Wearing the same thing every day

Check out this guy, always wearing the same grey T-shirt and charcoal hoodie. You don't need a facial recognition algorithm to know who he is.

It's Social Overlord Mark Zuckerberg, of course. (Captured by his nemesis, Google.) Recently Zuckerberg did a Q&A at Facebook headquarters and was asked why he always wears the same grey T-shirt. He answered: "I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how best to serve this community. […] I feel like I'm not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous."

I decided to blog about this, but as the blog post got more detailed I thought, "Why don't I actually pitch this as a feature story?" So I did… and you can read the rest of it over at Junkee. I'm glad they have a 'Style' section over there, so I can pitch these kinds of stories.

This has been one of my more popular stories lately. I'm surprised by the pageviews and the number of comments, and that it's got the biggest reach of anything I've posted on my Facebook page in the last three months. That said, the comments seem to have taken issue with the way I situate 'wearing the same thing every day' within a culture of technologised neoliberalism. Jeff Sparrow's essay on Soylent has been very influential in my thinking about this.

But of course there is the broader truism that anyone who actually uses the term 'neoliberalism' tends to do so suggesting it is a socially corrosive, structural phenomenon. Whereas those who might actually practise and enable neoliberalism rarely acknowledge it as a guiding philosophy at all, preferring to couch it as a climate of ideologically empty 'individual choice'.

To me, it seems obvious that much of tech culture's thinking about the body is instrumental – obsessed with what the body can be used to achieve, rather than how it looks or feels – and also can't be disentangled from the historic disparagement of the 'nerd body' and the way it's dressed.

Popular culture has created this category of the 'nerd' or 'geek' as someone who lives 'in his head' (the nerd is a historically male category) and so consequently is either incompetent or uninterested in the social and aesthetic aspects of dress. When I as much as raised the issue of gender and the way that 'being interested in clothes' is feminised and hence devalued, commenters told me I was "reading too much into this". So I guess it's really about ethics in videogame journalism.

I also feel that some people who either identify as or get categorised as geeks might experience clothing primarily as a weapon of social distinction rather than as a source of joy or pleasure. At school, clothes are used to police in-crowds and are adopted as badges of honour by defiant subcultural outsiders. If you felt victimised by or wanted to opt out of all that bullshit, you might say, "I don't care about what I wear."

But as a researcher of clothes, I think very few people genuinely don't care about what they wear. I suspect that people who deliberately wear the same thing every day (rather than dress randomly from a limited pool of utilitarian clothes) actually have much more invested in the issue of clothing, and have a keener awareness of what their clothing says about them, than your stereotypical absent-minded professor whose mum or wife or workplace supplies his clothing.

So the semiotic question – what wearing the same thing every day might express about a person – is the issue I focus on in the Junkee feature.

What's wrong with wearing dead people's clothes?

Recently I was at Savers and bought a cardigan that had a name label in it. I Googled the name, and the lady whose cardie it was had died in August. This made me investigate the stigma of 'dead people' that still clings to second-hand clothing. I've written a little feature for Junkee about it:

November 1 is a day for commemorating the dead. Christians call it All Saints Day; in Mexico and Latin America, it’s Dia de los Muertos. It’s odd that, while we’re happy to watch scary movies, dress up as corpses and admire carnivalesque skeletons, we’re more squeamish about real-life dead people… and their clothes.

I’ve shopped at op-shops since my early teens, and people have often teased me that I was wearing ‘dead people’s clothes’. The second-hand clothing industry has only recently emerged as ‘vintage’ from unsavory associations with poverty, disease… and death.

Head to Junkee to read the rest.

But in the meantime, please enjoy my #cardieselfie.

The futurist idiom in film costume

Screen costume is a pet topic of mine, as you may have gathered from my recent public talks. We get so many of our ideas of masculinity and femininity, glamour and power, how clothes should and shouldn't fit, from the movies and from TV.

Partly we want to extend the pleasure we find onscreen, and our identification with characters, by emulating the looks of our favourite stories. But screen costumes also reflect their historical, political, social and technological contexts, and contain rich intertexts drawn from our understandings of fashion history.

Recently I saw the new Neill Blomkamp film Elysium, starring Matt Damon. I really enjoyed it at the time – the visuals are amazing – but on reflection its script was pretty thin and its themes very didactic. (It's a critique of inequitable wealth distribution, harsh immigration policies and the moribund US healthcare system.) One thing that troubled me immediately was this:



Matt Damon lives in the year 2154. Why is he wearing a T-shirt and jeans (and sneakers, which you can't see in this still)? This made me think about how other films have represented 'the future'. I've written a feature for Junkee about it, showing how both classic and recent films use costume to convey their 'futuristicity', but as a taster, here are the strands of futurism I identify:

Uniformed Futurism – symbolising the wearer's allegiance to an organisation, uniforms can signify utopian collectivism and freedom from markers of inequality, or a totalitarian regime imposing its will on the public.

Retro-Futurism – Fashion is cyclical, not linear; retro-futurism draws on fashion history to put its social and political connotations in fresh contexts.

Couture Futurism – We often imagine the future will look strange to us; couture futurism suggests that extremely avant-garde fabrics, silhouettes and textures might one day come to seem ordinary.

Organic Futurism – These costumes use organic forms, colours and textures to distinguish humanity from technology. Organic futurism can also assign new technological purposes to natural forms and materials.

