I thought this would be great opener for a per -but then I was telling anna about it and she reminded me that the song was "Addicted to Love".
shit.
If I used Addicted to love" - then I'd end up with a psychoanlaytic link - modeeling - desire and THe LACK
nooooooooooo
so I'm sticking wiht the other song - coz its cuter.
Simply irresistible
She’s so fine
There’s no telling where the money went
Simply Irresistible
She’s all mine,
There’s no other way to go
Oh Woe Ohhh.
Behind the man in the suit, they also stand and sway. Silent. He alone mouths the words. Their mouths are closed, eyes staring into space. They are all the same height, similar featured, tall, thin Caucasian, young. Identically clad in black Lycra sheaths, dusky (40 dernier “ash”) sheer stockings over slender knees. Coltish legs, ending in glimmers of black high-heeled court shoes. Hair scraped back like ballerinas, white pan-stick faces, full red lips, dark eyes and hollowed cheeks. Their faces all eighties geisha masks, their slung back shoulders, bare arms dangling like empty sleeves off a coathanger, loosely gliding against instruments, slung against their narrow hips, thrust forward and empty. Barely even pretending to play, heads tilting slightly from side to side, swaying to the beat. A pack of monstrous dolls. Deliriously vapid, drawing my gaze into the Cathode ray tube and away from the blank suited man in front, they don’t look back, and don’t look into the camera recording the video tape, watched by teenagers like myself. I peer freely, with gay abandon, scrutinising eyes, lip shapes, hair colour for signs of individuality.
They have no names, no identities, and no talents, apart from simply being a blanking distraction from the bland guitar pop of the singer. He’s no heartthrob – but check out his bevy. Immaculate cool. Simply Irresistable. Robert Palmer’s video clip, where fashion model clones replaced traditional decorative miming chanteuses familiar to pop provoked a minor frisson that promoted record sales and his cultural kudos as a man of his age. Prefiguring the 1990’s and the emergence of ‘supermodels’ at the heart of celebrity culture; the clip evoked the mutability of genres, and bodies that became an increasing feature of music videos. My 1987 Copy of Smash Hits records him arriving at some music awards with a brace of models “all the same height” and describing it as ‘a joke’, but I doubt he was aware of Jean Baudrillard's publication of “simulations”, in which he described the precession of simulacra from stucco, to automaton, to mannequin.
This is a connection I’ve only made in retrospect, nearly 2 decades after seeing the video clip. I think I was doing my HSC. Certainly the images of the 80’s rockish fembots was tantalising enough for me to invest in a black lycra mini from Bondi Junction, bought from a term of skipped lunches and scraped pocket money on a trip to Sydney. No way I’d wear it in the country. I tried it secretly in my bedroom, with sheer stockings, high court shoes (black or white?); tottering and scraping back my permed hair. Imagining and yearning into the mirror, I wanted to be them, and I wanted them, and I wanted me to be wanted as I wanted them, and I became mesmerised with the possibilities of my own glassy transformation into cool simulation of something that I knew I could never be. I simply wasn’t that type of girl. Only after moving to Sydney, emerging from the HSC summer of hell, thinner and with new contact lenses did I try ‘the total look’ on a country kids night out in the cross. I wanted to look cooler than the other kids, incredibly sexy, cool, aloof. I could barely walk in my heels and swaggered like a hick, bum out, shoulders slumped, pigeon toed, arms flailing, but I got into the OZ Rock Cafe without showing my ID. None of the others did.
