chanel

Fashion Theory. Volume 14, Issue 2, pp. 135-158DO!: 10.2752/175174110X12665093381504Reprints available directly from the Publishers.Phoiocopyifig permitted by licence only.

Catherine Driscoll

Chanel: The Orderof Things

Catherine DriscotI Is the Chairof Gender and Cultural Studiesat the University ol Sydney. Sheis Ihe author of Girls: FeminineAdolescence in Popular Culture andCultural Ttieory (2002). ModernistCultural Studies (2009), andforthcoming books on teen film andon Australian country [email protected]

Abstract

This article considers the importance of fashion to both modernism andmodernity and the importance of modernism to understanding fashion.It docs so through a close consideration of the example of Chanel—notthe biographical woman Chanel, or even the label Chanel, but ratherthe Modernist moment in fashion we have come to call "Chanel." Theposition of ground-breaking innovator in the field of women's fashionthat is widely assigned to Chane! is one form of the modernist breakthat produces both "the avant-garde" and "the classic." Using such anunderstanding of Chanel, this article examines the intimacy between

136 Catherine Driscoll

fashion and modernity tlirougli Modernist aesthetics, modernist writingon fashion and culture, and that critical attitude Michel Foucault calls"modernism."

KEYWORDS: Chanel, modernism, modernity, style

She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt and her hairbrushed back like a boy's. She started all that.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (2006[19261)

Despite the ease with which the term is used, there is little clear consen-sus abour what counts as "modernism." There are two general typesof definition of modernism, although variations and hybridizations ofthem abound, both of which pose some problems for useful discussionof fashion and modernism. Tbe first is an aesthetic definition, in whichthe particular conventii)ns of modernism—its use of "self-consciousness;simultaneity, juxtaposition and montage; paradox, ambiguity, and un-certainty; and the dchumanization of the subject" (Felski 1995: 25}—are based on genres to which fashion rather uneasily conforms. And thesecond is pcriodiziiig, where modernism is a stage of modernity stretch-ing roughly from the late nineteenth century to World War 11 and re-quires historical specificity into vyhich particular designs and designerssometimes fit but at the expense of other histories important to fashion.In this respect, "fashion" is one example among many that calls for adistinction between such definitions of modernism and that attitude tomodernity also captured in many crucial uses of the term "modern-ism." I propose that we need to distinguish between what we might call"Modernism"—the now institutionalized assemblage of generally aes-thetic forms and practices that appeared (roughly) in the early twentiethcentury—and the "modernism," which names an attitude to modernitythat has much less formal or temporal coherence. In this article, in anargument that comes closer to thinking about modernity (rather thanpostmodernity) as a philosophy of temporality, I will use Chanel as aconjunction of and distinction between the concepts of "Modernism"and "modernism" for thinking about fashion.

I draw this approach in part from Foucault's provocation, in ''Whatis Enlightenment?," that we think of modernity as an attitude ratherthan an epoch. At the conclusion of an essay that spans Immanuel Kant,Charles Baudelaire and "ourselves today" (in 1978), Foucault asks:

I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as anattitude than as a period of history. And by "attitude," I meana mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choicemade hy certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feel-ing; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same

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time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.

(Foucault i9841197BJ:35>)

For Baudelaire, this artitiide could be detected in both art and theeveryday, which combined in particularly significant ways in fashion.In praising Constantin Guys' attention to the everyday, Baudelaire alsosees the man of modernity as he who "makes it his business to extractfrom fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history"(Baudelaire 199511863]: 12). This man of fashion writes the history ofthe present and the history of himself in the various dimensions of hisperformance of fashion and perception of fashion in others. Indeed,Baudelaire stressed the importance of fashion as self-representation, asin "the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior,his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art" (Foucault1984[I978]:41).

Like many before him, Fredric Jameson credits Baudelaire with in-venting our concept of modernity through the "category of the clas-sical," against which modernity is defined and which is "the birth ofhistoricity itself" (Jameson 2002: 22). But Jameson's argument addssomething crucial In stressing that modernism is difficult to periodizeprecisely because it is always claiming to break with something. Thisis another way of expressing the critical attitude that constitutesmodernism—reflection on the difference of today with regard to yester-day. The position of ground-breaking innovator in the field of women'sfashion that is widely assigned to Chanel is one form of this modernistbreak. It is typical too in that such breaks are identified primarily by theInstitutionalization of great names like "Chanel." In fact it is In install-ing a look that is both "classic" and "modern" that Chanel constitutesa rupture: she claims to be a forceful periodization of fashion that delin-eates what will always be true ¡in style). It is ciear that Chanel is not thesingle creator of, or even inspiration for, the transformations of fashionin the Modernist period, and still less of modernist attitudes to fashion.But in this I am not simply dismissing Chanel as less radical or innova-tive than she is sometimes seen to be. Instead, I want to reconsider whatwe want from the radical innovations of Modernism when we seek toapply them to fashion and what we want, moreover, from the installa-tion of Chanel as a classic'

Fashion is modern. This might mean no more than that the condi-tions of modern life, as George Simmel suggested in 1911, exacerbatethe starkest tendencies of fashion (20(}0[19I I ]: 191). Fashion partici-pates in that popular (as well as canonical) image of Modernism as,to quote Jennifer Craik's The Face of Fashion., "a commitment to newways of living that explicitly rejected the old" (Craik 1994: 75). Eliza-beth Wilson also prioritizes the "desire for the new" (2000: 63) in fash-ion, btit her Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (2003) adds tothis an emphasis on the relation between fashion and modernity. "The


concept of 'modernity,'" she argues, "is useful in elucidating the ratherpeculiar role played by fashion in acting as a kind of hinge between theelitist and the popular" (2003: 60). In fashion, as Wilson records, wecan trace the impact ofthe industrial revolution and even the emergingmodes of thought that transformed morality, art, and science into rec-ognizably modernist forms. The history of fashion, she suggests, is thatof modernity itself.