Grunge Futurism – The assertion of individual style in the absence of state or corporate authority. Putting personal twists on utilitarian clothes through punk-style bricolage, not just wearing a grubby T-shirt and jeans!

Read all about it here.

Home City Book Tour

As advertised, a few days ago I went on a book tour without leaving my home city. I was chauffeured by Affirm Press's sales and marketing manager Keiran Rogers in the company Prius (Affirm Press is a socially and environmentally responsible publisher, so that's how they roll).

It was a wonderful winter's day to be out and about – crisp and sunny. At first I was embarrassed to admit to being the author of my book ("Uh, do you have Out of Shape by Mel Campbell?") but Keiran was very matter-of-fact about it, and the booksellers totally knew the drill.

They were a great bunch of people: friendly, knowledgeable, and genuinely passionate about reading and writing. I really encourage you to buy books in bricks-and-mortar stores if you can. The ones I visited were all lovely places: airy and well laid out.

I tweeted our progress around town, photographing my book in various shops, and I've made the tour into an interactive map, so you can follow where we went. Just click on the placemarks to see the photos and text, and if you find the pop-up boxes extend off the map, click and drag anywhere on the map to reposition it and pull the info into view.

View Home City Book Tour in a larger map

In other news, I wrote an op-ed about Cosmopolitan magazine's recent, ridiculous "Size Hero" body image campaign for Junkee, which was syndicated to The Guardian. Here's a taste; click through to read the rest.

It is comically naive to think we can counteract a lifetime’s worth of immersive, pervasive cultural messages about body size and shape just by bunging a few scantily clad celebs and plus-size models in magazines. But weird magical thinking aside, we should reject all these campaigns for the same reason: they teach us that our bodies are other people’s property, to be gazed at and judged. You shouldn’t need Cosmo’s permission — or anyone else’s — to feel good about yourself.

And, excitingly, I've been invited onto Channel Nine's breakfast TV show, Today, this coming Wednesday (10 July). I'll be on air at 8:20am, talking about 'change room anxiety' and other issues. So I'll be making a flying visit to Sydney next week and hopefully will be able to pop into some bookstores there to chat to booksellers and sign copies of the book.

Out of Shape, into the world

Here's the cover art for my book, Out of Shape. Allison Colpoys did a lovely job, and I'm super pleased with Benjamin Law's quote. (More great design and quotes on the back cover, and inside!)

It'll be out in June, which is scarily not that far away. I'll also be speaking at a number of events over the next few months, so here are all the details:

ACMI's Hollywood Costume exhibition is opening on 24 April, fresh from its run at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Costume museums play a significant role in my book, as does clothing in film more generally. I was so excited by this show I was toying with the idea of travelling to London to see it, so you can imagine how thrilled I am that it's come to me instead.

There's an associated program of talks and events. I'll be speaking on a panel event called The Emperor's New Clothes on Sunday 5 May, along with costume designer Katie Graham (Wilfred, Small Time Gangster) and Dr Terrie Waddell, Senior Lecturer in Media and Cinema Studies at La Trobe University. It's about the role of costumes in developing a character.

I'll also be presenting a talk on Elizabeth Taylor on 21 May and 18 July, whose onscreen and offscreen clothes are so memorable. It's part of an ACMI package where you get to hear the talk and then go explore the exhibition. I've already been collecting images for my talk on Pinterest.

The Emerging Writers Festival runs from 23 May to 2 June. It's a favourite festival of mine because everyone is so friendly and it's genuinely focused on writing. I'm appearing at three events. I'm moderating a Writers' Conference panel on genre on Sunday 26 May, with Jane Harrison, Alex Hammond, Wayne Macauley and Alison Croggon. I'm also speaking at the Kill Your Darlings 'Late Night Live' panel about TV on Tuesday 28 May, and at the Express Media/Signal intensive workshop for young writers on 1 June, alongside Bethanie Blanchard, Amy Gray and Samuel Cooney.

On Monday 3 June I'll be reading from my book at Dog's Tales, a monthly storytelling night run by Angela Meyer at the Dog's Bar in St Kilda. Sharing the bill with me will be the very funny Lee Zachariah, who's also one of my film-reviewer buddies.

And hopefully, having got used to the idea of reading my work aloud, I'll be appearing at The Wheeler Centre's Debut Mondays on 17 June. Debut Mondays are held at booze o'clock (6:15pm) in the Moat bar in the basement of the Wheeler Centre.

On the subjective address in non-fiction writing

I've got just over a week to hand in a full draft to my editor, and I've really been struggling with the issue of writerly voice. I've done so much research, in so many broad fields, and it frustrates me that rather than this fascinating stuff about the histories and cultures of size and fit, my editor wants more of my own experiences and anecdotes.

There's so much gold I'm having to summarise or cut out, but luckily I plan to showcase that stuff here on the blog.

I've also written a little essay for the Wheeler Centre about how I fret that adopting a subjective voice simply plays into the prejudices that people already have about the topic of clothes. Here's an extract:

My book needs to embrace subjectivity and embodiment, because it’s about clothing size and fit. I want to celebrate the sensuous pleasures of a garment that hangs, clings and moves in all the right ways, making us feel powerful, relaxed or sexually alluring. I also want to explore the excoriating shame we endure when our clothing doesn’t fit. Those soul-crushing change-room experiences. The public disgust and ridicule that greets wardrobe malfunctions.

