“DRESS BECOMES BODY BECOMES DRESS” ARE YOU AN OBJECT OR A SUBJECT? ON COMME DES GARÇONS AND SELF-FASHIONING
By CAROLINE EVANS

PERTURBATION

The small invited audience sits in a square in the Musée d’Art Afrique et d’Océanie in Paris. It is the Comme des Garçons Spring/Summer collection of 1997, called “Dress Becomes Body.” There is no music and no catwalk. The first model comes on in a slender, white, semi-transparent dress with two little buds at the back, like nascent angels’ wings. As the show progresses each model comes out in increasingly larger and, to most commentators, odder swellings, all under long, fitted dresses in stretch fabrics. Some are in red, white, or blue; others in a range of ginghams: black, pale blue, pink, or red and white. All are padded, with goose-down fillings. The feather pads are arranged asymmetrically; they run over a shoulder, diagonally across a hip, down the back, or coil round the torso, to form half-bustles, raised necks, or prominent backs. It is hard to find the words to describe the effect of these down pads under sheer dresses: if words fail perhaps it is because the dresses do not engage with the everyday language of the fashion body. “To make a form in which a woman looks pretty in a conventional way is not interesting to me at all,” says Comme’s designer Rei Kawakubo.1 And it is true that she does not emphasize its conventional assets: small waist, flat stomach, curving hips and bottom, small, high breasts. Yet neither does she deny them particularly, even when she obscures some of these body parts. This is not a collection which engages tyrannically with fashion, and its requirements that the body be honed, exercised, produced. It seems, instead, to be a speculation on what else the body could be, other than.

Other than what? Do these pads turn women into ridiculous objects, or diseased subjects? Richard Martin describes the look as “perturbed beauty.” The shop assistants at a Comme retail outlet in New York reputedly called them “tumor pieces” between themselves. The fashion press was full of Quasimodo references. Articles were entitled “Like It Or Lump It” (The Guardian) and “Padded Sell” (Village Voice). Both Vogue and Elle shot the collection with the pads removed.

But are the pads really so alien? Haven’t we seen it all before, the weird, the tribal, the decadent? Mutant bodies are two a penny in postmodern culture. From New-Age tribalism to high fashion, from Modern Primitives to the fin-de-siècle decadence of Alexander McQueen, or the belle époque opulence of John Galliano, we are surrounded by a pervasive strand of postmortem cynicism; there is nothing new to be known. Yet, miraculously, Rei Kawakubo does seem able to rethink the body in this collection, and to do so without cynicism, but with passion and imagination. A modernist, she works against the grain of much contemporary culture, both aesthetically and commercially.

The Comme press release for this collection stated: “The theme … is body meets dress, body becomes dress, dress becomes body.”2 We already know that cosmetics have “become body” in the form of liposuction or cosmetic surgery; for our nineteenth century predecessors bodies became dress via the corset. Nowadays the “First World,” or post-industrial, body has already been reconfigured by the technology of the 1980s: the personal computer, the Sony Walkman, portable telephones, soft contact lenses. These “harmless devices” contribute to a new body, “one thoroughly invaded and colonized by invisible technologies.”3 The question, therefore, is not whether you are a subject or an object in Comme des Garçons’ padded collection, but what kind of a new subject, or future subject, you are. It is not so much that the new technologies force us to rethink the relationship between body and identity; rather, they have already invisibly extended the parameters of our bodies and, it follows, our consciousness. One could speculate that Comme’s padded extensions, which “morph” the body into new forms, are, simply, a series of poetic speculations on the theme of embodiment in the modern age.

ALIENATION

The idea that technologies might colonize the body and radically reconfigure subjectivities is not new; the relationship of people to things, or to technology, has, since the Industrial Revolution, often been theorized as split or alienated. Karl Marx, in his early writing, argued that in the 19^th century social relations between individuals assumed “the fantastic form of a relation between things”4 as a result of the alienation, or estrangement, of the worker from his labor. Men, women, and children were bound to machines in the new division of capital. As the worker lost control over the processes of work, and the product of labor, he became a thing; in industrial production, the human takes on some of the mechanical quantities of the machine while the machine becomes uncannily human. While much science fiction and film has tapped into fearful and dystopian fantasies of robotic hybrids, contemporary cyber-theorists have elaborated a more benign – and more Utopian – view of hybridity as ‘post human. In Donna Haraway’s formulation the cyborg, which exists in the machine-human interface is “a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and … an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.”5 It is neither traumatized nor a split subject. Perhaps Haraway’s formulation might be useful to think about the Comme des Garçons clothes as a fruitful coupling of mass and form, animate and inanimate, rather than the darker vision of human subjectivity as inevitably fissured. If these clothes relate at all to the history of an interface between body and technology, they reconfigure that interface by replacing fear with curiosity.

