Daily Life, Identity, Media: New Frontiers of Fashion Interrogating Boundaries

“Daily Life, Identity, Media: New Frontiers of Fashion Interrogating Boundaries,” a panel discussion with Agnès Rocamora, Yusuke Koishi, and Masafumi Monden, moderated by Kyoko Koma. The discussion took place at Meiji University on November 15, 2019, and was published in Diversity and Creativity in the Digital Society: Gender, Media, Art, and Fashion, edited by Hiromi Tanaka, Kyoko Koma, and Osamu Takamine (Meiji University Press, 2023), ISBN 978-4-906811-33-5. Translated from the Japanese for KLEINSTEIN.COM. Event information.

Koma: What changes have taken place around fashion between the period before the advent of digital society and the present? I would first like to hear the views of the fashion scholars Agnès Rocamora and Masafumi Monden and of Yusuke Koishi, who works in the field of fashion, before opening the discussion.

#parisienne: Social Media Stratification in the Image of the Parisienne

Rocamora: I would like to talk about how the women of Paris—those whom people call Parisiennes—are seen on social media and in digital media.

Looking at Instagram and digital fashion platforms, I have examined the distinct, and in some respects new, visions of Paris and the Parisienne that have developed across social and digital media. From the perspective of discourse, I have been particularly interested in who is included and who is excluded on social media.

Hashtags are especially important to social media. In practice, that principally means Instagram. As a sociologist, I have used hashtags to examine how Paris and Parisian women are seen and represented there. A hashtag, of course, also functions as an identifier: it archives data and serves as a signpost through which earlier material can be found.

When we look at how the Instagram page for “#parisienne” classifies society through fashion, we find rows of remarkably uniform and similar images. The normative discourse of fashion is clearly expressed here. The typical Parisian woman is represented as young and slender, conventionally very pretty, white, and in possession of a healthy body. A search for “French woman” produces photographs along with the term and, naturally, presents us with women who stand for Frenchness.

Three women repeatedly appear in searches for the French woman or “Parisienne”: Anne-Laure Mais, Jeanne Damas, and Sabina Socol. All three are white, young, slender, and heterosexual. Mais and Damas have also been used to support brands and e-commerce platforms associated with Adenorah and Rouje.

Among social networking services, Instagram in particular commodifies the Parisian woman. It has become a commercial platform and increasingly operates as an advertising medium.

Consider two brands, Rouje and MUSIER, founded by two of the women I have just mentioned. Once again, the same conditions recur: young, white, slender, healthy, and pretty.

Finally, I want to address algorithms. Algorithms matter because they shape gendered experience. A growing body of research and literature, including work in sociology, has begun to critique them.

The author of a 2018 book on algorithmic bias reported that when she searched Google in 2010 for the phrase “Black girls,” the results returned large numbers of sexualized and pornographic images. Algorithms are never neutral. They retrieve elements in particular, biased ways and thereby help construct and influence biased images within society.

I also tried searching hashtags myself. When I searched Google for “#paris” and “#parisian,” standardized images appeared en masse once again: feminine images of women who meet the conditions already described—young, white, slender, and healthy. What I want to emphasize here is the logic at work. When we look at discursive representations of fashion or society on social media, it is important to question the underlying logic and affordances as well.

Algorithms can be, and indeed are, forces that shape and sustain standards and norms. They are already cultural and social technologies. We need to understand how algorithms are culturally and socially constituted and consider the impact they have.

A Discretized Society and the Phase Transition of Meaning: An Age in Which “Correctness” Is Changing

Koishi: My name is Yusuke Koishi. I think many people are interested in semiotics, but I would like to suggest that a semiotics which ignores time has its limits.

At the beginning of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes one morning from troubled dreams to discover that he has turned into an insect. What might that mean in contemporary society? It would be rather like the Beatles waking up, checking their iPhones, and discovering that they had become white supremacists. Such a thing can happen. More recently, there have even been moments when the mop-top haircut itself has come to signify white supremacy. It is not really a laughing matter: such a transformation can happen in a single day. The meanings of signs evolve through time.

It is therefore important to ask what fashion is. People loosely describe fashion as a trend or in various other ways. For the past five or six years, I have argued that, to give the concept a more precise outline, we should understand fashion as the dynamics and condition of dress and use the term Yosou—the modes through which a person appears.

Wittgenstein says something particularly interesting at the beginning of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: the world is the totality of facts, not of things. The world exists, and fashion is one fact within that totality. The world is developing and swarming with movement. Fashion design is what produces that evolution through time.

Roland Barthes is famous for the analysis of fashion, but what was missing from his approach? In The Fashion System, his questions take a form like this: what happens to meaning when leather buttons are attached to a tweed jacket? Suppose a silk sweater is described as formal. Does its formality derive from the pointed collar or from the silk? He reads magazines and analyzes such relations. In other words, he classifies the elements in order to identify what supports the meaning at the center.

