The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges. Being isolated—and precisely for that reason—this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness; the unity it imposes is merely the official language of generalised separation.
The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (1967).
Fashion significantly
contributes to the spectacle of society, but is situated outside of the
academic discourse, and firmly in the realm of consumerism. Unlike ‘art’, which
is regarded as engaging with the world on an elitist level, fashion is
considered to be strictly for the masses. Even couture, despite being elitist,
is mediated to the masses via mass production of look-a-like items. Museums
hold costumes in specialist departments, but art gallery spaces rarely (if
ever) hang clothing on display in the manner that they may construct a display
of house bricks (Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII, 1972), show an unmade bed
complete with detritus including used condoms (Tracy Emin’s My Bed, 1999) or
plug in strip lighting (Dan Flavin’s Untitled [to you…] series, 2006). Occasionally
museums or art galleries stage exhibitions of couture dresses and other one-off
outfits created by Designers (always capitalized), who might consider
themselves to be Professional Artists, but they are employed by major
international corporations (Gucci, Chanel, Louis Vuitton etc.) to produce
consumer goods that will be sold in large numbers.
Any concept of the ‘art of fashion’ is constrained by its sole
motivation for being to satisfy mass demand and a certain degree of utility.
However, in the middle of the last century a spontaneous and
non-commercially-driven fashion developed among a working class group of
British teenage men that sparked a revolution in fashion—and art. The ‘Teddy
Boys’ of south, east and north London were a disparate group of males who took
to wearing clothes based loosely on an Edwardian design, but which were amended
using items of clothing and adornment adopted from Hollywood Western and Noir movies. The resultant exhibition of
found items were arranged and displayed on the bodies of Teddy Boys in a wholly
new and artistic manner.
The modification of dress by individuals for less than merely practical
purposes has, since the advent of mass consumerism in the 19th
century, involved intricate and subtle levels of artistry. Deprived of the
means of artistic expression by class, position and education, the British
working class male has, since the beginning of the Modern period at least,
created their own fashion which reflects aspects of ‘beauty, truth, genius,
civilization, form, status and taste’; [1] all the assumptions we make about works of art, according to John Berger.
Styles of dress and the addition of purely decorative elements to an
outfit have been affected since the Middle Ages, and usually by men. Recent investigation
into the history of fashion has led to a reconsideration of a widely held idea
that fashion was a largely feminine concern. As Anne Hollander has pointed out,
For centuries
male potency was expressed in erotic and vividly imaginative clothing, and
female charm was expressed in much simpler clothing that primarily emphasized
modesty. When women wanted to look more interesting, they either cautiously
exposed a small area of skin, or imitated men. [2]
Hollander goes
on to describe how little men’s fashion needed to change after the end of the
18th century though, because of improvements in the production and
quality of lighter cloths, the mechanization of tailoring and growth of the
middle class for whom ready made suits were acceptable because they were
difficult to tell apart from the hand-made suits favoured by the wealthy and
titled—at least at a glance, they were. ‘Fashion is meant to be read, not seen;
fit and proportion matter less, signals matter more.’ [3]
The aspiring middle class of Victorian Britain could look like they were more
affluent and successful than they might actually be.
Brent
Shannon’s original research into the growth of the male consumer of the 19th
and early 20th centuries cites the spread of the department store,
the popular press and advertising, as reasons for a middle class male adoption
of fashion as more than a matter of mere functionality.
Much of the
machinery vital to the ascent of a modernized capitalist culture of
consumption—the large-scale urban department store, sophisticated advertising
and marketing strategies, the mass production of affordable ready-made items—were
not possible until the technological and commercial advances of the machine
age. [4]
The flourishing
department stores thrived as hetero-social centres in which the sexes could mix
and consume in pairs or separately, but always within sight of one other.
Tailors ‘ shops were predominantly masculine spaces in which customers were
served by male staff. Department stores, points out Shannon, ‘were well-known sites of female employment
and activity and therefore already attracted a variety of eager and flirtatious
male voyeurs, flaneurs, and suitors.’
[5] Such a point is made by Henry James in The Princess Casamassima (1886) in which its central male character
Hyacinth Robinson, who is courting a department store model (Millicent Henning),
comes to realise, as he watches her model a dress for a male on the shop floor,
that she is having an affair with the customer. Being working class, Robinson
only visits the department store to meet Millicent, and when he does, he wears
his ‘Sunday suit’.