It is in part fashion's capacity to reorder the world that Foucaultdraws from Baudelaire as the critical attitude of moderniry. He writes:

modernit)' in painting does not consist, for Baudelaire, in intro-ducing black clothing onto the canvas. The modern painter is theone who can show the dark frock-coat as "the necessary costumeof our time," the one who knows how to make manifest, in thefashion of the day, the essential, permanent, obsessive relationthat our age entertains with death. "The dress-coat and frock-coat not only possess their political beauty, which is an expressionof universal equality, but also tlieir poetic beauty, which is an ex-pression of the public soul—an immense cortège of undertaker'smutes (mutes in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes ...). We areeacb of us celebrating some funeral." (Foucault 1984119781: 41,quoting Baudelaire) '

Phrased in this poignant way, tbe modernity of fashion cannot be re-duced to a cycle of death and rebirth, redundancy, and innovation. Thisarticle examines this intimacy between fashion and critical reflectionon modernity in several different ways. Tbe next two sections considerChanel and her aesthetic as manifesting both Modernist aesthetics andtbat critical attitude Foucault calls "modernism." The following sectionconsiders Chanel as exemplifying modernism's critical conjunction ofcommodification and art as a perspective on both style and the con-temporary, and the final section returns to Foucault's suggestions aboutfashion's capacity to reorder the world, using Foucault's concept of het-erotopias to suggest that we might make quite radical claims about theimpact and ongoing significance of modernist fashion.

While fashion is generally excluded from the Modernisr canon,deemed too transient and too superficial to count among its central rev-olutions, as Nancy Troy's Couture Ctdture (2003) argues, and the 200.5Chanel exhibition at tbe Museum of Modern Art (see Koda and Bolton2005) attests, the contested borders of Modernism are now sometimesextended to include bigh fashion. The name most persistently conjuredin this way is Cabrielle (Coco) Chanel. And there is no question that theChanel brand and "Coco Chanel" (her star status during her lifetimeand her iconic status after it) together form a key Hgure in renovatingrelations between art, industry, leisure, consumer culture, and modernidentity.

Chanel 139

Chane l i

Apocrypbally, Cbanel once met fellow designer Paul Poiret in tbe street.

Sbe was dressed in her own highly fashionable black and he asked who

she was in mourning for. She reputedly retorted, "For you, dear Mon-

sieur!" it is iust as often quoted that Poiret dismissed the Chanel look as

"undernourished telegraph boys dressed in black jersey." But Chanel's

democratic "undertaker's mutes," to invoke Baudelaire again, are not

tbe sum of modernist fashion, wbicb names instead tbe field in which

tbey appear. Even Modernist fasbion is not confined to the simplicity

of the Cbanel design any more than to the exotic, romantic, or surreal

styles of Poiret, Erté, or Elsa Scbiaparelli. It also incorporates wbat the

new idea of tbe fashion designer meant and to wbom. If the first strik-

ing thing about Cbanel is how sbe dressed women at the leading edge

of changes to dominant fashion and gender norms, the second is that

there could be a "Chanel woman" for whom clothes spoke to new ways

of living and possible new styles. In fact, for the purposes of this ar-

ticle I am not discussing this biographical woman Cbanel or even, more

strangely, tbe label Cbanel, but ratber tbe Modernist moment in fashion

we bave come to call "Chanel."

The early twentieth century—that period strongly identified with

Modernism—clearly saw dramatic changes in dominant standards of

dress and an expanding field of what could be called "fashion." Fashion

pages, and tbe expanding genre of fasbion magazines out of a blend of

dressmaking and society publications and tbe mass-distributed patterns

from this time all record a narrowed "silhouette," a reduction of fabric

and clothing, and a new everyday place for the dramatic fashion state-

ment: the short dress of tbe flappers; the "medieval" drapery of Erté

in the 1920s; tbe tailored but feminine exaggeration that moves from

Adrian in tbe 1930s to Dior's "New Look." Describing these changes in

this way shows how tbey also drew on the expansion of haute couture—

the avant-garde of fasbion, which, like other avant-gardes, has a strong,

but not an immutable, impact on dominant styles. As Craik claims, "Flv-

eryday fashion (dress codes, a sense of fashionability) does not simply

'trickle down' from the dictates of the self-proclaimed elite. At best, a

particular mode may tap into everyday sensibilities and be popularised"

(Craik 1994: ix). And as Valerie Steele puts it, "Couturiers tike Wortb,

Cbanel, and Dior were not so mucb dictators or radical innovators as

they were astute barometers of fasbion trends" (Steele 1998: 5).

As Steele elaborates, a range of broad social shifts and a collage of

other designs and designers contributed to what has come to be tbe

Cbanel look:

most of the literature on Chanel is wildly inaccurate: she is said

to have abolished feminine frills, liberated women from tbe cor-

set, and almost singlebandedly introduced sportswear, tbe "poor


boy" look, bobbed hair, designer perfume, suntans, and the "lirtleblack dress." With a little research, however, it is easy to use thefacts of fashion history as sniper's ammunition to pick off theseinflated claims. (Steele 1998: 247)

Chanel was and is often described as quintessentially modern: "Exer-cise, diet, bathing in the sea., an uncorseted body ... the modern wotnanwas born. And she resembled Gabrielle Chanel in every detail" ¡Bau-dot 1992: 12). In fact, Poiret was the leading figure in shifting fashionaway from the corseted image of the female body. But, as Harold Kotlaargues, "The disjunction felt in the juxtaposition of a Poiret wotnanviewing Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon ( 1907) evaporates ifshe is imagined dressed by Chanel." Koda thus aligns Chanel with "theadvancing aesthetic principles of art and architecture" (Koda 2005: 11}and with the institutionalized media status crucial to iconic Modern-ism. He also attributes to Chanel the capacity to perceive and insiston something more fundamental behind the ornament of conventionalappearance.

