Birgit Richard
The surfaces of self: Fashion as aesthetic-medial complex
The representation of the self, self-fashioning and self-design,
are of an increasing significance in contemporary society, across all income
classes and social strata. Developing from the raising importance of immediate
aesthetic self-decoration, by the means of pre-created segments of dress, is
a new ”profane creativity” (see Willis 1981, ”profane culture”).
Alongside advertisement fashion has turned into an area from which common social
and aesthetic tendencies can be “read”, such as the differentiation and segmentation
into the small units leading to the domination of ”sub”. The current aesthetic
heterogeneity within the fashion sector is mainly shaped by hardware and software
options of computer technology, which are employed for the design of prints,
logos, labels as well as for the development of fibers, fabrics and cuts. Computers
allow the mass-production of aesthetic variants and a quick alteration of designs,
so that the industry can immediately react to actual tendencies. An instantaneous
production of garments, with a minimized risk, is possible through the perfect
simulation of results before actually producing something and through technological
instruments which allow to plot patterns directly on the fabric. With the help
of new media, fashion industry can react to the continuing individualization
process in society. Even the smallest consumer group and niche market can be
served with variants of fashion. Articles can be produced directly on the basis
of consumer feedback, as practiced by the Swedish chain store Hennes & Mauritz:
Scanner tills register all bought articles including the information about color
and sizes. The data is then immediately transferred to the production sector.
At the end of the road we have the quick and profitable production of global
and at the same unique ”originals”. These developments result in made-to-measure
for every-body, when in the future individual body-maps will be constructed
by electronic body-scanners (as already practiced by Kaufhof and Centro in Oberhausen).
Made-to-measure clothing also in the field of casual clothing and basics, such
as jeans or trainers, will be normal. It is already possible to get a personal
pair of Levi’s or to order individually fitted Adidas via a digital system for
foot measuring.
But the side effect of fashion’s digitalization and individualization is a rather
hysteric and metastatic supply, consisting of a compulsively aesthetic plurality
of colors, symbols, shapes and eccentric high-tech fabrics, which on the consumer’s
side demand an increasing selection competence. Negatively as well as positively,
youth fashion is quite exemplifying for this subtle differentiation within the
clothing sector (clubwear and streetwear, especially so called ”casuals”). Youth
styles are marked by a particularly creative and communicative potential. The
vestimentary forms of youthculture’s expression demonstrate style strategies
which can be compared to artistic practices, like bricolage in analogy to collage,
ready made or decollage. Youthcultures develop a complex symbolic system.
Fashion is an aesthetic phenomenon of growing importance. In the 1990s fashion
broadens the designers’ field of practice and interferes intensively with the
arts. And this is not only since photography is in a process of new orientation
or consolidation, due to new digital possibilities, and discovers fashion as
a preferred aesthetic area.
However, this essay will not put forward a chronology of fashion in form of
a history of costume or haute couture. The difficult attempt of following the
”fluid imagery of fashion” (Hollander) at the turn of the millennium, demands
the concentration on a rather small, though non the less complex section: namely,
as indicated above, on the actual youth culture of techno and house. Emerging
by the middle of the 1980s, this youthculture is paralleled by the development
of new segments and variants of fashion, like “clubwear”. The style consists
of a heterogeneous agglomeration, an accumulation of highly diverse elements
and epochs. Its technique is similar to those of the digital age, incorporating
via digitalization all analogues means of style. Due to the high absorption
there exist no pure forms and no arbitrarily contingent appearances, in fact
nothing like an ”anything goes” eclecticism. The techno and house-scene represents
the end of the one-dimensional and homogeneous styles: It causes the confusion
of uniform styles, which still exist among certain youthcultures like heavy
metal and gothics, but their destruction has already been introduced by punk.
Through the concentration on this contemporary youth-culture, their fashions
will be put in the center of interest, so that their various styles like club-,
street-, sports- and workwear can be analyzed in depth with respect to their
socio-cultural and aesthetic implications.
1. Fashion and the dialectics of commodity society
Fashion, and youth fashion in particular, is categorized as
”profane” or ”common culture” (Willis 1981). It is due to their generative dependency
that they seem to be particular fatefully subordinated to the apparent, transient,
untruthful, commercially volatile as well as to manipulation. Therefore, on
first sight, fashion apparently corresponds to the prejudice of capitalistic
exploitation.
”Fashion is not a natural, original component of human
society. It cannot be explained by the driving forces of differing zeitgeist.
Emerging during the process of the social division of labor …. in bourgeois
society fashion became the instrument of exploitation. It serves an increasingly
intensified manipulation of conscience and the control of the working classes’
desires.”
(Curtius/Hund 1975: 21, 33)
Especially in the echo of the late 1960s students movement,
fashion is reduced to an instrument of social and sexual competition. Adorno,
who laid the foundations of the critique of capitalistic commodity society with
his essay on the culture industry (Adorno 1989), which is mainly interpreted
in a rather one-sided mode, emphasizes the absolutely necessary function of
fashion as an complementary element to art.
1.1
Fashion generations
In fashion, the model function of the elder generation has
played out. Regarding style and taste there is now a mutual influence, whereby
in questions of lifestyle the youth is often perceived as the ideal model. Thus,
fashion turns into a process of a retroactive socialization (Baacke 1988: 58).
Adults use subcultural impulses in their dress, often to give themselves a youthful
flair but also to integrate the visual trouble-makers socially. In the 1990s
“street credibility” and authenticity (“authenticity as commodity”, Polhemus
1994: 8) are significant values the diverse generations strive after:
“...`Western culture´ was most at ease and most recognizable
within grand interiors. Today, as high culture, it is the litmus test of `street
credibility´ that is crucial.”
(Polhemus 1994: 6)
For young people a piece of dress has a highly symbolic value,
especially when it provokes direct conflicts with other generations. However,
in the 1990s no garment can make a statement as provocative as the zoot suit
in the 1940s, which rebelled against the strictly regimented wartime fashion
and the rationing of fabrics. The zoot suit, as it was worn by Cab Calloway
for instance, was unpatriotic and illegal. As an offense against governmental
rationing of wool fabrics, the zoot suit embodied an excessive waste of material
in a prime and extravagant form of “over-size” fashion. (In 1942 the War Production
Board stated that wool for suits must be reduced at 26%, see Polhemus 1994:
19). The voluminous balloon-trousers, monstrous shoulder pads, jackets with
knee-length and over-dimensional chains for pocket-watches were at the same
time a definite rebellious comment against the suppression of certain ethnic
groups:
“The zoot suit as a refusal a subcultural gesture refusing the manner of subservience African American and Mexican Hispanic”
(Polhemus 1994: 18).
Addressing the discriminated
African-Americans, the zoot suit should signal “I got it made” (Polhemus 1994:
17).
By the mid-1970s the punks call their clothes “confrontation
dress”, an aggressive challenge to the traditional dress-order in the era of
Thatcherism. Despite of this signification and despite the martially spiked
gear, in a closer examination of dress the aggression seems to be rather aimed
at self-violation: In contrast to the sharp and tight fitting clothes of skinheads,
punk-gear offers more a surface for grasp and attack. However, in the 1990s
urban dress communication, between the diverse fashion generations, is on the
side of the youth no longer determined by shocking extremes. Instead of particularly
extravagant dress, the techno-scene provokes rather by a narcissistic and hedonistic
expression and by scene-specific practices like drug consumption and endless
dancing. They signal, that art’s avant-garde tactics of shock are passé - also
for the youthcultures who entered into the heritage of the artistic bohemia
with the aesthetic human being or the dandy of the 19th century (Mattenklott
1987, Riewold 1986). Apparently spectacular forms like cross-dressing, fetish
or extreme body-practices like piercing, are inner principles of the style,
though they are now not only a normality in the house or techno-scene. Men as
female models are also popular in haute couture (like the transvestite Ru Paul),
ordinary bankers have tattoos and they love latex bed-sheets. In the 1990s it
is the transfer of the images of youth lifestyles to the world of models that
is shocking, no longer the youth themselves. Apparently, the hegemony of youthcultural
images is diminishing since shock-images are produced by the media and by the
fashion industry’s image-machines, just to remind of the Benetton campaigns
or the heroin- and death-chic. But nonetheless youth fashions continually open
up niches, in which adults cannot or do not want to follow (as they actually
do in the case of sportive clothing). The 70s revival in the context with club
culture seems to be the one and only opportunity of deviation. During times,
when everything is hip and up to date, the recourse to elements of 70s fashion
remains incomprehensible to the generation who has originally worn the past
fashion in their own youth. Basically this is valid for a number of revival
phases. However, the decisive distinction is, that those who are today between
thirty and forty, perceive themselves in the 1990s still as young. But they
are confronted with teenagers and twenty-somethings who are really young - so
their citation of past fashions destroys the illusion of lasting youth.
1.2
Fashion topology: Superficiality and morphology
In the 1990s dress mutates to a carrier of pictorial information.
To decode a content gets increasingly difficult, because of the depreciation
of compulsory symbols. But despite of the change in poignant symbolism, symbolic
cores can still be traced. Thereby the representation of the self is more and
more confined to the presentation of marked and lettered surfaces.
The covering and uncovering of the body can be understood as a kind of self-wrapping.
This “character-branding” is comparable to the surfaces of products (for example
cartoon heroes on food packages, see Wippermann 1995). Towards the augmenting
iconization, “neutral” and standardized forms of dress, so-called “basics” like
t-shirts and sweat-shirts, are particularly suitable as carrier-objects and
matrix for written and pictorial information, because their smooth surfaces
show no disturbing elements like buttons or plaiting. The surface design, like
graffiti “characters” on a hooded sweat shirt, characterizes the appearance
of a garment. The visual variants of a brand, the label inside and outside a
garment, rise to a highly important design feature.
The wearer’s identity is mediated as a surface impulse, realized through the
“right” combination of the “right” labels, as manifested in a description published
in the techno magazine Raveline:
“You’ve had short hair, a brown, checked wrap-skirt, Stüssy t-shirt, DUB hooded shirt, Airwalks and a silver wristwatch ...”
(Raveline, September 1997).
In the 1970s labels were still rarely printed or embroidered
on garments. The imprinting of t-shirt extends in the 1980s. The first examples
in youthcultures are the fan and tour t-shirts, showing on the front the admired
stars. They can be purchased on concerts and in record shops. Writing and lettering
turns into an important means of design, alongside motives like characters,
cartoon figures, faces of rock heroes and their logos,.
Printing as surface design produces a new segment of casual clothing, for which
the cut, in the sense of “depth-design”, is of less importance. By the right
reading of the visual information, the label or drawing, individuals can be
classified according to specific styles. This is especially valid for actual
youth fashions: here only the decoding of visual messages can lead to expertise
and insider knowledge, but not the knowledge of specific textile techniques
and features, like the cut, a valuable fabric or a sewing detail. An individual’s
self-localization is made easier by the surface, it can be expressed very concretely
in characters and images. On the observer’s side this demands a growing competence
in differentiation. By reading and decoding the commercial signs and their combination,
young people are able to localize and characterize others at first sight. Apart
from label and surface design, the standard cut of “basics” is another possibility
for a meaningful differentiation: namely the size. In contrast to the European
size-system, the American sizes S, M, L and XL are quite restricting. Youthcultures
prefer the extreme sizes XXS or XXL to enlarge are reduce their body size. Dress
forms the body and influences the habitus, even common garments like jeans,
which are nowadays common across all age-groups.
“A circumstance, which divides the own body literally into two independent halves, one up from the belt-line, freed from dress, and the other down from the belt to the ankle, organically grown together with the garment. (...) Jeans forced myself to control my movements, they made me more civilized and mature. (...) Clothing, as it is forcing an outward appearance, is a semiotic mechanisms or communication machine.”