Suppose I wore a silk sweater with a pointed collar, then added a tracksuit and went to a dinner party. I would probably be out of place. But because it is an Adidas tracksuit, I might be fine at an Adidas conference or party; if it were Nike, I probably would not be. Barthes did not extend his analysis this far—that is, to the point of considering interaction with the real world.

The magazines he analyzed do not represent the whole of fashion, so fashion has to be considered in its temporal development. What does this mean? It means that the meaning of any one thing can only be grasped by calculating its relation to all communication across the world as a whole. And that calculation has to include the concept of time.

Consider what fashion design has done with Donald Trump’s slogan, “LET’S MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” When Ronald Reagan used the phrase, it did not provoke the same allergic reaction. When this person says it, however, it becomes unacceptable. Its meaning in 2016 is different from its meaning in 1980. That difference is not literal. If we think in Barthesian terms about what supports its meaning, we might consider the Republican red, certain groups of supporters, and many other elements. Then we can ask whether adding design might alter that meaning a little. This is fashion design. If design could transform the slogan into something that no longer signified white supremacy, the design would have succeeded.

The world is discretized. Depending on what a person selects, in a presidential election, for example, occupying a red position makes one legible as Republican, while occupying a blue position makes one legible as Democrat. Yet the mesh of that discretization is extremely coarse. Fashion is the work of making the mesh of meaning finer and producing a diversity of meanings.

The word queer, too, originally meant strange or unusual, but it has acquired a different meaning. Queerness has increasingly come to be understood as culturally compelling or cool; the word no longer operates only through its earlier meaning. Fashion becomes interesting when it produces such reversals.

This brings us back to Wittgenstein. We make facts and thereby affect the totality of the world. If this entire process is what we mean by fashion design, then fashion design can be understood as one tool of social hacking. To return to the Parisienne: if the Parisienne is cool, design can make her uncool; if she occupies a deeply ambiguous position, design can make her cool.

This is a kind of “theory of relativity of meaning.” If everyone goes one way, I go the other; the more powerfully minoritarian that position is, the more meaning it has. Michelle Obama once said, “When they go low, we go high.” But perhaps “When they go low, we go lower” would be more interesting. If you go all the way to the lowest point, it may operate like a periodic boundary condition: continuing downward may, in fact, connect you to the top. Thinking through such possibilities is what fashion does.

The Problem of Boundaries: Class, Culture, and Kawaii’s Potential for Transgression

Monden: Hello. I would like to discuss fashion’s potential for transgression.

Why do we wear clothes? It has been argued that people wear clothing for three principal reasons: to keep the body warm, to protect it from injury, and to conceal its sexual parts.

Within fashion studies, however, clothing is generally understood to be relatively independent of these biological reasons. Symbolic reasons are considered more important than functional ones.

The feminist fashion scholar Elizabeth Wilson has also argued that gender is produced through dress. We judge people using the coded signs of fashion that our cultures, societies, and experiences have repeatedly taught us to read as “for men” or “for women.” It is important to remember that these signs do not necessarily carry the same meanings in different cultures and societies.

The German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that two desires lie at the foundation of fashion: the desire to assimilate into a group by wearing similar clothes, and the desire to differentiate oneself from other groups by dressing somewhat differently.

Fashion is often described as a second skin. In Japan almost everyone wears some form of clothing, which makes dress effectively the body’s first visible surface. It can therefore be understood as the first boundary between the body and society.

The concept of kawaii offers one example of transgression. When applied to fashion, kawaii often describes clothing associated with a particular girlish taste: frills, ribbons, white and pastel colors, floral patterns, or boyish silhouettes. Gothic Lolita fashion is one example. People well beyond childhood dress in silhouettes that were once available only to children, and especially to girls. Such styles can therefore be understood as transgressing social gender norms attached to age and adult womanhood.

The concept of kawaii is also applied to boys. Boys described as kawaii can usually be understood, at least on the surface, as departing from gender norms associated with adult masculinity—being strong, macho, aggressive, and dependable. This becomes particularly evident when they are compared with ideal images of men in countries such as the United States and Australia.

Finally, I would like to consider male fashion models. Male fashion modeling in Japan actually has a history of more than sixty-five years. Since the early 1960s, some models have been able to make a living exclusively from modeling. They embody not only the beauty of young men in their twenties, but ideals of style and beauty for mature men as well. Could we not say that they transgress the fixed idea that fashion and beauty belong only to the young?

As these examples show, seemingly unremarkable fashions and forms of being can affirm—or transgress—social norms such as gender norms in ways that escape our notice. It is important to consider this as we move further into digital society.