But from the beginning of my project, I’ve struggled with the perception that what I’m doing isn’t ‘proper’ journalism. My book is no hard-hitting exposé, no barbecue-stopper that will land me on Q&A. (Well, okay, perhaps my absolute loathing of Q&A might have ruled that one out.)

It’s, like, about fashion, LOL!

‘Fashion has often been relegated to being a woman’s domain, something historically not deemed worthy of critical thought,’ says Serah-Marie McMahon, founding editor of Worn Fashion Journal. Fashion historian Valerie Steele, director of the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, adds that most people think of ‘fashion’ as a remote, superficial fairyland of runway shows and red carpet gowns: ‘They don’t identify it with what they are wearing.’

Read the rest at the Wheeler Centre website…

My original mannequin feature

As I mentioned in my last post, in 2005 I wrote a newspaper feature story on mannequins for The Age. The version that was ultimately published is quite different to the original, spiked, version, which I've just discovered now while searching for a transcript of my interview with Daisy Veitch of Sharp Dummies. Perhaps you'd like to read it?

As a child, I was terrified of mannequins. They towered over me with their stiff poses and pallid plastic skin. I was afraid to look at them in case their painted-on eyes swivelled to glare at me. Yet I couldn’t look away, because I was convinced they could creep up behind me when my back was turned.

I wasn’t the only one. Contributors to the childhood beliefs website I Used to Believe confess to thinking mannequins were real people who’d been punished for shoplifting, or for not making it out of the store by closing time. One tormented girl was afraid to touch them in case she turned into a mannequin herself!

Wobbly logic aside, kids recognise freakishness when they see it. Mannequins embody a mass of contradictions – lifelike but not alive, sexually provocative without genitals; warm, soft flesh cast in cold, unyielding fibreglass. They flirt with how a human body can look – and hint at what makes a body human.

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the term “uncanny valley” to describe the disquiet sparked by those contradictions. In his 1982 book The Buddha in the Robot, Mori observed that the more human an object appears, the more we empathise with it. But when the simulation is almost perfect, we start to feel something’s very, very wrong. This is the uncanny valley.

Eighteenth century wax modellers knew this, and exploited it. Galleries of notorious thieves offered a macabre thrill of authenticity because they were modelled from executed corpses. Other exhibits created believable fantasy worlds. The setpiece in the salon of Madame Tussaud’s mentor, Dr Philippe Curtius, was an astonishingly vivid but entirely invented tableau of the French royal family eating dinner at Versailles.

Visiting Madame Tussaud’s still gives spectators a frisson. The gallery encourages visitors to flout protocol and caress the Queen, or impertinently fondle Elle Macpherson. Still, you’ll never feel her ineffable star quality. It’s just a dummy, after all.

Nowhere is the elusive celebrity body more starkly highlighted than in the museum. Lindie Ward is assistant curator in international decorative arts and design at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. She says the Powerhouse’s vast collection of provenance costume – clothing with a personal history – demands more of mannequins.

“When we did the Moulin Rouge exhibition, we had some adapted to Nicole [Kidman]’s very slim, long figure, because we couldn’t fit anything on any other way,” Ward explains.

Ward has devised bendable wire mannequins that subtly fill the costume as a body might. “You don’t need to have the wire showing at all, so you can get the exact shape of the garment,” she says.

You enter another kind of uncanny valley when you look at these mannequins. The body is creepily absent, leaving behind only traces of sweat and makeup. Sometimes it even spooks Ward.

Several years ago, she was dressing an exhibition of gay and lesbian Mardi Gras costumes, but grew uncomfortable making the mannequin for a full body suit worn by artist and AIDS activist Brenton Heath-Kerr.

“I must say, I had to keep walking away from it, because sadly he had died a couple of years before.”

In the early 1960s, British window dresser Adel Rootstein translated the uncanny appeal of celebrity mannequins into worldwide success. For Rootstein, the plaster and papier-maché mannequins then used in shop windows were stiff and lifeless, failing dismally to capture the spirit of Swinging London.

Rootstein’s fibreglass mannequins actually swing, striking dramatic poses and lounging insouciantly. They embody the zeitgeist because they’re modelled on the very celebrities who become fashion icons – Twiggy, Sandie Shaw, Joanna Lumley, Marie Helvin, Joan Collins, Yasmin Le Bon, Saffron Burrows and Jodie Kidd.

Rootsteins are the Rolls-Royce of the mannequin business. Each figure takes thirty days to make from a live model. After initial measurements and photographs, the head and body are sculpted in clay around a wire armature. The hands and feet are moulded in dental silicon, and successive plaster and fibreglass casts made. Artists individually apply each mannequin’s makeup using oil paints, and hair stylists select and cut wigs to customers’ specifications.

The time and effort pays off. These figures are so gracefully posed and carefully rendered that you’re almost embarrassed to have glimpsed them in the nude. Still, it’s striking how similar they look. Even despite racial differences, they all have long legs, slender necks, slim hips and pert breasts.

Such mannequins can’t be called ‘realistic’, no matter how lifelike they look. But if we expect mannequins to be socially inclusive, maybe we’re the unrealistic ones.

Some commentators have praised the recent trend towards larger mannequins, saying they finally reflect real women’s bodies. Last year, New York designer Ralph Pucci released an enormously popular mannequin whose derriere was modelled on curvaceous actor-singer Jennifer Lopez.

