Professor Paul Jobling studied History of Art with Philosophy at University College London before completing an MA by thesis at the Royal College of Art, London: ‘The Evolution of Popular Illustrated Journalism in France during the 19th Century.’ His PhD was taken at the University of Warwick's Centre for British and Contemporary Cultural Studies: ‘Fashion Figures: word and image in contemporary fashion photography’.He moved from being a Curator at the V Address: Ecole Parsons Paris
The title will be published in spring 2022 and results from the MA seminar and thesis direction t... more The title will be published in spring 2022 and results from the MA seminar and thesis direction that Paul Jobling was involved with for MA students at Parsons new School, Paris in Fall/Winter 2018-19. How have fashion and fashion media responded to turn of the millennium non-binary, intersectional and liminal identities? Do they have a supportive or a contradictory and exploitative relationship with queer, trans and ageing subjects? Should promotions for international fashion brands be able to trade on hypersexual desire and porno-chic, or should they be banned? These are the core questions that this study unpacks in relation to clothing, representation, and identity and body politics in British, European and American culture between 1990 and the present. In the process it examines topics and issues as diverse as the following: intersectionality, women's writing and authorship in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ catwalk show for Dior (Spring-Summer 2017), and Alexander McQueen’s ‘The Widows of Culloden’ collection (Fall-Winter 2006); the authenticity and non-conformativity of transgender models such as Oslo Grace and Rostov Smirnov since 2015; the android as a redemptive figure in Alessandro Michele’s cross-cultural cyborg collection for Gucci (Autumn-Winter 2018/2019) and Andrea Giacobbe’s digital fashion spread ‘Simplex Concordia’ (1996); the nexus of cloth and clothing to embodiment, ageing and memory in work such as Magali Nougarède’s Crossing the Line (2002), 'Fashion For All Ages' (The Guardian, 2009-2020) and Ari Seth Cohen's Advanced Style (2008). Through a deft interweaving of theory to practice, each of the four original chapters reflects on the social, cultural, political and psychological dimensions of fashion and its representation. Overall, they illuminate the critical concept that human identities – whether as individuals or as groups - are never static entities and nor are they simply dependent on, or even defined by, what people wear but how and why they do so as well. Each of the complementary chapters that the book comprises acts as a set of case studies that trace the genealogy of and analyse the relevance to fashion of a particular movement or way of thinking about corporeal identities on a non-binary and intersectional basis since the turn of the millennium in Europe and the USA. It is on this level, then, it expands on Patricia Hill Collins’ idea of intersectionality as existing within ‘a matrix of domination’, such that it not only frames how positions of gender, sexuality race, class and age overlap but how, as a techne or tool of inquiry and knowledge, it furthermore enables us to analyse how fashion engages with modes of resistance and contests dominant narratives of identity and systems of social, political and cultural power.
A magazine edited by Paul Jobling and produced by finalists on the BA (Hons) Photography program... more A magazine edited by Paul Jobling and produced by finalists on the BA (Hons) Photography programme at Staffordshire Polytechnic (currently Staffordshire University). In July 1989 Design Week called it 'a student production that puts most coffee-table glossies to shame.' In the NUS and Guardian Student Media Awards for 1990 volumes 1 and 2 were awarded a special prize, and the following year Sarah Bowe won the best student photographer award for her photo-essay, 'Dock Road: on the Mersey beat', Vue, volume 3.
Fashion, Performance, and Performativity – edited by Andrea Kollnitz and Marco Pecorari, Bloomsbury spring 2021, 2022
The central theme of this paper about oral history and its relationship to fashion studies concer... more The central theme of this paper about oral history and its relationship to fashion studies concerns the dual function for individuals not only to perform vocally events known from the past but also, through the tactics of speech and counterspeech enacted between the interlocutors involved, to performatively narrate fresh perspectives about events and how they relate to their identity. In analyzing such issues, it focuses on the extended interview with fashion entrepreneur Tommy Roberts (1942-2012), owner of the cult London boutiques Kleptomania (1966-1969) and Mr Freedom (1969-1972), which was conducted by Anna Dyke in 2005 for the digitized National Lives Sound Archives at the British Library.