Say the word ‘model’ and the fashion mannequin is what springs to most people's minds. However, despite an enormous proliferation in visual culture, and popular press of images and ‘gossip’ features about catwalk and photographic models, there is not a lot of academic literature on fashion models or what fashion modelling entails as a profession. Karen Perthuis’ (as yet unpublished) doctoral thesis from 2003 notes that, apart from biographies of famous models such as Twiggy, ‘scholarly attention to the model is relatively unmapped landscape’ . Most descriptions consist of chapters in general books on dress or fashion. and some recent texts in social anthropology . Such writing is often based around extensive descriptions of models’ appearances and ‘lifestyles’, without providing much scholarly analysis on the social relations and cultural practices being pursued. While a number of feminist texts in cultural studies have attempted a critical social analysis of the representations of and practices within fashion modelling , most writing on fashion models is either focused on exploring ‘the model’ as an abstract cultural projection, or ‘models’ as a group of celebrities, workers or study subjects. In many ways this parallels the lacuna surrounding artists’ models. Art history and theory has devoted considerable attention to discussing and debated ‘the nude’ and even ‘the body’, but historical research on naked artists’ models has only started to emerge in the past decade. This lacuna could be described as semantic difference between the model as a noun and model as a verb. There is a considerable textual focus in contemporary cultures on ‘the model’. The ‘model’ by definition is a type of cultural prototype. However ‘model’, as a verb, an action or production of an individual outside of the nominal label of ‘model’ is barely defined and rarely articulated. This is surprising in the context of the amount of abstract theorising on the body and fashion undertaken by prominent contemporary cultural theorists, such as Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. The mannequin (an ambiguous model) is a central figure in Baudrillard’s description of the groundless, self-referential condition of hyperreality. The order of the mannequin is seductive idea on which to model a discussion of contemporary visual culture. If the mannequin or model is the ubiquitous and dominant experience of how subjectivity is constituted, then it makes sense to explore and articulate what the processes of modelling actually are. Baudrillard’s ideas on the precession of simulacra has been cited so often in so many contexts, that any discussion of the order of the mannequin or hyperreality, necessitates a brief exegesis of how such ideas are being deployed.
In “Simulations” , and later “Symbolic Exchange and Death” Jean Baudrillard described how the precession of simulacra has produced a contemporary embodiment that is entirely based on the mannequin. Baudrillard explicitly traces a historical narrative of the precession of simulacra from an imitation of bodies, to a complete phagocytosis of bodies into the realm of semiotic mirroring. He traces the order of simulacra as progressing through three stages. The first order is based on Stucco, a highly malleable and quick setting form of concrete is associated with Renaissance Europe, which sought and found means to create images and objects which could imitate every surrounding object. The development of plastic visual media such as stucco and oil painting was associated with the pursuit of tactile verisimilitude, which sought to recreate the world in singular continuous medium. The industrial revolution is associated with the order of the automaton, the machine age compelling labour and social relations to be regulated and coupled with mechanical inventions. Social life and human experience became increasingly structured around machinery, for working class as Fordist elements and in the development of a bourgeois and consumer society, increasingly mediated by fetishized manufactured commodities.
The third order of simulacra, emerging after world war two is that of the mannequin. In this order, the mannequin has no function beyond that of representation, and no relation to any reality outside of itself – or other mannequins. Collapsing the object into pure representation, the Mannequin presents the body as pure sign, empty of any references to anything beyond its own citations of other mannequins. As a contemporary ideal of embodiment, this presents a compelling image of post humanist subjectivity, evacuated of interiority, the collapse of the subject into a maelstrom of gestures, statements, signs all iterable as reflections of other gestures, statements and signs. Subjectivity becomes performance of citation, a repetition, a mimetic exchange between inscribed sites of signification, only the signification is only that of the act of signification, and not of anything outside of the exchange.
As a linear narrative the precession of simulacra can easily accommodate a slippage into a totalising view of hyperreality as an inevitable and universal consequence of the development of capitalism. Indeed many writers since Baudrillard have cited the groundless qualities of hyperreality in order to inscribe a post-subjective social condition based on a superficial incantation of ‘the body’ as a singular ‘mass grave of signs’ , a site of surface exchange devoid of interiority beyond that of lack. This view proliferates in a number of contemporary studies of fashion, which conflate fashion and dress in articulating an ahistorical, abstracted, totalising and arguably alienating description of contemporary experience of corporeal and sartorial exchanges.
Such a schema does a disservice to Baudrillard’s ideas on the mannequin, which are influenced by earlier writers of modernity and fashion, particularly Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s writings on fashion and the fashion mannequin prefigure the detemporalising qualities of hyperreality and they also articulate a profoundly temporal relation to the society that they seek to describe. While Baudrillard’s breathless manifesto style, can convey a seamless totality of social relations, they do not preclude a closer examination of specific cultural practices, or of tracing finer historical circuits between people, objects, illusions and aesthetic possibilities.
The word mannequin has an ambiguous meaning; representing both plastic lifeless ‘dummies’ used in fashion, medicine and car crashes, to the living models working in fashion industry, either as catwalk or photographic models. This semantic ambiguity is reflected in the history of fashion models, which have evolved as a specific mimetic doubling between live models and their plastic counterparts. While fashion modelling and art modelling circulate in two distinct cultural and social realms, the barriers between the two fields have always been quite porous. While artist modelling has been described as a precursor to fashion modelling, both practices developed from mimetic relations with inanimate objects, and have continued to circulate in shared cultural realms such as medicine, erotica, theatre and labour relations.