Hal Foster argues that the cyborg is not a subject at all, because it does not have the mechanisms for expressing fear and trauma.6 Instead he describes it as a mythical creature, no less mythical than the Oedipal subject but with the difference that the Oedipal subject at least is a subject, albeit a traumatized one. If industrialization inevitably produces a traumatized body, Kawakubo valiantly tried to re-see that body from another perspective, to invent it from scratch, and to envisage multiple possibilities for such a body. The Kawakubo body is not human, but neither is it inhuman: that’s why it’s not horrid. What else are her creations if not fabulous creatures, and where better than the catwalk to fashion such beings, fashion itself being the “enchanted fairyland” of signs?7 “Creature” and “creativity” have the same root etymologically; the Latin noun creatura, a creature, is “a thing created.”8 The padded designs from this collection, each of which is a variation on a theme, could be seen as speculative prototypes – an experiment in rethinking the human creature. Kawakubo, in her thought laboratory, sets up this experiment by refashioning the relationship between subject and object, between body and dress, and between human flesh and soft, goose-down pads. The collection shows fabulous creatures in which the boundaries between body and dress are blurred, and in which subject and object, or self and other, are no longer posited as mutually exclusive terms. Christine Battersby argues against the conventional model of body boundaries as a container of the self:

The boundary of my body should rather be thought of as an event- horizon, in which one form (myself) meets its potentiality for transforming itself into another form or forms (the not-self) … we need to rethink individuality differently, allowing the potentiality for otherness to exist within it, as well as alongside it.9

She suggests that in the late 20th century new philosophies of science and mathematics have yielded new topological models with which to model patterns of the indefinite and of fluidity. These changes – which spill out into computer games, advertising, and the media in general – might contribute to a changing view of the self and might help us “to think selves, bodies and boundaries in more revolutionary terms.”10

But are these speculations impossibly utopian? Do they deny the fact that, as a consequence of industrialization, to be human is, under Western consumer capitalism, to be a divided subject? Sartre located alienation in a split between subject and object when he wrote of being an object of the gaze:

I am possessed by another self whose gaze shapes my body and sees it as I will never see it. The one who looks at me possesses my secret, the secret that I am an object.11

Perhaps, after all, these Comme dresses do hover indistinctly between subject- and object-hood, located as they are in fashion, scopic land of the look. “I see myself because somebody sees me.”12 Where else are we objectified if not in the look of the other, and what does fashion solicit if not that look? In no other field of art and design is the body represented so incessantly, so exclusively, and from its center of operations the fashioned body returns the gaze: everything hangs on the body, in fashion. Foster argues that splitting, which is fundamental to being a subject, occurs with a new intensity under postmodernism where the subject is continually made and unmade by such splittings: between disembodiment and abjection, between disgust and fascination, between trauma and loss on the one hand, and fantasies of wholeness on the other.13 In these terms, the collection can be construed as paradigmatic postmodern representations of a body which oscillates endlessly between subject- and object-hood. On the other hand it could be argued, either, that such designs provide a respite from the compulsion to split or, alternatively, that they simply “fix” the body on one or other side of the divide. If these designs are on the side of a “fantasy of wholeness” then they do, at least temporarily, bridge a gap, close a fissure, make good, heal.