(Eco 1986:
74)
The tight and figure accentuating dress turns into an armor
and dress-machine, which forces to transfer the way of living to the exterior
and to neglect inner life and thinking (Eco 1986: 75).
Youthcultures play with the possibilities of widening and narrowing body boundaries
and with the construction of differing body silhouettes. With the Twiggy-like
fashion the 1960s produce a childlike body silhouette, which lengthens the legs
and shortens the upper part of the body. In the 1970s bell-bottoms and plateau-shoes
accentuate calf and feet in contrast to a narrow upper body. The mohican of
the punks or the dreadlocks of the rastafaris cause a pointed enlargement of
the head (Hebdige 1987). In the case of punk the shape of the head stands
disproportionate to the reduction and negation of the body with rather tight-fitting
clothing. The extension of the entire body-silhouette into a threatening gesture
can be seen among hiphop. Thick and bulky materials, like multi-layered fabrics
and big, over-sized down-jackets function as a deterrence of possible enemies
and opponents. Of course, the original interpretation, that the wearing of numerous
weighty dress layers, even at warm temperatures, indicate a fear of sickness
or old age, is here not valid (Lurie 1981: 47). The principle of the over-size
look makes clear, that youthcultural fashions are not aimed at functionality.
Fashion morphology is - apart from shapes, cuts, big and small proportions and
the interrelations of diverse clothing pieces - determined by diverse layers
of clothing. There is a new relation of “inside” and “outside” emerging through
changes in the order of dress-layers, by the inversion of garments or by holes
that uncover further dress-layers or naked skin. So the attention is drawn to
the diverse forms of intended interruptions within the single dress-layers.
Tears and holes are specifically destructive dress practices. Unfastened buttons,
zippers or apparently too short garments (Wright 1994) are more incidental,
unintended signs. The opening of dress is based on a kind of figure-ground relation.
The kind of the blank, uncovered part defines not only the respective garments,
but the entire ensemble.
In youthcultures bare parts, cuts and omitted dress have generally a meaning
of an offense against the “normal” order of common dress layers. The history
of youthcultures starts with the reduction of underwear or rather its growing
visibleness: In the movie The Wild One, Marlon Brando wears a white shirt, a
piece of underwear the youth turned into outerwear (Krüger 1985). During the
1950s and 1960s especially the female youth had to wear quite uncomfortable
and weighting dress layers: a complete set consisted of bra, panties, shirt,
petticoat, bodice and suspenders. The visibleness of a piece of underwear was
regarded a personal disaster, for example when the petticoat was showing underneath
the skirt (Rutschky 1996: 148).
During the last decades, the most intimate layers of clothing became more often
and more extensively visible in youthcultures, shrinking finally to a minimum
in the scenes of house and techno: Female outerwear consist often just of underwear
like light tops, bras and shorts, the male upper part of the body is even entirely
bare. The reversal of inner and outer layers of clothing and the loss of the
original meaning of outerwear reaches its peak among punk. The tears and holes
in the outfit of the punks display pale, naked skin and underwear. Beyond this,
a special field of underwear, namely fetish gear, is brought to light, too -
mainly initiated by Malcolm McLaren’s and Vivienne Wetswood’s boutique SEX,
situated on London’s King’s Road.
Additionally, in winter, punk and new wave girls also wear long underpants,
dyed in black (which can be regarded as early leggings) and long sleeved shirts
taken from the repertoire of men’s underwear.
The significance of bare body parts, realized by short tops showing the belly
or by the principle of smallness, is also widely spread among the hippies of
the 1960s. Here not only underwear but also nightgowns raise into outerwear,
as shown in the collections of Mary Quant, converting nightgowns into light
summer dresses.
By the middle of the 1990s the hiphop b-boys let their baggy pants down to the
knees, showing off their designer-underpants. Thereby they reanimate a traditional
aristocratic and bourgeois principle of distinction: white undergarments, with
luxurious lace showing out of the outer garments, indicated that one could afford
a stainless, bright white (Rutschky 1996, 150). Now, instead of lace, the b-boys
show the designer-label. However, the visibility of underwear also causes handicaps.
Similar to the bondage trousers of the punks, the dropping of clothing leads
to a conscious restriction of movement, resulting in a shuffling and rolling
gait.
Subverting gender specific connotations, they unconsciously transform an approved
model of the upper classes of earlier centuries: Because the restriction of
the female body’s movement was a sign of conspicuous leisure, demonstrated by
aristocracy and bourgeoisie (Veblen 1986: 144).
Since the middle of the 1990s a revival of body-shaping underwear can be observed.
The 1970s emphasize the behind and repress the breasts. Big breasts are regarded
a handicap, for a redemption of this natural misfortune the industry produces
minimizing bras (Lurie 1981: 251). And the bra is despised as basically unnatural
among the hippie generation.
Nowadays bras do not return as instruments of repression, but are used to accentuate
the own body forms and to bring them in “right shape”. Push-up or wonderbra
are bloodless corrections, which are (in Europe) still preferred to direct beauty
surgery and silicone implants. Analogously, there are also body-shaping tools
for men, like push-up underpants. In November 1996 Vogue recommends a corset
to bring the body in the perfect shape required for the skintight fashions of
1997 and Hennes & Mauritz offers forming tights and underpants. In their
function as invisible body shapers, lingerie has again a secret or mysterious
meaning. And in the 1990s the whole scale of body images is possible, ranging
from the silicon-tons of Lollo Ferrari down to the girl-like contours of Kate
Moss.
1.3 Fashion principles
Apart from fashion-morphological categories also the basic
sociological mechanisms, characterizing the circulation of specific fashion
elements in society, have to be considered. They will be adapted here to the
requirements of a youth fashion analysis. Polhemus adapts Simmel’s hierarchical
model of class (Simmel 1995: 3) to youthcultures, namely the principle of “trickle
down”. This means, that in a watered down version the ideas of haute couture
“trickle down” to the mass-market. The way leads from the original, exclusive
and elitist item to serial mass-production. However, the principle described
by Simmel (Simmel 1995: 11) must be extended, as it is far too undifferentiated
to describe developments in the working classes of earlier and contemporary
time. As Angela Partington shows, members of the working class consciously make
their own stylistic decisions and do in fact not strive after the compensation
of a bad copy (Partington 1992: 145). As an opposing model, Polhemus adds the
principle of “bubble up”, which introduces also the dimension of generation
into the process of fashion. The tendencies of street fashion, developed by
youthcultures, bubble up and rise into the state of haute couture. Zandra Rhodes’
adaptations of punk and Jean Paul Gaultier’s reminiscences of punk and new wave
are good examples. In the 1990s a characterization via simple, linear mechanisms
is no longer adequate to comprehend the complex interrelations between youthculture
and the fashion sectors of adults. Rather the opposite, because since the 1980s
youthcultures use also quite overtly the repertoire of haute couture. They expropriate
visually salient brand logos and wear either copies of favorite designers or
purchase the originals at any price (see Zeitmagazin on Japanese fashion victims,
September 1997). Some of the couturiers are especially popular among youthcultures
like techno and house, even though they do not offer special young collections
(Dolce & Gabbana, Prada, Helmut Lang). Therefore designers such as Jean
Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen and Walter van Beirendonk,
the enfants terribles of the fashion scene, are positioned or move between the
circles of youthcultures and haute couture.
Hiphop begins with the open and uninhibited citation and absorption of the elitist
signs of haute couture, who have simple and prominent logos (the logo of Mercedes
decorates necklaces, Gucci and Chanel logos are printed on t-shirts). The signs
of unreachable wealth and power are exaggerated by a “blow up” technique. Already
in the 1940s the zoot suit showed a similar strategy of overdoing and excess.
So the members of the black hiphop culture appropriate signs and objects, which
they are - in the eyes of the middle class - not entitled to. In the center
of interest is less a parole like “consumption and enjoyment now” or “designer
labels now”, but the message “I made it” addressed at the community. The citation
of dream images and their transformation via strategies of hyperconsumption
and hyperluxury, can be seen as a proof for the impossibility of this wish’s
realization - due to the social reality in the black communities (see McLaren
1995).
The appropriation of brands proceeds contrary to the strategy, which can be
regarded as a preparation to an expected and realizable luxurious life. For
the US-preppies and yuppies the moment of expropriation or inadequacy, as far
as age is concerned, plays no role. Here designer clothes are an anticipation
of an upcoming situation, because the yuppies of the 1980s, or the popper in
Germany, do not come from low-income backgrounds (Fischer/ Fuchs/ Zinnecker
1981).
Furthermore, youthcultures can be signified according to two contrary mechanisms:
dressing up and dressing down. The new market segments emerging during the 1990s
expand the functions and meanings of everyday-, work-, leisure-wear (dressing
down) and evening wear or “sunday best” (dressing up). Now dress marks the occasion
and not the other way around.
Dressing up and dressing down are commonly understood as class specific dress
practices. “The rich can afford looking poor.” (Angela Carter quoted in McRobbie
1995: 151). As reality shows, Carter’s argument, saying that the black community
and working class prefers dressing up whereas white and middle classes tend
to dress down, is not precisely correct.
Immigrants and lower classes behave in a hyper fashion conscious manner and
show off an over-fulfilling of a fashion-debit. Lower income classes tend to
utilize more rarely militaristic attributes or clothing which stem obviously
from the own work context. But regarding hiphop this must be relativized. Dressing
down turns here into dressing up with casuals, work- and sportswear. Thus protective
clothing, commonly characterized as plain and purely practical (Lurie 1981:
28) gets a new status.
Youthful work-, street-, and sportswear is a subversion of the dressing down
principle, because one is dressing up with simple and functional garments. Sportswear
is favorably worn because it has obvious functional elements, which are intended
to protect the body during exercise. By stripping it of its original function
and transferring it into a new context, sportswear gets an aesthetic intrinsic
value. The variety of sports offers an increasing range of stylistic elements
and there are many interdependencies between sports and subcultures (skater,
surfer, inline, snowboard). In sportive subcultures dress has first of all a
direct function: the breakdancer can optimize his headspin with particular caps
and hoods, the skater has special trainers with toe-caps, which resist grinding.
In the stage of popularization and extension of the style these clothes can
also be seen among people who do not practice skateboarding or snowboarding.
The growing significance of sports, following an American model, leads to a
transfer of elements from one to another area: sports wanders into leisure wear.
The sportive collections of Tommy Hilfiger and Helly Hansen are very recent
examples. So alongside the blurring of boundaries between dressing up and down,
clothes that is originally related to particular sporting activities are defunctionalized.
Youth fashions are always a combination of practical garments suitable to the
style and its activities and disfunctional elements, appropriated from other
areas, which can also be hindering.
Sportswear can be regarded as dressing up for leisure time. This is clearly
differentiated from dressing down for leisure time, as practiced for example
by certain people of the elder generation, who wear in their leisure time jogging
combinations made of artificial silk in bright colors. Dressing down in youthculture
must also be distinguished from dress regulations enacted from the top of white
collar jobs: in the age of information technology they transform “dressing down”
via (expensive) casual clothing for business, following the rule “dress up for
dress down day”.
Dressing up and down can also be seen in the juxtaposition of new and used clothes.
