The book Fashion, Performance and Performativity. The Complex
Spaces of Fashion opens with an initial sentence that reevokes the
2012 terrorist attack and mass-shooting by the Norwegian far-right
extremist Anders Behring Breivik, in which seventy-seven people were
pronounced dead. This opening paragraph aims to communicate the urge for
compiling of such a book; the sartorial choices that the attacker — who
chose to dress up as a police officer — made were performative in
blurring the fine line of the recognition of law, order and safety from
the victims of that day. The example perfectly reflects the main aim of
the book; to show how fashion can inform both performance and
performativity and be the key to their constant dialogue, exchange and
relation.
Published in 2021, the book was co-edited by Andrea Kollnitz and Marco
Pecorari, whose joint interest on the cultural meaning of fashion in the
field of museums, visual culture and archival research, led them to
select eleven contributors for a complete, but non-exhaustive, overview
of the role and meaning of fashion in performance theory and practice.
The multidisciplinary and multicultural case studies not only have roots
and are built from the field of fashion studies but also “art history,
media studies, postcolonial studies, cultural and gender studies, as
well as artists and practitioners”.1 This shows, I would
argue, an attempt from the authors to use the voice of academia by
looking beyond academia itself and considering practices of performers
and artists, in an attempt to expand the reach a field that oftentimes
tends to appear quite self-referential.
Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and
putting it in dialogue with other seminal works of the field of
performance studies, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker’s
Performativity and Performance (1995), the contributors of the
book touch upon questions of a body that can either be: colonial, naked,
hidden, overexposed, disciplined, idealised, vocal, utopian,2 mostly female, but always
performative in forming (individual and collective) identities and
social implications.
The book is divided into three main macro-sections. The first one is
titled ‘Transformations and Translations’, and its three chapters focus
on the role of the individual in performative contexts. Building up on
her research on the grotesque body, Francesca Granata’s chapter ‘Leigh
Bowery and Judith Butler: Between Performance and Performativity’
explains and compares Butler’s theories through the analysis of certain
performances by queer artist and club personality Leigh Bowery and the
construction and later staging of his gender(lessness) and
self-expression.
As a second chapter, artist Karima Al Shomely stages a form of
meta-performativity, by speaking about the latter through the
means of the performance itself. The practice-based research focuses on
the sartorial power that the clothed body holds in her study of the
Emirati burqa through the means of the embodied performance. Closing the
section is Paul Jobling’s digression on the power of orally transmitted
knowledge through testimonies, exploring the power of written fashion
narration in performing and mimicking the self. The chapter, built from
in-depth archival research from the digitized National Lives Sound
Archives at the British Library, unpacks the case of British
cult-boutiques owner Tommy Roberts.
The following case studies are then grouped by the editors in the
section titled ‘Stages and Places’, aiming to elucidate the inextricable
relation between fashion and the geographical and cultural context where
the ‘performance of the body’ happens.
Performance artist Tsuneko Taniuchi is the focus of Emmanuel Cohen’s
re-interpretation of Butler’s idea of ‘restored behaviors’ and Austin’s
theory of ‘unhappy performances’, using clothes and gestures to perform
reality and, at the same time, counter-reality.
Jacki Willson then develops the concept of the ‘bare flaneuse’,
building on the narration of the figure of the flaneur through
a feminist perspective. In the chapter, she analyses a series of
auto-portraits by photographer and artist Erica Simone, in which she
stages her naked body in public spaces, questioning issues of
spectatorship and consumption through her (un)fashioned body.
The sixth chapter of the book is written by Victoria L. Rovine who, in
analyzing written excerpts from French colonial travel books in the
interwar period, shows the performative effects that clothing has in
creating systems of power (in the Foucauldian sense) between the
colonizers and the colonized.
Closing the section is Jonathan Michael Square and his reflections on
the phenomenon of digital influencers Lil Miquela and Shudu, and their
performative presence on social media that he defines as ‘digital
slavery’, as these fictional characters hide behind the trope of black
feminism, while enriching their non-black male creators and taking jobs
from black models in the business.
The book then closes with a final section focusing on ‘Models and
Poses’.
These last four chapters open with an analysis by Karen De Perthuis on
the performative potential of white background studio photography in
decontextualizing clothes and models themselves from time and place, and
opening to potential, utopian and non-identifiable bodies and
gestures.
With a digression on the figure of the indossatrice (Italian
for ‘the wearer’), Gabriele Monti presents an historical overview of
Italian fashion models and their identification with the ‘typical
Italian’, while also introducing some non-canonical Italian models and
the consequential blurring of these stereotypical imaginaries.
Performativity, however, does not only happen in still images but also
in moving ones. Louise Wallenberg considers twenty-first century fashion
films and their tendency to incorporate violent and pornographic acts
often referring to an idealized, but potentially subversive, lesbian
imaginary, thus raising “issues regarding performativity of gender,
(queer) sexuality, identity, violence, performativity and aesthetics”.3
Lastly, the book closes with a chapter by Royce Mahawatte titled ‘Male
Gender Performance and Regency Fashion’, analyzing the representation of
mainly white male figures in fashion editorials over the nineteenth
century, mediated by the dandy novel which performed a
constructed type of masculine identity.
In Fashion, Performance and Performativity Kollnitz and Pecorari managed, I would argue, to curate a selection of articles that showed how dress, clothing and the fashioned (and unfashioned) body can be evidence for new forms of individual and collective identities and, to conclude, be the focus of new, innovative and non-canonical perspectives in the field of performance and performativity studies.
Bibliography
Kollnitz, Andrea and Marco Pecorari. Fashion, Performance and Performativity. The Complex Spaces of Fashion. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.