Yet much of the journalistic criticism of the collection did seem to be predicated on the notion of a traumatized body. The clothes were likened to cancers, tumors, ugly growths, despite the grace and the ethereal quality of the designs. Perhaps this says more about contemporary fears and fantasies than it does about the clothes. If we are all split subjects one could talk of the self as a ‘product’, the historical product of industrialization. In the nineteenth century women designed that product through consumption, and specifically through fashion: the mid-19^th-century middle class woman in her huge crinolines of hooped steel and her bright fabrics patterned with the latest aniline dyes fashioned herself as a newly independent consumer in a brash, modern world of goods, a world which was much disapproved of by contemporary moralists. Their criticism signaled an ambivalence about women as active, even aggressive, consumers in a period of aggressive trade and manufacture. Their outrage was not dissimilar to 20^th-century outrage at piercing or other forms of body modification: in both cases the body is altered by a degree of self-fashioning as the wearer produces, or stages, herself as pure artifice. These two technologically-related innovations, the crinoline and aniline dyes, became emblems of modernity.14 Women became huge, and hugely visible, in their bright colors and big skirts, as consumers and, as such, as producers of their own identities. Through the padding, shaping, and patterning of their clothes middle class women were intrinsically linked to the industrial era, an era which for Marx was defined partially by a split in subjectivity between subject and object. By the turn of the century huge department stores provided a context which legitimized the desire of women to look as well as be looked at – it enabled them to be both subject and object of the gaze, to appropriate, at one go, the pleasure/power of both the voyeur and the narcissist.15

One could conclude, perhaps, that the late twentieth century woman in her Comme down-filled pads, ostensibly so alienating and object-like, in fact constitutes herself as a singularly modern counterpart to her 19^th-century compatriot in her easy oscillation between subject and object positions.

She is, furthermore, a subject who finds herself at the crossroads of a different revolution, an information revolution as opposed to an industrial one. An explorer in new territories, the Comme customer stands at the crossing of two axis: one rethinks the nature of “a product,” the other reconsiders what “a person” might be in the modern age. The old technologies insisted on a (teleological) distinction between subject and object, man and machine. An artifact and a person were distinct: the one inorganic, inanimate, man-made; the other organic, fallible, possessed of consciousness. Yet a person riding a bicycle is a benign interface of (wo)man and machine. The heart pacemaker or the contact lens are prosthetics which augment, even rescue, human performance. Whereas a product used to be a thing, with the use of smart fabrics and interactive computers a product can now also be a process, a relation, part of a network of relations between a thing and a person, something which extends the parameters of the body. It is in this context that one could situate Comme’s fantastical creatures, as hybrids of flesh and feathers, textile and skin, objects in the expanded field.16

Historically, the fashionable body has many times been augmented, usually to emphasize the male or female form. The 19^th-century corset and crinoline echoed and exaggerated the female shape. Women in the 1990s could fashion their bodies through exercise, surgery, and diet as much as through cosmetics and clothes. The modern woman can redistribute her flesh with collagen implants, liposuction, breast augmentation and other cosmetic surgery; or she can resort to the gym and the personal trainer to realign her body mass. Thus the contemporary body is disciplined and produced, much as the 19^th-century woman relied on the external discipline of the corset to contain her unruly female flesh. By contrast Comme’s clothes don’t refer to the technologies of the body which nip, tuck, mold, and exercise it into shape. Far from containing and disciplining the body, designs such as the “Dress Becomes Body” collection actually seek to extend it in space, to link up with new networks and different spaces. Thus equipped, they begin to sketch new possibilities of subject-hood, a subject-hood which is not concerned with containing the body but with extending it, via new networks and new communications. Perhaps the best way to regard Comme’s designs is as an exploration, an early foray into space … a probe.

EXPLORATION

The artist Mona Hatoum’s piece Corps Étranger of 1994 tracks previously invisible interiorities of the body by using the medical techniques of endoscopy and coloscopy to send the spectator on a journey through the living, pulsating orifices and channels of the artist’s body. Just as Hatoum redraws the internal map of the body, so Kawakubo reconfigures its external map, tracking its previously invisible exteriorities in both actual and metaphorical space. Not so much prosthetic additions, these padded garments which shift and change in configuration as they move down the catwalk, leave traces in space like thought patterns: traces of ideas and connections to be made. Significantly, at least two separate photographers chose to photograph the collection on long exposures, producing images with blurred traces of earlier movements. In Patrick Keiller’s film London (1993) we are told that Robinson, the psycho-geographic flanêur, believes that if he looks long enough at the surface of the city it will reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way he will be able to see into the future. Something of this fantastical quality resides in these Comme designs: if time did have a molecular structure we could trace the past movements of these clothes in the contemporary spatial patterns they make on the catwalk.