The elder generation regards secondhand clothing as “dressing down”, because
the garments are old and used. On the contrary, nearly all youthcultures live
on the repertoire of the past, supplied on secondhand markets and in charity
shops. Since the 1980s there is a huge network of secondhand shops and rag-fairs
(McRobbie 1995: 143). It furnishes the young with raw material for new styles
(McRobbie 1995: 135). Also many wardrobes and cellars of parents have a promising
stock of old garments, which can be utilized as new stylistic elements. In the
1960s the secondhand clothing of hippies is an intentional affront against the
conservative clothing manner of the adult generation. It causes a revival of
natural materials and clothes like sheepskin coats. Also old uniforms and model
dresses are rediscovered. However, at that time the majority of people associates
used dress with need, poverty and with rag-pickers living on the street - connotations
which are consciously picked up by the youth. Nowadays the archaeological search
for the traces and survivals of past fashions is widespread and has lost its
disreputable character. Today a particularly exotic item from the rag-market
is a prove of taste, knowledge and meticulous searching, but not a sign of social
decline.
Generally, dressing up can be seen as an overemphasis or exaggeration of the
existing dress code, which is realized for example by the distortion of proportions.
Sufficient for the creation of an ideal style form (hiphop, teds, rockabillies,
gothics, mods) are more or less conventional dress, also historic reminiscences
(details are highly important) and a precise arrangement of the garments. A
great importance is attached to cleanliness and a proper order of garments.
Nonetheless, dressing up differs indeed from the habits of the elder generations,
as hiphop shows. For the older people in black communities dressing up implies
“sunday best”, whereas for members of the hiphop culture dressing up means cool
tracking suits and sneakers. Therefore, dressing down in youthcultures aims
at the destruction of existing dress codes. With torn clothes or “wrong” combinations
they introduce new categories of order. In Alison Lurie’s understanding of dress
as language, dressing down is here then synonymous with vulgar words (Lurie
1981: 8). Among the independent and sport styles, like punk, heavy metal, rockers
or skaters, dress has to look ragged and worn. The history of many failures
and hard training on the street must be engraved into the surface.
Youth fashions are essentially quite universal, showing no real differentiation
of dress for particular occasions. A resistance of dressing up for a special
situation bears not rarely potential for family conflicts. The clothing style
is so closely connected with the representation of the own persona, that it
is perceived as suitable for any context. Clubwear, however, is an exception,
because it integrates various elements from street-, sports-, and workwear.
Even though it is also worn in everyday contexts, it is primarily intended for
the context of clubbing. Thereby the concept of dressing up sneaks back into
youthcultures like techno and house, however, now it is a self-defined principle,
regulated via style internal agreements.
2.
“Plastic soul junkies”: The fashion of the techno and house-scene
Young people who belong to the techno and house scene regard
themselves usually as individualists, they refuse to categorize themselves neither
through style designations nor through particular models. This can also be seen
in the fact, that many youthcultural fashion elements are no longer restricted
to one specific style, but wander between the styles, like workwear or old school
training jackets, which are worn in hiphop as well as in techno.
Since the beginning of this movement more then ten years ago, the techno and
house-scene coexists in an authentic underground as well as an commercial mainstream.
The symbolism which characterized the style in its time of origin, like the
shrill neon colors is reproduced in mass. By the end of the 1990s a counter
movement of producers, which grew out of the scene and always tried to escape
commercial marketing, lay upon minimalism in form and color: Using plain, subdued
colors and disclaiming spectacular and large prints.
To the untrained eye the techno and house-scene appears like an excess of a
random eclecticism. In opposite to former styles, the repertoire for citations
and borrowings has now obviously expanded. It will be the task of the following
paragraphs to show, that dress in the context of the entire style follows particular
rules and creates time-specific forms, which can be read as a comment to social
reality.
2.1
Structural principles
The particularities of this dress style will now be worked
out on the basis of the creative principles of the techno-style, which characterize
the visual field as well as the field of music.
Essential techniques like transformation and modulation are less a break with
the foregoing, or a juxtaposition of the disparate, but rather a creation of
variants - with little but therefore very significant differences. For the production
of variants Photoshop or Roland TB 303 filters present typical instruments for
modulation. In the context of dress, modulation and transformation are mainly
applied to brand logos, which are printed on “basics”. The brand logo is looped
analogously to music and forms an invariant core. Size, color and fabric make
up the differentiations from the original or from the brand logo expropriated
via adbusting.
Another principle is artificiality: Sleeping and awake sequences are structured
in a new order that ignores the natural rhythm or separation of life into day
and night. The parole of excessive dance through runs counter to the bourgeois
week schedule, allocating the weekend the function of rest and recovery. As
the music is computer generated, it is artificial, too. The pitching of natural
voices generate childlike tones, reminding of Mickey Mouse (as in gabber). Further
hints to the synthetic as well as the technical can be found in the artificial
childhood of the girlie-look, in dyed hair, wrong lashes, shrill neon colors
and materials, like extravagant high-tech polymers in dress. There are actually
parallels to the color ecstasy back in the first decade of the 20th
century, when fashion, stimulated by the futurists, preferred colors with an
artificial expression, such as violet, orange, purple and jade-green.
In the techno and house-scene nature always appears in plastic versions, like
sunflowers or artificial lawn. The emphasis lies on special, man-made and chemically
produced materials - heavy duty stuff - which is extremely durable, non inflammable
and resistant to water, acid or oil.
Further principles are self-containment and stylistic hermetic in the culmination
of events, the rave or club night. The spaces of the techno- and house-scene
are like isolated laboratories, in which the various combinations of party people
are tested to create the right “chemistry” for the night. This hermetic is also
based on specific criteria of exclusion, differentiated according to dress-style.
Like all other subcultures techno, too, claims equality within the style. But
the postulation of equality functions only on a style intern level. In the moment
of an event social differences, such as class and gender, are in fact deactivated.
However, in advance to this, there are strict and steady selection principles
regulating the entry. The door politics of the clubscene generates a different
social order. Via the establishment of internal style hierarchies the scene
is subdivided into a manipulative dancing crowd (comparable to the users of
computers) and into a privileged producing elite: Analogous to computer programmers
these are DJs and producers. In the market these internal style hierarchies
are expressed by certain groups of commodities: The cd-compilation is targeted
at users whereas vinyl pressings or the White Label are produced for the practicing
DJ. Hobby mixer and Technics reproductions are aimed at the hobby-DJ and the
original Technics SL 1200 Mk 2 is used by the professional. These kind of hierarchies
are less expressed in fashion than in institutions like VIP lounges and VIP
cards and face control or door politics.
In addition to the social subdivisions in the scene, the individual tends to
shield the body from external influences with special accessories and materials:
Skintight, and partly impermeable surfaces like neoprene, latex, PVC and leather
or objects like lollipops, dummies or gas-masks shut the body orifices and conserve
the body like a mummy, delimiting it against a body-hostile surrounding. Keeping
the body fit for the event, by saving its energy and temperature, similar to
a diving- or space suit, is an apparently quite paradoxical practice, because
it forces and intensifies the process of “radiation” and ecstasy caused by drugs
and heat. For dancing excesses workwear is rather disfunctional, due to the
solid quality of the durable and protective materials people literally wear
themselves out in them (Beat Wyss 1981). This is similar to the flared worker’s
pants, they do not only indicate a loss of functionality in workwear, moreover
they present a direct hindrance for work and thus and a safety risk.
The reduction of sight through dark shades and protective glasses used for welding,
the limitation of olfactory nerve and breathing via gas or dust-masks and the
restriction of movement and dancing through bulky plateau shoes change the perception.
This “material” limitation of perception runs counter to an “immaterial” mind-expansion
achieved through chemical aids, like substances for inhaling (Wick Vaporup)
and designer drugs.
This kind of dress generates associations, which lead far beyond the basic material
level. Simultaneously, they are an imaginary protection against invisible “immaterial”
dangers like radiation (laser or x-ray) and chemical substances (acids), but
also a conscious exposure to risks: An expression for the effect of drugs is
“Verstrahltsein”, a German world indicating radioactive contamination (one of
the music styles is not only because of the tones of the 303 machine called
“acid”).
Literal superficiality is the next structural principle, from which the two
further principles “reflection” and “layer” can be derived. The entire clothing,
even arm holes and lining, is designed on a surface structure via imprints,
applications and layout. Here design reaches no longer into a deep structure.
Specialized high-tech materials turn the bodies into reflecting and communicative
surfaces - somehow positioned between billboard and screen, and moving between
the color-walls of light installations.
Layers are also produced by mix and remix techniques in the endless tracks of
sound carpets which produce overlappings and interweavings. Also the organizational
structure of the style is set up as a layer. Labels, record as well as clubwear
companies, represent with many sub-labels also a layered, non-hierarchical structure.
Layers in dress are produced by the connection and overlapping of particular
time-specific elements, for example when the historic survival from the secondhand
market is combined with futuristic high-tech materials. Layers are also formed,
when numerous garments, like t-shirts, are worn on top of the other. Tied around
the waist, like an apron over trousers, the prints are still kept visible. Clothing
layers are turned upside down, when bras and skinny undershirts turn into visible
party-dress.
Similar to the design of flyers layers are superficial, remaining two-dimensional.
Emblems in the form of logos and brand signs are the only point of dress, which
develops certain three-dimensional effects, for example in case of blinking
labels or op-art structures.
Reflecting labels and neon colors correspond to the structural principle of
radiation and visibility. The individual appears like a light-object. Shiny
materials reflect the light and transform the body into a projecting surface,
which sends simulated and even real light signals. Non-verbal forms of communication,
like gesture in dance, send and receive signals, too. An exchange of information
and energy becomes in techno highly visible through reflections: Dress is electrified
by punctual blinking and turns the body into a temporal vision of light. This
kind of metamorphosis is a sign for the voluntary transformation into an immaterial
appearance, flying across spaces. Fluorescent objects, as a necklace or stick
hold in the hand and laser-pointers reinforce this impression.
Material presence is alternately interrupted and accentuated. Communication
with others is kept in distance and at the same time wanted. Due to their own
transitoriness as a vision of light, flashing and reflecting materials are no
paradoxical remedies against the fleetness of the body within the virtual space
of the rave - but instead, they display the ambiguity of bodily presence in
virtual spaces.
2.2
Symbolic representation
By the expropriation of objects and structures, the fashion
of the techno and house scene produces a very disparate field of references,
which refers to diverse areas of function in society.
The central area of reference, connected to all others, is the area of work.
Its adaptation in workwear integrates also the forms of protective wear. They
are durable and robust products, easily purchasable on the mass-market (Doc
Martens, carhartt, Dickies) and which are relatively cheap in the U.S. When
youthcultures discover these commodities for their styles, they often become
expensive prestige objects. There are two contrary spheres of production visible,
and with them the past and the future of work: The clean and sterile high-tech
production of processors and microchips, a work in weightless respectively virtual
worlds, with accessories like white gloves, and parallel the traditional field
of craft, or rather machine supported bodily work, with heavy, bulky protective
wear, gas- and dusk-masks and protective glasses.
Workwear visualizes the step from concrete to immaterial work. The reflector
jackets of street cleaners, canalization workers, road workers and autobahn
service or the boots of construction workers (like Caterpillar Walking Machines)
promise the event of “real” bodily, though low paid and low valued work. Apart
from its warning colors and reflecting applications, the jacket of the street-cleaner
is especially interesting, because it indicates the discrepancy between the
dying industrial work, high-tech work for a limited number of “elected” people
and low service “Mcjobs”. But workwear can also be found among other youthcultures.
In the 1980s new wavers wear roofer’s shoes, the hippies and the ecological
movement use overalls and undershirts, the punks utilize worker’s boots with
toe-caps made by Doc Martens. Also the flares of the 1970s, the so called Manchester
trousers, originate in the area of workwear.
Beyond the references to industrial work, the symbolism of techno clothing is
also taken from extreme situations like emergency, accident, catastrophe or
dangerous substances - representing another specific work field. Concrete borrowings
stem from the field of public security, police, fire-workers, first-aid doctors,
national security and drug police. British and American elements are especially
utilized, because of the more shrill colors. Catastrophes and permanent emergency
are “normality” during an event, as the siren, the rave signal and terms like
mayday show. Thus techno is a preparation for survival in extreme situations.
