Tag: fashion

Critical Fashion Studies

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A review of Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property, Minh-Ha T. Pham, Duke University Press, 2022.

Minh-Ha PhamThe fashion world has always espoused the latest trends in society and kept up with the times. It should therefore come as no surprise that fashion producers and commentators now speak of “ethical fashion,” “sustainable fashion,” or “fashion for good.” But what do these terms exactly mean? Who has the power to declare fashion worthy of these labels? What lies behind the glamour and glitter of fashion shows and catwalk fame? Unsurprisingly, there is also a radical wing of fashion critique (or critical fashion studies) that scrutinizes those corporate objectives and tries to hold the fashion industry accountable. Minh-Ha T. Pham is one of those critics that read fashion in relation to race, class hierarchies, labor, indigenous knowledge, creativity, and intellectual property rights (IPR). In Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, she examines the way social media users monitor the fashion market for the appearance of knockoff fashion, design theft, and plagiarism. Through what she calls “crowdsourced IP regulation,” she envisages the online activities of bloggers and Instagram users as a form of free labor mobilized in the service of fashion capital accumulation. Network vigilantes who are policing the border between authentic and fake fashion are engaged in racial work: copycat producers and consumers are always portrayed as Asians and reviled as morally defective, while creativity is defined as a property of whiteness, which gives Western fashion designers the privilege to engage in racial extractivism and legitimate cultural theft.

The sociology of fashion

 Although this book is grounded in media studies, it also uses standard tools and concepts of sociological analysis. Its sociological value is limited by the fact that the author didn’t engage in fieldwork or participant observation: she only observed fashion blogging netizens from a distance and through the media impact of their activities. Nor did she collect quantitative data about fashion imitation and IPR policing activities. Her terrain is digital, and she gathered most of her observations online. But her critical perspective on the fashion industry places her in a long tradition of the sociology of fashion, from George Simmel and Thorsten Veblen to Pierre Bourdieu and Nancy Green. According to Simmel, fashion derives from a tension between, on the one hand, the tendency of each of us to imitate somebody else, and on the other hand, the tendency of each of us to distinguish oneself from others. Veblen coined the word “conspicuous consumption” to characterize the acquiring of luxury commodities by the “leisure class” as a public display of economic power. Bourdieu conceptualized fashion innovation as a field of values, norms, and power hierarchies structured around the opposition between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, mainstream élégance and avant-garde. Nancy Green gave a historical description of the working conditions of immigrants in the women’s garment industry in New York’s Seventh Avenue and the Parisian Sentier, showing how labor organization builds on gender and ethnic differences. Minh-Ha Pham’s perspective is thoroughly global: her examples and case studies originate from the heart of the fashion industry in Paris or New York as well as from the periphery of indigenous communities in Mexico or from ordinary social media users in Thailand. Call it multi-sited ethnography without direct engagement, or doing fieldwork from a distance.

Imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, but that is not how most fashion brands see it. For years, the luxury industry has been battling counterfeiters, investing heavily in technology, the internet, and AI to authenticate products. Brands have lobbied governments to seize and destroy fake goods, prosecute buyers and dealers, and managing online traffic to counterfeit platforms. However, legal action does not seem to be enough. For a start, in the fashion industry, intellectual property is not enforced as it is within the film industry and music industry. To take inspiration from others’ designs contributes to the fashion industry’s ability to establish clothing trends. Fashion copycat disputes rarely involve original designs: fashion is, after all, a copy culture, in which innovation feeds on imitation. With few legal basis to protect original works of authorship, fashion leaders turn to the public to defend them against imitators. In the early twentieth century, powerful fashion companies used the trade and popular press to create a popular sense of fashion legality. Today, social media users and environments do this work. For Minh-Ha Pham, crowdsourced IP regulation is extralegal work: rather than pay legal experts, fashion brands depend on social media users to stamp on knockoffs and copycats. The fashion industry reproduces downstream a practice that it uses at every step of its value chain: mobilizing unpaid or grossly underpaid labor, from the garment factory workers to the unpaid fashion interns and the models that are compensated in kind with the luxury goods they have to wear.

Crowdsourced IP regulation

In crowdsourced IP regulation, social media users are naming, shaming, and demanding boycotts against fashion copycats while defending and promoting alleged copycat victims. They are playing this digital vigilante role in good faith and with good intentions: most of them sincerely believe that they contribute to a more ethical fashion world in which creativity gets rewarded and copying is sanctiond. But according to Minh-Ha Pham, the denunciation of the copycat culture follows racial and colonial patterns. The copynorms that inform them are freighted with cultural assumptions and biases, whereby copiers are always construed as Asians and innovators as Western. Authentic and fake fashion, creativity and copying are racialized categories, not neutral facts. The Asian fashion copycat is ethical fashion’s quintessential racial other. It derives from deeply rooted ideas about, on one hand, Asians’ technical superiority and, on the other hand, their cultural and ethical inferiority. According to standard stereotype, Asians are incapable of creativity, they are condemned to rote learning and mechanical repetition. The premise of the Asian copycat is routinely accepted without question or qualification: fashion knockoffs are immediately perceived as made in Asia, as the products of cheap ethics and shoddy manufacturing. Google searches automatically associate copycat culture with China or South Korea. These countries are accused of having achieved development by imitation rather than innovation. Accusations of “bottom-up copying” bristle with moral indignation about the theft of creative property, hard work, and sales that should have benefited their rightful owners. Words like “copying,” “knockoff,” “piracy,” and “counterfeit” are laden with value judgements and potentially legal implications. Meanwhile, “top-down copying” receives much less attention, and “lateral copying” is mostly a concern within the industry that feeds on imitation and trend-making. Popular euphemisms for top-down copying include “creative inspiration,” “homage,” and “cultural appreciation.”