But such Modernist claims to revolution would not., however, com-prise the modernism of fashion—its critical attitude. We might thuswant to place Chanel and the Modernist transformations of fashionalongside critical reflection on it. This article will sample a range ofmodernist commentary on fashion—some now well known and somenot. Simmel, for example, saw m fashion a system of differentiationin dialogue with conformity. In "The Philosophy of Fashion," Simmelargues that fashionable "individual appearance never clashes with thegeneral style, but always stands out from it" (2OOO|I9I1|: 191). Hethus presents fashion as a signifying system—without using that turn ofphrase, but with an understanding of the network of shared meaningstaken from fashion chat intersects with Roland Barthes" more famouslater discussion in The Fashion System (1967). Simmel argues that ur-banization created a greater need for people to demonstrate individualdifference, particularly given the transient nature of urban relationships.While in "The Metropolis and Mental Life," Simmel notes that urbanlife demands that the subject exaggerate the "personal element in orderto remain audible even to himself" (2ÜÜ0|1903|: 184), in "The Philoso-phy of Fashion," he figures the main impetus behind the rapid changesof fashion as a desire to belong:

it satisfies the need for distinction, the tendency towards differen-tiation, change and individual contrast. It accomplishes the latter,on the one hand, by the change in contents—which gives to thefashions of today an individual stamp compared with those ofyesterday and of tomorrow—and even more energetically, on theother hand, by the fact that fashions are always class fashions.{Simmel 2000119111: 189)

Chanel 141

But this argument, consistent in many but not all respects with Thor-stein Vebien's {I899[|9651) representation of fashion as conspicuousconsumption, does not work for Chanel, even if she should not be seenas single-handedly having changed this system.

This sequence of new critical approaches to fashion insists thatchoosing one or another fashionable item involves a complex socialpositioning. Vehlen and Simmel both stress that an economy of styleshapes one's relations to strangers along lines that also support Baude-laire's conception of modern style as always performed in transit. Butafter Chanel, fashion was not predominantly a statement of "pecuniarystrength," "written in characters which he who runs may read" (Veblen1899(19651; 49). In fact, the expensiveness of Chanel required a cer-tain skill to divine In others. This consciousness foregrounds from thesewriters what Pierre Bourdieu would later describe as a system negoti-ated by taste. Bourdieu writes:

every change in tastes resulting from a transformation of the con-ditions of existence and of the corresponding dispositions willtend to induce, directly or indirectly, a transformation of the fieldof production, by favouring the success, within the struggle con-stituting the field, of the producers best able to produce the needscorresponding to the new dispositions. {Bourdieu 1986J1979]:231)

This idea of dispositions clarifies not only how Chanel impacts on theway fashion indexes social change, or what is generally presumed forany individual, but also the way her style works. Taste, Bourdieu says,is not a sign of something outside it (like access to what is beautiful) buta classifying statement that "classifies the classifier" (1986(1979]: 6).This denaturalization of taste—replacing beauty with style—is not a"postmodern" product but part of the complexity of modernist dis-course on fashion.

Images of fashion within the critical terrain of Modernism generallyfocus on what style means, which is not to say there are not substan-tial disagreements about that. Simmel's interest in differentiation fromthe mainstream via fashion is as typically modernist as the dismissal offashion by others. He argues that it is impossible to ignore fashion al-together and that even those who claim to disdain fashion in fact makefashion "statements" that situate them in relation to fashion in waysthat can not be reduced to a homogenizing "culture industry." And eventhose Modernists most stridently critical of mass culture acknowledgefashion's creativity. Adorno emphasizes the proximity of avant-gardeart and fashion:

The bourgeois religi{)n of art would like to keep art neatly apartfrom fashion. This is simply impossible. Ever since the aesthetic

142 Catherine Driscoli

subject began to take a polemical stand against society and itsobjective spirit, it has maintained a secret link to that societythrough the medium of fashion. (Adorno 1984(1970]: 436)

Modernism's emphasis on renovation is well known, but it matters herethat Adorno's aesthetic theory concedes how fashion materializes "in-cisive individual impulses that are saturated with history ... It is no ac-cident that in German and French the terms 'fashion' and 'modernism'are related etymologically" ( I 984[ 1970|: 437).

Yet another Modernist account of fashion can be found among thenewly visible psychologies. Tn 1929, psychologist Elizabeth Hurlockdiscussed fashion, following Havelock Ellis, as a secondary sexual char-acteristic. By her account, fashion progresses in line with "civilization,"and she understands the twentieth-century decrease in ornamentation asthe maturation of modern women (Hurlock 1929: 145-64). Hurlock isresponding in particular to the success of Chanel, where she thinks that"Perfect grooming demands that there be no ornamentation or displayof any sort, and even the artificially restricted figure has been replacedby the natural one" (Hurlock 1929: 160). Her argument must also becontextúallzed in relation to the architect Adolf Loos' more famous ex-hortation to extend the Modernist tendency to abandon ornament inarchitecture to all decoration of surfaces as a remnant of primitivism:"I have discovered the following truth and present it to the world: cul-tural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles indaily use" (Loos 1966[1908|: 226-7, emphasis in original). Hurlock'spsychological approach nevertheless agrees that fashion is a system ofdifferentiation and coherence at once: that fashion and its changes areboth social and political. It is the sociological approaches to style whichmore directly lead to Cultural Studies, however, only to be displacedby rhe influential semiotic analysis of Barthcs. The structure of fashion,according to Barthes, is composed of the separate circulation of "image-clothing," "written clothing," and "real clothing" (1983¡1967): Í~5},and a change in any of these registers can affect all the others. Thereare both precedents and crucial contemporary contexts for the impactof Chanel's sportswear and other lines, but the use of jersey, the shapecalled "cardigan," or the sign "little black dress" are not meaningfulin themselves but only within a system where jersey was not used inwomen's dresses, cardigans were practical warmth for working men,and black was reserved for mourning.

Ready-to-Wear

As Steele indicates, a range of historical contexts are needed to makesense of how Chanel became "Chanel." She stresses the impact ofWorld War I and indeed the ready-to-wear clothing which enabled so

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much of Chanel's success—because it was possible to look like a Chanelwhen one could not afford it—had initially been employed for uniforms(see Wilson 2003: 74). And by the end of the nineteenth century, asWilson notes, women's fashions had already begun to adapt tbe new"sports" styles for women to modern city life, as men's fashions haddone the century before (2003: 40). The adaptation for women's fash-ion of locknit and flannel from men's sportswear and underwear, still inthe same muted colors (Wilson 2003: 40), did not so much invent newpieces as rearrange how those pieces fit into tbe fashion system. Chanelstands for the prewar experimentation with these conventionally mas-culine fabrics, later extending to others like corduroy and tweed andthis new medium consciously inverted tbe gender and class distinctionsthat had been central to fashionable style. Cardigans and trench coatsbecame fashionable accessories, loose fitting trousers became glamor-ous rather than a practical necessity, and costume jewelry became adesirable dressed-down look. Tbe renovation in women's clothing weassociate with Chanel certainly gave new functions to a range of com-mon materials, but the stronger claim would be tbat it disrupted tbeway fashion's signifying practices had run parallel to, had mapped onto,those of gender and class.

