On "Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom": An Interview with Jonathan M. Square

by Tzuni Lopez Montgomery

Dr. Jonathan M. Square is a historian whose work devotes a pronounced attention to the sartorial practices of enslaved subjects. His long-term digital archival project, Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom, appears on Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube, and has prompted the development of two limited run magazines of the same title and two conferences called “Fashioning the Black Body in Bondage and Freedom” (2017) and “Community Curating: Stitching Together the History of a People” (2017). He is currently a faculty member at Harvard University where he has taught the classes “Black Beauty Culture,” “Black Visuality In the Digital Age,” and “Fashion and Slavery,” and was formerly a faculty member at Parsons School of Design where he taught the class “Fashion and Justice.”  He has curated three shows on Harvard University’s campus including Odalisque Atlas: White History as Told through Art (2019), Freedom from Truth: Self-Portraits of Nell Painter (2019), and Slavery in the Hands of Harvard (2019).

We met on ZOOM, as this interview occurred during COVID-19 social distancing restrictions while I was in Los Angeles, CA and he was in Brooklyn, NY.

FP: Can you maybe speak to Fashioning the Self for people who are unfamiliar with the project? 

JMS: So I founded and edit the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom. It’s a curated platform that explores the intersection between slavery in the fashion system, and I use a variety of social media platforms. The project so far has amassed close to eleven thousand followers just on its Facebook. On Instagram it’s about seven thousand. And the followers are academics, curators, costume designers, artists, and also just interested laypersons. 

FP: How did you develop this to begin with?

JMS: Well, the reason why it’s expanded so much is because the project initially just started with me sharing a lot of archival images of enslaved or formerly enslaved people. And I felt like I was cheating, I felt like I was just taking information that other people had created in the past and just sort of building a platform based on that. And I wanted to create original content. And that was the impetus behind the magazines. So not only do I want to share knowledge that’s already created, but I want to create my own knowledge and share it with the public.

It started while I was doing the PhD at New York University. I actually, in a weird way, fashioned myself into a fashion scholar while I was doing the PhD. By the time I finished, I was identifying with the field of fashion studies. And the project, Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom, was actually an outgrowth of a course that I created. And when I created this course, I also created a Facebook page for the course as a way for students to engage with the course material outside of class using social media. And the course was cancelled because of low enrollment. But I had already set up the Facebook page. And I was like, “You know what? I’m going teach the class anyway using social media.”

Cover of the second issue of “Fashioning the Self”

FP: It’s more accessible in that way then, that’s great.

JMS: I felt sort of empowered by social media in a way that I don’t think would have been possible a decade ago. And also, when I teach, I like for there always to be some sort of outward facing component. I teach a class called “Black Beauty Culture” and in that class, for two semesters in a row, students created an online magazine. And I’ve often had my students curate pop-up exhibitions for a class. So, I’m always trying to include some sort of element that’s facing outward.

FP: I love the idea of teaching pedagogy being the starting point. Do you feel like the mold that you created originally for the Facebook page—that has now existed on so many other surfaces—has retained that same class oriented structure?

JMS: Absolutely. I feel like at the end of the day, over anything else, I identify as an educator. And even at times when I identify as a writer or a curator, I think the point of my writing and the point of my curation—or any of my creative pursuits—is to educate. So that’s always sort of the core of what I’m doing.

FP: Speaking of curation, can you maybe speak a bit more about the curatorial projects you’ve brought to life?

JMS: So last year I curated two shows that were on Harvard’s campus. One was called Slavery in the Hands of Harvard. And in that show I paired archival materials and documents that are in Harvard’s permanent collection, and I paired it with contemporary art. And the archival materials and documents that I chose sort of touched on Harvard’s connection to slavery. And I chose contemporary art pieces by artists whose work grappled with the legacy of slavery in some respect. So it wasn’t so much a fashion exhibition, even though there were elements of fashion theory in the show, if that makes sense. I also curated two solo shows of the work of a historian now artist—Neil Irvin Painter.

FP: So your primary historical focus tends to orient around fashion, and a lot of these large-scale institutions don’t tend to preserve fashion to the same extent. What history do you feel has been lost on account of the de-prioritization of fashion within those spheres?

JMS: Yeah, it’s interesting, Harvard has no fashion collection that I know of. And for students at Harvard that are interested in fashion, they actually suffer a little bit, because there’s really no place for them. They end up either doing art history or a humanities major. But it’s a shame because fashion is a key component to understanding history. And in my particular case, it’s a key component to understanding the history of slavery. And I feel like if you don’t consider the genesis of the fashion system—and in particular, the growth of the ready-made clothing industry—then you’re missing really important information about the development of slavery and its relationship to global capitalism.

People focus on slavery in academia. There’s a robust group of scholars who specialize in the history of slavery in American universities, but there’s less focus on fashion outside of art schools or fashion schools. And I think what’s lost is individuals. It’s easy—and I have to say, I’m really guilty of this too—to focus on structures, to focus on the economy, to focus on the government, to focus on networks of capital, and forget about human beings. But you know, slavery was a system that was made up of individuals with unique personalities who woke up and got dressed every morning. Enslaved people rarely had access to the press or to governmental bodies, but they had access to their own bodies and how they styled their bodies. And so I think there’s a lot of political information that’s encoded in how enslaved people dress themselves.

I feel like anything associated with the body is seen as base within academia. So if you study intellectual history, you know, you’re an economist or a political scientist, or a philosopher, anything about the “life of the mind.” Anything lofty, that’s considered worthy of academic inquiry. Anything associated with the human body is considered base, even though the mind is part of the body. Things like food studies or fashion studies get sidelined because they are considered effects of the economy. Fashion is just an effect of capitalism, they think. Fashion is just an effect of regime change, they say. Instead of it being in dialogue with each other—like fashion is shaping the economy. Food is shaping governmental regimes. Like it’s a dialogue, it’s not just a governmental imposition. So I think, yeah, the focus on fashion reorients the conversation by saying that it’s actually central to understanding something like slavery. Because if you’re not considering the genesis of the fashion system, then you’re not really understanding the history of slavery because fashion, to this day, is based in coerced labor.

FP: Do you feel like that’s the case within the curatorial context as well? Has there been much attention devoted to visually representing the enslaved experience within an exhibition space?

JMS: Ooh, that’s a tricky question. It’s tricky because pieces worn by enslaved people—there’s very few surviving pieces in fashion collections. I probably know of all of them.

 FP: Really? 