But retailers aren’t interested in making “a statement about what size people are,” says Melbourne-based mannequin maker Phil Russell. “Mannequins are really just to display the clothes.”

Russell’s boutique company, Mannequin Revolution, works directly with clients to create or rework mannequins for specific displays. Its output includes hourglass-figured mannequins for fashion brand Review, stylised gangsters and molls for city tailor Anton’s, and the pint-sized dummies modelling Kylie Minogue’s famous gold hotpants in the Victorian Arts Centre’s current exhibition.

Mannequin Revolution has also produced dark-skinned mannequins – but not for diversity’s sake. Russell’s clients see memorable mannequins as good business sense.

“People have gotta have a point of difference, you know?” he says. “I only do a couple [of black mannequins] here and there because it decreases the impact. It floods the market.”

But for some, mannequins are more about pleasure than business. In the ancient Greek story of Pygmalion, a sculptor falls in love with his creation. Plenty of movies, including the 1987 film Mannequin, perpetuate the fantasy of a mannequin as a compliant vessel for male desire.

Of course, men have been able to buy artificial women for centuries. Dr Curtius had a profitable sideline in erotic wax dummies for the boudoir. In 1920, the painter Oskar Kokoschka obtained a life-size replica of his ex-girlfriend, Alma Mahler; although in his memoirs, he coyly avoided the question of whether he slept with it. And last Christmas, Sydney shoe store Hype DC dramatised the link between sex and consumerism – and caused an outcry – when it used inflatable sex dolls as store window mannequins.

Then there are RealDolls. Advertised online as “the world’s finest love doll,” they’re smack bang in the uncanny valley. Special effects artist Matt McMullen created them almost by accident in 1996, while working on a prototype for an extra-realistic mannequin.

“I had a website going, and people kept e-mailing, asking if I could make a love doll,” McMullen recalled in 2000. “So I changed my design. Now you have RealDoll.”

RealDolls are made of solid yet pliable silicon moulded around a metal skeleton. They weigh as much as a woman and have a similar range of movement. Where mannequin groins are fibreglass blanks, RealDolls are anatomically correct. And they’re totally customised – you choose everything from your doll’s eye colour to her bikini wax preference. All for the bargain price of US$6499.

It’s easy to dismiss RealDolls as misogynist fantasies. But they’re a powerful reminder of how we use cutting-edge technology to flesh out our desires. In the stories, magic brings mannequins to life – and isn’t technology the magic of our era?

New mannequin technology isn’t always this perverse. In 2001, Adelaide company SHARP Dummies conducted Australia’s first anthropometric sizing survey since 1927. And intriguingly, the technology it used then also produces mannequins that behave like human bodies.

SHARP creates mannequins using a mixture of tape measuring, body casting, and a laser body scanner. This creates a near-perfect copy of the live model, complete with creases, dimples and fat rolls. SHARP dummies also boast what founder Daisy Veitch calls “biofidelity.”

“A person is made from bones and tissue and muscle; our dummies are made from composite materials,” Veitch explains. SHARP overlays a hard skeleton with foam, silicon and polyurethane padding, with underlying cavities to simulate compression. There’s extra padding on the bits that make so many women self-conscious – the bottom, hips, breasts, and upper arms.

Unlike their fibreglass cousins, SHARP dummies aren’t meant for shop windows. They’re meant to make clothes look good on you. They help apparel manufacturers get an accurate fit for tight clothing like hipster jeans and underwear. Conventional mannequins just can’t deliver that kind of realism.

Displaying clothes on skinny mannequins “is a successful strategy, and it’s okay to advertise like that,” says Veitch. “The problem is when people take the clothes off the dummy and try them on, and they don’t fit.”

It’s certainly fitting that the most disquieting mannequin technology of all comes from the country that invented the uncanny valley. Japanese firm Flower Robotics has developed a mannequin robot named Palette that senses nearby shoppers and uses motion-capture technology to pose for them in window displays. Palette can also detect the age and gender of shoppers for marketing purposes.

Curiously, Palette has no face. Its inventor says customers should focus on the mannequin’s clothes. But perhaps it’s just as well. While we like our mannequins as lifelike as possible, we don’t want them too human.

Museum peregrinations: Silhouette and mannequins

The National Gallery of Victoria exhibition Drape features a Versace evening frock from 1996 posed next to a 1913 evening gown in the style of Paul Poiret's Directoire Revival. Viewers were meant to remark on the ways in which designers separated by decades have interpreted the ancient Greek chiton; but what I found more remarkable were the mannequins on which the dresses were displayed.



The Versace mannequin is noticeably taller, more statuesque and angular than the one displaying the Schmoiret, which is petite, with sloping shoulders and a swelling bosom. The 'contemporary' mannequin has a figure sculpted by diet and exercise, whereas the 'historical' mannequin's figure is sculpted by corsetry.

The catalogue entry for this garment noted that its innovation was to evoke an uncorseted figure while actually requiring a corset. The 1910s were a transitional period in silhouette, as the voluptuous, tightly corseted 'Gibson Girl' with her 'S-bend' figure gave way to the svelte, boyish 'flapper'. As well as Poiret, designers including Lucile (Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon) and Madeleine Vionnet were favouring less restrictive corsetry and a more naturalistic silhouette.