Pulling apart her iconic Modernist image as revolutionary styleleader in women's clothing, Steele settles on one key to Chanel's image:"To her supporters, tben and now, Chanel represented comfortable, re-alistic, 'classic' dressing." (Steele 1998: 247) As commentary on mo-dernity from Baudelaire to Jameson has often suggested, it is preciselythe concept of the classical., as tbat which sits outside of modernity andthus against wbich modernity is defined, that marks the emergence ofmodernity—not only or even principally as that which is displaced bymodernity but as that endlessly reassembling continuum in relation towhich innovation is perceived and set aside. Fashion is a continuallyself-reflexive attitude and can never settle on one thing as "fasbion-able." There was not. in fact, one Chanel look, but there were someunwavering Chanel principles. Understatement was one, reinforcing ashifr in the important distinction between day and evening wear and therole of particular fabrics in articulating wealth and the conspicuousnessof fashion consumption.

After the war, "To appear to pay too much attention to clothes wasdémolie., while to wear one's clothes arec desitwolture, in a free andeasy manner, was the look of modernity. Because this remains truetoday, we still admire Chanel" (Steele 1998: 248). As many writers havenoted, Chanel's "poor look," of which Figure 1 is a classic example,was radical enough to be referred to as an "antifashion posrure" (Davis1994(19921: 164), reversing the systemic copying ofthe upper classesby the lower, which in 1911 Simmel could claim was structurally char-acteristic of fashion (2000119111: 190}. The changes ofthe Modernistperiod depended upon the expanding mass production of ready-to-wear


clothing for almost all modern urbanized subjects, a process furtheredby Chanel's blend of haute couture, Zeitgeist rhetoric, and class mobilestyling. Tbe use of tbe low and tbe poor translates tbe mobility of Cbanelinto mobility across social contexts, as her use of men's fabrics and ref-erence to men's tailoring translated into some mobility between gendernorms. This was ''poverty de luxe," but also ecboed crucial modernistmotifs like urhanity, femininity, and banality: Chanel's "black dress andtbe sligbt suit were the apotheosis of tbe shopgirl's uniform, or the ste-nographer's garb" (Wilson 2003: 41 ); "It was tbe look of the workinggirl hitherto unknown to fashion" (Hollander 1999: 19).' Whether ornot it was a unique innovation in her collections, Chanel's "little blackdress" became the iconic representation of urbanely casual modern fem-ininity: a new fasbion grammar enabling new articulations. Tbe pbrase,label, or slogan, "the little black dress" is now often cited, but usuallyin forms long detached from wbat it was that Chanel's first little blackdresses actually looked like (Figure 1 is an example c. 1927).

Chanel was neither functionalist nor minimalist. Layers and acces-sories were botb crucial to the Chanel look despite C^hanel's refusal ofwbat sbe deemed excessive ornamentation. We could compart- this tothe fashion for and style of Imagist poetry. In 1913, soon after the ap-pearance of Simmel's essay and around tbe same time as CJhanel's firstsuccessful sportswear lines, Ezra Pound abjured aspiring poets to "Useno superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something"

Figure 1Coco Chanel (Chanel. Gabrielle,1883-1971): Dress, c. 1927.(Manufacturer: House of Chanel,founded 1913.) New York,Metropolitan fViuseum of Art. Silk.wool, metal, (a) L. at center back21^4 ¡n. (55.2 cm), (b) L. at centerback: 40 in, [101,6 cm),(c) L.: 40'/^ in, (102,9 cm). Marking;[label] c) (on buckle) "Chanel,"Purchase, the New-York HistoricalSociety, by exchange, 1984.Acc.n,: 1984.28a-c. © 2007.Image copyright The MetropolitanMuseum of Art/Art Resource/Sceüa,Florence.

Chanel 145

(1972[1913]: 30). As Loos (!966|1908I) exemplifies, this avoidance ofwhat was seen as outdated or unnecessary ornamentation also charac-terized contemporary architectural and interior designs. While, by con-trast, the "Camellia Brooches" designed for Chanel by Gripoix (Kodaand Bolton 2005: 178-9) are without doubt ornamental, the dramaticdifference of Chanel's look was that it confined ornament to what wewould now recognize as "accessories," thus crafting a more mobilebasic style with exchangeable extras. Chanel's use of costume jewelryand ropes of fake pearls (see Figure 2) suggest that good ornament wasa purposeful stylistic statement rather than a display of wealth. Whilethis is not as obviously true of dresses crafted from sequins, exceptionallaces, or tiers of tulle—and not only was real Chanel prohibitively ex-pensive but she did also design luxury evening wear—such designs addthe accessory of "luxury fabric" to what is otherwise a simple design.That is, ornament has the function of indexing a Chanel design to aparticular use or moment. Chanel's image, and thus the distributionof her work, emphasized a "total look." The Chanel woman was seento coordinate every element of her attire and lifestyle, from shoes todrinks, for which Chanel was the model as artist and artist as model.The Chanel look captured in Man Ray's 1935 photograph of the de-signer (see Figure 2) is such a moment of this hat and these pearls andthis cigarette and these bracelets, which also means it is this pose andthis attitude. What is often called modernist minimalism is actually anopenness to such assemblage rather than an ascetic approach to detail.

The famous 1925 Paris Exhibition des Arts Décoratifs^ after whichthe design category "Art Deco" was later named, featured Chanel andother fashion designers alongside architecture, furniture, and domesticdesign. Art Deco does exemplify Modernist art and design's preferencefor the geometric and the streamlined—the machinic—but always inrelation to movement and ilow. In Chanel's terms, movement within thefabric required softness that complemented the design's hard lines, andgive in the fabric belied her style's geometric edges by undermining thevisible structure. Chanel "blurred the boundaries of \sic\ the floti (dress-making) and the tailleur (tailoring) by applying the dressmaker's drapedeffects to her suits and coats and the tailor's pattern-driven precision toher dresses" (Koda 2005: 1 1 ). All this speaks to the mobility of and inChanel's designs. The Chanel look—for day or evening, work or play,motoring, shopping, or dining—was an active orientation in the world.Chanel was far from the only designer associated with this new activewoman. The overwhelming champion of women's tennis in the 1920s,Suzanne Lenglen, for example, was dressed by jean Patou. But by thelate 1920s, a typical fashion photograph was as likely to capture move-ment as it was a static pose—not only avoiding corseted and structuredstyles but also embracing the movement that was crucial to the Chanelwoman. "When photographed for the leading fashion journals of theday," Koda points out, "the models in their Chañéis run, pull back their


Figure 2Man Ray, "Gabrielle Chanei." 1935.© 2009 Man Ray Trust/AriislsPigiits Society (ARS). NY/ADAGP.Paris.

jackets, and plunge their hands Into their pockets, a clear counterpointto the static, stylized poses characteristic of the period" (2005: 12).