It mobilizes the interview to deal with a series of dialectics elaborated between performance and performativity - hearing and listening, language and speech, and dress and dressing - in the ensuing narration of a fashion life (hi)story on two distinct, though inter-related, levels: who is saying what and how it is being said; and what was being worn and how it was being worn in the 1960s and 1970s. The analysis is framed by the emphasis Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero places on the material role of the voice (phone) of the ‘unique existent’ and her related concept of the narratable self, by which the subject merges together past and present, identity and memory, and self and other, as his/her life story unfolds performatively. Thus Cavarero contends, ‘In the autobiographical story that the memory episodically – and often unintentionally – recounts, the narratable self … becomes, through the story, that which she already was’.
This catalogue essay attempts to unravel how and why the cult of the image is most expressly mani... more This catalogue essay attempts to unravel how and why the cult of the image is most expressly manifest in postmodernism by a concern with hyper-reality or the simulacral – the revival of the Platonic idea that a copy is made of an original which never really existed in the first place. The high priest of such thinking is Jean Baudrillard, who insists that we take flight from reality by reproducing images based on other images with the result that we no longer have the propensity to tell representation and reality apart. The mass media have a crucial part to play here and there is obviously something in Baudrillard’s argument when it comes to considering visual cultural forms like reality television and the constant rehashing of imagery in advertising and photography. Yet, when we consider the representation of the human body as a site for the exercise and regulation of power in advertising for Benetton and Levis 501 or Cindy Sherman’s untitled film stills, it doesn’t suffice to argue, as both he and Dick Hebdige after him have done, that all hyperreal texts are devoid of serious comment or political content. Moreover, Baudrillard’s thesis capsizes the relationship that still exists between words and images in postmodern political posters by the likes of Barbara Kruger or photo-essays for The Face such as 'Strategies for the Unemployed' or 'Who's Shooting Who? In Beirut It Pays to Know Your Terrorist'. Thus, as I argue, we also need to consider Jacques Derrida’s contention that the deconstruction of any text is more a matter of dealing with ‘multiple reading heads’, of resisting a system based on binary oppositions, and accordingly, a question of pondering the intertextuality of word and image.
"This pioneering monograph will launch Bloomsbury’s series ‘Dress and Fashion Research’ in 2013. ... more "This pioneering monograph will launch Bloomsbury’s series ‘Dress and Fashion Research’ in 2013. It is the first in-depth exploration of the production, circulation and consumption of print, television and cinema publicity for men's clothing in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. It encompasses the onset and vagaries of affluence and youth culture in what is commonly regarded as the golden age of creative British advertising, which began in the mid-1950s and lasted, to one degree or another, until the global impact of the economic downturn following the Al-Qaeda bombings on America of 11 September 2001. In particular, it considers how the material object ('this thing') is translated into advertising rhetoric ('that thing') and probes how copy, images and music were used to construct the idea of the 'peacock male' in promotions for suits, jeans, casual wear, shirts and underwear - and for whose pleasure.
It mobilises original archival research alongside theoretical debate to bring new analytical perspectives to menswear advertising as a significant cultural and socio-economic phenomenon. Thus it examines design issues and period style in advertising, the role of market research and consumer psychology in determining target audiences, the impact of youth culture and ‘new man’ in representing fashionable masculinities, and the various ways that menswear retailers and brands dealt with sex and gender, race, class and age. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, the advertising rhetoric for suits by Austin Reed, Burton's and Hector Powe, and shirts by Viyella and Double Two, addressed youth markets while also harping on hetero-normative stereotypes. Whereas the titillating puns in promotions for Y-fronts (viz. ‘It’s what a man’s like underneath that counts’), the portrayal of decadent and camp androgyny in publicity for Dormeuil's Tonik 'Cloth for Men', and the imbrication of sex and pleasure in jeans ads symbolised more narcissistic and ambiguous masculinities, appealing to male and female, and straight and gay spectators/purchasers alike. By extension, campaigns such as Levi’s 501 ‘Bath’ and ‘Laundrette’ in 1985-86 were key in connoting the idea of 'haptic visuality', that is the relationship of looking to feeling, and the embodied pleasure that men would get from touching or ‘being touched’ by the garment in question and seeing, or being seeing in it.