The collections of Daniel Poole offer survival packs and jackets, enabling a
person to wear everything directly on the body - in a sense of an urban support
system.
Workwear gets a rather utopian character, when it refers to the future work
in space. Visual ciphers from old science fiction novels and movies, and recently
also from the Japanese manga comics, present here the main means of stylization.
As “utopian dress” (Loschek) futuristic elements form a new direction in the
fashion of the 1960s, alongside miniskirts and hot-pants: In 1966 Courreges
launches silver space clothes, Pierre Cardin creates transparent boots and Paco
Rabanne’s dresses are made of plastic rhombus connected with metal hooks. The
movie Barbarella, produced in 1968, can be seen as a model for the space-look
now popular in the techno-scene. It features Jane Fonda in artificial and at
the same time seductive dress with transparent plastic holes. Television series
give another, highly important creative input to youthcultural style creations.
The techno and house-scene wears uniform-like shirts, as if they have jumped
out of spaceship Enterprise or Orion.
Further visual formulas referring to future and extraterrestrial life, are all
the emblems showing motives like stars and planets, rockets, spaceships, cockpits
or the stylized head of alien Roswell. Furthermore, the literary figure of the
cyber punk turns into a direct model of fashion. This is mainly because of his
outlaw image and strive after autonomy, uncoupled from the hegemony of economic
power. The punk parole “no future” is altered into “our future” - and the only
option to maintain in a technologically dominated society is the appropriation
of technology for own purposes.
Another area of reference is sport. Sport turns into work, into an endlessly
perpetuating marathon. Sportswear is either directly appropriated respectively
reanimated, like the blue Adidas jackets from the 1970s, or adopted in single
striking elements, like stripes on sleeves. The collections of Fila, Helly Hansen
and Tommy Hilfiger are highly popular because of the signaling character of
primary colors and the pure shape of the brand logos. As outdoor garments they
are made of simple, catchy forms and high-tech materials. Further areas of reference
in sport are motorcross (like the trousers and jackets worn by Sven Väth in
the middle of the 1990s) sailing (jackets and t-shirts), snowboarding (shoes
and glasses), football (strips as loveparade t-shirts), skiing (old jackets
from the 1970s) and skating (shoes and trousers).
It is remarkable, that especially the garments for outdoor activities are utilized.
The use of this clothing is not really appropriate for warm indoor spaces and
can therefore be seen as indicative for shifting outdoors into indoors. The
exterior enters into the interior when world and public space are (via internet)
connected with indoor spaces like cafes or clubs.
2.2.1
Fun-guerrilla and profanation: Military elements in youthcultures
Also military combat gear loses its function within doors.
Uniform elements became very important style components in all post-war youthcultures
(see also Poschardt 1998). McRobbie dates the begin of the utilization of military
clothing back to the hippies of the 1960s. Actually, the youtcultural usage
of uniform pieces goes back to the 1950s.
“Military uniforms were first found alongside the overalls
and great-coats in army surplus stores and on second-hand rails of shops....theme
in the counter-culture suggesting interest in the old, the used, the overtly
cheap and apparently unstylish.”
(McRobbie 1995:
137)
The uniform is an extreme form of conventional clothing. Its original function
is to impress or frighten the enemy during direct conflict (Lurie 1981: 20).
For this reason uniforms are kept in loud and flashy colors until the First
World War. Afterwards the aspect of concealment and camouflage is of primary
importance. Military pieces of dress are chosen by youthcultures, similar to
workwear, because of financial or practical reasons. Functionality and durability
of materials play an important role. However, the camouflage aspect is here
of less significance, instead the net of connotations, into which a military
garment is woven, as well as its immediate aesthetic effect is highly important.
Military stands for a particularly strict order in society. With the use or
appropriation of military accessories youthcultures express their opposition
to society. The military dress is deprived of their “frightening dignity” by
direct alterations like inscriptions, tears or the combination with rather contrasting
garments, like underwear. Hippies marked their military parkas with peace-signs,
symbols opposing militarism and the governmental authority. Inscriptions and
badges desecrate uniform elements. Another strategy is to render them useless
of their original function, for example by changing the colors of camouflage-suits.
Violet, red or orange patterns no longer serve concealment and camouflage, instead
they draw the attention to the wearer. In this they also refer to the military
strategy of dazzling the opponent side. The intention of dazzle paintings (a
protection paint for ships used in the First World War) was not to make the
ships invisible, but to irritate and confuse the enemy’s perception.
It is remarkable, though not surprising, that youthcultures use only rarely
the complete uniforms of a higher rank or a complete combat gear. This would
be directly associated with military megalomania and obedience. Significantly,
precisely for this reason, these garments are chosen by right wing youthcultures,
like nazi-skinheads. They are willed to demonstrate aggression, a nationalistic
attitude, patriarchal power, group membership and a return to “old values”.
Another exception is Public Enemy’s combat style and the aggression among the
visual language of many gangsta-rappers, who work consciously with military
elements to underline their readiness to fight for the Nation of Islam and the
Fivepercenters.
Among gay cultures, in the context of sado-masochistic plays, uniform pieces
serve the connotation of subordination and unlimited power. They are used to
exaggerate and overdo the heterosexual image of manliness.
All the other youthcultures usually play with only single military elements.
Neither do they understand them in a literal sense nor do they take them serious.
A brief overview on the forms of direct appropriations of military dress can
show this: Accessories like sunglasses are originally a military item. Today
they function as certificate of coolness and are either worn on the nose or
on the top of the head decorating the hair (since the 1970s). Sunglasses were
developed for pilots in the 1920s as a protection against the harsh light during
high flying altitude, which caused headache and sickness. The forerunner of
the legendary Ray Ban with green wad and Lomb glasses, made in 1937, was developed
for the U.S.-Marines.
In the manner of Marlon Brando in “The Wild One”, the young “rowdies” of the
1950s wear pilot jackets of the Second World War, model Perfecto Bronx, produced
by Schott, New York. In the 1960s, the British mods prefer oversize parkas with
US Airforce emblems. Their opponents, the rockers, in contrast wear Wehrmacht
helmets and emblems. The peace-loving hippies return to army parkas in the 1970s.
The punk style consists of a whole range of military garments: army trousers,
often dyed, with many pockets, army boots and Doc Martens worker boots, camouflage
prints, cartridge belts and long, dark-green coats formerly worn by the Gestapo.
The aspect of functionality, the price and durability - appropriate to the life
in the streets - plays a very important part in the punk streetstyle. Additionally,
another meaningful function of military elements among the punks is the reinforcement
of a distanced but non the less threatening habitus. The new wavers of the 1980s
differentiate the style of the punks further, by wearing short, black or gray
wool jackets with the Swiss cross on the buttons, they were originally worn
by the Swiss mountain infantry.
Calf-high Doc Martens with 18 holes and bomber-jackets are a reference to aggression
and male combat-readiness among the male skinheads. Female punks wear ankle-high
Doc Martens and army trousers as a practical demonstration of a different and
autonomous female role. Female punks are also the first to introduce a combination
of raw military footwear worn with a skirt or dress. Even if this is today fully
absorbed by fashion, in the late 1970s and early 80s women in high and bulky
boots are still scorn because of their “unwomanliness”. In the 1990s military
accessories are a direct expression of girls’ aggressiveness and combat-readiness,
as displayed by the cartoon character Tankgirl or by the riot grrrls.
Like in many other youthcultures, also techno and house involve military discourses,
reinterpreting them as aesthetic phenomena. Around 1994 and 1995 camouflage
patterns, visible in many youthcultures (punk, skinhead, hiphop, rastafari)
in diverse patterns and color combinations, are also particularly significant
in techno. The camouflage aspect is subverted by producing the pattern in a
wide range of flashy colors, and by applying it to all sorts of garments, including
shoes and skirts. In the middle of the 1990s, winter or snow camouflage is very
popular. Outside of a snow-capped surrounding this pattern is extremely salient.
Therefore, camouflage is not used to hide oneself, but to arouse attention.
Visibility is the motto on events. The use of other colors can cause the contrary
effect, namely getting invisible in the crowd on the dancefloor.
So in techno and house the aggressive touch of camouflage gets annulled. The
operational area is the party-battlefield. These actions are all an expression
of the fun-guerrilla. They conquer urban space following the Beastie Boys’ motto
“You gotta fight for your right to party!”
However, to be able to realize the progress of time within the dark space of
the party, there is a renaissance of digital watches with fluorescent faces,
like Casio’s G-shock. They are a reference to the clock-faces of pilot watches
with self-reflecting radium. Further military elements are neon-colors, which
have a function similar to signal rockets: they show a person’s positioning
in the space of the event and send a sign of presence. Fixing something with
the laser-pointer corresponds to the targeting with infrared and laser weapons:
they no longer fix objects through the reticule, but focus and mark them via
a red laser spot. This is an additional, technical way of communication in the
party-context, an immaterial, nearly telepresent method to tip on somebody’s
shoulder.
“Obviously the people with their motorial, sensorial and
intellectual equipment, are not really made to lead high-technological wars.
Since the First World War velocity and acceleration (to speak in Virilio’s words)
force to the establishment of special institutions, teaching the slow people
new forms of perception... In the intervening periods, that is, when war does
not pass in real time, presumably rock-concerts and discotheques play the part
of training-camps, which break through the threshold of perception.”
(Kittler 1989:
112)
Kittler’s description can be attached to diverse aesthetic and musical phenomena:
The stomping rhythm reminds to marching, samples imitate the noise of battle
and rifle fire, the rave signal resembles a military alarm signal. The special
light effects, the reduction of the color spectrum and the concentration on
white light, either produced by stroboscope-flashes resembling dazzle-rockets
or big searchlight-projectors, constructing a carpet of light, are similar to
the anti-aircraft rays of Albert Speer’s light-dome, however minimized and turned
down about ninety degrees.
To the eyes of outsiders, techno exposes the dancers to extreme conditions,
which are however not perceived as exceptional by the members of the style.
This is the serious side of the training towards new worlds of perceptions.
The other side is the fun-side: pasteboard tanks (Berlin Ensemble 1997 and Rake
ten: Camel The Move 1994, record label DJAX Up beats loveparade 1997) and military
vehicles are popular motives for lorries on parades like Street Parade in Zurich
and Love Parade in Berlin - who are not incidentally called parades and refer
in themselves to something military. However, together with camouflage and water
filled pump-guns (supersoaker) they represent a rather obsolete military area.
Blinking dress elements and laser-pointer hint to the future direction of military
transformation: The visible forms of weapons are turned into toys - the weapons
of the future will no longer be visible.
2.2.2
The infantile and the androgynous
The reference area of childhood shows a willful, stylistic
step outside of the adult world. The rejection of aging and the cultivation
of a shrill and child-like taste form the basis of a prejudice-free get together
and a feeling of safety in the big substitute family of the event.
As a fashionable element the recourse to child-like elements is nothing new.
Oskar Wild wore a suit which was perceived as infantile, the so called Lord
Fauntleroy suit, which consisted of short trousers and a velvet jacket (Lurie
1981: 44). Even today adults tend to dress for leisure activities or during
holiday like little children. They wear shapeless garments, which can be easily
put on, like jogging-pants with elastic waistbands or shoes with velcro fastenings.
This “temporary childwear” (Lurie 1981: 58) contains of the traditional materials
of children’s clothing, like cotton, jersey, baby colors and cute patterns.
As decades later in the techno- and house-scene, also the women of the 1960s
look like children. Make-up and haircut produce a big head with big baby eyes.