Several case studies in the book concentrate on this top-down copying and contrast the lack of sanction associated with it to the moral indignation and media campaigns raised by bottom-up imitation. In the exceptional cases where “top-down copying” is publicly acknowledged, the copying is often excused as an isolated lapse in judgement rather than a reflection of a broader cultural or racial pattern. In particular, indigenous knowledge and ethnic designs are considered as part of the public domain, constituting a “free bin” that Western designers can mine for their creations. For Minh-Ha Pham, cultural appropriation and cultural inspiration are two faces of the same coin. They rely on what she calls “copy rights,” the power to copy without being branded a copycat. Copy rights include the right to use and enjoyment and the right to exclude others. They provide some with the right to copy, to benefit from copying, and to exclude others from the same privileges. They constitute a “racial license to copy” that is part of the privilege of being white. Examples of such racial extractivim are numerous. Isabel Marant’s copycat version of the Mixe blouse, a traditional design from the Tlahuitoltpec people in Oaxaca, Mexico, led to a legal battle that classified the indigenous design as belonging to the public domain. The Maasai people of northern Tanzania and southern Kenya have experienced a similar pattern of legally sanctioned exclusion and extraction, being used in many media campaigns without receiving any share of the proceeds. The racial license to copy also protected the designers who launched “Navajo-inspired” collections, giving rise to a Navajo chic trend that didn’t benefit the Navajo people in any regard. In fashion’s parlance, “traditional clothing”, “folk costumes,” and “ethnic garb” are racially coded terms that de-skill non-Western designs as cultural and natural rather than artistic and intellectual.

Ppl knocking each other off lol

Whereas most websites dedicated to exposing fashion copycats “punch down” on cheap imitators and align with the interests of the luxury business, Diet Prada, an Instagram account with a massive followership, doesn’t hesitate to “punch up” or “punch laterally.” It plays the role of a whistleblower or an online watchdog exposing the structural problems that pervade the global fashion industry, particularly racism, misogyny, sexual predation, and labor exploitation. Diet Prada dares to name, shame, and, in some cases, flame industry giants. Its posts typically involve side-by-side comparison photos of two or more lookalike fashion garments or accessories. It also imitates the headlines of fashion magazines or uses internet memes to expose wrongdoings and express outrage. According to Minh-Ha Pham, Diet Prada is “a fashion insider that uses insider branding strategies and forms to articulate an outsider cultural political discourse about the inequalities sustaining the global industry of which it’s now a significant part.” Its refusal to consent to hegemonic ways also finds expression in absurd posts that poke fun at fashion, fashion policing copycat, and fashion copycatting itself by juxtaposing high fashion objects with mundane things, like a ham sausage adjacent to a Bottega Veneta shoe or a dog’s snout and a Saint Laurent dress. Its derisive one-line description, “Ppl knocking each other off lol,” has remained unaltered since its first post. Its status as an industry watchdog is now so established that fashion companies have instituted channels to communicate with it, eschewing the conventional language of corporate communication to publish off-the-cuff comments and candid reactions.

Apart from naming and shaming, another response to counterfeits is moving upscale. This makes perfect economic sense: according to market signaling theory, when counterfeits enter the market, authentic brands have incentives to upgrade their quality and innovate. A higher price signals a higher quality, while pervasive counterfeiting with low production cost could drive authentic products with lower prices out of the market (as in the “market for lemons” theorized by George Akerlof.) Chanel, Gucci, and Prada don’t really need to crack down on counterfeits: they control their own distribution outlets and have developed among their customer base a sensitivity to detail that allows them to distinguish between the authentic and the fake. Fashion is linked to elitism and fueled by the increasing wealth gap in society. This is why the notions of “democratic fashion,” or “affordable luxury,” are contradictions in terms. They were promoted at the turn of the century by television shows and feature films that made the rarefied world of high fashion relatable. With Sex and the City or The Devil Wears Prada, people who might never shop for luxury fashion were encouraged to become conversant in its language. Fashion imposed its brands and values upon a society that learned to distinguish between authentic taste and fake products, between high and low market positioning. This period also saw the rapid expansion of European “fast fashion” brands into US markets. After the 2008 financial crisis, terms like “cheap chic,” “recession chic,” and “credit crunch chic” were widely used to describe budget versions of designer fashions sold at stores like Zara, Target, and H&M. Cheap chic was as much a political fashion statement then as sustainable fashion is today. It promised to make fashion (the clothes and the industry) accessible to more consumers. More recently, fast fashion came to be associated with China and rejected as unethical: it became synonymous with cheap labor, shoddy quality, and environmental degradation.