Fashion mannequins or shop dummies, emerged in nineteenth century Europe . and were an amalgam of printed paper cut-out dolls, dressmakers dummies, early forms of sex dolls, drolly referred to as “femmes dociles” and exquisite porcelain headed fashion dolls of 18th century France While illustrated fashion plates had existed since Albrecht Durer, these ‘couriers de mode’ emerged in seventeenth century were developed by couturiers in order to distribute and promote the latest court fashions to potential clients in the European aristocracy. Exquisitely tailored and dressed dolls functioned as colourful sensual maquettes of increasingly fetishized costumed adult figures. Female figurines did not have legs, hinting at the seamless unity of dress and internal form, and ranged from 90cm in length to life size. Couture dolls were themselves a development from the lay figures used by artists from the 16th century. Royal subjects, reluctant to spend weeks sitting for artists, would have their face and hands superimposed onto bodily images painted from jointed wooden torsos, posed as and dressed in the elaborate costumes of the monarch. . The stiff disembodied images of Queen Elizabeth or King Henry are reflections of the hollow assemblage of face and fabric on which such paintings were based. This bodily absence of the monarch is echoed in sculptural ‘busts’, locating identity and power in the head, neck and shoulders. While artists had used living models, (themselves, family, servants or studio assistants) for parts of paintings, it is interesting that for a monarch painting, the replica models were inhuman.
The development of figurines in art and couture was also replicated in medicine. Anatomical figurines were made in clay and later in wax, and usually looked like hollow humanoid shells, stuffed with moulded objects resembling internal organs. As anatomical illustration developed in the 17th and 18th century, figurines and images oscillated between appearing as still corpses or as eviscerated living beings . The tension between depicting the verisimilitude of life of the verisimilitude of death was never resolved by medical figurines, which in the flutelike exactness of wax maintained a deeply disturbing ambiguity . In the nineteenth century wax figurines entered the realm of entertainment, with wax displays entering side-shows and public museums developing as an ‘educational’ pretext on anatomy and health . Even in the current century the elaborate displays of plastinated corpses by Gunther Von Hagens plays on this tradition, with the alchemy of plastination (injecting corpses with a polymer resin to transform flesh into wax) increasingly the aura of lifelikeness in the figures. Dressed wax figurines were used in historical folk museums such as Madame Tassaud's and the amusingly named ‘panoptika’ that proliferated in northern Europe. The public spheres for arrangement and displays of replicas of exhumed corpses developed as death itself was increasingly removed from the private social spheres of families, homes and small church graveyards. The development of the hospital, public morgues and urban graveyards, institutionalised the processes of natural deaths, and the removal of criminal executions behind walls banished death as a visible public spectacle. It is arguable in such a context that death became spectacularised in an allegorical form, and this explains the nature of the proliferation of mannequins and modelling culture in modernist spaces of urban Europe.
Fashion dolls continued to be made and distributed to haute Couture clients throughout northern Europe and North America well into the 19th century . Charles dickens features a ‘ladies doll maker’ in Our Mutual friend. However in Paris lifelike fashion dolls entered the public spaces, being placed in windows of arcades as advertisements for clothing. The appearance of lifelike/lifeless figurines in urban spaces is inextricably linked with the development of couture as fashion, and for Benjamin is one of the key elements in fashion’s own relationship with death.
Throughout the nineteenth century European academies allowed female models to pose, and eventually allowed female students into the art schools. While male and female models continued to find equal employment in schools and studios throughout Europe, female models came to dominate popular images of nude painting . The implicit sexuality of the privatised realms of female nudity contributed to the frisson and opprobrium attached to salon nudes and female models. However the increasing presence of women in public life, as workers in manufacturing, retail and service industries, as affluent urban consumers, and as writers, intellectuals and artists, compelled artists and illustrators to find new means for representing subjects who had previously been a subject confined to the domestic interior. The development of fashion mannequins and human models was integral to the ways in which male dominated early modernist visual cultures negotiated the threatening presence of women in public life.