The childlike body is constructed through simple clothing shapes, like mini-dresses
and baby-doll, slip-dresses and geometric forms. This impression is further
increased by the beauty ideal of the time, a thin body with slim legs and skinny
torso. Elements of children’s wear can also be seen among men, wearing jackets
without lapels, anoraks, chords, turtlenecks and bright colors. For Lurie these
infantile elements in fashion are a sign of an economically secure time. By
the time of the recession at the end of the 1970s infantilism is for a while
out of fashion (Lurie 1981: 81/83).
All of the described elements are now revived in the club- and event-scene,
labeled as girlie, cutie and babe. Heidi-plaits, hair-slides, the miniaturization
of accessories like backpack and rucksack, toys (waterpistols) and sweets as
necklaces are significant components of this style. The infantile look is complex,
the entire children’s world is ready for disposition. Even drugs like ecstasy
pills get a child-like face, displaying smileys, Fred Firestone, dinosaurs or
dolphins.
The girlie image in the context of the techno- and house-scene is not a construction
of an individualistic, anti-feminist social climate (Graw 1997: 80). Instead
of a regressive step, it is the creation of a safety-space for girls and young
women. The indicated accusation applies only to the media-images of girlies,
which have to be seen in close connection with commercial interests. Girls and
women symbolize with the original girlie concept, with an infantile, pre-sexual
outfit, an innocent and at the same time an autonomous engagement with their
body. They signal, that sexual attraction is not the aim of this partly body
exposure. By categorizing themselves as child-like, they display the wish to
be left alone. To men this presentation signals a taboo-zone. And many men wear
as well necklaces with wooden pearls, known from childhood and engage as fun
guerrilla in children’s pleasures, armed with plastic pump-guns and colored
water-pistols. The recourse to infantile elements allows men to get rid of the
macho postures for being sexually impressive and experience instead a rather
free or playful relation the other sex.
However, there are also different body concepts and practices integrated into
the house and techno-scene, adopted for example from the gay or fetish cultures.
Incorporating androgynous elements, particularly male body images tend to blur
gender boundaries visually. Fashion blurs the crusted structures of gender constructions,
even when the androgynous forms serve only an aesthetic differentiation. Men
who wear make-up or skirts are often still stuck in these experimental poses.
Only very few of them are real cross-dressers, transvestites or drags. Gay posing
becomes fashion, alongside a coquettish play with bisexuality a la Madonna or
Denis Rodman. However, it is decisive for the laboratory of the techno-event
and house-club, that the visual experiments towards a re-coding of the male
body is eventually possible.
Because of a wider and more differentiated range of styles, men are usually
the trendsetters of the scene, like in hiphop. In techno and house many men
also tend to cross the borderlines of gender and style. In contrast, with the
exception of the girlie-look, women’s wear in techno, develops no autonomous
line, but is often a “gendered” copy of men’s wear (like Adidas mini-dresses
and Puma trainers with high heels). So a crossing of gender-boundaries by girls
can only be seen in transformed sportswear and in bulky shoes, however, significant
is also the adaptation of a gay dance style. But nonetheless, there is no connection
to female androgyny, as it could be seen in the 1920s among the garconne, the
seductress who flattened her breasts with bandages to get a boyish appearance.
Men are on their way to become fashion victims and in their narcissistic poses
they touch on the style strategies of the gay-scene, as described in movies
like “Paris is burning” or in “vogueing”. The changes in male body images and
experiences is mainly initiated by the cultural practices of gay, black minorities
in the U.S., transferred to Europe by the early acid house scene and the house
clubs of the 1990s. In the techno- and house culture they are regarded as opinion
leaders. Because of a mixture of street credibility, black coolness and gay
dancing ecstasy they stand for an authentic party culture (see Poschardt 1995:
246).
“Urban blacks are the dandies of today, the true heirs
of Beau Brummel; their “boss vines” show a concern for fit and detail rare elsewhere,
and a talent for daring combination of color and fabric that a professional
designer might envy.”
(Lurie 1981:
98)
The plushy and kitsch-like interior of many house-clubs, with gold, brocade
and a preference for cheesy devotional articles is mainly stimulated through
the creative means of travesty, the artificial and ecstatic exaggeration of
femininity. Alongside the unveiling of the fragile construction of visual gender
norms, the cross-dressing strategies of this scene refer to media-technological
techniques, like gender-switching or bending, popular in the internet (see Stone
1996: 65).
2.2.3
Retro, revival, old school
Beyond the techniques of cross-dressing techno and house
work with the symbolism of super-high-tech, orientated towards the future but
juxtaposed with three retrograde forms: retro, old school and revival.
Retro means here the imitation of elements or complete dress ensembles of past
decades, as a nostalgic retrospect to the past. Barbara Burman-Baines differentiates
classical, rural, historical and exotic revivals. She signifies revival as a
form of retrospection, which is characterized not by change but by the search
for lost values like simplicity, the natural and classical severity (Baines
1991: 10). With respect to the youthcultures’ engagement in historical elements
the term retro is more suitable to comprehend the unchanged, nostalgic recourse.
Because revival already etymologically incorporates the dimension of change
within a revival. It is not intended to preserve styles and stylistic features,
instead they are open to changes and alterations. An actualization happens also
via the release and reintroduction of original forms, materials and glossy fabrics
like satin, lurex or PVC, which were highly popular among the disco-scene of
the 1970s and are now incorporated into the new context of club-culture.
Disco-revival is an attempt towards the establishment of an anti-fashion. Anyway,
the resistance of fashion produces regularly new fashions. An apparently overcome
aesthetic faux pas, some part of the generation in the 1970s felt helplessly
exposed to, returns in all of its disproportionality, disfunctionality and
contrariness of tight and oversize forms. Flares, gogo-dancers and rounded or
extremely long collars find their way into the actual house club-culture. The
recognizable shrill, high-tech fabrics are juxtaposed by the proletarian, square
and “bad taste” of the 1970s. The bulkiness and misshape of forms such as over-dimensional
flares, plateau-shoes and poly-fibers make an especially traumatic reappearance.
The janitor-look - consisting of training jackets, undershirts, proper polyacryl
jumpers in beige- brown and a haircut with proper parting - is, if at all, only
very late recognized as subversion. In the overfulfillment of a rather conform
and proper style, the look seems to correspond to an accused escapism. However,
with reference to the ecstatic style of the British mods, this uptight style
is clearly differentiated from the success orientated and expensive conformity
of the yuppies back in the 1980s. Because here they use the overtly unspectacular,
not the labeled, but the proletarian common article.
The mentioned revival elements are a sign for the simultaneity of the different
time levels - past, present and future - which are now synthesized in one style.
A completely different form of self-referentiality or retrospection, in distinction
to the aforementioned modulations of the past, is presented by the so called
old school phenomenon, which appeared for the first time among techno and hiphop.
This is a style-internal revival, produced by the recourse to the archetypes
of the own style during its time of origin and demonstrates the autopoiesis
of youthcultural systems.
2.3
Simultaneity of the contrary
One characteristic feature of the contemporary house- and
techno culture is an (unconsciously generated) dialectical relation of contrasts,
quite in the sense of Adorno. The sixes xxs and xxl exist parallel, however,
not without causing a special tension. Tight and small dresses in children’s
sizes appear alongside extremely wide and baggy clothing, as common among hiphop.
Oversize xxl is produced by the amount of fabric, not by applications or linings.
Particularly eye-catching is the re-occupation of the object, with a strong
emphasis on the material and its qualities for a differentiation of products,
and the use of particular durable and raw special materials.
Another contrast is the “naturality” of the naked male torso and the partly
bare female body or the natural fabrics and ethnic symbolism (introduced via
musical directions such as goa) in opposite to the entirely synthetic dancing
context. The direct manipulation and inscriptions into the surface of the body,
via tattoo and piercing, produce a contrast between the “restored” primitive
body and the technological music, lighting and spatial surrounding.
Nudity and exposure do not display a “natural” body, but a body who’s surface
has been designed by workout and wonderbra, illustrating the potential constructiveness
of bodily images. The upheaval towards a maximum robotization and the forcing
of alienation can also be traced in phenomena such as hybrid plateau-trainers.
For a better visibility already the actors in the Greek tragedy wear stage-shoes
with high soles, the so called cothurne. And the Venetian courtesans of the
15th century are not even able to walk in their high plateau shoes
(zoccoli) without assistance. Depending on somebody for support, they confirm
Veblens’s thesis of the women as valuable property (Veblen 1986: 144). The actual
form of the plateau shoe, the Monsterlette, produced by Buffalo Boots, is a
hybrid between a calf-high plateau boot, sneaker and the snow- or moon-boot
of the 1970s. Although they are extremely high, these shoes do not have a fetish
character. Because they do not show the fragility of high heels, they assign
the wearer not the image of a dangerous seductress. In contrast, the Monsterlette
connects the wearer securely with the ground, signaling autonomy instead of
a helpless female need for protection. Though in the case of techno and house,
bulky footwear indicate “take off” as well as being down to earth. Like the
astronaut returning from space or virtual reality, men and women experience
via their footwear - after an event back on earth - the everyday reality. Their
footwear and balloon-like clothing, resembling Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet,
turns them into mutants incapable of moving. This is closely linked to another
aspect of simultaneous contrasts: traveling between absolute freedom of corporeality,
floating to the music (“fly”) and the conscious hindrance of corporal freedom
by heavy boots and insulating garments.
2.4
Micro-society of the future
Music, as a connecting element, produces temporarily a higher
state of consciousness, a take off from the finite, corporal worlds. This corresponds
with the utopias of the new technologies, aiming at the body’s preparation towards
a life in space (see Extropy Institute, Max More: http://www.primenet.com/maxmore/).
Motives like astronauts, cyborgs and aliens open up a huge spectrum of new corporal
worlds, ranging from the discovery of new living forms up to the desire of being
oneself extraterrestrial or of leaving the human system and turn into a technoid
machine. The symbolical robotization of the human body leads to an identification
with alien and non-humane forms. In that sense, glaring hair colors, common
among the scene, do not serve any ideas of provocation (as among punk), but
as an extension of the too small color range of natural hair. Thus they can
be understood as a hint or attempt towards a new specie. The insect-glasses
of the late 1990s produced by Global Eye Wear or Funk (although over-size “frog”
glasses are around since 1967) conceal the face and construct an image of an
extraterrestrial being. They can also be compared to head mounted displays.
“Additional eye-lights”, small lamps, positioned right beside the eyes (as used
in Orbital performances) are a further instrument for the creation of an extraterrestrial
look.
The techno- and house-scene generates a closed symbolic system. As an autopoietical
system it can be transferred to many places all over the world. The style coexists
with work, both are no longer incompatible, as in the case of punk. As parallel
worlds they are even partly structured identical. They serve the training of
a new form of living, a simultaneous existence in many paralleling natural and
virtual worlds. The important segments of society, like work, leisure, sports,
combat, war, executive, emergency, technology are in the scope of a non-stationary
micro society shifted, respectively represented in distortion. Furthermore,
the scene synthesizes a combination of primitive and “civilized” living forms,
thus societies from various epochs.
However, as any other form of society, the techno- and house-scene has a hierarchy
and is a distortion mirror of the characteristics and structures of the adult
world. In the deconstructional manner of the architects Eisenmann or Liebeskind,
the values of society are decentralized exaggerated or consciously filled with
senseless voids.
The scene refers via symbols and emblems abstractly to the future and the world
of technology. Flashing applications on dress, small lights, shining lollipops,
laser-pointer and numerous other reflecting and radiating objects are low-complex
technologies. Thereby the scene constructs unconsciously an image of new technology
with infantile means. They test the images of tomorrow in a childish-naive and
playful manner, stepping into the future in a rather child-like nature. As described
above, with the help of toys, dress and accessories, future as well as war
and evil are symbolized in a child’s view.