JMS: It’s probably, like, thirty-something pieces spread out throughout the entire country. Because, I mean, for most enslaved peoples, clothing was used for utilitarian purposes. And of course they had special pieces that they wore on Sundays, or on holidays, or on time off—but those pieces weren’t preserved in fashion collections. So to have a fashion exhibition of clothing worn by enslaved people would take a lot of effort. I would love to do it. Honestly, I think a lot of pieces—I mean, you would have to be very careful. They wouldn’t be able to be put on mannequins because they’re just too delicate. But I think what you can do is recreate pieces worn by enslaved people.

Installation shot of the exhibition “Slavery in the Hands of Harvard,” 2019.

FP: You’ve previously said that a large part of your fashion interests is predicated on the fact that “fashion is one of the few arenas in which slaves could possibly exert a modicum of control.” If you’re utilizing the historical documents of the oppressor, as many collections tend to prioritize this point of view in the objects they’ve acquired, how do you manage to empower the viewpoint of the enslaved person? Especially when you don’t have access to sartorial material?

JMS: Yeah, I really like this question. I feel it lies at the crux of me as a scholar. It’s my daily struggle. Because, you know, I literally think about the experience of enslaved people on a daily basis. But, you know, most of the time, I don’t have access to any written testimonies or interviews with these enslaved peoples. And all we have is images—rarely a garment—so I have to grasp for straws. But I also think there’s a lot of opportunity in that, instead of thinking of it as a problem. I think it’s actually generative. So I try to let the objects speak for themselves. For example, in the Zealy daguerreotypes, there’s a lot of information that you can glean just from looking at the eyes of the sitters. Because the enslaved subjects of Zealy’s daguerreotypes weren’t able to leave any written testimony about their lives, you have to really do some critical seeing and close visual analysis, which is at the heart of what I do. But your question is really important, and I think a lot of scholars of slavery think often, about this question of agency, and resurrecting the stories of enslaved people. It’s something I try to do in my work, not just in my curation but in my writing, in my teaching, on Fashioning the Self.

FP: Within your Slavery in the Hands of Harvard show, you were using the university’s own collection, and needing to work through their own framework and the things that they prioritize. But you were able to create this reflective environment, where it was able to shine the mirror back onto the institution itself using its own objects. Can you maybe speak to that reflective process a bit and talk about how you chose the specific objects that you chose to showcase there?

JMS: Well, my process for curating the exhibition, I had two means of doing that. One was my own research. The other was my own reading on the topic and really important conversations.

So, in terms of with my own research, I did a lot of readings on the Zealy daguerreotypes, which were a series of photos that were taken of enslaved men and women on a South Carolina plantation. They were commissioned by a Harvard professor named Louis Agassiz. He hired a photographer who was based in Columbia, South Carolina whose name was Joseph T. Zealy. And Joseph T. Zealy photographed these enslaved peoples and sent them to Louis Agassiz, and Louis Agassiz essentially used them to back up his racist ideas about how, people of African descent were inferior. And they were archived at Harvard, and they were essentially forgotten about for decades. And they were found in an attic in the 1970s. And since the 1970s they’ve been the source of a lot of scholarship on visual culture and slavery.

And also I just had a lot of really powerful conversations with scholars and artists; so for instance, I spoke with the artist Nona Faustine, and we were talking about the Zealy daguerreotypes. And she told me, “you know, I read a book called Delia’s Tears, which is about one of the enslaved women who was photographed by Joseph T. Zealy. That was one of the inspirations for the series that I did.” So, I included one of her pieces in the show

I did a studio visit with the artist named Noel Anderson. And I told him, “You know, I’m curating this show on Harvard’s connection to slavery. Do you have anything that might work for this show?” He said, “I don’t, but I have an idea for a piece I can create.” He created this piece titled “Henry/Renty” for the exhibition. On July 16, 2009, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested at his Cambridge home by police officer James Crowley, who was responding to a 9-1-1 caller’s report of men breaking and entering the residence. Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct, charges which were later dropped. The arrest sparked a national debate about the persistence of racial profiling, regardless of age, educational attainment, or prominence within scholarly communities. Anderson took this incident as a point of departure for this piece that explores power and control of the photographic image vis-à-vis black men. Though over a century and a half apart, the piece exposes continuities in discrimination in the African American experience.

I also spoke with a scholar named Caitlin DeAngelis Hopkins—who at the time was the Harvard and Slavery fellow—Harvard has since defunded this program, unfortunately, but I think they’re probably going to put more funds in it now given the conversations about race and representation that are happening. I think there’s more impetus around studying this connection. But at the time, they had a fellow, whose sole purpose was to study the University’s connection to slavery. And I met with her several times, and she actually told me about a lot of things that I didn’t even know about, even though I’d done a lot of research on the University’s connection to slavery. So for instance, she told me about the tuition bill that was paid for with sugar in the 18th century—and I actually hadn’t known about that document. So, I actually included a reproduction of that document in the exhibition, and I paired it with a reproduction of Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby installation.

I also created a piece, an artwork in the show, and I took my diplomas, and I painted over them. So, I had a conversation with myself (laughs) for the exhibition.

Jonathan M. Square “Slavery in the Hands of Harvard” 2019

FP: I love the idea of curator as artist as well, and so the fact that you inserted yourself into this actual exhibition through your own work: what was that experience like? 

JMS: I’m not a trained curator. I’m an academic. So, my method of curation is very unorthodox in a lot of ways—I just sort of do it organically. But I’m also a creative person, and so, I don’t know, one day—I’ve always held on to my diplomas. Not because I have some sort of attachment to them, but just because it’s something that you’re supposed to do—I don’t really care about it, it’s just a piece of paper to me. It’s the process of doing the work to get the diploma that meant more to me than the actual diploma. But I’ve held on to them, they’ve gone from apartment to apartment in a little sleeve. And I slid them under my bed. And I was just sitting there, reflecting on being an African American man, having three degrees, being a professor, and knowing that these universities have this problematic history that they’re not really grappling with in any substantive way. One day I just pulled them out and started painting over them and I created these pieces. And I actually tried to draw a connection between diplomas and freedom papers carried by enslaved peoples.

FP: I feel like that carries such a strong affective nature, especially when considering who would be coming in contact with the work at an institution of higher education.

JMS: It’s funny, people were horrified when I would give tours of the exhibition and I’d say “I actually created this piece, and these are my diplomas I’ve painted over.” They’d ask me if they were copies. I would tell them that they were my actual diplomas to their chagrin.

