Postmodernism and Society. Communications and Culture. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20843-2_8
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