Valerie Steele, photographed by Aaron Cobbett, courtesy of FIT... the last time I went to New York I was lucky enough to meet and interview Valerie Steele, who, as you all will know, is director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and a wonderful scholar, theoretician, thinker - as well as an extravagant personality. The interview in German language is online here - but I still wanted to quote from the English original. Mrs Steele is the author of a very well-known, and rather controversial essay entitled "Why People Hate Fashion". When I had the opportunity to talk to her, I asked her for a short summary of her conclusions. Here we go.
A lot of people hate fashion. Many leftists, many feminists,
moralists – fashion has been viewed for thousands of years
primarily negatively in terms of vanity, waste, elitism, repression of women.
You need only compare how fashion is viewed with how art is constantly valorized.
Art is eternal, the true, the beautiful, the good.
Fashion is the ephemeral, constantly recycled,
a form of ugliness so extreme you need to change it every six months,
it's all a kind of conspiracy of the designers to try and part you from your money.
There is a tremendous number of negative things that are habitually said about fashion.
In society in general, not just among intellectuals, there are many people
who find fashion a totally frivolous, bourgeois, consumerist,
an unimporant if not actually pernicious phenomenon.
"Japan Fashion Now" is an exhibition curated by Valerie Steele for the Museum at FIT. It's on until April 2, 2011
... voilà donc une citation plus qu'impressionnante d'une interview que j'ai réalisée avec Valerie Steele du Fashion Institute of Technology à New York. Madame Steele, vous le saurez tous, est l'un des personnages les plus extravagants dans l'univers de la théorie de la mode, et elle est une personne tout à fait charmante, en même temps qu'éminemment intelligente. Soit dit en passant. Puisque Madame Steele a publié, il y a quelques années, un article intitulé "Pourquoi les gens détestent-ils la mode ?", je lui ai posé la question : qui est-ce qui déteste la mode, et pourqoui. Eh ben, quelle réponse :
Des gens de gauche, des féministes, des moralistes.
La mode, depuis des millénaires, a été perçu sous le signe de
la vanité, du gaspillages, de l'élitisme, de l'oppression des femmes.
Il suffit de regarder l'art à côté et comment il est sans cesse valorisé.
L'art, c'est le perpétuel, le vrai, le beau, le bon.
La mode, de son côté, elle est éphémère, recyclée à l'infini, une forme de laideur si extrême qu'il faut la renouveler tous les six mois ;
la mode, c'est le complot des créateurs pour vous arracher votre argent.
Il existe un nombre immense d'arguments négatifs qui sont professés quand on parle
de la mode. Et cela, dans toute la société, pas seulement parmi les intellectuels.
Vous trouverez beaucoup, beaucoup de gens pour qui la mode est un phénomène frivole, bourgeois, consommiste, dépourvou de toute importance et même, pernicieux.
1 commentaire:
you know, i think most people, like me, actually have rather hate and love relationship with fashion as well as with art... by the way, the art as it appears to me lately might even be more shady behind closed doors.
what i dislike is that less than in art the media describes everything as fashion, yet the people you see in photos mainly are buyers and critics, rather than designers. the fashion scene offers a great variety of people with different ethics and perceptions of fashion and it's relevance.
however it is also true... nobody needs pre-fall / -spring collections and also a lot of people tend to throw their convictions away pretty quickly once they are surrounded by the fashion scene and it's competition to show your wealth (and therefore importance, as being rich and being a strong buyer seems to give you some kind of fashion-street-cred. ironically blogs popping up in the last years have enforced that development.)
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