FP: I love that. I feel like people apply a weird sanctity to them even though it’s really about the knowledge you gain from an institution rather than having the evidence that you’ve gone through the curriculum. Well with the conversations that are erupting on the mainstream on account of the Black Lives Matter movement about contemporary structures like the prison industrial complex, how do you see sartorial codes of resistance being represented in our contemporary moment?

JMS: Yeah, it’s interesting, because I feel Black lives are trending right now. But they’re not trending—, they’ve always been trending for me. It’s not a new thing. You know, every day is Juneteenth on Fashioning the Self. I’ve been doing these posts before this current moment; I’ll continue doing these posts after Black lives aren’t trending. When the novelty wears off. But I have to say that one thing that I’ve noticed is that I’ve gotten greater visibility. And that people are listening closer. So it’s sort of forced me to take my role as an educator and public intellectual more seriously.

[In regards to sartorial codes,] I see two things happening. I’m seeing some Black Americans retreating to what might be called respectability politics. So, for instance … in Omaha, Nebraska there was a march staged and several Black men in suits led the march. And part of me thinks that’s problematic because being a Black feminist, I actually think it’s Black women who have led the charge in most radical movements. So I kind of took umbrage with these Black men wearing suits and sort of leading the charge … suits won’t protect you from bullets. I feel like that lesson has been learned decades ago … I understand where they’re coming from; you have these ideas about Black men and we’re going to counteract that by wearing the suit which has long been associated with cis het maleness and respectability. So I get the impulse to do that, but I just don’t think—and it’s long been proven—that it’s not effective. Wearing a suit is not going to protect you from state sanctioned violence. And then, of course, I think on the other side, I think people are sort of leaning into their Blackness. And embracing the sartorial ingenuity of the African diaspora, whether it’s wearing prints that reflect African heritage in some respect, or wearing head wraps, or wearing something that’s a visual cue to African pride or African diasporic pride. So I see two sides, two sort of camps that are developing. 

FP: Do you have any new plans on account of the “new COVID world” where a lot of life is more enmeshed in the digital realm?

JMS: You’ve probably noticed that I’m very active on social media. And I’ve always been a big proponent of digital humanities projects. I think I’m almost like a higher education abolitionist if that makes sense. I want to democratize higher education, I think it should be accessible to everyone. I hate that people don’t go to school because it’s costly. I think that’s a shame. And I try to share the information that I have in my classes and make it available online. For example, if you go to my website, most of my syllabi are web based, and you can see what I teach in my classes, and you can click on the links and be sent to the readings. So you can almost take the class yourself if you want to. So I’m really trying to radicalize my pedagogical practice. And I think social media is really instrumental in that. But also, it’s a double-edged sword, I have to be honest. I think social media doesn’t always lend itself to thoughtful reflection and critical analysis. I am an aesthete. I’m a visual person, like I’m a material person. So I get—I get Instagram. I get Facebook, but what frustrates me about it is that everything has to be driven by a compelling image. And in the case of enslaved people, sometimes there’s some amazing stories, but sometimes there just isn’t that beautiful, compelling image to go along with it. And so, you know, there’s been times when I’ve worked really hard on a post or a YouTube video, but it wasn’t attached to an object or an image, and it just didn’t get the traction just because there wasn’t that visual element.

I’m really into radical approaches to higher education and expanding the conversation. I’m inspired by other academics, but I’m also inspired by artists, and I’m inspired by curators. I feel social media lends itself to those kind of conversations in a way that higher education doesn’t. I’ve been taking my IG Lives and posting them on YouTube in an attempt to create my own stand-alone institution.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Because, you know, I really love the idea of working for myself. And, I mean, honestly—in a world capitalist system, there really is no such thing as working for yourself. But, you know, a lot of these institutions are problematic in some way—and for a number of reasons, I’ve questioned being affiliated with them or being attached to them. And sometimes I feel more comfortable being attached to a platform like Facebook, or Google, or YouTube. Even though they’re problematic too. They’re problematic. But I don’t come face to face with it the way I do in institutions. So I’ve been really interested in building a more robust online presence.

Book Release—Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival, and the Grotesque Body

by Francesca Granata

Leigh Bowery, July 1989, Look 9, Photo Fergus Greer, courtesy of the Artist 

I am thrilled to announce the publication of my book, Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival, and the Grotesque Body  (I.B. Tauris). Experimental Fashion is a study of designers and performance artists at the turn of the twenty-first century whose work challenges established codes of what represents the fashionable body through strategies of parody, humor, and inversion. The book argues that the proliferation of bodies-out-of-bounds in fashion during this period was influenced by feminism’s desire to open up and question gender and bodily norms and particularly the normative bodies of fashion. It was also tied to the AIDS epidemic and mediated the fears of contagion and the obsessive policing of bodily borders that characterized the period. 

Rei Kawakubo, "Body Meets Dress", Spring/Summer 1997. Courtesy of Firstview

Starting in the 1980s, the book investigates the ways designers such as Georgina Godley challenged the masculinized silhouette of the power suit and its neoliberal exhortations, while Comme des Garçons’s Rei Kawakubo questioned the sealed classical body of fashion, in part thanks to her collaboration with choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Cindy Sherman. Fashion designer, performance artist, and club figure Leigh Bowery upended gender codes and challenged fears surrounding the bodies of gay men through the decade. The book also examines Martin Margiela’s “deconstruction fashion” of the 1990s and the way his work challenges norms of garment construction and sizing. It enters the new millennium through the work of Bernhard Willhelm, which shows the increased cross-pollination of fashion and performance art and the renewed interest in upending codes of masculinity. The book concludes by examining how experimental fashion—particularly in its grotesque and carnivalesque variety—moved from the margins to the mainstream through the pop phenomenon of Lady Gaga.

Naturally, there are countless people to thank for helping me with the book. These include Caroline Evans, Alistair O'Neil, and Elizabeth Wilson (my dissertation advisors at Central Saint Martins); Philippa Brewster at I.B. Tauris; Kaat Debo, who allowed me to do research in the ModeMuseum Collection in Antwerp; and  Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda, who granted me a one-year fellowship to do research in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume. I could not be happier with the book! It can be ordered here.

For those in New York, save the date for the book launch on March 16th at Parsons School of Design at 6pm in Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building  65 West 11th Street, where I will be in conversation with fashion designer Bernhard Wilhelm.