Wilson describes Chanel's designs—"Agile and full of movement"—as"the spirit of modernity and futurism" (2003: 41). Chanel's star statusand the timeliness of her designs were simultaneously imported intoproductions of timeliness, whether those were magazine pictorials, fash-ion parades, or rhe collaborative art projects for which Chanel designedcostumes: for example, for Le Ballet Russe's 1924 Le Train Bleu, botbnew sports and leisure travel were referenced by tbe costumes Chaneldesigned to complement Picasso's sets. In Chanel's mobile and stream-lined designs, like avant-garde art and aesthetics but also popular cul-ture and everyday life at the time (for example, in the rise of radio andcar cultures), we see the continued meaningfulness of an iconography ofthe machine. Indeed, if a house is a "machine for living in," as Le Cor-busier claimed in L'Esprit Nouveau (Le Corbusier et al. 1981(19211:86), tben fashion might aiso be described that way. Fashion as muchas modern architecture and design stresses the conjunction of machineand subject (see also Wigley 2001¡l995|). just as the ideal modernistcities (see Harvey 1989: 25-6) described networks of lives, and net-works of cultures intersecting them., so Chanel addressed a conceptionof the modern woman thr{)ugh fashion as technology.' Innovation atthis level affects something like Bourdieu's "habitus." 1 find the accountof habitus that is linked back to Gottfried Leibniz most useful here: "an

Chanel 147

agent's disposition to do something regularly but in a spontaneousway" (Shusterman 1999: 4). The changes we summarize as "Chanel"impacted not only on what people wore but on how often and in whatways people needed to change clothes., and how they could and woulddeport themselves—even how they might stand or walk. Habitus meansmore than recognizable expectations, describing influences on practiceand identity that exceed rules or reasoned judgment: influences basedin a learned disposition.'' If modernism is always a reflection on thepresent it continually refers to those elements that can be consigned tohabitus and, at the same time, those openings in which things as theyare might be ordered differently. This is precisely why Chanel should beunderstood as avant-garde. From Baudelaire to Chanel to Dick Hebdigeto Calvin Klein, modernist style Is the interplay of the personal with themasses—a relationship between singularity and field. And in the ap-parent irrationality of fashion's intervention in this relation we find itscapacity for heterology and for critical reflection on ourselves.

Commodity Art

If nineteenth-century trips to the theater or a ball were ways of map-ping what was being worn by people whose culture one was presumedto share or to want to emulate, the modernist emergence of movies andmagazines and mass-produced fashion apparently reversed this sense of"going to see." Benjamin's (1969[1929|) argument about mechanicalreproduction and art could be reintroduced here and gives us anotherperspective on why the Modernist Chanel can never be equal to themodernist "Chanel." The nineteenth-century designer Charles Worthperhaps, but certainly Chanel and her peers, attempted to invest clotheswith a value that could not be easily reproduced. Returning to the moreliteral example of Chanel as a corporate entity and a media image, boththe Chanel brand and Chanel's name function to invest "fashion" withsomething superficially like an aura (like that of movie stars). However,this "aura" claims to be almost reproducible if the cost can be met. Slm-mel argues, "the objects of fashion, embracing as they do the externali-ties of life, are particularly accessible to the mere possession of money"(2000[191I]: 190). Not despite but because o/" Chanel's rejection ofsome of the most visible elements of conspicuous consumption in dress,only Chanel herself can exactly have—or be consumed as having—theprecise Chanel style.

Chanel was a modern celebrity in the mode of the srars among whomshe moved. Figures like Cihanel and Man Ray exemplify an imaginedModernism populated by superstars and shameless self-promoters. Infact, the emergence of "high fashion" Is precisely the emergence of theauteur designer, a nineteenth-century history bound up, as traced byTroy, in the increasing role of mass production in the clothing industry.


The couturier expressed opposition to mass-produced clothing. Troyquotes Poiret: "1 am not commercial. Ladies come to me for a gown asthey go to a distinguished painter to get their portraits put on canvas.I am an artist not a dressmaker" (Troy 2003: 47). Nevertheless, in 1916,Poiret traveled to the USA to promote a new clothing collection intendedfor American women and described as "genuine reproductions'" (Troy2003: 302). Fashion produces a particular dialogue on the relation be-tween art and mass culture in the distinction between hiiute coutureand prêt-à-porter. Otber fields where Modernists worked across art andmass culture (for example in Bauhaus design or in Corbusier's expan-sion into furniture) do nor make this distinction so clearly. But as Troyargues in Couture Culture (2003), and Richard Martin had already sug-gested in C«f)ísmíiníiFiís^/on(1999), modernist fashion intersects withmodernist visual art in its approach to product differentiation and tothe merchandizing of taste as style.

Renato Poggioli (1968[19621) argues tbat fashion is in fact what en-ables the avant-garde to be seen and admired and thus also what defeatsit by inevitably drawing it into the mainstream. Hebdige (1979) makesa similar argument with reference to the co-option of "cutting edge"subcultural style by the popular mainstream and this similarity is di-rectly due to the extent to which Hebdige borrows bis idea of style fromModernist avant-gardism. Poggioli insists that the concept of artisticoriginality at stake in this dynamic is an entirely modern concept:

According to Baudelaire's clever paradox, the chief task of geniusis precisely to invent a stereotype ... the modernity of the stereo-type is worth emphasizing. The tacitly enunciated task of classicart was the splendid repetition of tbe eternal maxims of ancientwisdom; impossible, then, for it to conceive of the commonplacepejoratively ... Classical thinking on art admits of only a singlenegative category: the ugly ... the classical aesthetic, contrary tothe modern, was in no position to admit into the category of theugly those forms that might be said to have a not-new beauty.(Poggioli 1968[1962|:80-l)

As Rosalind Krauss (1985[1981j) has also argued, tbe attachment tooriginality so crucial to defining Modernism always requires a solip-sistic picture of the relationship between famous works and artists andtheir historical and social contexts. It also obscures the relation betweenart and the copy that was so pivotal to the iconic Modernists but ap-peared in the realm of fashion in very different ways because it had notbeen preceded there by the same history of Art.