In late 19th century Paris, female artists models were working class, and many worked part time in service industries such as cleaning, housekeeping or laundry. Some critics have argued that these artists’ models were the natural antecedent to fashion models which emerged at the same time, but it is important to note that artists' models came from both genders and many different ages and races, whereas fashion models were almost entirely young, Caucasian and female. The earliest fashion models in Paris, called “Sosies’, were usually shop assistants in haberdashery stores. Young, attractive and docile, if they bore a resemblance to a particular client, would be asked to model a new style of gown, as means of persuading the client to order one, thus acting as living mobile versions of the life size dolls that had been sent across Europe . The physical presence of mobile models was an important aspect of the increasing urbanisation of fashion. Couturiers and clients encountered on another face to face, in the liminal zones of arcades, and 19th century fashions became increasingly focussed on the sensuous qualities of bodily movement. The rustle and sway of skirts, the falls of pleats around hips and legs and the posture of corseted and bustled torsos were something best demonstrated on a living model rather than a limp and rigid armature . The “sosies’, acting as live mannequins for fashion customers, weren’t really functioning as models on who the clients would base themselves, and are less an antecedent to supermodels of the 20th century, than to ‘fashion mannequins’, still employed by pret-a-porter manufacturers in Australia such as Rockmans. Employed as “floor assistants” and classified under the shop distributors alliance as ‘fashion mannequins’, these are usually employed according to torso measurements fitting to the proportions of dressmakers size charts, and generally perform clerical duties with occasional fittings for the prototypes of new garments. The poor rates of pay and anonymity of such fashion mannequins are a world away from the agents, contracts and high pay rates for glamorous catwalk models.
The development of fashion models as spectacular figures of modernity, emerged from a cultivation of specialised group of young urban women, trained in personal grooming and deportment in order to imitate the living exemplars of style, the ‘demimondaines’. Promenading in public parks, balls and racecourses in expensive clothing, jewellery and millinery, such women’s precarious social condition as displaying the physical talismans of their association with wealthy male benefactors (as courtiers, lovers, fiancées) became living fetishes for male financial display. It was the mobilisation of these fetish elements of urban feminine display that characterised the development of female fashion in modernity. In the late nineteenth century, model agencies, associated with specific fashion manufacturers developed. . The most famous of these, Maison Lucile, became the most famous of these early ‘model agencies’ . Initially from London’s West End, Lucile recruited middle and working class girls and trained them in deportment and hairdressing and arranged them to be presented in theatricised choreographed displays of the latest clothing . Remaining silent, these women would not reveal their grisette or cockney accents and were able to complete the illusion of being sophisticated contemporary figures, worthy of emulation by the wealthy clients of the fashion houses. These new models were silent and nameless, usually named after their fashion houses, and interchangeable. The continuing changing spectacle of eternally young, almost identical women, produced the contemporary figure of the model, and reinforced the spectacle of fashion as an eternally timeless circuit of artificially seasoned neo and retro.
The development of fashion spectacles was twinned with developments in popular theatre such as music halls. While Lucile’s troupe prefigured the dance troupes such as Blue Bells, posing itself became a minor music hall craze. “Tableaux Vivants” became a brief craze particularly in England, where actors clad in flesh coloured body stockings, would arrange themselves on stage in imitation of famous paintings. Emerging in the 1840s’, they had their cited origins in the salon performances of “pose plastiques’ by Emma Hamilton during the previous century. Tableaux Vivants required actors be clad in ‘fleshings’ and facilitated some exchange between stage actors and artists models. While apparently artist models were less likely to be employed on stage than chorus girls, many chorus girls used the format of the ‘pose plastique’ to pose for artists or photographers ‘in character’. Distributing etchings or photographic prints allowed actors to promote themselves more widely. The emergence of photography in the mid 19th century quickly fuelled a demand for nude images, both among artists painting nude studies and general use as pornography. The proliferation of tableaux vivants, and nude photography and increasing nude paintings, caused a considerable public controversy in England and led to the passing of the obscene publications act in 1857 . Provision was given for allowing models to appear naked, as long as they remained completely still. This allowance had effects in the life class, of ensuring a strict protocol of robing between posing, which persists in English speaking life classes to this day. Paradoxically the legislation led to the degeneration of the tableaux vivants form a public spectacle to a genre more association with prostitution. By the 1860’s, men only clubs as the ‘coal hole’, featured naked women on stage, adopting an ‘art pose’ before the drunken male clientele who would later hire women as prostitutes . In a downmarket imitation of the scenes played out across the Atlantic at the academic Julian, women’s posing provided a theatricised fetishizing of their bodies as icons of male sexuality and consumerism. Even in its most lugubrious setting in the late 1860’s, the tableaux vivant operated within a set of protocol that still govern contemporary sex/based performances such as strip clubs and peep shows. The presence of the naked dancer, actress or model in a live setting amongst a group of men, is still charged with considerable social anxiety, such that club owners are eager to regulate, according to the socio economic identities of their clientele.
