Author Archives: Hailey Lam

Repetitive Rebelliousness

 

SNL, 90th Oscars, Premiere of ‘Girls Trip”  

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/05/why-tiffany-haddish-keeps-re-wearing-her-4000-oscar-gown.html

I chose this article to read alongside Llewellyn Negrin’s piece “Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Embodied Existence,” and Jessica Kennedy and Megan Strickfaden’s piece “Entanglements of a Dress Named Lavern: Threads of Meaning between Humans and Things (and Things),” as a contrasting embodied experience. Merleau-Ponty, Kennedy, and Strickfaden speak about how the body and the thing modify each other. The audience can observe this symbolic alteration. In the article “Why Tiffany Haddish has worn her $4000 Oscar’s Dress at least 3 Times, ” Emmie Martin calculates that through amortizing, “Haddish has gotten the cost of the dress down to at least $1300 per wear” (Martin). Through repeated wear, Haddish changes the value of the dress. It is also necessary to note the dress’s own agency in its (his/her/their?) relationship to Haddish. The cost of the Alexander McQueen dress, impels Haddish to wear it more than once. The dress becomes synonymous with its value, which accrues additional value for Haddish because the dress cost more than her mortgage (Martin). We can observe the entanglement happening as Haddish’s personal life is woven into the very makeup of the dress. The mutual dependency between Haddish and the dress is further illustrated when this “breaking of social taboo” through the repetitive wear of the dress warrants explanation (Martin). Haddish must explain why she has decided to break the rules and wear an expensive gown more than once. She is almost forced to reveal how poverty and homelessness have influenced her decision to (re)wear this dress. Her body and dress are now entangled and influence how they navigate social and public spaces. The dress, in turn, is made famous (and Haddish too, made known for these rebellious actions), as the dress is “now iconic” (Martin). Speaking to the materiality of the dress, Haddish cares for it, and wears it despite its fragility and its whiteness is prone to staining. This expensive gown, is a very disposable thing. It is too delicate to be washed (only fabreezed), and too recognizable to be worn more than once. Haddish’s commitment to the care of the dress along with the way she and the dress imprint value on one another through repetitive wear point to the idea that,“when we act in the world, we do not act just as bodes, but as clothed bodies” (Negrin 130). We (and I include things in this we) always move dependently in spaces.

Walking, the body, and manufactured environments

In Peter McNeil’s piece “Mocking the macaroni: fashion victims of 18th-century England” and Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello’s text “The art and science of walking: gender, space, and the fashionable body in the long eighteenth century,” there is a discussion of fashion that revolves around adornment as a practice that produces and forms national identity. This conversation specifically centers the exchanges between France and England during the long eighteenth century. Both articles address the evolution of men’s fashion, the resulting division between how aristocratic men and women dress, and how this influences how gender identity is constructed. While “Mocking the macaroni” offers more insight into the reception of the macaroni trend and how it was adopted, resented, consumed by and made accessible to people over time, “The art and science of walking” offers readers insight into and contextualizes how environment, culture, health, and gender both construct and are constructed by fashion (McNeil and Riello 2). I enjoyed using these two pieces to think through my own project, specifically the relationship between fashion and manufactured spaces and how that relationship affects mobility. I am also invested in how both texts speak about silk (as an oriental material), and how changing ideas of hygiene influenced a shift away from certain textiles (like silk). The disposability of silk is also of interest to me, as there are several accounts of people throwing silk away within both texts, and what this implies for perceptions toward the East and the Asian subject. These pieces continue to shape my growing knowledge and understanding of Fashion Studies literature, thinking through these texts alongside Ellen Sampson’s projects reveals the multiple entry points into thinking and theorizing about the body through its reciprocal (though hierarchical) relationship with (and to) clothing.

Writing Prompts
“The art and science of walking: gender, space, and the fashionable body in the long eighteenth century”
“This article will focus on English dress…” (McNeil and Riello 1)
“By focusing on France and Britain, this article develops two…” (McNeil and Riello 2)
“By the early nineteenth century Paris…” (McNeil and Riello 2)
“The complexity of such historical discourse regarding the relationship between the body and fashion…” (McNeil and Riello 7)
“The physicality of the body, the action of walking…” (McNeil and Riello 8)
“Mocking the macaroni: fashion victims of 18th-Century:
“Derived from contemporary French and Italian fashion…” (McNeil 1)
“Interest in elaborate clothing would have been further…” (McNeil 2)
“By virtue of their flamboyant dress and behavior…” (McNeil 2)
“The late 18th Century was a time of rapid transformation…” (McNeil 2)
“The notion of moderation was thus embraced as …” (McNeil 3)