Fashion thus has a privileged position when it conies to tbe art ofmodernism. The continual replacement and co-option of old avant-garde movements by "the new" defines avant-gardism as driven byfashion: spurning tbe masses but requiring an audience of like-minded

Chanel 149

"individuals" and spurning mere novelty while insisting on tbe new.

Troy argues that tbe work of hoth Marcel Ducbamp and Poiret circu-

lated around an uneasy distinction between tbe original work of art and

the mass-produced copy that comprises one of "tbe most recalcitrant

(and compelling)" problems "o f the modern period" (Troy 2003: 292).

While Duchamp's readymades extract art from the everyday, haute cou-

ture calls for tbe everyday to respond to its art. The relation between

tbe unique work of art and tbe copy is repeatedly given new inflection

by the way fasbion expresses botb similarity and difference, and it is

not tbe popularity of a style that leads to its devaluation in the realm of

fashion so much as its loss of specialization.

Wilson claims, " I t was perhaps Chanel who announced the death

knell for old-style couture" (2003: 89). In her famous Vogue interview

on reopening in 1953, Chanel declared: " I am no longer interested in

dressing a few hundred women., private clients; I shall dress thousands

of women. But . . . a widely repeated fashion, seen everywhere, cbeaply

produced, must start from luxury." Quoting this interview, Wilson

contitiues: "Soon the Chanel suit was being reproduced everywhere,

particularly in the United States, wbere, Cecil Beaton felt, it bad indel-

ihly stamped tbe American 'working gi r l ' of tbe fifties; while tbe brigbt,

sbarp Mary Quant style of the I 960s was really a marrying of the style

of the Chelsea art student witb Cbanel" (2003: 89). If ber particular

embrace of commodification shifted in Chanel's " re turn" it had always

linked her interdisciplinary work in fashion, theater, design, and adver-

tising tbrougb ber own name.

In general. Modernist avant-gardism is never opposed to branding

and selling its products and Jennifer Wickc itisists on the broad sig-

nificance of advertising to modernism, remarking that " i f advertising

did not literally bring about modern life, it may be its chief emblem,

a sign of tbe sign of tbe times" ( 1993: 593). Advertising is as modern

an art form as the newspaper or the photograph, and was not just

well placed to take advantage <»f modernism's emphasis on speed and

cphemerality but centrally helped produce tbat experience of moder-

nity. Tbus advertisers have quickly adopted tbe changing techniques of

modernist art—in fasbion as everywhere else—precisely because from

the outset tbey sbared a heavily stylized commitment to selling nov-

elty. The ground-breaking New York Armory show of 1913, featuring

many famous proponents of surrealism and dada, is reported to have

attracted "more than 10,000 visitors a day" (Harvey 1989: 28). Dra-

matically publicized by this sbow, Duchamp's (or Man Ray's) "ready-

mades" themselves comprised a kind of brand, matiifesting a particular

mode of consumption—Bicycle Wheel and iUuieau arc not in any literal

sense already "made" before tbey are taken up as art—and a fashion-

able style of Modernist art. Chanel's style was botb singularly hers and

a mass-producible model, an ideal image and a collectable set. She just

as often stressed tbe latter in advertisements, l inking ber designs to tbe


efficiency of streamlining associated with iconic slogans like "Less ismore" (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, quoted in Baudot 1992: 2-3). Troyalso compares Chanel to Corbusier in terms of their embrace of an "in-ternational style" that explicitly relied on the commodification of thatstyle. Certainly both Chanel and Corbusier, well before Andy Warhol,used their names to label a sphere of production that incorporated thework of others.

In 1926, French Vogue labeled the little black dress "a Ford signedChanel." Within the month, American Vogue reiterated: "The Chanel'Ford'—the frock that ail the world will wear—is model '817,' of blackcrêpe de Chine." The Ford image comprised style leadership, technolog-ical innovation, reliable repeatability, and the combination of all theseimages in that of "America." The Europeanness of Chanel makes thisan interesting conjunction. On both side of the Atlantic it worked asadvertising: she was Paris for the Americans and Ford for the French.Elizabeth Hawes' Fashion Is Spinach (1938) claimed that the USA was"the only country in the world which can produce garments in masses.Any woman in America can buy a Chanel dress for whatever amountshe has to spend" (1938: 120). But Hawes also understood such fashionas a middle-class copy of style: "Nobody ever told |the middle-classwoman] about style. She's fashionable,—God help her" (1938: 127).I have tried to suggest that Chanel's relationship to this conception ofauthentic style is complex but this, rather than her actunl designs, maybe Chanel's most radical legacy. She claimed, and her designs claim,that "Chanel is a style," but her explication that "A mode becomesdemoded. Style never does" (Troy 2005: 21; see also Davis 1994| 1992|:162) depends on a modernist context in which fashion and style canbe both entwined and opposed. Style, as recognizable and authorita-tive command of a particular historically changing repre.sentationalschema—whether painting, literature, dresb, or ways of living—couldonly be outmoded by fashion itself becoming redundant. But becauseher art needed to be fashionable, Chanel also embraced the possibilityof being "copied" as a verification of her originality.

To be communicated as style, a "lifestyle" must always refer to fash-ion and belong to an intensely present-tense set of distinctions. Likeall incarnations of "the New Woman," Chanel's version of her "gen-eration" was a lifestyle that combines attachments to commodities andpractices (such as bicycles or cars, shirt-waists or cigarettes, cocktailsor lipstick). While scholarship and commentary on Chanel understand-ably stresses the freedom of movement in her loose-fitting uncorseteddesigns, this "freedom" nevertheless still participated in the impositionof a fashionable body type and associated lifestyles. The body culturesthat emerged with modernism always intersected with fashion in thisway. In 1925, Rudolf Kayser could speak of the physical appearanceof European Americanism as a combination of body styles opposed tothe past even while they varied according to taste (1994[1925]: 395-7).