Fast fashion

Minh-Ha Pham’s book encourages readers to take a broader view of the value chain in the fashion industry. It should include all actors who create value, including the “free labor” mobilized downstream to expose counterfeits and reinforce IPR protection. Could critical fashion studies be included in this broader industry environment? Does Minh-Ha Pham participate in the regulation of a sector she so vehemently criticizes? Like fashion bloggers, academic critics believe in the importance of fashion as a social phenomenon. They treat their activity as work and dedicate an important part of their time to monitoring the industry’s latest developments. By holding fashion accountable, they demonstrate that the fashion world cannot stand outside broader societal concerns pertaining to racial justice, gender equality, labor rights, and sustainable development. The fashion world is very sensitive about these issues, not because it is particularly virtuous (it was late to follow the #MeToo bandwagon), but because its business has always been to keep abreast of latest cultural trends and to align with the changing times. Corporations in the luxury business are very careful about the language they use and what is told about them. Any blemish in their corporate image translates into massive revenue loss and need for reputation repair. The Asia Pacific region has become one of the brightest spots in the global fashion economy: as the economic status of Asian women is growing globally, racial stereotyping of Asian groups is no longer acceptable, as any blunder can lead to devastating boycott campaigns. Reading Minh-Ha Pham’s book might help corporate executives in the sector become more aware of concerns about race, gender, and global justice.

The Brazilian Buttock Lift

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A review of Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil, Alexander Edmonds, Duke University Press, 2010.

Pretty ModernIn Brazil, women claim the right to be beautiful. When nature and the passing of time don’t help, beauty can be achieved at the end of a scalpel. Plastic surgery or plástica is not only a status good or the preserve of socialites and celebrities: according to Ivo Pitanguy, the most famous Brazilian plastic surgeon and a celebrity himself, “The poor have the right to be beautiful too.” And they are banking on that right. Rio and São Paulo have some of the densest concentrations of plastic surgeons in the world, and financing plans have made plástica accessible to the lower middle class and even to favela residents. While in the United States, people may hide that they have had plastic surgery like it’s something shameful, in Brazil they flaunt it. The attitude is that having work done shows you care about yourself—it’s a status symbol as well as a statement of self-esteem. Cosmetic surgery’s popularity in Brazil raises a number of interesting questions. How did plastic surgery, a practice often associated with body hatred and alienation, take root in a country known for its glorious embrace of sensuality and pleasure? Is beauty a right which, like education or health care, should be realized with the help of public institutions and fiscal subsidies? Does beauty reinforce social hierarchies, or is attractiveness a “great equalizer” that neutralizes or attenuates the effects of class and gender? Does plástica operate on the body or on the mind, and is it a legitimate medical act or a frivolous and narcissistic pursuit? Does beauty work alienate women or is it a way to bring them into the public sphere?

Class, race, gender, and plástica

Alexander Edmonds, an American anthropologist, answers these questions by mobilizing the three key dimensions of his discipline: class, race, and gender. Brazil is a class society with one of the most unequal wealth distributions in the world. It is also a society organized along racial lines, even though a long history of miscegenation has blurred color lines and made racial democracy part of the national identity. Brazil continues to have large gender gaps within the workforce and government representation. The country’s supposedly large number of exotic, attractive and sexually available women makes it a masculinist fantasy worldwide, while Brazilian feminists face enduring challenges. All these issues relate in one way or another to the availability of cosmetic surgery, the quest for beauty and attractiveness, and the development of medicine into new terrains of well-being and self-esteem. Pretty Modern mixes several strands of literature. It is a travelogue into contemporary Brazil, a deep dive into its history and culture, a journalistic description of the cosmetic surgery industry, a philosophical treatise on beauty and appearances, a personal memoir about the impasses of erudite culture and the wisdom of ordinary people. It even contains samba lyrics and color pictures of scantily clad models.

The Brazilian constitution recognizes the human right to health. It doesn’t recognize the right to beauty, but cosmetic surgery is provided for free or at subsidized rates in public clinics such as the Santa Casa da Misericórdia in Rio. Surgeons perform charity surgeries for the poor to get practice in large residency programs before opening their private clinics. Some medical doctors come from afar to learn how to operate barrigas (bellies) or bundas (buttocks), techniques that come predominantly from Brazil. Ivo Pitanguy himself, the pioneer of plastic surgery in Brazil, learned the trade from Europe before bringing it back to Rio and taking it to a new level. His democratic ethos has been maintained by his disciples who share his vision of cosmetic surgery as psychotherapeutic intervention that should be accessible to all. Pitanguy famously defined the plastic surgeon as “a psychologist with a scalpel in his hand,” echoing the saying that “the psychoanalyst knows everything but changes nothing. The plastic surgeon knows nothing but changes everything.” Women see their operations as a form of psychological healing; given the choice, they prefer the surgeon’s scalpel than the couch of the psychoanalyst. Plástica has psychological effects for the poor as well as for the rich: surgery improves a woman’s auto-estima, self-esteem, and is considered as a necessity, not a vanity. Appearance is essential to mental well-being, economic competitiveness, and social and sexual competence. If we follow the WHO’s definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being,” then beauty work represents the new frontier in the pursuit of happiness.