During the event the techno- and house scene simulates on a pre-technological
level the existence in a material-corporal world, which is determined by immaterial
impulses and stimuli. As analyzed, the shift between material and immaterial
happens abstract-symbolically via medial clothing, similar to concrete techniques
like wearable computing. Above that, the scene tests a further characteristic
of the future, which is an important criterion of wearables, too: They wear/carry
anything directly with their body, chain purses, small backpacks or Daniel Poole
survival packs.
3.
Technology u wear: Wearable computing and dress-networks
“We wear clothes, put on jewelry, sit on chairs, and walk
on carpets that all share the same profound failing: they are blind, deaf and
very dumb. Cuff links don’t in fact, link with anything else. Fabrics look pretty,
but should have brain, too. Glasses help sight, but they don’t see. Hardware
and software should merge into “underware”. Your shoes should be retrieving
the day’s personalized news from the carpet before you even have time to take
off your coat.”
(Quote from
Visions site, Think That Think, MIT Lab October 1997, see also Negroponte 1995:
13)
Since the beginning of the 1990s especially American projects
research on “wearable computing” in short “wearables” (URL: http://wearables.www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearables/FAQ/FAQ.txt;
version 1.0, August 28th, 1997) examining how mobile media-technology
can be worn directly on the body and become connected. The integration of technical
instruments (wearables) into the clothing layers produces an external - at the
moment still visible - technological layer or envelope. This is going to have
a basic influence on the human’s bodily senses and perception, producing even
a new skin ego (Didier Anzieu). In her book “What do Cyborgs eat? Logic in
an Information Society”, Margaret Morse regards oral incorporation as the dominant
modus of subject construction within the new technologies (Morse 1995: 160).
One of these forms consists of an embracing of the other, for example through
a layer of muscles, trained in workout, which covers the skin itself, or through
covering the body with a second technological skin like “wearables”.
Wearable computing turns technology into dress and thus into a case of fashion.
In contrast to the expensive and unique items like datasuits or suits for special
applications, like art installations (see Stahl Stenslie cyberex-suit or the
suit for the installation of Ars Electronica 1997), wearables are intended to
be affordable in a certain time by all people. Thereby the datasuit, formerly
not wearable without special technical units, uncouples and turns into an ordinary
everyday object. No longer fixed to a technical naval-string it will then be
governed by a remote control principle. This leads to a mobilization of telepresence
(Rheingold 1992), as the users sit no longer in a control center, but are mobile
themselves, operating and influencing from a distance.
The universalized smart clothing has then been detached from the original military
function of the future, where wearable computer systems and networks play an
important part. Military concepts like “21CLW” the 21st century land
warrior are dependent on the development of wearables.
“... the 21st century land warrior project is integrating many elements and capabilities into military uniforms.”
(http://www.us.neet/signal/Archive/March96/Next-mar.html)
But here are also medical applications of wearables: Blind people will be capable
to see again via artificial eyes, already tested on animals. They consist of
glasses with implanted cameras which forward recorded visual information to
a wearable computer, which again sends impulses to the optic center in the brain,
causing a visual impression.
In contrast to this, the new medial garments are not a sign of disability, not
an artificial limb in the classical sense. They are initiated to expand human
capabilities, though at the moment they are still causing bodily hindrances.
The everyday surrounding is not suitable for the movements of robots or men
like Steve Mann, who observes the external world via a camera. The desire, that
a simultaneous look at the head mounted display and at the external environment
will not reduce the freedom of movement (“without running into people”) is temporarily
not realizable (actually, on Ars Electronica 1997 Steve Mann needed some assistance
to find the sanitary facilities). However, Steve Mann is the first who steps
outside of the laboratory and shifts science fictional visions into reality.
He is called a cyborg and people find his media supported presence weird and
scary. His perception of an augmented reality converts two different layers,
in the connection of virtual and “real” reality, on one screen. The “private
eye”, in the form of glasses, displays also additional information to the observed
surrounding, mediated for example in texts.
For quite a long time now, these visions are already realized in movies: The
cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in “Terminator 2” is already equipped with this
augmented reality. By targeting an object, his retina projects the additional
information on locality, weapon system and individuals. In “True Lies” the secret
agent wears sunglasses which expand his perception, they function as screen
for a micro-camera. Alongside movies, the ideas of wearable technologies are
particularly developed in literary cyberpunk stories, as for example in Bruce
Sterling’s “Artificial Kid”:
“...floating about him in the air are six small, silent camera modules each with two lenses and sound recording equipment, each carefully programmed.”
(Sterling 1990:
2).
In case of Sterling’s figure “Artificial Kid” technology keeps a distance to
the body. It circles around him and is not integrated as instrumental means
into the clothing. William Gibson’s figure Molly in “Neuromancer” introduces
another aspect of medial clothing, which is the combination of dress and weapon:
numerous double-edged scalpels are fired out of a container positioned behind
the protagonist’s nails (Gibson 1987: 44).
Wearables are a highly popular topic in movies: In “James Bond” it is the task
of Mr. Q to integrate secret weapons invisibly in garments and elsewhere, so
that they are quickly at hand. Dress is turned into deadly danger, which is
able to look through a camera. Steady connections and hybrid mutations from
body into weapon via digital techniques like morphing are realized in newer
science fiction movies like “Spawn” or “Stargate”. By the medial technology
in dress the entire surrounding can be organized by remote control, as shown
in “Stargate”.
The utopias and experiments of literature are only rarely consequential and
turn technology via data into immaterial accessories, as practiced with the
figure of the datadandy by “Agentur Bilwet”:
"The datadandy collects information to boast with them, not to transfer them. The screen is the mirror for his toilette. The button and unbotton of the textile dandy found its equivalent in the chanel-surfing of an on/off decadence. The datadandy measures the beauty of his virtual appearance in the moral outrage and laughter of the plugged-in civilian."
(Agentur Bilwet
1995: 75).
Actually the type of the datadandy has not developed yet. “Fashionable” technology
manifests itself at the moment not in an abstract form. It enters directly into
fashion, not only embodied in materials, producing techniques or futuristic
symbolism. Media turns into intelligent clothing, “smart clothing”, occupying
the gaps and holes, that body and dress offer. Especially body decorations regarded
as primitive pave the way for high-technology. Opening the body through tears
and piercing, they are a preparation for the future invasion of technology.
Thus, in the future, a receiver in a piercing of the bellybutton, would be a
good place to implant technology.
The integration of technology into the body happens in two stages: Starting
with mobile objects, media-technological extensions, like walkman and watchman,
leading via pager (advertisement and textual messages can slip via pager directly
onto the body, see Quix by Bravo), cellular phones, watches (like Swatch the
Beep) and PDAs, which are both sender and receiver, to wearable processors with
internet facilities, namely online-wear.
Miniaturization up to nano-units as well as the reduction of weight are actually
the technical preconditions for wearable media-packages. Concepts like “fluid
machines”, a cooperation of AT&T and NEC, the projects by Frogdesign, Carnegie
Mellon university in Pittsburgh and IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose
(Thomas G. Zimmermann) to name only a few, show that the elements are in fact
already small enough and that there are also materials, but it is their connection
that causes problems.
Like multi-media applications, wearables are set up to incorporate all possible
functions of consumer electronics, like cd-player, fax and pager. Christian
Nürnberger observed on the Funkausstellung in Berlin 1997, that people can get
car-radios with an integrated mobile phone, organizer with digital camera and
pocket computers with fax and internet. In his view the trend goes in the direction
of a vibrator with integrated pc, telephone, face-solarium, fax, cosmetic mirror,
camera, soap-dispenser and internet (Nürnberger 1997).
Actually, this requires the development of an universal language, like html
or java for the world wide web, which offers also an option for personal design
(in the sense of an electronic hand-me-down fashion, a pendant to basic clothing).
The requirements for the data transfer has to be identical for all people. Therefore,
through the simplification of individual bodynets, which will then emerge, a
non-visible software-uniform can be developed. The original creators and inventors
of wearables in the scientific laboratories prefer still the LINUX system. An
absorption, of the Microsoft or IBM systems which is just driven by economical
interests, has at this stage not taken place.
In the MIT media-laboratory wearables belong to the department “Things that
think”. Dress conceals media, making them always available for the user. The
development of wearables is realized on three levels: The lowest level engages
in the hardware design of the objects. This is the only level of material design,
which allows fashionable variations. The next step is the connection of the
wearables and their integration into bigger networks. The last and highest level
is the design of the entire information architecture, the integration into the
entire system and the retrieval of knowledge.
The “mobilization” of the objects (naturally, their development originates in
military purposes) is followed by civil applications. Their aim is the integration
of technology: Implanting receivers in the ear, equipping collars with senders,
or fitting mobile phones into jewelry. Actual examples for already existing
wearable computer systems are UPS, mobile ticket machines, worn by the conductors
of German Bundesbahn.
In this way already existing “stupid” clothes can become “smart objects”. Due
to their specific positioning on the body, they have a task within the personal
computernet: Shoes, “smart sneaker” (designed by Thad Starner MIT and produced
by Nike), are used as energy generator or as receiver. Glasses can house screens.
Caps, worn on the top of the head and thus the highest point, function as stations
for sending and receiving data. Smart underwear controls the physical condition
and regulates body temperature (see Richard 1996). Integrated affective sensors
measure bloodpressure and cardiac frequency (http://wearables.www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearables/FAQ/FAQ.txt).
For military purposes smart clothes are equipped with special functions. The
21st century land warrior has a particular equipment analogous to
its specifications:
“The uniform would include thermal controls so they [the soldiers] can endure adverse conditions for a longer period of time.”
(Steve Brown,
http://www.us.net/
signal/ Archive/March96/Next-mar.html, page 2).
The medial soldier wears a helmet with display (one-eyed optic), showing data
to the own unit and information on the enemy. He is woven into a net in which
his position can be immediately traced via “laser range finder” and “global
positioning system”. Integrated into this system are also various tools for
the extension of perception and weapons.
Wearable computing turns media into dress and dress into media. Through this
direct technical extension, the body becomes a sending and receiving surface.
Media degrade the body to carrier material. The harmless term “clothing” averts
from the significant invasion of technology. The theoretical-ideological condition
for the technological body conquest and occupation, is the proclamation of its
inferiority - due to the “flesh factor” (title of Ars Electronica 1997) - for
example on the side of “Radical Humanities” (Ross 1995: 334) in the context
of media- and hacker-culture, as well as in publications like Mondo 2000 or
WIRED.
Andrew Ross unveils the technological ideology, which stands behind the growing
“smartness” of the entire object world: Humans become “outsmarted”, because
“smartness” is transferred to the lifeless object world (Ross 1995: 329). This
automated intelligence illustrates: “human-made object world becomes an alternative
home of intelligence” (Ross 1995: 330). In contrast to human smartness, which
always overshoots the mark, the smart intelligence of objects is cost-saving,
systematic, user-friendly and can be subordinated under programmed structures
(Ross 1995: 331). The economic complex strives after the production of this
submissive, unscrupulous, non-neurotic, anatomically correct form of intelligence.
The thesis “machines get smarter, people get dumber” arouses the impression,
that the human being is at the limit of its mind capacity and in an urgent need
of intelligent products (Ross 1995: 332). The “promethic shame” (Anders) is
reinforced, because superior technology is directly applied to the body.