But at the same time Kawakubo wants to create forms which didn’t exist in the past, which have never before been seen or made.17 At an earlier stage in her career she was quoted often as saying, “I start from zero.”18 Her designs have always stood apart from the genealogy of clothing, rather like a new life form. How did they come to be? Morphologically, if the collection changes the concept of “body” it also, equally, changes the concept of “fashion.” If we struggle with them it is perhaps because we have yet to invent a typology for these new forms. All these ologies suggest a need to explain the new by reference to an established system of classification: but the polemical tension in Rei Kawakubo’s work comes precisely from this pull, between the known and the unknown. Her designs suggest a beginning, new things, before they set into orthodoxy, and perhaps, since she is an explorer in new territories, we can no longer rely on old -ologies to make sense of her work. These designs are something like a spaceman taking his first few steps in space. They combine the wobbly optimism of the baby, and the curiosity of the explorer, with the grace of a dancer whose every performance re-inscribes new gestures in old spaces, creating something from nothing each time.

For the design of Merce Cunningham’s ballet Scenario (1997-98), Kawakubo used reinforced seams and stronger fabrics, bigger prints and bigger shapes, but the principle was the same: down pads under stretch fabric, this time altered by the way the dancers moved in the costumes, as opposed to the way fashion models walked in them. Scenario lasts forty minutes; it is a ballet for fifteen dancers who wear bustles, spiraling pillows, dresses and shorts. It has three sections, involving three costume changes. In the first, the dancers wear scaled-up green and white gingham or broad blue and white stripes. Anna Kisselgoff comments on how the dancers are often doing straightforward movements such as raising a knee, standing still on one leg, rotating a shoulder or doing a pliér in second position, with the legs apart. Yet the costumes and the choreography, combined with Merce Cunningham’s habit of giving the torso movement which is not apparently related to the limbs, combined to “make strange.”19 The second section consisted of black-clad padded figures, and one woman in red carried on by four men; the third section consisted of entirely red-clad figures. “The work as a whole is full of carved, plunging shapes, and the speed accelerates … at the end all spin slowly like statues on revolving pedestals.”20

Merce Cunningham’s working methods, like those of his former collaborator John Cage, have always included chance. He uses tossed coins, the i-ching, or a computer to decide the sequence of movements in a piece. Music only comes the day before the first performance; before that the dancers rehearse to a count. Although in an interview he excludes the costumes from all the chance operations which went into Scenario,21 there seem to be more similarities than there are differences between his and Kawakubo’s working methods. Kawakubo will work experimentally with her pattern cutters to develop her final designs very much as Cunningham works with his dancers to arrive at the final performance. In the early 1980s many of Kawakubo’s innovations came out of experiments with materials: loosening a screw in the textile factory, or throwing a crumpled-up piece of

wet linen out to dry in the sun. These methods are not dissimilar to Cunningham’s use of the i-ching, or to allowing a computer program to determine a dancer’s movements. Both Kawakubo and Cunningham work in a modernist, avant-garde tradition; both have extended the definitions and forms of their field; each has collaborated with artists and musicians. And in this piece in which, as one of the dancers said, “She’s added a sculptural element to the body outline that Merce has been messing with for fifty years,”22 they draw attention to some similarities between ballet and fashion (the shared investment in the idea of the body as an index of youth, flawlessness, and control in particular) while at the same time distancing themselves from other practitioners in their respective fields.

Kawakubo’s designs for Scenario extend her involvement with non-fashion based work, and put a distance between her and the fashion world; designing for a ballet is not the same as doing a perfume to increase sales – on the contrary, it further distances you from that world. She is a designer whose affiliations seem to be with the idea of art for art’s sake. As a student she studied philosophy, specializing in aesthetics. Since 1969 she has designed clothes under the label Comme des Garçons, first showing in Paris in 1981. She also designs furniture, and exhibits artists’ work in her main Japanese shop in Aoyama. In addition, each season an artist makes a work in situ. From 1988-91 she published a magazine, Six, which illustrated the work of artists and photographers. The clothes in her menswear shows are modeled by artists, actors, and musicians. Yet she is level-headed in her insistence that her work is to be located in an economic and financial context. She hopes to “confront established values in going beyond accepted limits;” like a modernist pioneer she searches out the new, the never seen or made before.23 But she does not consider that what she does is art, or that her world has any direct relationship to art, and she insists that creating garments is a matter of teamwork. She claims to dislike possessions; she is an international designer who doesn’t even own the house she lives in, let alone any of the art that has sprung from her collaborations.