The right to beauty

Of course, the growth of cosmetic surgery has not been without controversy. A “right to beauty” seems to value a rather frivolous concern in a country with more pressing problems—from tropical diseases, like dengue, to the diseases of modernity, like diabetes. Brazil has a health system divided into a public and a private sector with different standards of care, and the poor often see their universal right to healthcare obstructed by long queues, squalid conditions, and substandard practice. Cosmetic surgery stretches medical practice into an ambiguous grey zone where the Hippocratic oath doesn’t always fully apply. The growth of plástica has also been accompanied by a rise in malpractice cases, insurance fraud, and media stories of horrific complications. Some Brazilian critics see the new fashion of breast enlargement as a form of cultural imperialism brought by Euro-American influence in a country that has long valued small boobies and big booties (the ever-popular butt implant raises fewer cultural concerns.) Beauty ideals peddled by women’s magazines are blamed for eating disorders and body alienation. Cultural elites from the West see the pursuit of the artificially enhanced body as vain, vulgar, and superficial, betraying a narcissistic concern with the self. But who is one to judge? asks Alexander Edmonds, who confesses he shared some of the misapprehensions of the distanced scholar before he was confronted with a candid remark by a favela dweller: “Only intellectuals like misery. The poor prefer luxury.” Even though it is not common for a scholar to glance through local versions of Playboy or watch telenovelas titled “Without Tits, There is no Paradise,” the anthropologist knows the heuristic value of suspending one’s judgment and immersing oneself into the life-world of cultural others through participant observation.

Race raises another set of issues. Here too, North Americans have been accused of exporting their cultural imperialism, with its bipolar racial categories and immutable color line, in a country that has long prided itself for its racial democracy and color fluidity. In fact, Brazilians are very race-conscious. But rather than grouping people into races defined by ancestry, the local taxonomy describes subtle variations in appearance along a continuum. The national census racially classifies the Brazilian population in five color types: branco (white), pardo (brown), preto (black), amarelo (yellow), and indigenous. But in everyday usage, more than 130 color types have been identified. Brazil’s famous “rainbow of color terms” intersects with class and gender. In Brazil moving up the social scale can be seen as a form of whitening. For example, a light-skinned multiracial person who held an important, well-paying position in society may be considered branco while someone else with the same ethnogenetic make-up who had darker skin or was of a lower class may be considered pardo or even preto. But unlike in many parts of the world where lightness of skin tone is fetishized, in Brazil brown is beautiful. Many women pride themselves of being morena, a term that can mean both brunette and brown-skinned. On the other hand, blackness is stigmatized, and European facial features and hair confer social advantages. No wonder that “correction of the Negroid nose” is a standard surgery operation that raises few eyebrows, while Brazil remains one of the biggest consumer market for blonde hair dye.

The anthropology of mestiçagem

More than any other nation, Brazil’s self-image and national identity has been shaped by anthropologists. The Amazon Indian is known solely from the reports of ethnographers in the field, perpetuating the heritage of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Gilberto Freyre, a student of Franz Boas in the early twentieth century, provocatively reversed the scientific discourse on “miscegenation”  and its racist underpinnings by affirming the virtue of racial mixture and cultural syncretism. Freyre’s celebration of idealized and eroticized mestiçagem played a central role in defining Brazilian national identity. Sexuality—especially across racial lines—became a key symbol for the formation of a new, mixed population with positive traits, such as cordiality and physical beauty. But more recently sociologists have deconstructed the myth of racial democracy by documenting the persistent racial inequalities in wealth and income, access to education and social services, and representations in the media and in the political sphere. Governments introduced controversial quotas to promote racial diversity in higher education and in the public sector. There has been a shift in the representation of race in the past twenty years. More dark faces now appear in telenovelas, ad campaigns, and variety shows, and multinational companies have found a new niche market for black beauty products, fashion, and cosmetics. Afrodescendentes are adopting a black hairstyle and a negra identity as well as narratives of racial pride and militancy. It is too early to say whether affirmative action and identity politics will substitute to mestiçagem and the rainbow of colors, but the emergence of the black movement in Brazil also confirms the significance of the aesthetic dimension of modern subjectivities.