"
The title will be published in spring 2022 and results from the MA seminar and thesis direction t... more The title will be published in spring 2022 and results from the MA seminar and thesis direction that Paul Jobling was involved with for MA students at Parsons new School, Paris in Fall/Winter 2018-19. How have fashion and fashion media responded to turn of the millennium non-binary, intersectional and liminal identities? Do they have a supportive or a contradictory and exploitative relationship with queer, trans and ageing subjects? Should promotions for international fashion brands be able to trade on hypersexual desire and porno-chic, or should they be banned? These are the core questions that this study unpacks in relation to clothing, representation, and identity and body politics in British, European and American culture between 1990 and the present. In the process it examines topics and issues as diverse as the following: intersectionality, women's writing and authorship in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ catwalk show for Dior (Spring-Summer 2017), and Alexander McQueen’s ‘The Widows of Culloden’ collection (Fall-Winter 2006); the authenticity and non-conformativity of transgender models such as Oslo Grace and Rostov Smirnov since 2015; the android as a redemptive figure in Alessandro Michele’s cross-cultural cyborg collection for Gucci (Autumn-Winter 2018/2019) and Andrea Giacobbe’s digital fashion spread ‘Simplex Concordia’ (1996); the nexus of cloth and clothing to embodiment, ageing and memory in work such as Magali Nougarède’s Crossing the Line (2002), 'Fashion For All Ages' (The Guardian, 2009-2020) and Ari Seth Cohen's Advanced Style (2008). Through a deft interweaving of theory to practice, each of the four original chapters reflects on the social, cultural, political and psychological dimensions of fashion and its representation. Overall, they illuminate the critical concept that human identities – whether as individuals or as groups - are never static entities and nor are they simply dependent on, or even defined by, what people wear but how and why they do so as well. Each of the complementary chapters that the book comprises acts as a set of case studies that trace the genealogy of and analyse the relevance to fashion of a particular movement or way of thinking about corporeal identities on a non-binary and intersectional basis since the turn of the millennium in Europe and the USA. It is on this level, then, it expands on Patricia Hill Collins’ idea of intersectionality as existing within ‘a matrix of domination’, such that it not only frames how positions of gender, sexuality race, class and age overlap but how, as a techne or tool of inquiry and knowledge, it furthermore enables us to analyse how fashion engages with modes of resistance and contests dominant narratives of identity and systems of social, political and cultural power.
A magazine edited by Paul Jobling and produced by finalists on the BA (Hons) Photography program... more A magazine edited by Paul Jobling and produced by finalists on the BA (Hons) Photography programme at Staffordshire Polytechnic (currently Staffordshire University). In July 1989 Design Week called it 'a student production that puts most coffee-table glossies to shame.' In the NUS and Guardian Student Media Awards for 1990 volumes 1 and 2 were awarded a special prize, and the following year Sarah Bowe won the best student photographer award for her photo-essay, 'Dock Road: on the Mersey beat', Vue, volume 3.
Fashion, Performance, and Performativity – edited by Andrea Kollnitz and Marco Pecorari, Bloomsbury spring 2021, 2022
The central theme of this paper about oral history and its relationship to fashion studies concer... more The central theme of this paper about oral history and its relationship to fashion studies concerns the dual function for individuals not only to perform vocally events known from the past but also, through the tactics of speech and counterspeech enacted between the interlocutors involved, to performatively narrate fresh perspectives about events and how they relate to their identity. In analyzing such issues, it focuses on the extended interview with fashion entrepreneur Tommy Roberts (1942-2012), owner of the cult London boutiques Kleptomania (1966-1969) and Mr Freedom (1969-1972), which was conducted by Anna Dyke in 2005 for the digitized National Lives Sound Archives at the British Library.