Martin Margiela, Enlarged Collection, Autumn/Winter 2000, courtesy of Firstview

An Interview with Margaret Maynard

by Nadia Buick Cover of Margaret Maynard's Out of Line: Australian Women and Style.

Associate Professor Margaret Maynard is one of Australia’s most respected dress historians. She has published widely in the field and taught for decades at The University of Queensland (UQ) at a time when dress and fashion subjects were few and far between. She continues to hold an Honorary Research Consultant position at UQ in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History. Maynard has contributed greatly to publishing on Australian dress and fashion. Her book Fashioned from Penury re-evaluated Colonial dress in Australia, debunked previously persuasive myths about the impact of the British Empire, class and gender while arguing for institutional acquisition of everyday clothing rather than ‘high fashion.’ In Dress and Globalisation she was one of the first to discuss clothing and sustainability and cross-cultural dressing practices. She also edited the Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands volume of the Berg Encyclopaedia of World Dress and Fashion.

Margaret Maynard and I are both based in Brisbane (arguably quite far removed from the ‘centres’ of fashion) and I have been fortunate to work with her on a project about fashion in Queensland called The Fashion Archives. We spend a lot of time chatting via email and I recently took the time to ask her these questions…

You are a dress historian whose work has also occasionally examined fashion. What is your working definition for these terms?

Fashion for me is the highly volatile aspect of attire and behaviour—the latest look and comportment at any one time. It is a transformative concept or social ideal (not necessarily just reflective). Shaping and reshaping the body, it is an active and material demonstration of change, the nature of its visibility inextricable from social and cultural experiences. The other point is that fashion is inseparable from the industry in which it is made and more recently the commercialisation of its marketing and promotion.

For me fashion is a form of dress, so the term dress encompasses all attire, irrespective of economic factors or class. My view is that one can’t fully understand the workings and nature of fashion unless one takes into account wider processes of dressing. In fashion photography, for instance, one should bear in mind technical processes and the whole marketing structure of the industry. It has been said that fashion is where ‘costume’ and ‘dress’ converge but I don’t think that fashion should be thought of in this way. There are also degrees of fashionability dependent on class and economic circumstances as well as aspirations to look stylish.

Is ‘dress studies’ no longer fashionable?

Yes, I agree that ‘dress studies’ has the lower rating at the present time. Fashion studies today have cachet largely because they have become almost professionalised by the academy and the obsession with dense kinds of theory has lent to a sense of superiority amongst some practitioners. There are also convenient links to contemporary interests in design and lifestyle. And there is no doubt fashion benefits from its association with visual pleasure, aesthetics and artistic creativity.

Dress studies on the other hand seem intellectually less demanding and its subjects can give an impression of being mundane even drab. It is often downgraded as mere social or working-class history compared to fashion. It is interesting that second-hand dress rates more highly perhaps due to its association with self presentation as a creative form. The media loves fashion as allegedly newsworthy, with its links to the latest upmarket designs. Thus most newspapers have columns on ‘fashion’ where they seldom have on dress. The term ‘costume’ used to have the same low standing but somewhat upgraded now it has become the accepted term for theatrical performance attire.

Many theorists and critics interested in dress and/or fashion have observed the field’s relationship to women and femininity, and suggested that this close link is the reason that dress and fashion studies have often been overlooked. Have you also found this to be true? Do you think this is something that continues to happen?

I think that the association of dress/fashion with women’s interests was prevalent until the later 20th century. Historically fashion has been associated with vanity and folly, thus contributing to the perception it is not a serious study. The topic has been disparaged, written about defensively and considered frivolous. But this has certainly not been the case in the last decade or so. In academic circles the subject is flourishing. Publishers like Bloomsbury have catalogues saturated with books on the topic. This said exhibitions of women’s fashions are huge drawcards, suggesting women are still objects of desire as opposed to subjects of analysis. Countering this are the many women who have in recent times written seminal studies on the complexities inherent in dress/fashion and forged new pathways for the study

What does dress provide us as a tool for examining women’s lives?

With respect I think this is only half the question that should be asked. Dress provides an extraordinary useful method to explore the nature of any culture and to examine both the lives of men and women and their relationships. In place of the old single time line of style or cyclical change, dress provides an entry point into any culture, its social interactions, commerce, sexual mores and is a key indicator of identity. Dress allows us to interpret the history of men and women in a unique way.

You are also interested in the dress practices found in other cultures, such as Aboriginal Australians and Pacific Islanders. Does dress studies, as opposed to fashion studies, allow historians and theorists to take a wider, cross-cultural view? Fashion can of course be very Westernised in its focus.

I feel that reinforcing the notion of a gap between dress and fashion studies is not necessarily productive. Cross disciplinary research appeals to me as more useful. I also think the answer to the question lies in how one understands and uses terminology. Under the rubric of dress one can certainly include analyses of Indigenous clothing and associated practices, that of Islanders and indeed so called ‘ethnic’ attire. But non-Western dress also expresses wealth and status in its own ways. Fashion with a capital F is driven by Western interests, global commerce and creation of novel products in order to increase consumption. Fashion with a small f is closer to a fad or slight alteration and this latter does inflect both customary dress and less obvious kinds of wearing and bodily adornment. We know customary dress is not stylistically static and, to varying degrees, incorporates new elements and slight shifts in style. So nuances in both fashion and dress can be considered in non-Western attire.

I believe you grew up in South Africa and initially worked as a costume designer. Was clothing and dress something that you were always drawn to? Were there many opportunities in those days to pursue dress history?

Since a child in South Africa I loved clothes and dressing up—a passion was collecting paper dolls. I trained in so called ‘Fine Arts’ but was always interested in ‘the Decorative Arts’ which were less prestigious than the former. I was fortunate to get my first real job with the State theatre company mainly making theatre, opera and ballet props. I was catapulted into designing costumes for major opera shows in Johannesburg and teaching theatre design with no prior training. There were no opportunities at all to study ‘dress’. It was a question of teaching oneself. The only other person I knew interested in dress was a woman artist recording tribal African attire in remote areas. I admired her work and would have liked to have taken this further but felt her lifestyle too dangerous.

You left South Africa in the 1960s after winning a highly coveted place to study at the Courtauld Institute in London – this was one of the only formal costume history courses at the time. It was run by Stella Newton, who was pioneering in her approach to studying dress using paintings and art history. Can you tell us about that? What was she like as a teacher? Has her approach remained with you?