The working
class in Victorian Britain did not shop in department stores, but they aspired
to. Without the means (or need) to dress other than for comfort, warmth and
protection while at work, workers who wanted to raise their sense of self worth
and to make a statement of intent about their social ambitions began to watch
their bosses at play, and to develop their own sense of sartorial taste from
them. James relates the late Victorian ritual of Sunday courting in the novel,
during which shop girls, maids and cooks walked in parks or more often, along
high streets to window shop with ‘their’ young men who were similarly employed
as bell boys, apprentices, factory hands or footmen. After a morning spent in
church, the single suit that the working class male possessed would be retained
in order that he could impress in public his respectability as he walked with his
partner. They would walk alongside carriages carrying the upper classes,
observing their clothes and accessories, enjoying and wanting to be part of the
spectacle f their society. They’d look through windows of stores showing new
styles of dress for both sexes, getting ideas of how to produce their own
versions at home (Robinson’s guardian in the novel is a seamstress who makes
items of clothing for girls and women in her neighborhood; her work decreases
as ready made clothing becomes cheaper, however).
In the years
leading up to WWI the British upper classes enjoyed what would prove to be their
last days of social superiority and absolute deference from the working
classes. Masculine styles of dress had become both more ornate and more
streamlined than in the late 1890s. Top hats were replaced as daywear by bowler
hats, morning tails had been replaced by frock coats with tapered waists and
flared edges, suits were slim-fitted and three-piece, of which the jacket hung
to fingertip length. Waistcoats were decorative rather than merely functional,
shirts lost their starched fronts and Eton collars. Pocket handkerchiefs flowed
from breast openings, trousers were tapered to the ankle and shoes were elegant
and always shone. Even the evening dress for men became less formal, with
dinner suits as well as, or rather than, tailcoats being considered de rigeur.
The
cut and style of the upper class Edwardian male’s clothes were copied by as
many working class males as could afford to pay a tailor, or buy a ready-made
version. It was a look that, after two world wars and during a period of
austerity and rationing, would re-emerge in Britain, and be modified as fitted
the wearer.
It
is commonly held that the British couturier Hardy Amies encouraged Horseguard
officers and young bankers to adopt the Edwardian dress style in the early
1950s, in order that, ‘the average young man of position try to give an air of
substance without being stodgy’. [6] Savile Row tailors
recreated suits and coats, hats and accessories for the wealthy and privileged,
and the sharp look stood out against the loose, wide-lapelled, dour, demob
suits that dominated the streets of the capital at the time. Or, at least
dominated the City streets of the capital. In the poorer boroughs of London, a
different look was being worn by young working class males, many of whom had
been born just before (or during) WWII.
Most
commentators on the Teddy Boy phenomenon credit the development of the style to
being an aping of those upper class officers by working class males. As
Christopher Breward writes, Harry
Hopkins’ The New Look: A Social History of the Forties and Fifties (London, 1964), supplied the approved account of
the rise of the teddy style for successive generations of academics and
researchers. Hopkins ‘traces its origins as a whim of upper class Mayfair
playboys, its migration to the deprived boroughs of south and east London, its
importance as a mode of social resistance, and its rapid commercialisation at
the hands of a growing retail sector adapted to the desires of the teenager,
has become an oft-repeated mantra of sociologists and historians of popular
culture.’[7] However,
quoting a 1949 Mass Observation study, Breward suggests that by then,
The Teddy Boy was rapidly emerging as a particular working-class London
type; Anglo-Irish or ‘cockney’ in his associations in contrast to the
continental and American preferences of London’s sizeable Italian and Maltese
gang members. Though he drew some inspiration from the ‘spivvy’ style … his
look was far more negotiated, deliberately differentiated and consequently more
subversive than that. [8]
With
their radically different physical appearance, the children of war heroes (or
cowards or ‘conshies’) sought to express themselves as individuals, outsiders
to society, but as belonging to a new society of their own making; that of the
Teddy Boy gang. Teddy Boys—who predated both the import of rock n roll music by
at last five years and the emergence of Elvis Presley by seven—adapted and
adopted elements of clothing and style from their grandfathers and American
cinema, by essentially including a ‘signature’ piece to their outfits. That
could be something as small as a ring worn on a finger, a tattoo, a certain
colour handkerchief, a delicately brocaded waistcoat or a scarf. The addition
of the original and unique item to the standard dress code of fingertip-length
‘drape’ jacket, tapered trousers, brogue or thin crepe soled shoes, bootlace
tie and extravagantly quiffed hair enabled the Teddy Boy to be one of the
gang—usually defined by the neighbourhood in which members lived—and an artist
(without knowing it), utilising the only materials they had. Their look was
all-important, a visual statement which spoke far louder and more articulately
than they ever could with words.