(As an aside, I really want to get my hands on a copy of Waist Not: The Migration Of The Waist 1800-1960 by Richard Martin. But I baulk at the price of international shipping.)

Meanwhile, the bias cut is often championed as flattering to the female body, but the Versace dress looks cruelly revealing: see how the pubescent, pointy breasts and hipbones jut through the dress, and even the stylised fat pad on the mannequin's stomach is visible. It reminds me of one of the 'origin stories' of the bra: improvised by New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacob, who in 1910 had bought a diaphanous evening gown but found it revealed her corset's whalebones.

At the Fashion and Textile Gallery in Sydney, Dreaming Of Dior author and curator Charlotte Smith told me that she prefers modern mannequins for displaying much of the Darnell Collection because these mannequins are quite slim, which suits the clothes. I should add here that Smith – the former wearer of some of these garments – is a tiny, birdlike woman.

A group of older dresses from the Darnell Collection (including the bustle dresses from 1884 and 1885, below, and a 1910 evening dress) are actually posed on child-sized mannequins with padded busts, hips and replica bustles. (Smith has the real period undergarments, but they're too fragile to use under the dresses. Besides, I think it's a shame to hide them that way.)





These images don't give the best idea of how small these garments are, but they are clearly clothes for adult women, so perhaps they do convey how weird it felt to imagine the bra-wearing kiddie mannequins beneath.

Smith's take on the small size is that women in the 19th century weren't as active and athletic as women nowadays, and also that people then tended to settle in the same areas where they'd grown up, so they lacked the 'hybrid vigour' of intermarriage that would result in taller offspring.

I'm still skeptical that either of these ideas completely explains the radical smallness of old clothes, but I am getting a sense for the ways in which any genealogy of clothing size depends on a concomitant genealogy of silhouette… and corsetry. The NGV measures its garments by "centre back length" and "waist, flat", which sometimes gives an indication of fit but sometimes doesn't. For instance, the Versace dress has a waist measurement of 32.5cm, whereas a gold lamé dress by Vionnet, c1927, has a waist measurement of 61.4cm. This doesn't mean the Vionnet was made for a larger woman, but rather that 1920s dresses had no structured waist.

While it's useful to think about mannequins in this case because they are judiciously chosen to show off particular garments in a 'museum-appropriate' way, it's a mistake to extrapolate that the sizes and shapes of retail mannequins reveal very much about the size and fit of clothing. Not only are the mannequins themselves abstracted for visual impact, but the clothing can also be carefully pinned by visual merchandisers, in the back where customers won't see it.

Years ago I wrote a feature on mannequins for The Age. It was originally commissioned by Sunday Life, whose then editor wanted me to write, basically, "Oooh, look, mannequins are getting larger to reflect 'real women'." This wasn't the picture I got from my own observations, nor from interviewing a mannequin maker. Also, I think Sunday Life was a little freaked out that I brought RealDolls into it. So they spiked it, but I sold it to the regular paper instead (albeit without the RealDoll stuff).

However, another bit of my research that never ended up making it into the final article was an interview I did with Daisy Veitch of Sharp Dummies in Adelaide. They are a really fascinating firm because they don't make retail display mannequins; rather, their dummies are meant to be used during the manufacturing process.

They've harvested extensive anthropometric data and used it to build human forms that don't just reflect the shapes of actual bodies, but are also specially padded so that their 'flesh' has the same 'give' as a person's. This makes them invaluable when fitting things like lingerie and jeans, where it's important that the clothing doesn't dig in. Rather than use a (live) house model, your company could buy one of these dummies.

I wonder if I still have the interview transcript somewhere. I'd actually love to interview Daisy again because anthropometric research is deeply implicated in clothing sizing; the world's first anthropometric study was done in Sydney for Berlei in 1926-27, and still forms the basis of Australian clothing sizes.

The look of comfort

What follows was commissioned by The Age back in June, but due to a series of comical misunderstandings it was never published. Not to let my work go to waste, please enjoy it here.

Cruel winter is a time to dress for comfort. Fleecy tracksuits, layers of cotton jersey, shapeless jumpers and cardigans, fluffy socks, flannel shirts, slip-on shoes, and even this season’s key piece – a fleecy blanket with sleeves.

As a keen proponent of the notion of “No Pants Friday”, I can attest that baggy tops and tunic dresses worn with leggings are some of the cosiest winter outfits around. I write this while wearing harem pants.

Problem is, comfort and fashion don’t often coincide. Vitriolic condemnations are proffered at Leggingsarenotpants.wordpress.com and Tightsarenotpants.com. Lindsay Lohan’s well-documented love of leggings is often considered one of the American actress’s personal troubles, along with her controlling parents and drug abuse.

Harem pants have also endured a backlash, especially in their current drop-crotch incarnation. Some say they distort the body’s natural proportions. Others ridicule harem pant-wearers for resembling MC Hammer, a penguin, or a baby with a full nappy.

Indeed, dressing for comfort is generally considered the antithesis of caring about your appearance. People are quick to condemn comfy clothes as ugly, slovenly, and even warning signs of mental distress.

For some reason, comfortable shoes especially enrage fashionistas. Crocs have become the shoe people love to hate, ousting Ugg boots, Birkenstocks, hiking sandals, massage sandals, sheepskin moccasins and those dove-grey vinyl shoes with zippers. The Facebook group I Don’t Care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like A Dumbass has close to 1.5 million members.