As a student of ‘costume’ I felt totally at home. Stella was a marvelous and inspiring teacher. Her focus was painting and sculpture as a source of information on dress. We started with lectures on the Greeks and progressed up to the 19th century. She was less keen on contemporary dress. The visual source was our primary evidence in her view. But she drew from a wide range of information, especially art history. She was interested to contextualize dress and used archival and other social and historical material as supporting evidence. We were alerted to all classes of wearers. (She was especially interested in European so called ‘peasant dress’). She taught us to date paintings extremely accurately, something I can still do. This technique was useful to art historians and dealers who needed to give art works (with limited provenance) as accurate a date as possible. We were also asked to determine if works of art were fakes or not. Stella believed that forgers often got the dress of a period wrong where they could calculate painting style and other things more accurately. There are art historical precedents for this in the work of a 19th century scholar called Morelli. She made us feel we had special abilities.

I have since taken a different path. Whilst I had a matchless education, I don’t like chronological approaches to high-end style and I like to integrate material culture to a greater degree. Surviving dress interested Stella but in a slightly limited way. Unlike her I see much value in theoretical approaches especially related to material culture, consumption, etc and I feel that ethnography and anthropology have much to offer the subject. I aim where appropriate to forge links between material objects, theoretical considerations and what I know of visual sources. I am probably more interested in the dress of everyday life than Stella. Perhaps one reason I took a different route was because Brisbane has fewer examples of early international art than were available to me as a student in London.

You came to Australia in the 1970s and began working at the University of Queensland. There you pioneered fashion and dress courses and began serious research about Australian dress. Even today dress and fashion research in Australia is still emerging, but I imagine it was really an entirely new field when you began. What were those early years like?

When I first started at the University I was employed to teach art history. I did not teach dress studies for some years. The topic was seen as quite bizarre but it soon gained a bit of a following especially when I leaned more toward teaching fashion. Many people felt and perhaps still feel that they are qualified to discuss dress/fashion where they do not talk about other specialist areas such as archaeology. People wear clothes and thus consider themselves experts. This led to the perception that the subject could easily be dismissed as light on and also to a sidelining of dress/fashion expertise.

I was extremely lucky to feel I was the ‘first’ to look at certain archival material, literature and imagery from this new perspective. But it was isolating and my work was something of a curiosity. I did give papers at art and history conferences but I did not have the reassurance of a particular discipline behind me. On the other hand coming new to Australia from a conservative country, I found a critical openness in students that was refreshing.

I think you even had a radio program on the ABC? I often think there should be more radio and television programs about fashion and dress. What kinds of things did you cover?

Beginning in the 70s I was asked to do question and answer programs with one of the local announcers. They were comments on current trends in dress, or I answered questions on the origins of different types of clothes. I did one series of six on dress and identity. It was taped and one ran each week. I also did a taped radio program on dress of PNG where I had lived for a year. Over the years I have done a great many interviews on current dress. Some were round table interviews with different ABC stations and other experts. If some unusual dress was worn in Brisbane for the first time, perhaps new uniforms for Queensland Rail employees etc, I would be asked to comment. I worked on a film shown on the ABC a few years ago. It was very disappointing as it skated over the interesting issues in Australian dress. I also think far more should be done, but there is a tendency to go for superficial issues, rather than the really significant aspects of dress/fashion which I consider more interesting.

You’ve published widely. I wonder which books or articles you have been most proud of?

My book Fashioned from Penury (1994) did fairly well at the start but interestingly it has had a bit of a revival in the past few years. I am proud of this as there has been no equivalent publication. I am also very proud of the volume I edited for the Berg Encyclopaedia of World Dress and Fashion (2010) which was extraordinarily challenging. I am also proud of Dress and Globalisation (2004), the first book to discuss dress and sustainability, and the essays ‘The Fashion Photograph: An Ecology’ in Fashion as Photograph Viewing, and Reviewing Images of Fashion ed Eugénie Shinkle (2008) and ‘The Mystery of the Fashion Photograph’ Fashion in Fiction. Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television eds Peter McNeil Vicki Karaminas Catherine Cole (2009) – a transcript of my keynote paper given at the ‘Fashion in Fiction’ conference in Sydney.

It is fairly hackneyed territory, but you also have a fine arts and art history background. I wonder what you think of the art versus fashion debate. Do you see fashion as art? What about dress? This is quite a fraught area of debate for which there are no simple answers, as with the art/craft debate. Consumers certainly experience art and fashion differently and they have different value systems but many artists, for different reasons, have been designers of fashion. There have been frequent slippages and synergies between the two practices but also antagonisms. Both fashion and clothing/dress can be exhibited as installations in art galleries but does this make either ‘art’? ‘Putting oneself together’ in terms of dressing the body is akin to a personal art, and fashion and art have at times found themselves mutually useful. The answer to your question is not straightforward in any way. You’ve been working with fashion and dress across a period of dramatic growth within museums, universities, libraries etc. I wonder if you could comment on how the study of dress and fashion has changed? When I started out the study of dress and fashion was a great novelty. It was as if one could research in any area and opportunities were endless. Today publishers have almost overdone the subject and it is difficult to carve out an entirely new specialist area. Naturally the internet has made a huge difference to image access as well as access to other forms of information. In my early years of teaching there were practically no articles or books I could recommend to students. Now there is a huge range of material which is wonderful. Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Material Culture Studies, Women’s Studies, Ethnography and associated Critical Theory has lifted the bar in studies of dress and fashion. Without interdisciplinarity the area would have remained limited and esoteric. In Britain after I had completed by study, there was a strongly conservative attitude but this has changed dramatically. What do you think the future is for fashion and dress studies? What are you currently working on?

I hope that fashion and dress studies has a great future, especially in links with Material Culture Studies and Ethnography, even Archaeology. In some ways I feel too much has been published too quickly but many books are of a very high standard. Fashion is extraordinarily popular. One can see this in the crowds who visit fashion exhibitions and clearly museums use fashion as a draw card. I think that this is excellent, especially if displays are inventive. But it is important to also stand back from the glitzy aspects of fashion and look for other narratives that clothes can offer.

At present I am working on a project on Dress and Time. I am considering how the cultural phenomenon of time explains dress practices around the globe, given the vastly different socio/cultural, political, religious and imaginary concepts about it existing over millennia. Reflecting on the temporal in the widest sense shows how time has been coextensive with how, when and why humans design, fabricate, wear and preserve all forms of garment, fabrics and accessories.