To the extent that her work can be located in a modernist, rather than postmodern, tradition it is “against the grain.” In another sense too she works against the grain: her most innovative work is, regardless of her insistence on her place in the fashion system, not very commercial. “The clothes aren’t easy to sell.”24 Despite this, profits are systematically plowed back into the business, and the enterprise is in good health financially, and it does well enough for her to continue to work – which she does assiduously; a perfectionist who never cuts corners, who sends color photocopies of press cuttings to journalists, whose retail space costs in New York must have been doubled by her insistence that the clothes hangers be kept exactly 10 cm apart at all times. Rei Kawakubo does seem to believe in what she’s doing. Comme des Garçons actually doesn’t sell more clothes when it does a collection like “Dress Becomes Body” – it sells fewer. All fashion designers do showpieces to get in to the papers; only Rei Kawakubo puts those showpieces in the shops. In doing that she opens up a space, not from outside but rather from within, from the very heart of consumerism – a space for exploration and new ideas, just for the sake of it. It’s important for this space not to be eaten up by the conglomerates – strangely, high fashion becomes like a valiant little corner shop, still going, against all the odds. It’s heroic, Promethian …

2ibid

3 Tiziana Terranova, “Posthuman unbounded: artificial evolution and high-tech subcultures,” in Robertson, G., Mash, M., Tickner, L., Bird, J., Curtis, B. & Putnam, T., (eds) FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture (Routledge: London & New York, 1996), P.166

4 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1976) p.72-3

5 “A Cyborg Manifesto” in: Haraway, D.J., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Free Association Books: London, 1991) p.150

6 Foster, H., The Return of the Real: The Avant Garde at the End of the Century (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass & London, 1996) p.222

7 Baudrillard, J., L’échange symbolique et la mort (Gallimard: Paris, 1976), p.135, contains a study entitled ‘Fashion, or the enchanted fairyland of the code’

8 Oxford English Dictionary

9 Battersby, C., “Her Body/ Her Boundaries: Gender and the Metaphysics of Containment” in Benjamin, A. (ed), The Body. Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts (Academy Editions: London, 1993), p.36 and p.38

10 ibid., p.38

11 Sartre, J-P., Being and Nothingness, trans. H.E. Barnes (Methuen: London, 1957), p. 364

12 Ibid., p.260

13 Foster, H., op. cit., pp.221-223

14 Breward, C.,The Culture of Fashion (Manchester University Press: Manchester & New York), 1995, pp.157-169

15 Mica Nava, “Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store” in Falk, P. &Campbell, C. (eds), The Shopping Experience (Sage Books: London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, 1997), p.72

16 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” in Foster, H. (ed), Postmodern Culture (Verso: London, 1985). This idea has been used fruitfully to write about jewellery: West, J, Made to Wear: Creativity in Contemporary Jewellery (Lund Humphries: London, 1998)

17 “Je souhaite stimuler les ésprits en me confrontant aux valeurs établies, en allant au-delà des limites admises … on cherche du nouveau, du jamais vu ou fait auparavant.” Rei Kawakubo interviewed by Yan C, “Rei Kawakubo: le rouge est le noir,” Hors Serie, numéro 18, 1997, pp.23-27

18 For example, see Women’s Wear Daily, USA, 1 March 1983 and Sudjic, D. Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons (Blueprint & Fourth Estate/Wordsearch: London, 1990), p.10

19 Kisselgoff, A., “From Baffling to Familiar to Startling Anew,” New York Times, Thursday 16 October 1997, p.El-E7

20 ibid

21 Kourlas, G.,”Comme Dancing,” Time Out, New York, 9 October 1997, pp. 21- 22

22 Matthew Mohr, quoted in “Prêt-à-Danser,” New Yorker, 22 September 1997, p.97

23 Yan C., op. cit. p.24

24 ibid. The words are Kawakubo’s.