I must admit to a feeling of dumbass-ness as I clomped around in a pair of black suede, Velcro-fastened ankle boots by sensible German brand Ara. They had been given to me by my mother, for whom they were slightly too small. “I know you’ll think they’re ugly,” she’d presciently told me.

But the true ugliness of these shoes wasn’t their actual appearance, but the way they made me seem like someone who doesn’t care how she looks. No amount of physical comfort, it seemed, could offset this social discomfort.

But by calling comfortable clothes “ugly”, we reveal that they don’t operate in a separate sphere from fashion where aesthetic considerations don’t matter. Instead, fashion’s denigration of comfort reveals its own high stakes.

The fashion world has always defined style as something ineffable and difficult to acquire. Learning this sensibility is a mental discipline and fashionable clothes themselves are a bodily discipline. Difficult-to-wear things such as teetering high heels, stiff tailoring and corsetry are mimetic symbols of the effort and sacrifice it takes to be chic.

Many criticisms of comfortable clothes also carry socio-economic inflections. Moccasins and flannelette shirts are deemed bogan uniforms; outer-suburban mums are fashion criminals in leggings and baggy windcheaters; silky tracksuits by Kappa and Adidas are “woggy”.

Wearers of Birkenstocks and Crocs (themselves derived from peasants’ clogs) are mocked for being pretentious bourgies, while we sneer at nouveau riche celebrities for their Juicy Couture velour tracksuits and Ugg boots.

However, one of fashion’s most iconic names made her reputation by turning devalued symbols of class into statements of luxury. I’m talking, of course, about Coco Chanel.

As dramatised in the current film Coco Avant Chanel, Gabrielle Chanel came from humble, provincial origins and made her own clothes by adapting men’s sportswear. French fishermen’s everyday clothes inspired her high-fashion silhouettes, and she created glamorous, feminine garments in cotton jersey, which had formerly been viewed as a cheap fabric for men’s undies.

Disdaining the Belle Epoque’s corseted waistlines, fussy ornaments and enormous, feather-filled hats, Chanel found new elegance in simplicity and freedom to move.

With layers of padding and interfacing, Dior’s traditionally tailored New Look garments were incredibly heavy and sometimes needed help to put on. By contrast, Chanel’s famous tweed jackets were made by simply sewing the lining to the outer shell, and were as light and comfortable as cardigans.

“Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury,” opined Chanel. And while I wouldn’t claim she inspired the Snuggie, it’s true that luxurious things are those purely intended to give pleasure. There are definitely tactile delights in swathing our bodies in soft flannel and fluffy angora – and even much-maligned fabrics such as polar-fleece and Tencel are designed to be pleasant to touch.

Dressing for comfort doesn’t mean giving up on looking good, either – it has visual pleasures. Soft fabrics fall into exciting, sculptural folds. Bias-cut garments skim the body gracefully, creating fluid waves as the wearer moves. Loose garments skim flatteringly over pudgy or gaunt figures.

Sorry Mum – nothing is going to make those German walking boots stylish. But funnily enough, the main reason I’m not wearing them is because they’re cut awkwardly just above the ankle and dig into my legs as I walk. They’re simply not comfortable.

Design journalism

About a week ago I was commissioned to write a 1000-word feature on 'capsule collections' that are joint ventures between fashion labels and retailers. The story was for Design Reporter, an initiative of the 2009 State Of Design festival that was independently produced by Chase & Galley and edited by Penny Modra and Ray Edgar. (The astute observer will realise that I worked with Stuart and Penny on Is Not Magazine.)

It's really a magazine, with news, features, interviews and reviews about different aspects of design and debates within the field, but it uses the newspaper format to provoke questions about what we currently settle for in design writing and journalism in general. I haven't actually got my hands on a copy yet, so I can't tell if it's achieved its ambitions, but I'm amused by the way the front page makes design topics – which are so often arcane and elitist – seem like urgent news for everyone.

As you can see, my story ended up with the tiniest headline on the front page (it appears just above the giant EAMO'S), which may be a good thing as I worked really hard on it but wasn't especially happy with the results. Within the word limit, I pretty much just had space to give a broad overview of some of the best-known designer/retailer collaborations, gesture towards the way they were viewed by designers, retailers and consumers, and suggest some criteria for a 'successful' collaboration.

I feel frustrated that I didn't really get to the bottom of why these collaborations are everywhere right now, and what's at stake for everyone involved. I can't help thinking that if I'd had more time to think about and shape the piece, more incisive ideas would have emerged. Lately I have been thinking that the way I write often feels like the process of hewing a statue from a hunk of marble – revealing and polishing ideas using words as my tools. The more I chip away with my writing, the more I feel the essence of what I'm trying to say emerges in a recognisable, elegant form.

However, this isn't really compatible with the 'reportage' approach that was important for the Design Reporter project. I felt as if my final story had been a compromise between an interview-driven story and an analysis-driven story, without the strengths of either genre. Also, having to depend on interview material to shape the story was logistically difficult. As well as Fat, I had approached TV, Alpha 60, Alice Euphemia and Chip Chop! for interviews, but only Bianca Wiegard from Fat and Karen Reischieck from Alice Euphemia were able to respond by my deadline. I felt bad about not including Karen in the story but then I didn't want to turn it into a story about how independent boutique owners view mainstream design collaborations.

