Triumph of the frill The Creation of Fashion

The Creation of Fashion

Your Own Fashion Design And Creative Style Ideas

Triumph of the frill

Posted July 14th, 2011 by Brock Cumpston No Comments »

Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 political thriller The Conformist—screening Jan. 14 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox—provides a cogent reminder that fashion and fascism share more than just a similar sound and spelling.

A philosophy advocating governance by a dictator , assisted by a party both hierarchically organized and strongly ideological , in maintaining a totalitarian and regimented society through violence , intimidation and the arbitrary use of power .

What’s this a definition of, class? Anyone? Anyone? Starts with an “f.” Yes, you there, in the back: “Fashion.” Yes. And if you take away the brackets, what does it define then? Oh, did someone say “fascism”? Yes.

Fashion and fascism: it’s facile enough to liken the two, if only ’cause they sound half the same. But there’s a hard truth there. For all the talk about blogs, street style, e-shopping and the mass-marketization of fashion, it’s not a democracy. If it were, it wouldn’t be fashion, right? Style can be democratic and individual and free, but fashion—and I mean what people sometimes call “high fashion,” i.e., the stuff made for beauty, provocation, or other artful purposes, and also lots of money—cannot.

Fascism is a different stripe of political philosophy, it being defined in a major way by its enforcement . Fascism can’t just exist in theory and neither can fashion—it has to enforced, which is to say, worn.

What you wear doesn’t matter half as much as who else is wearing it. Ideas, expressed in clothing? Yes, but they’re far less than the sum of those expressions. Individualism is insignificant. One camel coat does not matter; dozens upon dozens of camel coats matter. Any coat that is not a camel coat, or a military coat, or a leopard coat, or whatever coats multiplied in the market pages of September issues, will be trampled on in the rush for camel and military and leopard coats. If you are not wearing such a coat, you’re ignorant. Perhaps willfully ignorant, perhaps even a rebel, but ignorant nonetheless.

And so only two forces make up fashion: conformism, and anti-conformism. There are insiders and outsiders. The outsiders become insiders—think of grunge god-turned-luxemaker Marc Jacobs, or Misshapes-DJ-cum-spokesmodel Leigh Lezark—and it begins over again.

Which brings us to Bernardo Bertolucci’s political thriller The Conformist, and back to fascism proper. Bertolucci’s films are playing in a retrospective at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, from now until Jan. 24, so you should see at least one of them, and if only one, then this one. Bertolucci made another film about fascism, 1900, but that will bring you to tears by way of boredom. The Conformist is a masterpiece.

Angle for angle, you’ve never seen a more exquisitely shot film. It’s deliberate, almost ruthless, in its symmetry. In it, beauty becomes excessive force. You just might literally die.

And then there are the clothes.

Made in 1970 and set in 1938, the film combines the feel of the latter era with the look of the first, creating something of a timeless perspective.

Everything in The Conformist is codified. The hemlock-addicted boheme of a mother wears bedraggled feathers and a flowered silk slip, like she’s a garden gone to rot. The fiancée—a “petty bourgeoise” married by the fascist-spy protagonist so that he might feel “normal”—wears vertically striped things in strict A-line shapes. At the end of the film, she appears housebound, and arrestingly so: her long multi-striped tunic matches exactly the slipcovers on the sofa and chairs, making her look like a Missoni Home ad. The professor’s wife—liberal and a little bit emancipated, if that’s possible—wears trousers and parts her curls down the middle in that ’70s way. In one brief flash of bachelor revelry, there is a piano-playing girl who looks so ’70s—she wears a white, lacy, poet-sleeved dress, little white round sunglasses, thick hair tied low at the back—that she’s almost an anomaly, a glimpse of some romantic future.

The end of the film also marks the end of fascism, and we see commoners rushing through the streets, arm in arm. All the girls seem to wear sleeved, knee-length kitchen dresses, cut from plain cloth and printed with flowers, so many flowers. When the crowd is seen from behind, there are dozens of identical straw hats with identical wide, dark bands. The people are conformist in their anti-conformity. It’s all fashion.

How to define this “fashion” in less political, more human terms? How to explain why we rush to it season after season, our better judgments and budgets be damned? Why do we subject ourselves to its apparent tyranny? What freedoms of expression does it give us in return, or conversely, what security?

One scene in The Conformist tells you everything. The professor’s wife, a lover of leopard print because she’s wild at heart, and also—SPOILER ALERT!—doomed to die in the woods, has thrown an eerie white-fox stole over the bougie fiancée’s shoulders and taken her shopping for a party. The fiancée buys a gown of bias-cut silk, ebony and ivory, along with a long string of pearls; it all seems very Coco Chanel, which makes sense, given she was the great emancipator of 1930s women. Indeed, the fiancée is having something of a sexual awakening, so it fits. Later, the professor’s wife wants to dress her. The fiancée says no—she’s too ashamed.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” says the professor’s wife, holding the silk to her chest. “You are a woman, the same as me.”

This is how fashion, like all great dictators, seduces us: not with a bang, but with whispers. Put on the dress now. See? There’s nothing wrong with you. Now you’re a woman. Now, the same.

The Creation of Fashion