The group life and intense loyalty of the Teds can be seen as a
reaffirmation of traditional slum working-class values … to lads traditionally lacking in
status… there remained only the self, the cultural extension of the self
(dress, personal appearance). [9]
Certainly
some Teddy Boys sought to show off their lack of deference to the upper classes
by copying the style and form of the Edwardian look, and by having original
suits made by a chosen tailor, to who the Ted would give strict instruction on
length, width, materials etc. However, financial restrictions meant that the majority
of young men who would and could be a Ted—and many were still either at school
or in apprenticeships and so earning little—took to having either their father
or more likely their grandfather’s Edwardian suits and coats adapted by
mothers, sisters, girlfriends or tailors, in order to fit them.
The
important distinction here between fashion as pure consumer product and as art
is the individuality of the Teddy Boy’s style—at least until the look was
commodified and mass produced to be sold in department stores. Even then, while
elements of the style could and were bought from stores ready-made, the
accessories applied to them and the meaning with which the wearer imbued them,
was a unique expression of what Richard Martin calls, ‘the maverick, bad-boy self-expression
that once was the province of the fine arts bohemianism and Existentialist
angst.’ [10]
The
news media of the early 1950s took notice of the emergence of the Teddy Boy
after there had been several instances of ‘turf war’ battles between rival
gangs and the supposed ‘Teddy Boy murder’ of 1953 in Clapham, south London.
Teds were reviled in print as being juvenile delinquents and dangerous to
society in general. The idea of the Ted as an outlandishly dressed thug and/or
rebel was disseminated across the UK in newsreels, documentaries and made-up
newspaper stories. The shock of the new was such that even Americans began to
take note, and the first rock n roll musical hero of the era, Bill Haley And His Comets, were re-dressed in specially made Teddy Boy outfits when they
arrived in Britain in 1957 for their first tour.
The
swift and effective exploitation of the Teddy Boy phenomenon by the fashion
industry was the beginning of a turn toward a new generation of consumers
hitherto unrecognised by the retail industries; the teenager. The anti-social
inference of the look, at least as it was interpreted by the media, was
identified by businessmen as being imperative to the success of their products.
It was a lesson not to be forgotten by the industry. ‘In our time, fashion
strives to provoke as readily as to appeal … In this capacity, fashion seeks to
disclaim society and to declaim the individuality of its single or exceptional
wearer.’[11]
The
spectacle that Teddy Boys created was an unarticulated artistic statement that,
because of its swift immersion into general acceptance by society was rendered
as invisible. The outline of the Teddy Boy, from his slicked-back quiff, down
to his crepe-soled feet became visual shorthand for a time and an attitude that
was temporally fixed. A closer examination of any Teddy Boy from 1951-1955
however, reveals something more subtle and complicated: an artist working in
unique materials.
[1] Ways
of Seeing, John Berger, p.11 (London, 1972)
[2] The Modernization
of Fashion, Anne Hollander, p.29 Design
Quarterly, No. 154 (Winter, 1992), pp. 27-33
[3] The Modernization
of Fashion, Anne Hollander, p.33 Design
Quarterly, No. 154 (Winter, 1992), pp. 27-33
[4]
Refashioning Men: Fashion, Masculinity, and the Cultivation of the Male
Consumer in Britain, 1860-1914, Brent Shannon p.626 Victorian Studies, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Summer, 2004), pp. 597-630
[5] Ibid, p.611
[6] Just So Far, Hardy Amies, (Glasgow,
1954) quoted in Style And
Substance, Christopher Breward, p.190, Material
Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2003)
[7] Style And
Substance, Christopher Breward, p.194, Material
Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2003)
[8] ibid,
p.201
9] Cultural Responses
of the Teds, Tony Jefferson, p.367 The
Men’s Fashion Reader, eds. Peter McNeill and Vicki Karaminas (New York,
2009)
[10] A Note: A
Charismatic art The Balance of Ingratiation and Outrage in Contemporary
Fashion, Richard Martin p.310, The Men’s
Fashion Reader, eds. Peter MacNeill and Vicki Karaminas (New York, 2009)
[11] Ibid
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