Chanei 151

In emerging discourses on health and fitness, in the physical educationof the nineteenth century merging with the mora! tenor and Zeitgeistpower of physical culture in the early twentieth, and In the glamorousaesthetics of modern ballet or sport that proposed new subjectivities,modernist body cultures express fashions in the body and clothing asentwined practices. Their coherence comes from their regulatory claims,rather than from the designs themselves, because the former not oniycould be copied but were disseminated with the imperative that theymust be copied if one was to be truly modern. Simmel concludes hisessay on fashion by claiming that, while the "seeds of its own death" areintrinsic to fashion, "this transitoriness does not degrade ¡t totally butactually adds a new attraction" (2000| 191 1 ): 192)—fashion's constitu-tive openness to reinvention. But modernist fashion also openly framesitself as ideological in order to ward off the image of its own ephemeral-ity. Fashion must make a claim at the level of habitus, whether it is aheterotopic i)ne or not.

Craik's caveat that icons of fashionable identity—such as the flapperin the 1920s—cannot simply be translated into assumptions about actuallives (Craik 1994: 75-6) is an important one. But it also presumes thatthe modern "lifestyle" involves wholesale adoption. It is possible, if notunavoidable, to have more tban one lifestyle. It is true that few womenwere "flappers,", but few women were untouched by the changes toimages of women's everyday lives and expectations that the flapper sig-nified. For example, by 1925-6, the first years of Chanel's iconic "littleblack dress," it was widely presumed by popular and public culture thatthe bobbed-hair girl was everywhere. Some employers would not hirewomen with bobbed hair, but while public voices debated whether theywere immoral, radical, foolishly derivative, or just the new common-place, women also bobbed their hair to get a fashionable job or ¡ust tobe seen in a fashionable style. Bobbed hair signaled not only "flapper"but a recognizable position in relation to the range of ways of livingavailable to women. Bobbed hair belonged to clubs, dancing, motor-cars, and cocktails; identified artists, scholars, and professional or busi-ness women; was a recognized declaration of independence in which theavant-garde bohème met acceptable style.

iThe Order of Things

Discussing the Exposition culture that appeared in the late nineteenthcentury and expanded in the early twentieth, Tom Gunning claims thatthe dominant discourse of modernity "is not only one of innovation,but precisely one of novelty, maximising the dazzling experience ofthe new" (2004: 43). Most studies of fashion emphasize just such aconstitutive process of renovation and novelty. However, Gunning alsonotes that in these Expositions, "the carefully arranged lay-out of space

152 Catherine Driscoli

and the logic of form and color in the architecture, evoke cultural as-sociations and determine the temporal and spatial unfolding of vistasand patterns" (2004: 43). While this may contribute to a novelty effectby tbe combination of particulars, the elements themselves are alreadyknown—as the phrase "evoke cultural associations" makes clear. Theyrely on a preexisting order of things. This provides a new perspectiveon how the set of changes we give the shorthand "Chanel" reorderedthe expected forms of fashion to foreground new possibilities. Ratherthan avant-garde, then. I want to try out another term for this Chanel;heterotopic.

In The Order of Things, Foucault uses the term "heterotopic" tosignify an "other" ordering, an apparently disorderly order. Fashionclearly has Utopian forms, such as the modernist dress reform move-ments (see Wilson 2003: 208-27), but like all utopias they work only in-sofar as they do not come into being. In his lecture "Of Other Spaces,"Foucault reuses the concept of heterotopia to distinguish sites where"all the other real sites which can be found within the culture are si-multaneously represented, contested, and inverted" (1986[1967|: 24).Heterotopic fashion might form a particularly interesting juxtapositionwith "the Utopia of the mirror" (1986[1967]: 24): a place, rather thana non-place, where the self is reflected and suspected at once. This is aconcept worth pursuing because, while fashion is not a site in the samesense as the garden, theater, or cemetery, and nor does it have the appar-ent institutional stability of those spaces, it is "a simultaneously mythicand real contestation of the space in which we live" (1986[1967]: 24),requiring, on the one hand, certain efforts and "rituals" to enter andinstalling, on the other, "hidden exclusions" (1986(1967]: 26). Consid-ering the move from hétéroclite to heterotopic in The Order of Things(1973(19661) and the above lecture (1986[1967]), it seems that het-erotopic fashion would fail to fit, but still exist within, present fashioncategories and, at the same time, gesture to another place, order, andhistory. Chanel's reordering of the fashion system is not directed to-ward any particular transformation but rather brings into question howelements like "women," "dress," "trenchcoat," and "Chanel" are inan everyday way distinguished (or not) in relation to each other. Thephrases "she dressed for tbe evening" and "she put on a work dress"mean something different after Chanel because the possibility of dis-tinguishing a work dress from an evening dress is problematized and,just as significantly, because distinguishing "dressed" from "put on" nolonger works in the same way.

Foucault's early examples of the hétéroclite and heterotopia are re-vealing here and include the illogicality of Jorge Luis Borges' "ChineseEncyclopedia," the incoherent patterns of an "aphasie" sorting coloredskeins, and the surrealist aphorism from Comte de Lautréamont viaAndré Breton: "Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machineand an umbrella on a dissecting table" (Foucault 1973|1966]: v-viil).

Chanel 153

These examples are linked by the impossibility of finding a locus forordering, and thus knowing, them. The "table where, for an instant,perhaps forever, the umbrella encounters the sewing-machine" makesstrange the "table, a tabula, that enables thought to operate upon theentities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes,to group them according to names that designate their similarities andtbeir differences" (Foucault 1973[ 19661: xvii). To tbese terms together,we might say that while the hétéroclite is disorder that seems to have nohabitus (no knowable place in which it makes sense), the beterotopic istbe presence of disorder within the habitus. Thus Chanel does not haveto shock after the fashion of James Joyce's Finnegans ^ake in order toconstitute, at least for a time, a disruptive order.