What does cosmetic surgery tell us about gender relations and women’s roles? Contrary to a popular perception, women do not engage in beauty work to comply to men’s expectations and submit themselves to the male gaze. They do it on their own terms, to follow their own desires or to respond to society’s “interpellation.” Motives may vary across social class, age category, and marital status. Some Brazilian women can be openly frank about it: “After having kids, I’ll have to do a recauchutagem [refurbishing, normally of a car]. After shutting down the factory, nê?” Plastic surgery is closely linked to a larger field that manages female reproduction and sexuality. It is not coincidental that Brazil has not only high rates of plastic surgery, but also Cesarean sections (70 percent of deliveries in some private hospitals), tubal ligations (sterilization accounts for half of all contraceptive use), and other surgeries for women. Some women see elective surgeries as part of a modern standard of care available to them throughout the female life cycle. Cosmetic surgery can mark key rites of passage: initiation into adulthood, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and menopause. The transformative events by far the most often mentioned in connection with plástica are pregnancy and breast-feeding. Tensions between motherhood and sexuality are analyzed in detail by Alexander Edmonds, who mentions that both are equally important for self-esteem. Drawing on a range of examples—from maids who aspire to acquire cosmetic surgeries, to favela residents who dream of entering the fashion world, to single mothers who embrace plastic surgery as a means of erotic body scuplting—he describes how sexual and class aspirations subtly mingle in beauty culture.

The right of the Brazilian morena

In his last book Modos de homem, modas de mulher, published shortly before his death in 1987, Gilberto Freyre warned against “yankee influence” and the impact of “north-Europeanization or albinization”: “one must recognize the right of the Brazilian brunette to rebuke northern-European fashions aimed at blonde, white women.” In Pretty Modern, Alexander Edmonds shows that the right of the Brazilian morena is not to be abolished. The tyranny of fashion applies more than elsewhere in a country where bodies are being refashioned to fit aesthetic and sexual mores. But Brazilian plástica does not follow an American or north-European blueprint. If anything, it leads the way that other emerging countries in Latin America or East Asia are also beginning to tread. There, the female body is invested with hopes of social mobility and self-accomplishment that demand long-term investment and management. In poor urban areas, beauty often has a similar importance for girls as soccer (or basketball) does for boys: it promises an almost magical attainment of recognition, wealth or power. For middle-class cariocas, the body is a source of distinction and success. For many consumers, a lean and fit body is essential to economic and sexual competition, social visibility, and mental well-being. Beauty culture interpellates women as autonomous sexual beings and as economic agents in markets where physical attractiveness can be exchanged with various kinds of cultural and economic resources. This anthropologic study shows that cosmetic surgery arises in unison with a central concern for Brazilian women: staying young, sexy, and beautiful.

If You’re the Average K-Pop Fan, This Book is Not for You

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A review of The Korean Popular Culture Reader, Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe Ed., Duke University Press, 2014.

KPop ReaderWhy publish a reader on Korean popular culture? Because it sells. This is the startling confession the two editors of this volume, Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe, make in their introduction. They are very open about it: their scholarly interest in Korea’s contemporary pop culture arose as a response to students’s interest in the field. It was a purely commercial, demand-driven affair. As they confess, “Korean studies had a difficult time selling its tradition and modern aesthetics in course syllabuses until hallyu (Korean Wave) came along.” Now students enrolling in cultural studies on American or European campuses want to share their passion for K-pop, Korean TV dramas, movies, manhwa comics, and other recent cultural sensations coming from Korea. Responding to high demand, graduate schools began churning out young PhD’s who specialized in such cultural productions. Course syllabuses were designed, classes were opened, workshops were convened, and in a short time the mass of accumulated knowledge was sufficient to allow the publication of a reader.

Teaching Korean pop culture on American campuses

But the average K-pop fan or drama viewer will surely be taken aback by the content of this volume. If they are looking for easy clues to interpret Korean dramas or the latest fad in boys bands’ hairstyle, then they will probably drop the book after a few pages. There are magazines or websites for this kind of information. As scholars, the authors have loftier interests and higher ambitions than just discussing whether Girls’ Generation really empowers young women or instead reproduces sexual cliches, or why the ‘Gangnam Style’ video generated so many clicks on Youtube. In fact, in another candid move, the editors confess what they really think about K-pop: it sucks. Or as they put it, “Thus far, Korean popular music has yet to produce one single progression of chords that has created a ripple effect of global critical response without the aid of inane music videos and excessive use of hair gels.” Yes, you read it right. For a book devoted to Korean pop culture, with a section on popular music that discusses artists ranging from Seo Taiji to the girls band 2NE1, this is the strongest indictment one could make.

But the ambition of the editors, and of the authors they assembled, is not only to sell books. They have a hidden agenda: they want to show that popular culture matters, and that it is no less noble and worthy of study than manifestations of high culture. As they see it, a discipline should not be judged by the prestige associated with the social reality under consideration, but should be valued from the perspectives and viewpoints it brings on seemingly arcane or mundane topics. There is even a general law at play here: the lower the culture, the higher the theory. The commoner your research topic, the more dexterity you have to prove in using difficult concepts and arcane prose. Conversely, commentaries of high cultural productions can accommodate a bland style and a lack of theoretical references. You may use Bourdieu or Deleuze to comment on photography and other minor arts, but paintings from the Italian Quattrocento or Baroque architecture demand more conventional writing tools. Some critics, such as Slavoj Zizek, have become masters at commenting low brow cultural productions with high brow philosophical references.