It mobilizes the interview to deal with a series of dialectics elaborated between performance and performativity - hearing and listening, language and speech, and dress and dressing - in the ensuing narration of a fashion life (hi)story on two distinct, though inter-related, levels: who is saying what and how it is being said; and what was being worn and how it was being worn in the 1960s and 1970s. The analysis is framed by the emphasis Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero places on the material role of the voice (phone) of the ‘unique existent’ and her related concept of the narratable self, by which the subject merges together past and present, identity and memory, and self and other, as his/her life story unfolds performatively. Thus Cavarero contends, ‘In the autobiographical story that the memory episodically – and often unintentionally – recounts, the narratable self … becomes, through the story, that which she already was’.
This catalogue essay attempts to unravel how and why the cult of the image is most expressly mani... more This catalogue essay attempts to unravel how and why the cult of the image is most expressly manifest in postmodernism by a concern with hyper-reality or the simulacral – the revival of the Platonic idea that a copy is made of an original which never really existed in the first place. The high priest of such thinking is Jean Baudrillard, who insists that we take flight from reality by reproducing images based on other images with the result that we no longer have the propensity to tell representation and reality apart. The mass media have a crucial part to play here and there is obviously something in Baudrillard’s argument when it comes to considering visual cultural forms like reality television and the constant rehashing of imagery in advertising and photography. Yet, when we consider the representation of the human body as a site for the exercise and regulation of power in advertising for Benetton and Levis 501 or Cindy Sherman’s untitled film stills, it doesn’t suffice to argue, as both he and Dick Hebdige after him have done, that all hyperreal texts are devoid of serious comment or political content. Moreover, Baudrillard’s thesis capsizes the relationship that still exists between words and images in postmodern political posters by the likes of Barbara Kruger or photo-essays for The Face such as 'Strategies for the Unemployed' or 'Who's Shooting Who? In Beirut It Pays to Know Your Terrorist'. Thus, as I argue, we also need to consider Jacques Derrida’s contention that the deconstruction of any text is more a matter of dealing with ‘multiple reading heads’, of resisting a system based on binary oppositions, and accordingly, a question of pondering the intertextuality of word and image.
"This pioneering monograph will launch Bloomsbury’s series ‘Dress and Fashion Research’ in 2013. ... more "This pioneering monograph will launch Bloomsbury’s series ‘Dress and Fashion Research’ in 2013. It is the first in-depth exploration of the production, circulation and consumption of print, television and cinema publicity for men's clothing in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. It encompasses the onset and vagaries of affluence and youth culture in what is commonly regarded as the golden age of creative British advertising, which began in the mid-1950s and lasted, to one degree or another, until the global impact of the economic downturn following the Al-Qaeda bombings on America of 11 September 2001. In particular, it considers how the material object ('this thing') is translated into advertising rhetoric ('that thing') and probes how copy, images and music were used to construct the idea of the 'peacock male' in promotions for suits, jeans, casual wear, shirts and underwear - and for whose pleasure.
It mobilises original archival research alongside theoretical debate to bring new analytical perspectives to menswear advertising as a significant cultural and socio-economic phenomenon. Thus it examines design issues and period style in advertising, the role of market research and consumer psychology in determining target audiences, the impact of youth culture and ‘new man’ in representing fashionable masculinities, and the various ways that menswear retailers and brands dealt with sex and gender, race, class and age. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, the advertising rhetoric for suits by Austin Reed, Burton's and Hector Powe, and shirts by Viyella and Double Two, addressed youth markets while also harping on hetero-normative stereotypes. Whereas the titillating puns in promotions for Y-fronts (viz. ‘It’s what a man’s like underneath that counts’), the portrayal of decadent and camp androgyny in publicity for Dormeuil's Tonik 'Cloth for Men', and the imbrication of sex and pleasure in jeans ads symbolised more narcissistic and ambiguous masculinities, appealing to male and female, and straight and gay spectators/purchasers alike. By extension, campaigns such as Levi’s 501 ‘Bath’ and ‘Laundrette’ in 1985-86 were key in connoting the idea of 'haptic visuality', that is the relationship of looking to feeling, and the embodied pleasure that men would get from touching or ‘being touched’ by the garment in question and seeing, or being seeing in it.