Nadia Buick is a fashion curator, writer and researcher based in Brisbane, Australia. She recently completed a doctorate in fashion curation and is currently Co-Director of The Fashion Archives.

Review of Fetishism in Fashion, MOBA 2013

by Philip Warkander

“We are born in bondage, a cord wrapped around our baby body”, curator Lidewij Edelkoort stated in her introductory speech to this year’s Mode Biënnale in Arnhem, Fetishism in Fashion, open June 9 through July 21. During an interview, she tells me that the starting point of the exhibition is the trauma a child experiences after birth when it is separated from its mother through the cutting of the umbilical cord, resulting in a lifelong search after new unities to be part of. According to Edelkoort, this feeling of lack explains the charm bracelets around our wrists and crucifixes around our necks; magical substitutes for the physical connection between mother and child that was lost at birth. For the biënnale, Edelkoort has chosen 13 different perspectives on the theme of fetishes, presented in separate rooms along long corridors, ranging from patriotism to sado-masochism, the common denominator defined as attempts to reconnect and retrace what was lost at birth, to find meaning in matter.

Philosopher Sara Danius has claimed that when fashion evolved into a modern industry in the nineteenth century, fashion objects took the place of religious artifacts and became the new fetishes of the emerging consumer society. At the Arnhem biënnale, this is made especially evident in the rooms devoted to spirituality and shamanism, but also in the room devoted to high-speed consumption, labeled “consumerism”. Designers such as Written Afterwards (Japan), Luke Brooks (UK) and Kosuke Tsumura (Japan) have integrated a critique of fast fashion into their design, creating outfits out of worn-out shoes, plastic flowers and disposable waste products. On the theme of “infantilism”, designer objects are mixed with large plastic pacifiers and milk bottles found through online fetish sites, creating interesting hybrid expressions of fashion, innocence and pornography, in pastel colors but with a dark edge. According to a text in this room, this demonstrates how “the choice of baby clothes, diapers and coddling textiles expresses a need for being cared for and a wish to never grow up [...]”.

Ana-Rajcevic, photo by Fernando Lessa

Many of the objects at the biënnale are created by emerging designers rather than by established fashion houses (even though Prada, Vivienne Westwood and Jean-Paul Gaultier are represented, and a film of the Dior couture show S/S 2007 is showed as a sign of “nipponism” being a contemporary fetish). Edelkoort tells me that this is because the traditional fashion houses did not live up to the requirements of the exhibition, but the lack of designs by brand such as Givenchy, Versace and Maison Martin Margiela, otherwise a given considering the theme of fetishism, nevertheless raises a few questions concerning the selection process. Also, curating a theme of “nudism” by “using the colours of our own skin” but only including beige objects unfortunately enhances the Caucasian norm already strongly prevalent in Western society, as does the naïve statement (returning to “nipponism”) that, “Japanese people have an innate knowledge of how to package and fold geometry into form [...] it can possibly be considered the most fetishistic culture in the world, where each rule and move is codified and all aspects are about attachments.” This kind of simplification of an entire culture obscures the important Japanese presence in fashion rather than elucidating and explaining the many interesting interrelations between western and eastern influences and actors within the industry.

Edelkoort has been aided by a number of other designers, curators and artists – all in different ways connected to Arnhem and its ArtEZ Institute of the Arts – who in different ways have contributed to the biënnale. Under the fitting rubric “Elevation”, footwear designers Marijke Bruggink and Marlie Witteveen have investigated the central role of high heels in fetishistic fashion. In particular, their exploration of stilts and clogs is worth mentioning, demonstrating beautiful and intricate wooden constructions, with particular care given to displaying shoes that are actually possible to walk in. In a centrally located church in downtown Arnhem, the design duo People of the Labyrinths have been given free hands to construct an art installation, investigating the fetishistic position of fashion objects in comparison to relics, traditions and rituals within various religions. For example, a Catholic monstrance is placed next to Hermès’ Kelly-bag at the end of a long red carpet, while a neon sign spells out the words “make-believe” in the church ceiling. And in the Zypendaal Castle just outside of the city, menswear designers Ravage have curated an exhibition based on their fascination of style codes in menswear, focusing on objects such as underwear, shoes and neckties.

To briefly summarize, the 2013 biënnale combines an international perspective on mainly emerging designers with an explicitly Dutch team of curators. This gives the exhibition both global and local dimensions, creating tension in some areas while in others presenting humoristic approaches and in-depth explorations of how fashion can operate as a research tool in order to understand Western society’s ultimate fetishes.

Philip Warkander recently completed his PhD in Fashion Studies, and is currently working as a freelance fashion writer and consultant, while also teaching fashion theory and gender studies in Stockholm.

Yu Otaku, Clogs

This is Not A Fashion Critic: An Interview with Guy Trebay

by Jay Ruttenberg

Illustration by Nathan Gelgud

Guy Trebay, of the New York Times, defines himself as a cultural critic and even when working the traditional fashion beat, allows his attention to wander into that broader realm. Although he operates without a column, Trebay’s articles are easy to spot. Like some debonair newsman of Hollywood lore, he reports from exotic corners of the globe. He is cynical without being closed-minded or small, and writes about glamour with neither aspirational veneration nor wanton bloodlust. His writing on style betrays a love for the fashion world, yet he does not hesitate to shiv those who have it coming. Most conspicuously, his every sentence is spun with a panache that seems perhaps too opulent for newsprint, even that of the Times. “The lush mane was ratted and back-combed into a frowsy beehive, the kind in which hoodlums of legend used to conceal their razor blades,” he wrote about Amy Winehouse shortly after her death. “Her basic eyeliner became an ornate volute, a swath of clown makeup, a cat mask.”

Prior to landing at the Times’ Sunday Styles section, in 2000, Trebay spent two decades at the Village Voice. Where his current post finds him traipsing between Miami art parties and Milan menswear shows, his Voice column—anthologized in the 1994 book In the Place To Be: Guy Trebay’s New York (Temple University Press)—sent the writer to more humble quarters, often up in the Bronx. If his change of landscape follows the New York zeitgeist, Trebay’s history also lends his fashion writing an unavoidable socioeconomic undertone. “Once it starts to be just about clothes,” he says, “I’m out.”

Trebay met Fashion Projects in a small conference room at the New York Times building, sandwiching the interview between reporting trips to Europe and Los Angeles.

Fashion Projects: You’ve said that you don’t consider yourself a fashion critic, but a cultural critic.