Anyway, these are just a few thoughts on the constraints and compromises involved in the production of this particular story.

On 'vintage' and 'stylism'

God help us all, boho is back, with its jangly, awful baubles, cheap-looking pleather accessories and scrunchy, wafty 'ethnic' clothes that make everyone look less like folk singers from the '70s than refugees from suburban op-shops full of discarded boho crap from the last time this rubbish was in fashion. I hated it back when it was championed by the dread Sienna Miller and I still hate it now. Such was my annoyance that I've just written a story for the A2 section of The Age - it should be in tomorrow's paper - about why boho is such an empty look yet people really seem to love and embrace it.

In particular, I argued that a logic of individualism is crucial to boho, and I tied this into the ways that mainstream fashion appropriates and decontextualises second-hand cultures. As Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe argue in their book of the same name, and as I touched on in my post on ethics, plenty of people shop second-hand simply in pursuit of bargains - but just as many are in pursuit of distinction, either by demonstrating their mad bricolage skillz or by ensuring few other people will own the same items as them.

But within mainstream fashion systems, "vintage" styles are re-worked and brought back in a way that highlights their retro-styling and general 'old-schoolness'; according to this logic, there's no point wearing second-hand clothing if it could pass for something you bought new. (There are "designer recycle boutiques" that do specialise in second-hand clothing that looks new, but they tend to privilege 'designer labels' and 'pristine condition' rather than an overtly anachronistic look.) And 'vintage' transmutes the rituals and skills of personalisation that surround clothing in the second-hand fashion system into a hazier idea of "personal creativity". This happens both in the retail environment and in fashion journalism.

We all know that "vintage" is a much-abused term because it enables shops to ask large amounts of money for garments that are simply pre-worn - or even merely retro-styled. Owners of "vintage stores" openly buy up bulk clothing from flea markets, op-shops, garage sales and estate sales, carefully curating them and then marking the prices up vastly. These are the people who rock up at your Camberwell Market stall at 7am and go through your car boot with a torch before you've even unpacked. You'll also see them at Savers with shopping trolleys piled high.

This is starting to happen in high-street retailers too as they realise the market for 'vintage'. For instance, Sportsgirl is currently selling second-hand cowboy boots for something like $150, but rather than the motley collection of items you fossick through at a second-hand store, they've been carefully picked to look similar. What's more, they're displayed alongside a rack of dresses that are marked "vintage" but, similarly, have a look of extreme curatorship in order to make them 'match' both each other and the new goods elsewhere in the store.

It's easy to scorn people as dumb bunnies for buying their clothes this way, but while it's definitely a move away from the skill set that's required to fossick through heaps of old clothes and choose the right garments (the vintage clothing dealer has done all the hard sifting for you), there is still a certain feeling of pride and creativity that comes from saying, "It's vintage" when someone asks you where you got something. Here, "vintage" means, "I'm too individual to settle for mass-produced new clothes", even though the 'vintage' garment was almost certainly worn on a mass scale whenever it was new. More subtly, it also means, "I'm sophisticated enough to redeploy the styles of the past, not just wear whatever's new" and of course, "No, you cannot buy this item yourself, it's all mine."

I guess for me the question right now is: "How do we make clothing our own?" Too often, fashion writing answers that question through a logic I could call "stylism". Stylism is the belief that having a coherent and identifiable 'personal style' is the yardstick of chic. It's a somewhat counter-intuitive move from a fashion press that spends most of its time prescribing what to wear, but some people are held up as possessors of an ineffable logic of creativity and bricolage that enables them to render old ideas new, either through recombination or by recontextualisation. The rest of us can learn to attain that logic ourselves through observation (especially in 'street style' discourse) and copying.

A key aspect of stylism is its irritating insouciance: it must appear completely effortless. It must appear to stem from your brilliant personality and your fancy-free whims rather than a calculated attempt to stand out from the crowd or surf the waves of breaking trends before everyone else. Successfully cultivating a personal style requires a very high level of fashion literacy, or else a complete ignorance of fashion altogether - a kind of Forrest Gump-esque holy fool approach of getting it totally right, totally by accident.

Boho is a triumph of stylism because the most retarded things can be worn together and rather than being pitied for dressing like a pretentious git or a bedraggled hippie, the wearer is praised for their free-spirited originality and their stupid outfits actually trickle down into mainstream fashion stores. It's the central paradox of stylism that while it champions individuality, it ends up being so prescriptive. It's not an intellectual logic, it's an intuitive one; and because it's so hard to put your finger on how a particular style comes together, all you can do is copy it dumbly.

Moments in the limelight

Last week the issue of Meanjin in which my article appears was released. The article turned out to be quite stressful to write and I'm pleased that it appears to make some sense. So when I got to the end and realised it still didn't have a title, I was somewhat dismayed to remember that, unlike journalism - in which you simply call it "Leather Jacket Story" and the subs will do the rest - journal articles require you to invent a title yourself. Usually my academic titles are horrible affairs strewn with colons and puns, but luckily I was defeated enough to call my Meanjin story simply: "My Failure As A Leather Jacket Person".

I was interviewed about the article by Elly Varrenti for Radio National's Life Matters program. I always tend to think of radio as a evanescent medium but of course that's not true in these days of podcasting and online streaming. In that spirit, you can listen to the interview. In it, too, I have inexplicably managed to make some sense.