So the solution of the authors is to trick students into enrolling in their class with the promise of studying catchy topics such as K-pop or K-drama, and then to brainwash them with a heavy dose of politically-correct theory and academic scholarship. Lured by the attraction of pop culture, they are given the full treatment associated with the cultural studies curriculum. This can be summed up by three injunctions: contextualize, historicize, theorize. The aim is to contextualize contemporary Korean culture within its local and regional or global environment, while historicizing its colonial and post-colonial legacies, thereby leading to new theorizing about global cultural futures. Another move is to broaden the scope of phenomena under review to the whole spectrum of popular culture. The Korean Popular Culture Reader therefore includes chapters on sports, on cuisine, on advertising, and one video games. Conversely, there are no chapters on cultural heritage or on folk productions associated with traditional Koreanness: crafts, calligraphy, ceramics, Korean painting, pansori, seungmu dance, etc.

Contextualize, historicize, theorize

The first injunction to contextualize is taken very seriously by the authors. Cultural artifacts are not symbolic signifiers or self-referential texts that could be subjected to a purely formal, textual analysis. They are social facts, and should be explained as such. The authors refrain from sweeping assumptions about Korean popular culture as expressing essentially Korean cultural traits or as being naturally in tune with other Asian peoples’ aspirations. Instead, they look for archival evidence and locally grounded causalities. They seek neither to defend nor to attack popular culture, but rather attempt to place it in a context and describe how it works. Beyond apparent continuities, they uncover historical ruptures and shifts, and insist on the singularity of each domain of cultural practice. They are also careful to situate Korean popular culture within its regional, global, and transnational context. As the success of hallyu illustrates, Korean pop culture is now represented on an international stage and can no longer be understood narrowly through a model of national identity.

The chapter on the failure of game consoles, and the rise of alternative gaming platforms played on computers at home or in PC bangs, is a fine example of social contextualization. Home computers caught on in Korea for the same reason game consoles didn’t: blame Confucianism and the heavy focus on education. Parents bought their children computers to run educational software and improve English skills. Similarly, PC bangs offered young people a public space that was outside the remote reach of parental surveillance or elder supervision. PC bangs have thrived by giving young people the chance to translate online relationships into real-life ones, or to team under the leadership of a master player to attack a castle or win a battle in role-playing games. The Korean professional game player, who excels in MMORPG games and becomes a worldwide celebrity but who cannot speak English, has become an iconic figure in game-related media.

The political potency of the melodrama

Analyzing street fashion and movie cultures in 1950s’ Seoul, Steven Chung shows that Korea’s compressed modernity takes place against the background of global cultural circulation that cannot be reduced to a unilateral Americanization process. The 1950s was a remarkable decade for movie stars, and the roles played by actor Kim Sung-ho illustrate the ambivalence toward familial patriarchy and political authoritarianism. The political potency of the melodrama is nowhere more apparent than in North Korean movies, with its aesthetics of socialist realism and the overbearing gaze of the benevolent leader in hidden-hero narratives. Bong Joon-ho’s movie Mother strikes Korean viewers with the discrepancy between the iconic status of the two main actors, Kim Hye-ja and Won Bin, associated with motherhood and with idol stardom, and the role they endorse in the narrative, an abusive mother and a half-wit son.

The book cover featuring the glitz and chutzpah of Korean contemporary scene–with a picture of a live concert–is there to deceive as much as to allure. In fact, only nine chapters out of seventeen focus on the contemporary, and only two essays address issues commonly associated with the Korean Wave–one on K-drama fandom and another on girl bands. Many contributions to the volume deal with the colonial or post-colonial past, as contemporary Korean popular culture remains intimately connected to the history of colonial modernity. It was during the early part of the Japanese colonial era (1910-1945) that the first instantiation of the popular emerged. The idiom “popular culture” is not easy to translate into Korean, but the words inki or yuhaeng, taken from the Japanese, suggest the mix of individualism, commercialism, and cosmopolitan ideals that stood at the core of Korean colonial modernity. The history of cultural transfers, collage, plagiarism, and creative adaptation is repeated in many sectors, from popular songs to manhwa and even to Korean cuisine, as processed kimchi and makgolli appear to own much of their popularity to their adoption by the Japanese consumer.

At the origin of modern Korean literature, we find love of the romantic kind, translated into Korean as yonae or sarang. As Boduerae Kwon writes, “It was by leaning on the concept of romantic love that Korean literature tutored itself in the art of writing, nurtured the awakening of individual consciousness, and sharpened the powers of social critique.” Boy meets girl was a new concept in early century Korea: as a new import into the Korean language, yonae required a pose that suited the novelty of the word.” North Korea relied on its own set of concepts and ideologies, such as taejung (the masses) or inmin (the national citizen). It is no coincidence that both Stalin and Kim Il-sung recognized the power of film and considered it not only the most important art form but one of the primary means for creating a new art of living as well. “Cinema was used as the primary technique and medium for the construction of socialism and the creation of a national people,” writes Travis Workman, who uses Baudrillard and Debord to show that socialist realism was in many ways more real than really existing socialism.

