Style post-moderne

A few days ago, Anna Wintour, Michael Kors, and Natalia Vodianova gave a talk at the Harvard Business School about the increasing awareness and attempts at prevention of eating disorders within the fashion industry. This is a hot topic lately, especially as high-fashion magazines like Vogue and Elle are beginning to open up to the idea of featuring plus-size models, not just buried within their pages but front and center on their covers. Popular response has been overwhelmingly positive, though as feminist sites like Jezebel have been quick to point out, much of this new-found concern with health and "curviness" is self-congratulatory, vacuous, and more to do with PR than BMI.

I don't have much of an interest in fashion per se (in fact, I pretty much abhor the culture of obsolescence and the tautological tyranny of "style" that it breeds... but that's for another entry). I am, however, fascinated by this movement in the industry because, to me, it mimics exactly what's going on in a world with which I'm much more intimately familiar: literary criticism. Fashion's increasing concern with the "ethical" side of its art (castigating tiny sample sizes, banning cigarettes and alcohol from backstage, upping the minimum age of girls on the catwalk, etc.) mirrors the recent paradigm shift in lit. crit. from the detached Kantian gaze of formalist theory to the more "ethically engaged" post-colonialism and various other nouveau-humanist trends (the work of Elaine Scarry on pain and trauma, or Barbara Johnson on women and animal rights). And yet, in literary studies (as well as in fashion, I think), this movement has been contradictory and problematic at best. On the one hand, once the question of Kantian capital-B Beauty is broached, it opens up the floodgates of low- and middle-brow art as being of equal value for critical study -- which means fewer courses on elitist Tolstoy and more courses on popular Twilight. And, on the other hand, the whole move away from form has succeeded in denigrating the value of literary studies as such -- because if the whole point of a novel is what it tells us rather than how it does the telling, then what's the point of reading it at all when we can skim the Wikipedia article, listen to the podcast, or see the movie?

Similarly, if the fashion industry is so concerned about women and their health, why bother with the whole project of enthroning certain body types as being more beautiful than others? If a size 12 can be just as beautiful as a size 2, then why can't a size 6? Or a size 20? And if that's the case, then what's the point of fashion magazines? Obviously, I don't particularly like to see 13-year old size -6 anorexics strung out on coke and knocking their knobby knees down the catwalk -- nor am I Harold Bloom when it comes to the White Male Western Canon -- but I will say that it's hard to have it both ways: remaining the arbiter/impresario of a certain canonical aesthetic and opening up the door for a more friendly, popular, inclusive version of that aesthetic.

Then again, as Vodianova pointed out at the end of the talk, “It’s in fashion now to be healthy." The Harvard Crimson seemed to see this as a perfectly warm and fuzzy ending point for their article, but to me it's a disturbingly savvy take on the concept of fashion as such. The new "ethics," it seems, aren't any less detached or dehumanizing. They're just fashionable.