Magazine
Essay Series “Walking Now” MISHIMAGAZINE #10 – On Fashion
The original text was written in Japanese for MISHIMAGAZINE and published on April 25, 2018. This post is an English translation and republication of the original article.
From time to time, I am asked to write something about fashion. More often than not, the request arrives with a preface: “Since we do not know much about fashion…” My own feeling, however, is that almost every person who has come into self-awareness already knows fashion very well, not as information but as bodily knowledge. Fashion is closely tied to the structure of society and to our behavior. Because it concerns the appearance and condition of how people are clothed and how they are, I sometimes think the Japanese word yoso, meaning something like the appearance or modality of things, might be a better translation of fashion than the usual word for trend. This is the kind of fashion I want to write about.
In the context of literary and cultural magazines, what is often expected is fashion as knowledge one ought to possess. But are the topics proposed under that expectation actually interesting? What I want to point out first is that, in this context, even knowledge itself is one fashion. Many people will remember that postmodern thought was once the newest fashion among the intellectual class.
There is also another context of fashion: fashion as a kind of how-to, the information that tells us what to wear according to TPO. That may have value as information. But it is not where my active interest lies. I may write about it when the flow of the discussion requires it, but the most interesting pleasure of fashion, to me, is not to live smoothly by following social rules such as TPO or rules as tacit knowledge. It is the opposite: to hack them, to betray them, and thereby experience a new scene one could not have imagined.
Fashion is not merely the “strange thing” that appears in fashion shows. The images proposed in runway presentations in Paris, Milan, or London are only one aspect of fashion. Because there is an image that avant-garde styles impossible for ordinary people to wear in daily life are being proposed there, fashion is often seen as something detached from real society. Yet just as avant-garde contemporary thought gradually influences the discourse of actual society, hidden social dynamics exist there as well.
Let me take up one recent topic. About two months ago, it was widely reported that the uniforms of Taimei Elementary School, a public elementary school in Ginza, Chuo Ward, Tokyo, would be supervised by Armani. Looking into it, most people’s reactions were critical, as though there were an almost physiological disgust at making elementary school students wear expensive uniforms. The fact that the decision seemed to have been made solely by the principal apparently amplified the public reaction. Still, the principal made a fairly punk choice.
There were also a few opinions, though a minority, that supported the principal’s decision as a rebuttal to the criticism. These argued that, compared with the actual prices of other uniforms, the Armani uniforms were not so outrageously expensive, and that perhaps people were making too much noise. I watched the news for a while with curiosity. What surprised me most was that one small phenomenon, elementary school uniforms, was taken up so heavily by the media for several weeks.
What should be pointed out first in this issue is the enormous power of the symbols and signs that contemporary fashion has created. It is the meaning carried by the sign “ARMANI,” created by Giorgio Armani. The image he made is certainly closely tied to wealth, power, and success, especially in Japan, where the brand is often associated with men from late middle age onward. Armani uniforms. The disturbance seems to have arisen because the image and fact of elementary school students, supposedly far removed from such things, wearing a symbol of wealth, power, and success every day was considered socially and commonsensically improper.
The mass media seem to have judged that, compared with gossip about celebrities wandering between fame and anonymity, complicated economic policy, or international news, the Armani-uniform incident was a topic that genuinely interested the public. It stirred the latent unconscious surrounding wealth, power, and success, aroused anger and anxiety, and became a commotion. But the very fact that such a commotion occurred is also proof of fashion’s power.
One aspect of fashion design is its capacity to create social signs such as wealth and power as things that can actually be worn. It is also this power that shakes people’s emotions. This is one of the ways in which we become involved in fashion whether we like it or not.
It may be surprising, but among people involved in fashion, I do not think there are that many who dislike uniforms. Some may say that rules in design are restrictions, but the more rigid and inflexible those restrictions and rules are, the more room there is for creation. Because everyone follows the rules, rarity appears in the position that goes against that trend. And rarity produces value.
Fashion is often translated into Japanese as ryuko, trend. But the creative part of fashion actually depends on how one misses the trend while establishing one’s existence firmly. Many trends are born when an alternative, or a thought or position slightly off from common sense, approaches the mainstream. Creation is most powerful when it exists between public acceptance and rejection.
Let us return to Armani. Today he occupies one corner of luxury fashion, but what most clearly shows his sharp eye is that in the late 1970s and 1980s he looked not to Paris, which the industry was always watching, but to New York. Armani became famous in 1980 for providing costumes for American Gigolo, starring Richard Gere, but what made him famous in actual society was women’s business suits.
At the time, as women’s advancement in society was being loudly proclaimed, shops did not yet have work clothes, or uniforms, for women working alongside men. His business suits for women were, quite literally, power suits. They proposed hints for a new society and a new way of life for women: one in which women could obtain power and success with their own hands, just as men did.
Armani’s suits became famous around the world not because they were a fashion trend, but because he read and confronted the condition of human society and created another possible condition. When new human beings walking in the present are born, uniforms for those people are always required. Fashion has created not only signs of wealth and power, but also signs such as intelligence, youth, maturity, rebellion, and the alternative. The images born together with those messages carry messages of resistance and transformation against the status quo of each age.
If we think while observing the correlation between the appearance of people and the condition of society, fashion may begin to seem less like someone else’s affair. Returning to the Armani-uniform incident, if one reads the message as children who carry within themselves the possibility of success, the Armani uniforms may not be entirely bad. Elementary school students who reject and rebel against the style adults have decided for them would of course be punk. But perhaps an elementary school student who, buried beneath public criticism, deliberately continues to wear a uniform that no one else wants to wear until graduation would also be punk. If such a student, oriented toward that way of living, existed even hypothetically, would that not be interesting?
In this series, as before, I intend to write about scenes that catch my attention as I walk through the present, and about people walking through the present. As the spirit moves.
1 I have previously contributed an article introducing Giorgio Armani to FREE MAGAZINE. FREE MAGAZINE ISSUE #2 freemagazine.jp/giorgio-armani/