The two paragraphs assigned “Re-Dressing Race and Gender: The Performance and Politics of Eldridge Cleaver’s Pants” and “To the Ends of the Earth: Fashion and Ethnicity in the Vogue Fashion Shoot” discuss how fashion and race affect one another. The Art Blake article about Eldridge Cleaver’s pants reflects on how the activist’s pants are a representation of Cleaver’s position on race and sex during the 1970s. “To the Ends of the Earth” by Sarah Cheang talks about the fashion industry using ‘exotic’ locations as a background for white models to assert the dominance of white people in places described as the ‘other.’ Race and fashion play off one another in these texts by examining how people who are non-white reject white society’s class and racial structures through fashion. However, even in cases where an ‘other’s’ culture is put at the forefront it is done in an exclusive manner. For example, Italian Vogue’s July 2008 all black issue was praised for being inclusive, but the fact that black models are perceived as outside of fashion and need their own separate issue rather than being included regularly speaks to the Eurocentric idea of mainstream fashion. Regarding gender, Eldridge Cleaver’s penis focused pants were not out of necessity for a high fashion black owned business, but to assert his manhood which he perceived as being stripped from him in traditional pants. To him, the ‘other’ were women and the fashion industry, which he felt did not cater to him. While one’s definition of who or what the ‘other’ is can change, fashion is used both by the oppressor and oppressed to rebel or assert one’s dominance.
“To the Ends of the Earth: Fashion and Ethnicity in the Vogue Fashion Shoot”
- “Body adornment plays a crucial role in the signaling and maintenance of social categories- it is a primary means by which we announce our belonging to particular ethnic groupings and also experience that belonging.” (36)
- “The concept of fashion that the Vogue title encapsulates is predicated on a series of interrelated ideas about modernity, cosmopolitanism and individual identity construction in an aspirational consumer culture.” (37)
- “In this fashion story, the model and her clothing have been decentered, both visually and through a range of supporting texts.” (41)
- “A highly internalized understanding of fashion as evolutionary- and the use of tribal cultures to comprehend Western society- explains the closeness between Walker’s visual repertoire and popular ethnographic forms of photography typified by the journal National Geographic.” (42)
- “Magazines are primarily spaces of consumption.” (43)
“Re-Dressing Race and Gender: The Performance and Politics of Eldridge Cleaver’s Pants”
- “Through literary and visual texts, Miller’s analysis of the black dandy and his place in American racial history provides a key conceptual frame through which to understand Cleaver’s interest in clothing and in dressing his gendered and racialized body at a point in his life when his political performance seemed to be losing an audience.” (14)
- “Mary Blume, a reporter with the International Herald Tribune, interviewed Cleaver in Paris on August 14, 1975.” (18)
- “Cleaver vociferously opposed the “unisex” look of the mid- and late-1970s” (21)
- “Let us return now to Les Halles, to the shop window in which Cleaver stood, posing, for René Burri.” (29)
- “Cleaver’s performance in Burri’s photographs, in the interviews he gave in France and the United States about his pants design, in his establishment of Eldridge Cleaver Unlimited, and in the photographs Nik Wheeler took of him and his merchandise in the California Mart and in his West Hollywood store should be understood as combining together into an autobiographical act.” (33)