"
n this paper I mobilize Funny Face (dir. Stanley Donen, 1956) to examine the intertextual nexus b... more n this paper I mobilize Funny Face (dir. Stanley Donen, 1956) to examine the intertextual nexus between fashion, fashion photography, and film. Set in New York City and Paris, with costume design by Hubert de Givenchy and Edith Head, the film is a latter day telling of the Pygmalion myth, such that photographer Dick Avery (Fred Astaire) and Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson), the dictatorial Fashion Editor of Quality, take up the challenge of converting Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), whom they regard as an unprepossessing bookstore intellectual, into a top model. Thus I analyze how a film that is more generally regarded as a benchmark in the Hollywood musical for its exuberant use of colour and songs is, more particularly, a cinematic locus for both the mediation and mediatization of fashionable identities. To this end, I assess how the film elaborates the power of the fashion industry as a matter of social practice in regards to Foucauldian discourse and the related concept of the énoncé, or event/ statement. Thus I evince I two events/statements — “Think Pink!” and “Bonjour Paris” — to discuss in particular the relationship of style to national identities and the need or desire for America to assert cultural leadership in fashion photography, art, and design over France in the context of 1950s Cold War politics. By comparison, I enlist the statements, “Take the Picture!” and “A Bird of Paradise,” to examine respectively the dynamic of looking/gazing between the fashion photographer and designer and their (in this case) female models, the nexus between star designing, clothing, and gender identity, and what Foucault calls assujetissement — subjection — which connotes the dual process of Jo’s subordination as well as the act of her becoming or “being made” a subject according to a system of power.
Stanley Donen's film Funny Face (1956), starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, is generally re... more Stanley Donen's film Funny Face (1956), starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, is generally regarded as a benchmark in the Hollywood musical for its exuberant use of colour and songs, a pleasurable feast for the eyes and ears. Alexander Walker, (1999:13), for example, called it ‘an amorous photo session of the utmost elegance’. But, in the way that it deals with the intertextual nexus between fashion/photography and film, it is not only a cinematic locus for the mediation of fashionable identities but one that deals with their mediatization as well, dwelling on a new style of photographic representation, which came to be known as the 'New American Vision'. Accordingly, in examining how the theme of captivity is elaborated in Funny Face, I want to analyse the way it depicts the performative dynamic between the fashion editor, photographer and model. Specifically, I shall take into account the dialectic of looking, gazing and power it involves between them in creating a physical (and metaphysical) space for fashionable female identities.
Mobilising what Jean-Marie Floch calls the semiotic square, this 10,000-word article explores the... more Mobilising what Jean-Marie Floch calls the semiotic square, this 10,000-word article explores the tranition from 'this thing' (the car itself) to 'that thing' (the car in the advertisment) and what the concomitant transitivity between a global brand and a national culture can entail through a close textual analysis of British televison and poster pulbicity for the Renault Clio, and in particular for the Clio III. Organised around the ludic rheme, 'Twice the Va Va Voom', and the crtitical valorisation, 'French car, British designers', the advertising campaign, launched in 2005, elaborates a double-code that sets up the idea of the 'country-of-origin' as a contest, pitting Britain, in the guise of Ben, against France, in the guise of Sophie. As such, the commercial identity of the car is performatively imbricated, scene-by-scene, with cultural phenomena from both France and Britain - engineering, food, literature, and romance.
Accordingly, I deal with the tension between sameness and difference in Anglo-French relations that the verbal and visual rhetoric of the publicity connotes in the context of the 'entente cordiale'. I take into account the way the ad campaign simultaneously maintains and deconstructs the cultural, social and historical stereotypes that exist on the ‘outside’, addressing sex and gender identities, white nationalism and white foreignness, and the racial blind spots of the advertisement in comparison to the preceeding 'Va Va Voom' campaign, which starred the black footballer Thierry Henry.