The stoking of male fantasy

As much as they put popular culture into context and trace its historical development, the authors put cultural phenomena in theoretical perspective. The book is not too heavy on theory: most of the savant references and conceptual discussions are put forward by the two editors in the short introductions preceding each section. But all authors share an ambition that goes beyond the mere description of cultural facts. Cultural studies is predicated on the premise that the cultural sphere has replaced the socioeconomic sphere as the main site of political struggle and ideological production. At the same time, popular culture is caught in a process of commodification and commercialization that makes it incapable of articulating a coherent worldview that would effectively challenge domination. Perhaps most striking in Korean pop culture is the absence of the transgressive element. K-pop acts, or more specifically female K-pop singers, are visual stars who epitomize the “stoking of male fantasy” while cultivating a shy innocence and mild appearance. Although Seo Taiji upset the established order in the 1990s with his school-dropout status and signature snowboard look, “there was no profanity, no sexism, no use of any substance, no piercings, and no tattoos.” This lack of rebellious impulse is what may have conducted the editors to formulate their damning indictment of K-pop.

Letter to a Young Muslim Fashionista

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures, Reina Lewis, Duke University Press, 2015.

muslim-fashionSo you’ve picked up this book because you think Muslim fashion is the next new thing. You’ve made a good choice: this book is totally made for you. It is a book that will teach you things, give you ideas, and make you think. Don’t expect tips on what to wear and how to wear it, though: this you will have to decide for yourself. If who you are is what you wear, then you cannot delegate this task to a third party. But reading Muslim Fashion will help you make your own choices and dress on your own terms. Maybe you won’t feel the same after reading it. Maybe your image will look different into the mirror. This is what they call a transformative book: it will make you see things differently. This is the good thing about reading books in general: you can turn them to your own use. So if this book helps you dress smarter, so be it. But it may also help you think about what you wear and why you wear it. If your style of dress makes a statement, be sure it includes the word fashion in it.

If your style of dress makes a statement, be sure it includes the word fashion in it.

To be frank with you, you may find Muslim Fashion a bit hard to read. But relax: this book review is here to help you through the reading. It will give you tips that will make understand things a lot easier. So don’t freak out if you see long sentences and difficult words. This is how people working as university professors make a living. Sentences are like skirts: you can wear them long or short according to your likes and dislikes. Trust me: I will use short sentences to describe long hijabs and ample robes. Or at least I’ll try. As a full disclosure, I don’t work in the fashion industry, and I am not involved in any way with Muslim fashion. I just like to read difficult books and try to make them simpler to read by writing book reviews. I wrote this one especially for you. If you find it helpful, you may provide feedback by clicking on the ‘helpful’ button or by writing a comment. But please understand: I am not a specialist in Muslim or modest fashion, or in any women’s fashion for that respect. So take my writing with a pinch of salt: if you disagree with what you read, blame the author of the book, not me.

I am starting from the premise that you are already familiar with basic vocabulary. So you can tell a niqab from an abaya, a jilbab from a hijab, or a shayla from a turban. You may also be familiar with ethnic clothing: burqa cover from Afghanistan, kebaya dress from South-East Asia, chador cloak from Iran, tesettür veil from Turkey, salwar kameez outfit from South Asia. I am also assuming that you know what pious fashion, or modest fashion, is about. So you may be interested to learn where it came from, or how it varies in time and place. The important point to make is that modest fashion is not only about To Veil or Not To Veil. And even if you do, there are many different styles to veiling. Indeed, you may wish to design your own style, based on examples and references glimpsed in magazines or on the street. There are also a lot of tutorials available on Youtube. This is not pure exhibition: people choose what to show and what to hide. All people do.

You can be both pious and fashionable at the same time

Some islamic clothing are clearly outside the purview of fashion. This is clearly the case with burqa, niqab, or abaya—although you may be interested to learn that some embroidered abaya sell for thousands of dollars in Gulf states. Indeed, some people challenge the idea that you can be both pious and fashionable at the same time. For them, a modest outlook is the antithesis of fashion: modesty is to break free from the tyranny of appearance, to contest the idolatry of the body. And indeed, the fashion world has accustomed us with habits that are far from restrained or modest. Exposed nudity, promiscuity between models and their admirers, rumors of drug consumption and tales of anorexia make the catwalk sound like a freak show. No wonder some customers and clothes designers want to break free from this model. But that’s the thing about fashion: no fashion is still fashion, especially when it becomes fashionable. This is what is happening with Muslim fashion; and this is the story that the author Reina Lewis recollects in her book.