The rest of the issue is very good, too, and it's a beautiful object to look at and hold. Sophie Cunningham should be congratulated on putting together a literary quarterly that's juicy and engaged with the wider world, rather than dry, insular and academic.

A cloth-covered button

A cloth-covered button is a new publication of which I approve heartily. Founded by Jessica Friedmann and Gillian Terzis, both of whom are from student media backgrounds, it welcomes analytical and curious writing on fashion, eschews modelled photo spreads, and rejects the advertising- and advertorial-driven approach of most fashion publications.

I have an article in the launch issue that is an expanded version of this post. I would have liked to contribute something completely new, but lately I've found my work commitments have impeded the amount of time I have free to think about things with the clarity that I'd like to apply to this blog. But I wanted to contribute to a cloth-covered button because, as I outline in that post, I believe strongly in the importance of intelligent and considered writing on dress. I don't agree with all the arguments mounted in the various stories, either - and I believe that's a good thing, because I welcome the proliferation of opinion, and of debate where opinions differ (as opposed, I stress, to ad hominem attacks like: "you have no taste...").

Another thing that pleases me about a cloth-covered button is that it features writing by both men and women. In the past, it's made me uncomfortable to realise how female-dominated the world of academic "fashion studies" can be, which in turn makes me worry about ghettoisation (people confirming each other's arguments rather than challenging or reinterpreting them), and the marginalisation of dress as a "soft" intellectual topic in an academy that tends to valorise abstract theory.

Anyway, I feel it's important for anyone who's interested in seeing the proliferation of intelligent writing about clothes and fashion to put their money where their mouths are by purchasing a cloth-covered button. It is a beautiful object as well as being smart, and would make a good gift. It's currently available at Mag Nation in Melbourne, or directly from the editors.

The Streety Morning Herald

My opinion piece on the idea of 'the street' was in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald. I wrote it while I was writing my recent conference paper.

It's somewhat frustrating to have to compress so many ideas into the short length of an op-ed story - you could do better justice to this concept in an extended feature, and I would definitely like to write one. (Editors - you have only to click on the little lady...) But on the other hand, I'm glad I'm able to publish ideas about contemporary culture in a mainstream newspaper, especially in a space so often dominated by the minutiae of international policy and Australian parliamentary politics.

Time to get pragmatic

As I posted recently on my personal blog, the field of commercial blogging is growing exponentially, and bloggers are increasingly being viewed as 'content providers', much as television has always been a content provision exercise that delivers audiences for advertisers. As I've argued, the trouble begins when bloggers aren't adequately recognised and remunerated, and I see syndication agencies such as ScooptWords as a dangerous development.

This is because they notice and exploit a culture in blogging in which bloggers are amateurs who are not equipped or not inclined to deal personally with editors wishing to republish their work. Indeed, new business ventures driven by the growth in so-called "citizen journalism" rely on an amateurised (as opposed to a professionalised) market of "content providers" who are willing to provide their work anonymously and to have it edited with impunity. All because they are happy just to see their words in print, under the aegis of a 'respectable' media masthead.

I argue that this is a patronising attitude. It may work for some people for whom blogging is a hobby. Indeed, I run a number of personal blogs for which I wouldn't expect to get paid. But as a working journalist and cultural critic, I would like to earn a living from my research, my innovative ideas, my authoritatively argued opinions and my analytical abilities. These are my tools of trade. And I believe that bloggers writing this sort of material should learn to put a dollar value on the work they publish.



This is why I am adding this button to my sidebar. I'll keep posting here for free, but I will ask for a reasonable pay rate if any editors should be interested either in republishing my posts or in commissioning stories from me. I believe that if enough bloggers are polite but firm about this, there is no reason that bloggers can't be content providers. And this more equal industrial relationship ought to be the future of online content provision.

The irritation of Sienna Miller and the curse of the It Girl

An article of mine was published today in the Sydney Morning Herald. It discusses the irritating phenomenon of Sienna Miller - someone who's famous as a clotheshorse and celebrity handbag rather than for her own accomplishments.

I don't particularly like Sienna's "signature boho style" or whatever else the papers want to call it. But it's fascinating the way she has become a style icon, even for her fashion mistakes. My SMH article briefly outlines the media's role in this - their desire to identify fresh talent and monitor its development, even as that attention crushes the talent's potential.

But I am also interested in the industrial apparatus that enables high-street fashion stores to diffuse celebrity and runway style for chicks on the street. Topshop is the best at this, but Supre and Sportsgirl are very canny Australian examples. As Elanor has said, Sportsgirl at the moment is a "shrine" to Sienna - and I would like to do more research into the process by which this happens.

I think the most interesting thing about Sienna Miller is the very blandness I object to in her media deification. While she's not very interesting as a celebrity, she's not that different from thousands of other women, and her style is wearable and comfortable. You don't have to be astoundingly beautiful or style-savvy to look like Miller - it's just clever accessorising. Basically, she is a blank canvas onto which you can project your own sense of style. Because of the bitsy nature of 'boho chic', it can sustain a wide range of variation.

But as Claudia Croft suggests in The Times (UK), this look is tired already. And if Sienna wants to maintain her status as a fashion icon, she'll have to reinvent herself. Croft points to the fact that Miller is starring in a new movie as Andy Warhol's muse Edie Sedgwick, who was also an It Girl. Maybe we'll all be dressing as beatniks next year.