The 19th century featured increasing social mobility and social instability for women in Europe, the United States and some colonies, particularly in urban centres. In England the threat of women’s social mobility was projected onto the image of the prostitute, as an independent, socially mobile and socially contagious element of urban societies. The spectre of physical contagion was harnessed by concerns about the spread of venereal disease from brothels into respectable middle class families, and it echoed the enormous fears of social contamination between the classes. As urbanised men were seen to be moving in a number of different class based circles, urban women were also able to engage with and move through social classes. Service based occupations such as retail, modelling and performance were sites where different classes could and did come into extended intimate contact, and it is arguable that the emergence of fixed gendered models, provided a means of mediating the complex and volatile social exchanges that were possible. While prostitutes encapsulated the social dangers of independent socially and sexually promiscuous and socially and physically contagious women, female artists models acted as in increasingly mnemonic function for illustrating the transgressive and sexualised possibilities of nudity. In England, there was an enormous social gulf between artist and models, and artists models could be regarded as working class victims of middle class exploitation. In the late 19th century this changed in France as ‘bohemian’ cultures of the avant-garde circles emerged. Rejecting bourgeois morality and critical of academy conventions, avant-garde artists came from many regions of France and Europe. Many of these artists were poor and had disdain and an exclusion from bourgeois society and conventions. Unable to afford models, many bohemian artists posed for each other or entered sexual and emotional partnerships with women who would pose for free in exchange for lodging company and art education. The emergence of avant-garde art movements in Paris in the 19th C was linked to the bohemian lifestyle of radical artists and writers, and as new art movements popularised, bohemian lifestyles became romantic and glamorous aspect of the new cultures. In the bohemian contexts of the Pre-Raphaelites movements, artist models became considered as muses and lovers, singular worshipped icons of romantic passions of artists. In England, artists sought a type of ‘naturalism’, rejecting studio models as artificial, stagey, and seeking to recruit models based on their capacity to embody all of the artists’ creative aspirations and dreams. Artists would select models based on their feminine glamour, approaching them in public settings of concerts and streets , and recruiting them by a process of wooing – itself often culminating in a sexual tryst.
The new naturalism, was a form of responding to the complex social configurations of 19th modernity, and a means by which artist established their own social distinction in a flourishing consumer cultures. The views of the life class as ‘stagy’, and artificial, were no doubt a reaction to the popularising of life models in stage productions and the increasingly downmarket '‘pose plastique’. The creative appeal of daily life’ was no doubt drawn from the excitement derived from increasing social interchange in public spaces such as opera, theatres, open air markets, public gardens, public transport . They were also arguably, a means whereby artist fought to maintain cultural capital in a social milieu where technologies of photography but also complex public theatres of social exchange were eclipsing them. The 19th century architecture of Paris with the wide boulevards, Grande Magazins and elaborate buildings such as the Eiffel Tower and Garnier’s opera were not only spectacular in themselves but provided new landscapes for populated assemblages. The development of arcades, as semi-interiorised passages between such open streets, provided forms of intimate spectacle and facilitated the increasing fetishization of consumer objects and products. In such settings the movement of living models, fashionably dressed women, reflected in the large glass windows of the grand boutiques were doubled by the posed mannequins within. While store dummies had been initially constructed as crude metal armatures, with exposed heads covered in horsehair and fabric , more lifelike plaster heads and bodies gradually replaced them. This lifelike turn was coupled with the development of fashion models, and maybe explained as a transfer of commodity fetish from the clothes as discrete products, to an embodied sartorial model of human form. In the mid 19th century, mannequins came to represent models for human comportment in public; upright, elegant and fusing into the latest fashion. The spectacle of store dummies was twinned with presented spectacles of living dressed models. In Australia, fashion parades were principally hosted by and housed within the department stores.