The goal of concepts such as “ubiquitous computing” (Mark Weiser, MIT) is the
“augmented reality”: a world, enriched with intelligent clothing, furniture
and spaces. The medializing of objects is followed by the integration of humans
into the networks of electrified garments. The internal network of the body
via smart dress, which will be worn by all people in ten years time, is an intermediary
state, as long as technology is not able to enter directly into bio-substance,
to implant microchips (in twenty years), respectively cultivate genetically
nano- and processor technologies in our bodies (in thirty years according to
the prognosis of Neil Gershenfeld, MIT, see http://physics.www.media.mit.edu/publications/papers/96.03.times.pdf).
As a flexible communication-junction the human being can move objects, far and
near, by remote-control via the personal body-network (PAN, Personal Area Network).
Through the BodyNet an individual is connected to a network, like a mobile phone
in stand-by mode, and can be localized in the net as a dialogical junction,
visible in its data movements. This enables the construction of movement profiles,
which can be reinterpreted in concrete spatial movements (see the Swisscom scandal
at the end of 1997). Smart dress, especially underwear, similar to the “smart
toilette” of the “Tronhaus” (see Richard 1996) enables also to compile a personal
health profile. In the case of aberration or irregularities the data will be
immediately send to the doctor.
Furthermore, through techniques like “tagging” the industry can analyze purchasing/
customer’s purchase habits and register electronically the course of articles.
In stores tags have a control function already for a long time, for example
as an electronic safety against shop-lifting. New models allow, via implanted
chips, to trace the way from the shop to the customer, thereby weaving an invisible
net of garments. Sending out invisible signals, the producers are able to localize
the positioning of their articles. Future applications are imaginable, as tagging,
respectively registered and actively sending garments would increase the success
of the search for criminals or terrorists. The news, that a personalized pair
of Levi’s can be made responsible for the capture of a criminal -due to individual
size and traces of use - could become normality.
Dress influences its wearer. Even comfortable casual clothing is never entirely
neutral or unobtrusive. Therefore, wearables will significantly change our habitus
and the way and manner of moving around in the world. The technicians and producers
have the illusion, that there will be a form of wearable computers “that’s always
with you, is comfortable and easy to keep and use, and it is as unobtrusive
as clothing.” http://physics.www.media.mit.edu/publications/papers/96.03.times.pdf
Instruments for espionage, like micro-cameras or bugs function
as models for design, because they are invisible and unobtrusive. Wearables
will be controllable by voice or twiddler, a mixture of mouse and an one-handed
keyboard, allowing a “hands-free” operation (wearables.www.media.
mit.edu/projects/wearables/FAQ/FAQ.txt, version 1.0, August 28th,
1997). However, as a technical extension they cause unfamiliar sounds and movements
directly on the body. Facing the vision of a rotating mirror of the “private
eye”, it is still doubtful, that wearable media are unobtrusive. Another problem
which stands against their unobtrusive integration, is the supply of energy.
Accumulators are actually the most weighting elements and last approximately
for eight hours. They will restructure the rhythm of the day into three accu-phases.
Wearables are yet not real components of clothing, but invaders and technoid
alien elements, like the additional munitions hooked to the belt of a soldier.
Towards an everyday use of computer wear their construction is particularly
focusing on a special durability of the small computer boxes as well as shock
resistance. Design and comfort are still of a secondary importance.
3.1
Dressed in computers
Are wearables used like conventional dress? When are they
worn? Except from sports, sex, showering and sleeping, they can be worn at all
times, is the answer of their developers. They only disturb in context with
bodily activities in which people wear a reduced clothing, as well as in context
of wetness or excretion.
In the future, a day will start with putting on one’s intelligence. So when
one awakes in the morning, being in a dumb (and very human) state, one is already
awaited by the smart, thinking uniform. The German term “reizwäsche” gets a
new dimension of meaning, as computer wear always has to be equipped with electronic
impulses. The energy supply is the basic element, forming a kind of immaterial
underwear. Its components also have to be exchanged on a regular basis, so that
the common male-chauvinistic question in the everyday life of marriage will
be: “Darling, can you lay out a fresh accu for me?”
The human being of the future has to care for his body and his health on two
levels: material and immaterial. Both of them have to be protected against viruses
and violent infringements. The now “independent” dress requires a regular update,
repair and safety care. It needs the “mending” of security gaps and burst seams
or the replacement of buttons. The electronic clothing of the normal user is,
similar to the internet, a partly open system and therefore not safe against
viruses and invasion. Other persons could get hold of the data of the bodynet
and enter quasi through this data into the bodies of others. If the exchange
of data is possible via handshake and all information on a person is immediately
present (Negroponte 1995), then this is always a revelation of personal data,
as it is impossible to prepare the data according to the opposite person.
But security problems are no topic in the development of software. Instead scientists
promise, that when one wears intelligent clothing, one will never again forget
something or somebody. In an immaterial sphere, navigational systems, thesaurus,
dictionary, calling cards or telephone numbers as well as personally gained
knowledge are parallel and continuously running. Quick searching machines guarantee
immediate access to all needed information. Software-accessories for media clothing
are programs for face recognition, which compare and classify the face of the
opposite with portraits saved in the personal or public data base.
So the problem of information overload sticks directly to the body. On the one
hand all the personally relevant information has to be fed into the system -
if one does not want to wear standard softw(e)ar. On the other hand, according
to the degree of personal control, the human being is clad or locked into an
invisible aura of information, loosing the privilege to forget something intentionally.
A computer does not forget - only completely in the case of systemic catastrophes,
so there is no selective oblivion. Intelligent clothing keeps everything in
mind, what has been implanted, remembering even what the human being would prefer
to forget. Therefore is transports the unconsciousness in digital form.
3.2
Work in motion: the mobile office
The decisive criterion of wearables is, that one can move
in them. This means not necessarily mobility, but the main interest lies in
the option to move away from the workplace, without loosing the track of work.
The American scientists regard it as disturbing to work in a fixed location
“with a conventional desktop stuck in the office, chaining you to the office”
(wearables.www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearables/FAQ/FAQ.txt,
version 1.0, August 28th, 1997).
For the “radical humanists” the breaking away from fixed spatial-material structures
is a very significant aspect. The elite of information society prefers a residence
in wilderness, a life in nature, though with complete media-technological facilities.
Behind this lies the hope, to lead a free and self-determined life at the edge
of civilization, (New Edge) and to get rid of the traditional restrictions of
work (Freyermuth 1996: 96/100). However, they oversee, that only very few privileged
people can afford such a “self-determined” life.
Moving away from the fixed workspace, suggests total independence and freedom,
the release from a fairly bad treatment of the body, caused by the standardized
workplaces. However, the freedom of movement is an illusion, because media-clothing,
programmed and standardized through hardware and software, mobilizes the entire
office and glues it to the body. Thus, working people mutate into an office
on legs. Work is always present, bodily perceivable. Its corporal nearness,
is a liability to work overtime - it is impossible to escape from work. Just
like in connected tele-work, the employer can control minutely, how long and
on which task somebody works. The illusion of personal freedom and a free timing
of the work is made by possible by a subtle control, exercised by a telepresent
employer. This can be understood as a subversion of the punk maxim “if you move,
you don’t feel the chains”, which is the principle of bondage trousers, a voluntary
fastening, demonstrating with each step drastically the restriction of the own
freedom of movements. The mobility of wearables reminds of electronic cuffs,
which are used in the U.S. for prisoners placed under house arrest or for young
delinquents in Britain. In this way control organs are always informed about
the positioning of the prisoners.
3.3
Self-sufficiency of electrified objects
Smart clothing makes dress independent and emancipated. Objects
communicate with each other and feed each other with information. In Thomas
G. Zimmermann’s vision of modern family life the human being is even entirely
excluded: The shoes in the closet exchange the news on the daily activities
of their user. Humans do not have to talk about the things of daily life, it
is carried out by objects. Things have even an autonomous perception, own senses.
It might happen, that only the glasses see, but not the person who wears them.
The human is the sender of impulses, his task is to collect the communicative
data for the machines. Dress, however, leaves its passive state behind. Through
electrification it becomes “active wear”, in a literal sense.
Wearables generate electric fields with changing impulses on the body. They
are not immediately perceivable, but it is imaginable to reinforce them, as
it is practiced in art (Stahl Stenslie, Stelarc, Huge Harry). Wearables are
a sign of a Lilliput syndrome: Like Gulliver, human beings are surrounded by
tiny material particles, which contain artificial organs like agents (see MIT,
gesture and narrative language group) or artificial life forms, which can communicate
with each other even without any action on the human’s part (Serres 1984: 72).
Electronic parasites inhabit the host “human”, who feeds them with energy. This
settlement of intelligent nano-populations and immaterial agents form the human’s
second skin, a quasi-home (Serres 1984:17). The technology of wearables reverses
the relation of human being and surrounding, as the human formerly occupied
it all as his hostage (Serres 1984: 45).
Furthermore, as the example of Steve Mann shows, dress is no longer a private
matter. It becomes a surface in public space, it expropriates and publishes
human perception. As an interface it transfers individual views. Wearables present
an exceptional state, turning humans into permanent spies of humans - against
their will. The look is split in the moment when it can switch between display
and external world. This diffusion of the senses turns the individual into a
“divisum” (Anders), which is yet not in the state of coordinating all the different
motorial actions with different perceptive impulses, as the combination of car
and mobile phone shows. Thus electronic dress, which can theoretically stress
the senses and transfer them at the same time to other localities, reinforces
sensual diffusion.
3.4
Digital fashions
To return to the relation of fashion and technology, now
a slight variation of Manfred Schneider’s three stage model of information media
will be applied to the development of wearables (Schneider 1996: 16). The model
transfers the principle of “trickle down” from fashion to technology. In the
first instance a technological instrument is a prototype, which is used only
by an avant-garde group of users (military, industry, science). When it is put
on the market, it is rare, expensive and exclusive. However, at that stage it
is already user-friendly, respectively its use demands not a technical expert.
The instrument is first appropriated by the economic and political elite, becoming
a public as well as private means of distinction.
“The powerbook as decoration is the pride of many salon-digitalist, who mocks with actuality, hype, and fashion .... When he is plugged off the net, his personality evaporates.”
(Bilwet 1995:
75)
With the new instrument of technology they can clearly express
the principle of conspicuous consumption (Veblen 1986: 106). Then in the third
stage mass-consumers start to identify with the product. Mass-production is
paralleled with a further technical simplification and cost reduction. However,
during this stage the gadgets do not lose their distinctive features entirely,
as Schneider argues (Schneider 1996: 16). Distinctions just get more subtle.
In a phase of universal dissemination one can easily disqualify oneself by the
use of wrong variants: a bulky, turquoise mobile phone is not really a status
symbol.
Wearables are currently in the test-period of their inventors. They are purely
functionally defined and show no intentional aesthetic implications. What Morse
states regarding smart food, namely that it is not tasty and only a medicine
for body-tuning (Morse 1994: 161), applies to smart clothing, too. Everything
“smart” has per se no aesthetic design. Therefore wearables, as future components
of everyday wear, will provoke new questions regarding individual style and
self-performance. Is there a society of immaterial decorated data-dandies and
unfashionable computer-nerds emerging, whose insignificant flesh - namely the
body-facade - tells nothing about the inner beauty of the collected immaterial
data? The fashionable attributes of the new programmer elite are of a technological
nature, their clothing plays a subordinated part and can be classified into
the traditional dress segment of “casuals” (remember Bill Gates as a young programmer).
“Perfume and pink stockings are just replaced by valuable
intels, delicate data-gloves, data-glasses decorated with ruby and fine sensors
on his eyebrows and the wings of his nose.”
(Agentur Bilwet
1995: 75)
The person who can telephone by the means of a pin and ear-ring, will be regarded
as avant-garde. As in the area of mobile phones the “almost” invisibleness will
become an important status symbol. Only the members of the old economic elite
will impress each other with the latest Armani design. The new sort of clothing
and accessories will be made-to-measure, purchasable in the computer store.