On a first look, no industry could be farther from fashion than the tesettür producers in Turkey, This is a country that brands itself secular and where the wearing of headscarves is frowned upon by the state, with an outright ban in schools and colleges or in the national parliament. Women wearing the local headscarf or tesettür have other concerns than fashion. Since Atatürk promoted western clothing and western mores, wearing the veil has always been coded as old-fashioned, rural or excessively religious in secular Turkey. But think again: tesettür companies have gained market share at home and abroad, and are now competing on brand image and seasonal collections. Today’s veiling-fashion producers market colorful and constantly changing styles, from bold and close-fitting to more conservative ones. Istanbul is now developing itself as a fashion city with a critical mass of consumers and fashion specialists, and Muslim fashion is definitely part of the show. For many young Islamic women, wearing a headscarf marks them off as different from their mothers who are going out bareheaded. This is precisely the point: who would like to look exactly like her mother? And as fashion catalogues and lifestyle magazines will show you, there are many ways to wear the tesettür.

People have the right to wear the hijab if they choose to do so.

Doing research for her book, Reina Lewis interviewed several shop workers wearing the hijab in fashion stores or malls located in several British cities. The interviews were conducted between 2005 and 2010, and I am sure many things have changed since then. But maybe some things haven’t. UK law promotes employment equality regardless of religion or belief, and so sales persons have the right to wear the hijab if they choose to do so. Shop rules may define how workers dress and present themselves, but only up to a point. Discrimination on grounds of religion can bring an employer to court. Of course, how sales assistants dress is important for their boss and for their clients. They are the brand’s ambassadors, and their style and advice will help match the product and the consumer. In this context, familiarity with modest or pious style can be an asset, especially in neighborhoods populated by Muslim families. Take the case of Y.S. for instance. She didn’t have to apply for a job: she was recruited while shopping in a branch of Dorothy Perkins because the store manager thought she looked cool. She wore her hijab with style and personality, and being modest and trendy was exactly the image the store wanted to project.

Here I may introduce a few concepts proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist. For Bourdieu, style is a form of symbolic capital: it is something that you can cultivate and that can be converted into forms of economic capital, like finding a job in a lifestyle magazine or a fashion store. Style is also a component of habitus, a social property of individuals that orients human behavior without strictly determining it. In a book called La Distinction, Bourdieu described the rise of a new class of cultural intermediaries working in service activities: sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration, and so on. Upwardly mobile, these middle class individuals used their symbolic capital and were driven by their habitus to give legitimacy to new forms of cultural activities: minor arts such as photography or jazz music, self-presentation through fashion and lifestyle, and mass consumption of goods and appliances designed to make life easier. The young fashionistas described in Muslim Fashion are the heirs of these trendsetters. They do not act in isolation, but in a field (another important concept from Bourdieu) composed of many players and sources of authority. Only this field is not much cultural as it is religious. As surprising as it may seem, women participating in Muslim fashion are also religious intermediaries.

Fashion is usually regarded outside of the mainstream of religious concerns. Except for Islam: in this case many people—Muslim and non-Muslim—have an opinion on what Islamic women should and shouldn’t wear. As Reina Lewis describes it in another chapter, Muslim lifestyle magazines and fashion catalogues are faced with a conundrum. How to represent women’s bodies? Some magazines such as Azizah have a policy of always putting a model with a headscarf on their cover. Others, such as the American quarterly Muslim Girl, do exactly the opposite: their idea is to represent as many different girls as possible and all their different approaches to faith. Still others avoid photographs of the human form, or take pictures of women viewed from behind so as not to show their face. Emel, another lifestyle magazine, takes straight-up photos of real people wearing street fashion but avoids professional models. The representation of female bodies raises even more controversies online, where readers and commentators are prompt to express their views in reaction to blog posts or social media pictures. Reina Lewis describes how the rise of online brands selling modest apparel was accompanied by the development of a lively blogosphere and social media devoted to modest style.

Modest fashion is coming to a store near you

A new category of “modest fashion” has therefore emerged and become legitimized on the Internet. Women can now find products designed with modesty in mind, consult style guides and join in fashion discussions about how to style modesty. These discussions are not necessarily faith-based and inspired by Islam: they can be inter-faith—as some Christian groups or Jewish believers have similar modesty needs—or based on no faith at all. They are increasingly cosmopolitan: see for example the new fashion line designed by Hana Tajima, an English woman based in Malaysia, which was launched in Singapore by Uniqlo, a Japanese apparel company. I have to confess I learned more from browsing the web using the “modest fashion” keyword than from reading long articles about secularity and attitudes considered as ostentatiously religious in my own country—which is France. Speaking of France, if I have a minor quibble with Reina Lewis’ book, it is when she alludes to a supposedly outright ban of Islamic dress in France, whereas the limitations introduced by French law are only limited to certain types of dress—the face-veil—or to certain locations, such as schools. And even these laws may evolve, along with the changing attitudes among the French public. Paris has long been the capital of fashion: my personal wish is that it will also become a magnet for the creation and expression of Muslim fashion.