In these shows, the mute, still world of the store fashion dummy, transfixed behind stage-like windows of glass, was transformed into live drama, although window displays and fashion models continue to mutually create each other, and the blankness of the dummy was imperceptibly transferred to the live model.
Combining elements of music halls, theatre and striptease, fashion parades attracted thousands of spectators, and were a major form of public theatre. Models as the ‘stars’ of such parades became as reified as the fashionable clothes they wore. They were increasingly regarded as a respectable and desirable career for middle and occasional upper class women. Fashion models had in fact become genuine social models for affluent female consumers. Fusing personae and product, they were the embodiment of the fetishized power to transform clothing into a spectacular expression of modernity.
The strangest aspect of the new fashion models, presented in such theatricised settings was their apparent lack of theatricality. While models were glamorised and respectable, they were still silent and nameless on stage, and in their choreographed routines, resembled troupes of marionettes rather than individual women. The doubling of fashion model and mannequin as lifelike but profoundly uncanny human forms, provided a public spectacle for the alternance of life and death, as mediated and managed by fashion. The necrophilial fetishizing of the new female models was echoed in Pre-Raphaelite painters who painted their muses as dead, drowning, collapsing, consumptive mythic heroines . However without the public outlet provided by department stores, of allowing audience to enter and merge with the spectacle, to purchase its raiments and imbue themselves with its mythic power , the fine arts were destined to occupy a more marginalised position in popular culture, and fine art models with it. While a number of upper class women did become celebrity art models at the art of the twentieth century , they were eclipsed, by the saturation of visual culture with cinema stars, and the fashion super models of the late twentieth century.
The late nineteenth century, with the intense confluence of fashion spectacles, reified female nudes in art, proliferation of mannequins, anatomical models and other forms of automated or simulated figurines, fascinated many writers at the time, and many writers and artists since. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project, developed in the 1930’s as a patchwork of comments, quotations and reflections on the emerging spectacle of modernity which centred on the new consumer arcades in Paris. The Arcades project, as an incomplete bricolage of textual fragments, evokes contemporary writings of Benjamin's contemporaries such as the surrealists Michel Leiris, but they provide a rich source of contemporary social theories. In heralding the (post) modern age of hyperreality as being dominated by the order of the mannequin Baudrillard mobilised many of Walter Benjamin’s earlier writings on fashion, models, seduction and death. In “The Doll, the Automaton” Benjamin assembled various quotes, from the history of fashion, to contemplation of literature, theatre reviews, Marxist theory and juxtaposed them with comments of his own. The accumulation of such fragments, often contradictory and ambivalent about the seductive and repellent qualities of the new modernity evoke the power of fashion as mobilising major cultural forces. One quote describes a presentation of Chinese Shadows a puppet exhibition at the Palais royal:
“A Demoiselle gave birth on stage, and the children could immediately scamper about like moles. There were four of them, and they danced together a few moments after the birth in a pleasant quadrille. Another young women started tossing her head vigorously, and in the twinkling of an eye a second demoiselle had stepped full clothed from out of her head. The latter at once began dancing but, the next minute was seized in turn with head shaking; these were labour pains, and a third demoiselle stepped out of her head. She too immediately began dancing but soon took to tossing her head like the others, and out of arose the fourth demoiselle It continued in this manner until eight generations were there on the stage – all related to one another through spontaneous generation, like lice”
Juxtaposed between a paragraph on women in carriages looking like dressed display dummies and Paul Lindau’s descriptions of automatons and dolls as repulsive, the excerpt evokes a phenomenon of inhuman parthenogenesis, of reproduction spreading like a contagion across the stage, provoking identical copies of copies of copies. The compelling spectacle, at once mimicking life, arresting death and arresting the gaze and mind of the viewer. As the organ of reproduction, the model's heads indicate the force of the imaginary code that directs the hall of mirrors of mannequin culture in hyperreality. It is all in their heads. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin juxtaposed descriptions of each, or references to each in fashion writing, trying to elicit connections between modernity, fashion culture and the distorted productions of humanity and monstrosity. Dolls, extrapolated and extruded sections of human forms, of heads, torsos breasts and legs, are twinned to the same bizarre mechanics of clockwork, inventing and circularising micro time into miniaturised mechanic circuits, referential to their own machinic logic. Keeping time.