Thereby, to become a fashionable medium, wearables have to pass the stage of
standardization and become mass-confection. Without standards, dress cannot
fulfill its communicative promise. There is no sense in being the only one wearing
a certain system, because there can happen no exchange with others. So for the
present, there will be no haute couture of wearables - data-suits without compatibility
are useless.
Visually marking signs for new systems will emerge to suit people’s wish of
distinction. However, even insiders are not able to recognize the latest processor
or the newest gadget in dress. A perfect media-dress will stand out by the exclusivity
of a personal filter, sorting out digital junk immediately. But they, too, are
not visible. Socio-economic development will contradict the scientist’s original
idea of invisible wearables. Like in youthcultures, the design of labels and
logos will play an important part in the demonstrative display of differences
in the immaterial. T-shirts saying “Intel Inside” already exist, but for the
future prints listing the data capacity of the worn processors are thinkable,
too. Maybe the electronically enriched clothing will also show small embroideries,
similar to labels, which give information about the worn system. And wearables
will also produce fashionable and unfashionable systems. There will be secondhand
ware and retro-aesthetics, featuring old school processors. However, they will
never be a serious functional competition to actual models. Because technology
never falls behind its possible systems and its own velocity, they will remind
to past systems only as aesthetic surface.
4.
Fashion, technology and transitoriness
There are three models which can be traced in the connection
of technology and fashion, which are not hierarchical or evolutionary build
on each other: a. youthculture (techno- and house-scene), b. radical technologies
(cyberpunk) and c. high-technology (wearables). All of them are connected with
each other by transfusion and exchange modes and embody an engagement with technology,
as described in the preceding chapters, which depends on socio-economic hierarchies:
a. youthcultures as users practicing a sign-like symbolic misuse, b. cyberpunks
and hacker with a direct misuse and practices of expropriation and c. the elite
of programmers and producers with an affirmative engagement in technology for
economic purposes.
The linkage of fashion to the technological, respectively the integration of
the technological into dress, stimulate theoretical speculations, which would
normally be out of question. Tying fashion with a claim to eternity seems paradoxical.
Precisely through the digital, fashion evaporates in an accelerated velocity.
Fashion’s half-life period drops analogues to the one of computer systems and
software. The reproducibility and variation of products via press-button contradicts
their potential eternity. They are more rapidly exchangeable, have a reduced
life-span, though they also have the prospect of a potential re-entry into the
system. The fast-moving time causes also an opposite trend, namely a forced
construction of myths and classics. Youthcultural fashions are per se set up
towards the eternity of their stylistic elements, as they serve towards the
consolidation of their style.
“Style isn’t trendy. Quite the opposite. It is conservative and traditional ... all [forms of body decoration] serve to resist change.”
(Polhemus
1994: 13)
Print campaigns for youth-specific products put the eternity
and endlessness of brands and fabrics in the foreground. Product and brand will
survive the individual which is long since fallen a victim to the external conditions
(see the advertisement of Eastpack or Doc Martens). Here the emphasis lies on
the inferiority and decay of the human body in contrast to the man-made materials
and fabrics. The performance of the brand’s durability is emphasized by particular
robust workwear and high-tech fabrics like neoprene. In techno it is the idea
of the eternity of artificial materials which is especially important, in contrast
to the transitoriness of the human body. The scene transports the contradictory
contexts of an emphasis on the body and the parallel overelectrification and
disintegration of the body into immaterial structures. The focus on the future
and the emphasis on a bodily independent weightlessness suggests eternity. The
end of the own existence seems to be relativized by the safe keeping in the
endlessness of music and space. Beyond that, fashion is here also the preparation
for an eternal hard life in space, by being fluorescent, water-proof, sealing
and insulating.
Furthermore, techno- and house-culture represents the eternity of radiation
as positive. Industrial safety pictograms for radioactivity and laser are very
popular as a sign of the scene’s creative energy. The German expression “verstrahlt
sein”, which means “radioactively contaminated”, has not only a negative connotation,
but implies instead a “chemically” brilliant mood caused by excessive drug consumption.
However, only after a revision phase of the techno- and house-scene, death and
transitoriness find their way into the “happy” collections of clubwear and its
pendants in haute couture. A negative symbolism connected with the evil exists
up to this point only among the hard-core segment of the scene, as in gabber
(-tekkno). Also the visual forms in video-clips show still the delighting sides
of life. Only in 1997 the Euro-techno formation Soundstone operates with a vampire
and necrophile symbolism, which is rather untypical for the scene. Also, after
years of neon-colored collections decorated with aliens, in 1997 a part of the
W+L.T. collection shows a darker touch with a tendency to decay, in reference
to the gothics. “Gothic” features can be seen in the black clothing and white
make-up of the models.
Clothing ages instead of the self. On its surface dress gets increasingly older,
while the body gets younger. Pre-aged or pre-used dress seems to fulfill a relief
function and offers a projection screen for aging and dying. The performance
of use suggests vivacity and an allusion to individual history and endlessness,
characteristics a new garments lacks. In a magical ritual, by a symbolical act
of dressing, the bodily is freed from the process of age, shifting transitoriness
to the external, simulating the process of age. As in the case of wearables,
the clothing is in the end more vivid, active and intelligent than its wearer.
By the “young” outfit, simulating age on the surface, the individual is equally
suffocated as by a “smart” outfit.
With the aesthetics of heroine and death chic, fashion photography represents
an opposing tendency. Models reach into a sphere of artificiality, masked as
reality. In this very moment the same is valid, what Adorno exclusively adjudges
to art: “Art has no power over the simulation by its abolition.” (Adorno 1995:
166) Fashion photography shows, that it is better, when the artificial surface
directs, offering insights into the shallows of the technologically manipulated
and digitally revisable corporeality. It opens up the layers of simulations,
producing tears into the smooth surface, exhibiting disgraceful, miserable,
anorexic bodies, that nobody really want to see that way. There is only one
possibility to overcome the “naked” horror of the shapeless, stunted body: the
right brand of dress. Dark rings, blue marks or the indication of physical
disabilities, as seen in the Prada campaign of 1997 (which shows a male model
with hare-lib and a female one apparently with crippled legs), are an evidence
for the basic injury of the corporal, which can only be ennobled by dress. The
invalidity and decay of the body in contrast to the eternity of the brand gets
obvious. The lettering with the name of the brand, for example on Kristen McMenamy’s
body, shows in contrast the transcendence of the brand name.
To have disgust and horror of the blemished body is a realization of computer-ideology,
opposing an inferior body with the mind, finally rendered eternal by media.
This becomes now concretely apparent among model-bodies, which are after technical-media’s
revision left as inferior flesh. In contrast to the worthless, blemished flesh,
the body turns via wearables into pure media and is thus upgraded. This is a
perpetuation of the ancient Paulian tradition: viewing the corporal, be it ever
so perfect, as putrefied by sin from within.
Only the bodies which are right from the beginning hybrid (as ideally constructed
by the photographs of Ines van Lamswerde or by the coarse screening of the Gucci
ad , 1997) do not need a second, technological skin. They already embody themselves
the very image of technoid smartness.
Otherwise the bodies of the late 20th century require the reinforcement
of fashionable media clothing. Therefore, wearables could present the first
realizable form of Moravec’s utopian “mind without body”, which is no longer
tied to the human flesh. The surgeon does not need to transfer the brain waves
of a dying person to a chip (Moravec 1990: 156). It will be far more simple:
just by taking off the dead person’s media-dress, one already gets access to
the personal perception, views, data and entire living-structure. A new person
can slip into this individual media-skin and experience the perception of the
deceased.
Wearables help to never forget again. As a workout for the brain, they are a
further means for the vain run against entropy. “Forgetting” is a sign of age.
As an intelligent, artificial limb for human thinking and perception this sort
of clothing displaces death and age in a time of BSE and Alzheimer disease.
Therefore wearables fit very nicely into the concept of the Extropy Institute,
demanding the maximum extension of human boundaries, in a bodily and mentally
sense.
In the techno- and house culture a fairly similar concern gets evident: The
struggle towards a crossing of bodily and mentally boundaries, exemplified in
the sentence “free your mind from all pressures” (Tyree), which gets concretely
visible in the punctual exceeding of traditional body and gender concepts within
the laboratory situation of the event. “Wearables” and the techno- and house-scene
are dependent on artificial energy. If this is omitted, communicational death
and isolation will occur, like a small social death. Both phenomena express
the desire to be connected with others in an immaterial way and to be woven
into a communicative dialogues network by the means of dress. This is the contemporary
contradiction of a maximum individualization, self-realization and at the same
time inclusion or integration into a network, which makes it possible, when
required, to be “fashionably” connected with others. The electronically network
via wearables can be seen as socially concrete forms for the immaterial, global
network, as is has been worked out by the aesthetic styles of youthcultures,
whose communication has already since the Second World War, alongside the local
scenes, a telepresence-character.
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(PellePelle, US 40, Casio, 69, Bad&Mad,
OTL, Carlos Murphy´s, carhartt, Peaky Blinder, Mad Max House, Pash, pose, Puma,
Next Guru Now, Shoot, ID+T, Oxmox, Third Rail, Shoot, dosydos, Apollo, Muzgerei,
E-Play, Boks, Dickies, Tribal Gear, Abgang, Red or Dead, Anziehungskraft, Spiral,
Fred Perry, W.+L.T.,Daniel Poole, Nastrovje Potsdam, Jansport, G-Star, Shelley´s,
X-Large, X-Girl, Caterpillar, Converse and Force Inc., Ladomat, 69 frequencies,
Hyper Hype, DMD, Pikosso, ID&T, Dosordie, Mocca, Essence, Plus 8.)
The collection concentrates on anything that is related to youth culture for
example the techno- and house culture, including its numerous subdivisions like
bigbeat, drum & bass, ambient, jungle, triphop, acid, hardtrance, gabber.
It also collects to the objects of the youth cultures hiphop, punk, new wave,
gothic, skins and disco.
It is the aim of the archive to preserve the material world of youthculture,
which is marked by an increasing acceleration, as examples of scene-specific
symbols and cultural forms. A preservation of youthcultural styles is very important,
as they have a high influence on design, fashion and art within the entire society.
Thus the archive can provide insights into a very important area of everyday
cultural history.
Towards a research on everyday aesthetics the collection can offer basic material
for the development of theories on youthcultural aesthetics and media use. Particularly
the heterogeneity of forms, material aesthetics and the affinity to the new
media technologies can be investigated.
The collection can be presented in diverse forms of media. The construction
of a website, for actual information on the collection, is currently in progress.
Further forms of presentation are video documents of events, photographs and
cds.
The mobile element of the collection is the techno-kit, a didactic suitcase,
developed by Erman Aykurt, MarkusFrankowski, Gösta Naujoks, Meike Noster, Harald,
Steber, Rolf Strangfeld (Industrial Design, Essen University). The suitcase
consists of a strap, a portfolio made of mixed scotchgard polyethuran fabric,
trekking straps and polystorol containers. The techno-kit is constructed towards
flexibility, its elements can be variably positioned. There are also large internal
and external display surfaces for the presentation of garments. The visual model
of the suitcase are the space containers used in popular science fiction series
from the 1960s and 1970s “Moonbase Alpha” or “Star Wars”. Due to the intentionally
reduced form the suitcase can be used to exhibit various styles and materials
from the collection.
The techno-kit can display elements of the archive in a mobile form for teacher
training, lectures, university classes, schools and youth-centers. The techno-kit
and the objects in the collection are also used as visual material for projects
like DJ- and music-workshops or parties (music-workshop October 1995, DJ workshop
April 1996).