Discussion

Koma: Thank you. I would first like to ask Rocamora a question. Has the spread of digital media, rather than allowing us to escape the norms constructed by Western modernity, ultimately done no more than reinforce their reach? Looking toward the future, is there any path by which we might escape algorithms?

I have one further question. The word “white” appeared very often in the discussion. Can we escape the Western-modern and white-centered framework?

Rocamora: I think our hope lies in education and the cultivation of awareness. Gender and fashion are now discussed in many ways around the world. I hope that we can see them through approaches that are not binary—not limited to one side or the other.

Koma: I would like to ask Koishi a question. If we were to consider Barthes’s The Fashion System now rather than in the period in which it was written, how would you explain it from your perspective?

Koishi: Deviation through time and changes of context are fairly self-evident. It is almost a trivial point. If I went to sleep here for ten years, then when I awoke this might no longer be this auditorium. That is obvious. My point is that the same is true within the world of meaning. Monden and Rocamora are both saying something broadly similar. The algorithms mentioned earlier are quite important, and the people who possess them hold considerable power. This is why I think that philosophers, sociologists, and designers should not simply regard algorithms as an enemy. They should get on board—and then take them over.

Monden: I have a question for Rocamora. In Japan, I think there is an idealized image of France, even a kind of obsession. Books claiming that French women own only ten items of clothing in their entire lives, or that women in France stop wearing makeup after the age of forty, sell quite well. What do you think about this?

Rocamora: I think we also need to examine geopolitically how fashion travels around the world. I imagine everyone here is familiar with Michel Foucault. Who says something can be emphasized more strongly than the thing that is said; in other words, the identity of the speaker can sometimes exert more influence than the content. The Parisienne, for example, may be seen quite differently in Japan and in Europe. I would also like to ask Koma about this.

Koma: In Japanese magazines, the Parisienne is treated as an ideal particularly by publications affiliated with French magazines and by magazines for readers in their fifties and older—that is, people who grew up with the Parisienne as an ideal. Images of Japanese women in France, from Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème at the end of the nineteenth century onward, have similarly depicted them as cute and small. Even today, we find images of women presented through the kawaii fashion Monden discussed: immature figures who fall outside Western norms.

Monden: I would like to hear Koishi’s thoughts. In Australia, some young people in far-right groups have adopted a kind of “Australia Great” rhetoric, like that of the United States, and use neo-Nazi symbols in their activities. A colleague of mine pointed out how strange it is that they feel no resistance to using the symbols of what was, during the war, an enemy country in order to express Australian patriotism. What do you make of that?

Koishi: There are things that continually have to be updated. If Barthes were alive now, I suspect he might work with Google or Facebook on something. Baidu and Tencent, for example, hold enormous amounts of data about the distribution of Chinese speakers’ lives and systems of thought—data about signifieds and signifiers. I think something quite interesting could be made from it.

To answer Monden’s question: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is fundamental to human society. I would rather not use the word Nazi too casually, but the swastika has been appearing often lately, and I do not think that is good. Today’s politicians have moved in such a morally punk direction that simply being ordinary can look remarkably punk.

Koma: We have discussed many aspects of what the new frontiers of fashion might be in digital society. We have considered how traditional gender norms continue to be reinforced by algorithms, the geopolitical possibility of diversity within those norms, and proposals for how we might make use of algorithms. To conclude, I would like each of you to offer a final thought on fashion’s new frontiers in digital society.

Rocamora: Education is the key word. I also think we need to be more direct and more optimistic.

Koishi: On transgression: Saussure uses the terms parole and langue. Parole is something like the individual way a person dresses—or, to move away from clothing, their way of speaking rather than a legally prescribed way of dressing. Langue is more systematic, like grammar. Society is the process through which everyone produces different things in parole and thereby rewrites langue.

Monden: Young Asian Australians once felt self-conscious about their Asian appearance, but they now watch a great deal of YouTube content—makeup and fashion channels made by Asian creators. About two years ago, a colleague surveyed the attitudes of Asian Australians between eighteen and thirty. The respondents said that they did not feel at all self-conscious about their Asian appearance and were happy with it. I believe social media, technology, and digital society still hold the potential to encourage departures from the mainstream.

Koma: We have arrived at three key words for considering fashion’s new frontiers in digital society: education, parole, and transgression. Digital media society allows everyone to communicate information freely. Although algorithms continue to reinforce traditional norms, the discussion of education, parole, and transgression has suggested the possibility that individuals can nevertheless change something. Digital media holds domination and resistance together as two sides of the same coin, which makes individual agency in selecting and judging information all the more important. I hope that, for those who wear fashion, digital media can become a space of empowerment that respects diversity. It is a development I intend to continue watching closely.