“All of fashion is in conflict with organic life, all fashion invest itself in marrying the living corpse and the inorganic world. Fashion defends the rights of the cadaver over the living. Fetishism which cannot resist the sex appeal of the organic its vital centre. Benjamin “fashion” in Passage works Paris 1993 p104. “
At the time of Benjamin’s research Fashion mannequins had already moved past the lifelike representations which populated the arcades in the previous century. The macabre qualities of lifelike lifeless store dummies were already publicly acknowledged, in art and fashion magazines. 1924, a French arts writer wrote:
“Here is a new art, that of mannequins, we have finally become disgusted with those horrific wax cadavers, those disturbing counterfeits…”
The writer articulated the abject figures with a kind of ‘knowing’ complicity, with a insouciance typical to fashion writing, dismissed the old figures as ‘so yesterday’. This capacity to declare something ‘dead’ or ‘over’ resurfaces again and again in writing on fashion.
Cadaver images are, in fact, merely a revival of a '60s fashion. In 1961, five years before Twiggy was named model of the year, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the "sick look as fashion craze" and the corpse-like appearances of wasted tubercular models with chartreuse complexions, sunken spines and smudgy eyes (1961). (Living dolls)
But today, traditionally pragmatic Australian women are apparently resisting the persuasions of illusions which elides them with dummy, porcelain doll, puppet, mannequin and the corpse-like body.
The above quotes only serve to highlight the self-referentiality and circularity of fashion discourses. The closed circuit of references does eliminate any credible reference to a ‘natural’ order. In the 1920’s this rejection of corpse like mannequins, was coupled with a precise turn in how artificial mannequins and later fashion models were denaturalised in the interests of consolidating the pathways of female fetishization and consumer spending. Twentieth century mannequins became increasingly abstracted, effaced, and more redolent of the abstracted shapes of early abstract painting. As stated by the following critic
“The modern decorative artists has…sworn to annihilate the horrible simpering wax figures of the clothiers shows of our youth… sometimes all anturaliation is cast aside, decoratively cut features, cut out of in plane, are gilt or silvered over, adding to its strangeness. Sometimes face and figure become a mere cubist chaos of intersecting surfaces; sometimes face and hands are reduced to a decorative hieroglyphic traced inn space.
As fashion mannequins became increasingly referential to abstract art, surrealists exhibited fashion mannequins in bizarre juxtapositions of objects. The permeation of avant-garde art and fashion mannequins was promoted as a modern and modernist stylistic shift, however it was also characterised by a disarming level of misogyny towards the female bodies depicted. The surrealist such as Hans Bellmer used fashion poupees in increasingly disturbing way and this reflected Picasso’s own hysterical violence on the rearranged nudes of the 1930’s. While effacement and evisceration of feminised figurines participated in the imperative of transgression and shock, they also consolidated a deeper displacement from the fetishized female body onto the fetishized objects of consumer culture. Gronberg argues that this was a deliberate and conscious strategy, developed by retail advertisers in the 1920’s. Citing the science of psychology, advertisers described and devised strategies for producing and promoting stylised images of women, that would evoke fashionable models, and yet act as a lure to the inorganic objects they were selling.
The new mannequins, featured in the 1925 Paris Exhibition, were faceless, with stylised pinheads ‘Javanese’ poses and peach textured skin smothered in gold and silver paint. These abstracted and unreal figures helped articulate varying levels of cultural capital within consumer groups. ‘Sophisticated, modern affluent consumers appreciated the modern art references and sought to be aligned with the new mannequins. This alliance of sophisticated consumer and abstracted mannequin was enhanced by cartoons, mocking the shock and inability of unsophisticated rural folk to comprehend or comport themselves around the new modern figures.
With the logic of simulacra firmly established in the previous century, live fashion models started to imitate the increasingly abstract mannequins. Fashion parades increasingly featured ‘sullen’ models, straight mouthed and eyes looking into space . Models moved in unison, as spectres or automatons, with the stylised forms of comportment ‘sashaying’, turning and posing becoming increasingly stylised and artificial . The contemptuous ’ face of the models, as inscrutable, added to the mystique of the commodities they were promoting. Such models, performing as mindless hypnotised zombies, not only spectacularised a denaturalised living state, but increased the power of the fashion spectacle to direct social order. The social power of such models, was enhanced in the early twentieth century spaces where alternance of fashionable clothing, from fixed plaster mannequins to stylised zombie like creatures, provided an uncanny replacement, for socialised enactment of death and rebirth.