At the same time, as we observe Ben and Sophie driving their respective Clios around London and Paris in the television advertisement, and the conjunction of London and Paris signified in the poster, the city is objectified as a kind of meeting point or passage for the negotitation of new social relations and networks that enunciate the transition from poltical to commercial globalism in the Single European Market.
This research paper was originally delivered as a keynote address for the Design History Society Annual Conference, ‘Writing Design - Process: Object: Discourse: Translation’ at the University of Hertfordshire, 3-5 September 2009.
It is my belief that graphic design history has too often been presented through a parade of styl... more It is my belief that graphic design history has too often been presented through a parade of styles and individual achievements devoid of significant social context, and that this tendency has obscured much of the richness and complexity of its development. In contrast, this book is ...
Fashion Theory-the Journal of Dress Body & Culture, Jan 1, 2005
... One of the earliest known posters by him, promoting Dewar's Whiskey, can be trac... more ... One of the earliest known posters by him, promoting Dewar's Whiskey, can be traced back to 1907 and in its depiction of an idealized male figure wearing full evening dress, John Hewitt has rightly argued that it prefigures many of the stylistic conventions that were to become ...
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Books by Paul J Jobling
Through a deft interweaving of theory to practice, each of the four original chapters reflects on the social, cultural, political and psychological dimensions of fashion and its representation. Overall, they illuminate the critical concept that human identities – whether as individuals or as groups - are never static entities and nor are they simply dependent on, or even defined by, what people wear but how and why they do so as well. Each of the complementary chapters that the book comprises acts as a set of case studies that trace the genealogy of and analyse the relevance to fashion of a particular movement or way of thinking about corporeal identities on a non-binary and intersectional basis since the turn of the millennium in Europe and the USA. It is on this level, then, it expands on Patricia Hill Collins’ idea of intersectionality as existing within ‘a matrix of domination’, such that it not only frames how positions of gender, sexuality race, class and age overlap but how, as a techne or tool of inquiry and knowledge, it furthermore enables us to analyse how fashion engages with modes of resistance and contests dominant narratives of identity and systems of social, political and cultural power.
It mobilizes the interview to deal with a series of dialectics elaborated between performance and performativity - hearing and listening, language and speech, and dress and dressing - in the ensuing narration of a fashion life (hi)story on two distinct, though inter-related, levels: who is saying what and how it is being said; and what was being worn and how it was being worn in the 1960s and 1970s. The analysis is framed by the emphasis Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero places on the material role of the voice (phone) of the ‘unique existent’ and her related concept of the narratable self, by which the subject merges together past and present, identity and memory, and self and other, as his/her life story unfolds performatively. Thus Cavarero contends, ‘In the autobiographical story that the memory episodically – and often unintentionally – recounts, the narratable self … becomes, through the story, that which she already was’.
It mobilises original archival research alongside theoretical debate to bring new analytical perspectives to menswear advertising as a significant cultural and socio-economic phenomenon. Thus it examines design issues and period style in advertising, the role of market research and consumer psychology in determining target audiences, the impact of youth culture and ‘new man’ in representing fashionable masculinities, and the various ways that menswear retailers and brands dealt with sex and gender, race, class and age. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, the advertising rhetoric for suits by Austin Reed, Burton's and Hector Powe, and shirts by Viyella and Double Two, addressed youth markets while also harping on hetero-normative stereotypes. Whereas the titillating puns in promotions for Y-fronts (viz. ‘It’s what a man’s like underneath that counts’), the portrayal of decadent and camp androgyny in publicity for Dormeuil's Tonik 'Cloth for Men', and the imbrication of sex and pleasure in jeans ads symbolised more narcissistic and ambiguous masculinities, appealing to male and female, and straight and gay spectators/purchasers alike. By extension, campaigns such as Levi’s 501 ‘Bath’ and ‘Laundrette’ in 1985-86 were key in connoting the idea of 'haptic visuality', that is the relationship of looking to feeling, and the embodied pleasure that men would get from touching or ‘being touched’ by the garment in question and seeing, or being seeing in it.