Guy Trebay: That’s right. First of all, what is a fashion critic? What is that? I mean, it’s not a very developed critical discipline. It seems to me that for decades, it was a kind of business reporting. But somewhere along the line, in a very wholesome way, it evolved into getting some critical discipline. I guess it’s like movies. In the beginning, there were no movie critics. At a certain point in our period, fashion developed something of the valence, culturally, that movies had.

FP: When?

GT: I’d guess the ’80s, but I really don’t know. When I first started writing about this, it was in a much broader context. I was writing about the city for the Village Voice—I wasn’t writing about fashion, per say. But fashion shows would come to town like the circus, and it would change the atmosphere of the streets. You were aware that there was this population of people coming in from who knew where, and models like gazelles were leaping over sidewalks. And you were like, “Well, this is interesting.” But in those days, it was a small and very contained world. The knowledge wasn’t widely dispersed. That has changed so radically. I came to the Times in 2000 and by then, IMG had gotten into the business. IMG was a sports promotion company, as everybody knows. But Mark McCormack, the founder, looked at the landscape and said, “Where am I gonna find another thing that is as translatable across cultures and—without the necessity for language comprehension—can sell as an image language. That’s when they got heavily into fashion and started these fashion weeks. They bought into New York Fashion Week and it became this global plague of fashion weeks.

FP: Before that was it simply an industry event? GT: It was a trade week. For all that I’ve poked fun at the proliferation of fashion week—the Bulgarian Fashion Week and whatnot—it’s very useful. There’s a circuit that people routinely follow in this business: New York, London, Milan, and Paris. Over time, people have talked about how it can all be done online, but that absolutely isn’t the case. The longer I’ve been around it, the more I’ve become aware of the way that information is transmitted through the tribes or the pack. It’s quite beautiful, actually.

FP: Why do you think it couldn’t work online?

GT: The same with everything else that has to do with person-to-person contact. It’s over mediated. For all that it’s so global, it’s pretty hermetic. Particularly with fashion, a lot of the cues, being visual, are too subtle.

FP: Do you mean not being able to see the texture of garments in fashion week slideshows?

GT: No, I think those are great. But I’ve always been interested in the sociology. And that’s a little more opaque online, which is more garment-based. Also, there’s another thing that happens online, which is the super narrativization around sites like the Sartorialist. That’s a very editorialized site. It’s one guy’s idea of what some kinds of people look like or should look like. It’s very successfully put across. But at the same time, when I look at the Sartorialist, I’m much less struck by the clothes—or whatever people think they are putting across with the clothes—than by the strings. The degree to which people want to create narrative around you based on a picture of you and your clothes is very compelling to me. People are telling themselves stories about other people based on the way they tie a scarf. Which we probably do in real life, but it has a little more practical utility in real-time encounters than it does online. There’s a little whistling in the dark happening, where everybody’s telling themselves a story that doesn’t really have to do with the other. And fashion is about the other—you require social interaction for it to get off the ground. [Pauses] God, I hate those.

FP: Tape recorders?

GT: Yeah. I never use them. When I was a kid, I wrote for Andy Warhol’s Interview

FP: Well, you must have used one there.

GT: No! Can you believe it? At first I did. This was like the dawn of time—the center of the earth cooled, and Andy started [the magazine]. And I was working there—I was, like, 19. Somehow, I had forgotten to finish high school. I did an interview with Christopher Isherwood. I tape recorded it and then my mom very helpfully typed it up, because I couldn’t type as fast as her. He had a very grating voice. When she transcribed the thing, it was almost like out of a John Waters movie, where the person throws a typewriter out the window and runs screaming from the house. I thought, Maybe I won’t use this tool anymore—it drives a very patient mother crazy.

FP: How old were you when you left high school?

GT: About 17. I mean, I just dropped out.

FP: You grew up in New York, right?

GT: My parents had an apartment here, but I basically grew up on Long Island. But by the time I left high school, most of my life was already here. In those days, I wanted to be a painter. So I came here and got an apprenticeship. I started painting and making videos. And I wrote plays. I’m not sure exactly why, but they were produced at WPA. In a world that no longer exists, you could kind of have that life.

FP: Did you get introduced to journalism through Interview?

GT: I backed into it through Interview. I went on to be their so-called Paris correspondent for a year. I was 19, maybe 20.

FP: Did you know Warhol?

GT: I knew Andy, but I can’t say I was an intimate of his.

FP: That must have been amazingly intimidating. GT: No.

FP: You were a teenager, hanging around the Warhol crowd. How was that not intimidating?

GT: It wasn’t an intimidating scene. I know that sounds weird. I think people have trouble understanding it because of the mythologizing of him, which is so extensive now. But the fact that Valerie Solanas could walk in there and shoot him speaks to how porous that world—and all the worlds in New York—were at the time. You could get in. In New York now, I don’t think it’s about how easy it is for you to get in. Anywhere.

FP: When did you start working at the Village Voice?

GT: Late ’70s, around the same time that Jim Wolcott went there.

FP: That must have been one of the newspaper’s real golden periods.

GT: I can say it was. It affiliates itself very naturally in my mind with the problems that I have with the general cultural relation to Occupy Wall Street. Of course people feel like it’s nothing and they have no goal: Nobody knows what a counterculture is [anymore].

FP: Your subjects at the Voice differed from your Times work. What was the thrust of your Voice column?

GT: I think I did the column for 20 years. I don’t know how you can characterize it. It was urban anthropology, maybe. The thing is, I was just going out and reporting on stuff that the mainstream media hadn’t gotten to. It sounds very self-aggrandizing to say this now. But I was talking to a friend the other day about having been in the Bronx project houses with [Africa] Bambaataa. And ABC No Rio, the Times Square Show, and also a lot of gay culture…there was a lot of emergent culture. There was a lot to write about. It would just be the normal part of what you would be reporting.

FP: In the Place To Be, your book collecting many of those columns, focuses a lot on the Bronx. Were you living there at the time? GT: No. Although when I worked for Andy, I did live in the Bronx. I’m kind of a Bronx nut. I just like the Bronx. I did some really early stuff about crack, which came after I was brought to meet the mother-in-law of Eric B., of Eric B. and Rakim. She lived in a certain housing project. She was a hard-working woman, and her life was being destroyed—as many people’s lives were—by crack all around her. I was really compelled by that, and went back and back and back.