"
Papers by Paul J Jobling
Through a deft interweaving of theory to practice, each of the four original chapters reflects on the social, cultural, political and psychological dimensions of fashion and its representation. Overall, they illuminate the critical concept that human identities – whether as individuals or as groups - are never static entities and nor are they simply dependent on, or even defined by, what people wear but how and why they do so as well. Each of the complementary chapters that the book comprises acts as a set of case studies that trace the genealogy of and analyse the relevance to fashion of a particular movement or way of thinking about corporeal identities on a non-binary and intersectional basis since the turn of the millennium in Europe and the USA. It is on this level, then, it expands on Patricia Hill Collins’ idea of intersectionality as existing within ‘a matrix of domination’, such that it not only frames how positions of gender, sexuality race, class and age overlap but how, as a techne or tool of inquiry and knowledge, it furthermore enables us to analyse how fashion engages with modes of resistance and contests dominant narratives of identity and systems of social, political and cultural power.
It mobilizes the interview to deal with a series of dialectics elaborated between performance and performativity - hearing and listening, language and speech, and dress and dressing - in the ensuing narration of a fashion life (hi)story on two distinct, though inter-related, levels: who is saying what and how it is being said; and what was being worn and how it was being worn in the 1960s and 1970s. The analysis is framed by the emphasis Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero places on the material role of the voice (phone) of the ‘unique existent’ and her related concept of the narratable self, by which the subject merges together past and present, identity and memory, and self and other, as his/her life story unfolds performatively. Thus Cavarero contends, ‘In the autobiographical story that the memory episodically – and often unintentionally – recounts, the narratable self … becomes, through the story, that which she already was’.
It mobilises original archival research alongside theoretical debate to bring new analytical perspectives to menswear advertising as a significant cultural and socio-economic phenomenon. Thus it examines design issues and period style in advertising, the role of market research and consumer psychology in determining target audiences, the impact of youth culture and ‘new man’ in representing fashionable masculinities, and the various ways that menswear retailers and brands dealt with sex and gender, race, class and age. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, the advertising rhetoric for suits by Austin Reed, Burton's and Hector Powe, and shirts by Viyella and Double Two, addressed youth markets while also harping on hetero-normative stereotypes. Whereas the titillating puns in promotions for Y-fronts (viz. ‘It’s what a man’s like underneath that counts’), the portrayal of decadent and camp androgyny in publicity for Dormeuil's Tonik 'Cloth for Men', and the imbrication of sex and pleasure in jeans ads symbolised more narcissistic and ambiguous masculinities, appealing to male and female, and straight and gay spectators/purchasers alike. By extension, campaigns such as Levi’s 501 ‘Bath’ and ‘Laundrette’ in 1985-86 were key in connoting the idea of 'haptic visuality', that is the relationship of looking to feeling, and the embodied pleasure that men would get from touching or ‘being touched’ by the garment in question and seeing, or being seeing in it.
"
Accordingly, in examining how the theme of captivity is elaborated in Funny Face, I want to analyse the way it depicts the performative dynamic between the fashion editor, photographer and model. Specifically, I shall take into account the dialectic of looking, gazing and power it involves between them in creating a physical (and metaphysical) space for fashionable female identities.
Accordingly, I deal with the tension between sameness and difference in Anglo-French relations that the verbal and visual rhetoric of the publicity connotes in the context of the 'entente cordiale'. I take into account the way the ad campaign simultaneously maintains and deconstructs the cultural, social and historical stereotypes that exist on the ‘outside’, addressing sex and gender identities, white nationalism and white foreignness, and the racial blind spots of the advertisement in comparison to the preceeding 'Va Va Voom' campaign, which starred the black footballer Thierry Henry.
At the same time, as we observe Ben and Sophie driving their respective Clios around London and Paris in the television advertisement, and the conjunction of London and Paris signified in the poster, the city is objectified as a kind of meeting point or passage for the negotitation of new social relations and networks that enunciate the transition from poltical to commercial globalism in the Single European Market.
This research paper was originally delivered as a keynote address for the Design History Society Annual Conference, ‘Writing Design - Process: Object: Discourse: Translation’ at the University of Hertfordshire, 3-5 September 2009.