FP: In the introduction to your book, you write about how the unhinged New York of that period differed from the buttoned-up town of your youth. It’s funny reading that now, when so much nostalgia is essentially the opposite—today’s New York being sedate compared to the wild city of the ’70s and ’80s. GT: There’s a definite arch. I’m not a fan of nostalgia at all. But I don’t  think my memory is falsifying to say it was a very yeasty period. Maybe not to everybody’s taste, and there were plenty of problems. But as I said, there was a porosity, culturally, that has been replaced by a kind of cultural paucity. You could move in and out of worlds.

FP: But weren’t you able to do that easier because you were a reporter?

GT: No, no, no. I always looked preppy, and people used to say to me, “Oh, you go [to the Bronx]—it’s so scary.” But as long as I was respectful to people, I was treated respectfully. In my experience, the city had a greater degree of openness. There was a mixture of uptown/downtown that’s gone out for real estate reasons—as usual. We all know that there’s a general trend to cultural conservatism. At the same time, everybody essentially got remarginilized.

FP: When did you join the Times? GT: In 2000. I came to the Styles section. I kind of morphed into doing more fashion as I came here. It was at a moment when fashion was really emerging as a cultural force.

FP: Was it strange to go from writing about the Bronx’s crack problem to fashion shows?GT: In a way—except not if you’re inside my head. I’ve always had these interests. I was talking about this with Judith Thurman. We were pissing and moaning, as people do who have an interest in these degraded subject matters and culturally disfavored subjects. She was talking about a certain correspondent for the New Yorker who writes about child soldiers in wherever. She was saying that that kind of thing—if you have the skills, the stomach for the work, and can stand all the risk—is like taking gold out of streams with your hand. It’s all there. There is something slightly perverse and masochistic about applying yourself to [fashion] and having to rehabilitate things that are considered culturally beneath regard. That’s been the most challenging part of this for me. Because it isn’t taken seriously, and never has been taken seriously. I hope to live to see the day when it is. Which can be done without sacrificing what’s beautiful and delightful about the ephemeral and frivolous part of it. Those are not opposing ideas.

FP: Do you think the disparagement comes from the tradition of fashion being in the women’s section of the paper?

GT: Of course. It’s women’s work. It’s feminine, it’s not worthy of masculine attention and regard. [When I started here], people said, “You’re throwing your career in the toilet to write about fashion.” Not that it’s such a big career.

FP: Oh, please. But do you think they would say that now?

GT: They may well.

FP: But you did say you noticed a cultural change in the last few years.

GT: The culture changed. I think people are interested in [fashion]. I was a contract writer at the New Yorker for quite a long time, paralleling the Voice thing, and I wrote for lots and lots of magazines. You never saw anyone in those mainstreamy magazines writing about fashion. I mean, Kennedy Fraser and then Holly Brubach did [at the New Yorker], but it was pretty much about the collections or the occasional profile. They didn’t have a style issue at the New Yorker. It wasn’t what we serious people—that is, people with testicles—do.

FP: Do you think that fashion writing needs a Pauline Kael? GT: I don’t know what fashion writing needs, frankly. It’s not one of my main concerns. I think writing just needs better writers, period. I could hope for the liveliness of Pauline Kael—kind of crack-brained opinion-slinging. Remembering back to the Voice, and that whole auteur/anti-auteur world, it was so micro, but so essential to groups of New Yorkers. That conversation is long gone. I haven’t encountered tons of people dissecting fashion writing. It’s pretty much been hijacked by the visuals, as it probably ought to be.

FP: In many ways, is fashion writing most similar to sports writing?

GT: That’s probably the closest analogy, yes. It’s specialist. I read the sports section very, very avidly. It’s one of the few places left where you find human interest. It’s very narrative, not to say novelistic, to follow sports teams and sports in play. Fashion is a bit like that, because the personnel set is not that changeable. It’s one of the weirdest and most contradictory things about fashion. It’s based on novelty, but in many ways very little is new. It’s such a stable population. All the editors have been the same forever. All the designers have been more or less the same forever. The only thing that changed was when Anna Wintour saw that nobody was developing a farm team, and got in gear. Because everybody was aging out and there was nobody to replace them. Because she’s a great HR person, she literally made it her business to make another generation to cultivate and anoint.

FP: Why do you think fashion is so stable? GT: It’s a very conservative business. And it is a business. [In the past], the city could support somebody who didn’t get into the business with a business plan and a backer. You can no longer do that—that’s out. You better arrive with a business plan and maybe an MBA and, whatever your design skills are, hope that Anna Wintour will take you up.

FP: Do you think that fashion from New York designers has suffered?

GT: I don’t know. I think there are a lot of people who do what they’re meant to do here. It’s a commercial center. It’s hard for me to pronounce on this, because I don’t know if my lack of interest in what’s going on in New York—across the board, culturally—is my problem or New York’s problem.

FP: Do you still cover the shows in Europe?

GT: Yeah, though not as much as before. I’m mainly writing about menswear. I’ve [always been] more interested in menswear. When I started, I felt like there were more ideas in play in menswear. Masculinity was much more up for grabs. There was a lot of gender play, when I started.

FP: You mean when you started at the Times? GT: Yeah. When I got involved with this as a full-time thing, there was a lot of change. It was a bracketed period. I didn’t realize it at the time. Starting around 2000, the multinationals saw what was happening. They realized that this was really gonna blow up—that this fashion thing that had been niche and not fully exploited could be globalized. And they invested heavily. Three of these multinationals—LVMH, PPR, and the Richemont Group—got heavily into reviving old marks and houses, then buying and creating stars, [in order] to put this thing across globally. We were all beneficiaries of that. That’s how Alexander McQueen happened. That post-mortem show at the Met, which had these staggering 600,000 visitor numbers, was a tombstone for an era in this business. Galliano being discredited, McQueen being dead, Tom Ford having morphed into whatever he has morphed into…. These were all showmen who were heavily funded by multinationals. Now, the multinationals have gotten what they were after, and there isn’t so much need for [showmen]. You don’t need the showpieces anymore—the marks themselves do the work. We’re in a new era. All the showmanship, which is very costly to sustain, can be reduced. They’ll have fashion shows, but you don’t have to pay $25 million salaries.

FP: Was the money there in the end?

GT: For the multinationals? Without any doubt.

Jay Ruttenberg is editor of the comedy journal The Lowbrow Reader and its book, The Lowbrow Reader Reader(Drag City, 2012). His work has appeared in The New York Times, Details, Spin, and Flaunt.