Foucauir foregrounds surrealism here because it surprises by prob-lematizing tbe meanings classification gives to objects. In saying thisI make room for the claim that surrealism comprises a set of gameswith meaning rather than a movement that is now finished. F\enBreton never settled on one manifesto for it. The art of Claude Cahun,Hans Bellmer or Cindy Sherman works by defamiliarizing or disturb-ing expected modes of representation: by staging in new media or newaesthetic frames the styles and poses proliferating around them or thefoundational components of those styles. And it is with Cahun in par-ticular, but also Sherman because, as Steele points out, many modernistinnovations are still contemporary for us, that I see an apt comparisonfor Chanel. While many of Cahun and Sherman's most famous imagesare striking for their familiarity against the grain of habit rather thanfor any shock value, they work by disrupting but remaining within tbeexisting order. For botb gender and fashion are clearly intersecting lan-guages for identity. While not as confrontational as Cabun, Chanel'scross-gender references contribute to the popular ground on whichSherman works, including tbose self-portraits in which she posed as ayoung man. In Cahun's self-portraits and Sherman's Unritled Film Stills,a familiar image has a cutting edge because of some framing dislocation.In Chanel the regularity we seek from fashion is twisted by includingonly highly acceptable elements but excluding the literal representationof capital that made fashion sense.

The violent edge of surrealism still present in Sherman also movedalong other trajectories in the twentieth century and touched other het-erotopic forms. When Hebdige takes up Claude Lévi-Strauss' bricoleurto talk about the way youth culture styles open new symbolic spaces bymisrepresentation, he does so by making a direct comparison betweenpunk and surrealism, seeing in the punk style sometbing heterological.Hebdige's punks provided "self-conscious commentaries on the notionsof modernity and taste" (1979: 107).They not only appropriated "com-modities by placing them in a symbolic ensemble which served to eraseor subvert their original straight meanings" (Hebdige 1979: 104), theyalso disturbed by ostentatiously refusing to fit into the world they drew


on and, at least for a time, gestured to some otber place where tbeymigbt make sense. As it appears in fashion the disturbance of expectedorders, and even of common sense, is crucial to the humor still huiltinto haute couture. But even the illogicality of haute couture dependson opening up fashion's possibilities for representing not tbe body oridentity so much as life. And tbe interplay of recognition and disruptionis more important here than the cycle of death and renewal often usedto discuss fasbion.

In an essay representative of many discussions of contemporaryfashion, Steele claims that, between 1950 and 2000, fashion was trans-formed utterly, "fragmented into hundreds of competing looks—whatTed Polhemus calls 'style tribes.'" (Steele 2000: 7) Steele follows thisclaim with a discussion of the ways in which Polhemus's focus on youth/street styles can be adapted to find adult "style tribes, epitomized bydifferent fashion labels" (Steele 2000: 7). This "stylistic proliferation"means that no new encompassing "Look" can now be launched forany fashion season and any such claisii would be met by ridicule basedin tbe "antifashion" sentiment now thought to be a characteristic ofpostmodernity (Steele 2000: 7-9). This postmodern version of design-ers as barometers rather than originators—examples include Quantand André Courrèges (Steele 2000: 10)—is distinguished from the greatModernist names by stressing its debt to youth/street style, but whetheror not this argument for a "break" could be countered by talking aboutthe relation between Chanel and tbe flappers, sports stars, and shopgirlsaround her ends up being irrelevant. Steele closes this essay with an ap-propriate reprise of the continuity within which the emergence, instal-lation, and critique of Modernism remains modernist: "fashion itselfremains alive and well, always new, always changing" (Steele 2000: 20).The youthful look of the 1960s in many ways reprised the youthful lookof the 1920s and was just as readily displaced by more exotic and thenmore tailored "work-related" styles in ongoing conversations betweensociety and personal style. But cycle is the wrong way to talk aboutfashion because of its simultaneous dependence on continuity and dis-ruption. Fasbion enables a culture of ongoing consumption in whicbclothes are not built to be worn for years, howt-ver "classic" they claimto be, but rather take part in a system where particular components ormotifs are redeployed repeatedly.

All this comes after, it seems, "the end of style and the death ofthe subject" (Jameson 2002: .5) presumed tt) mark the end of Mod-ernism. But, as Jameson points out, "museums and the art galleriescan scarcely function" without a modernist sense of the "new" predi-cated on innovative style (2002: 5), and Chanel has clearly been in-stalled as a Modernist classic in the realm of fashion—still succeedingfirst of al! on the grounds of a recognizable style that is just disruptiveenough to generate excitement but clearly functioning within the pres-ent system. In Chanel's "classic" fashionable look we find a refusal

Chanel 155

and an overt framing of the way fashion works to foreground timeas passing. "Fashion (as we conceive of it today)," Barthes explains,"rests on a violent sensation of time" (2005I1967I: 106), but this timecan nevertheless be articulated differently. In an essay on Courrèges,Bartbes argued that "From Chanel to Courrèges, the grammar of ti-mescales changes" (2005|1967|: 107); that time is a style for Chanel,but a fashion for Courrèges (2005|1967|: 107). Chanel, he contends,merely "varies" the same model from one line to the next like a musicaltheme (2005[ 19671: 106). Chanel's designs are thus "classic" fashionsin an exclusively modernist sense: they both emphasize their timelinessand claim to be timeless. What retains present usefulness or currencyfrom outside the now of fashion is a "classic," whether in literature,clothing, or music. One ongoing implication of "the classic," then, isthat it will not pass away except in always being past in some sense.And this pastness requires that the classic belong to a (closed) order.Like the Modernist canon more generally, all "classics" are rhetoricallypositioned as part of an order that cannot be reordered, despite allevidence to the contrary (the Modernist canon has never been stable inany medium). And this is the form of Chanel's Modernism that bringsher into museum culture and becomes part of a sometimes nostalgicsometimes politically and aesthetically fraught narrative about the clo-sure of modernism itself.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Prudence Black for her comments on a draft of this articleand to the Museum of Modern Art, Scala, Man Ray Trust, ADAGP, andthe Artist Rights Society for permission to reproduce images.

Notes

1. My Modernist Cultural Studies (Driscoll 2009) argues at length thatthe relationship between modernism and Cultural Studies is muchmore specific than an intellectual inheritance within a broad Westerntradition. Drawing on the work of writers like Foucault, RaymondWilliams, and Jameson, it finds in Cultural Studies the ongoingthread of a critical attitude best understood as "modernism." Thisarticle draws on that discussion, and in particular on Chapter 5 ofthat text.

2. Chanel's working-girl look seems to fit the exceptional stylishness ofsome working girls on screen particularly well and thus the make-over plots of Hollywood film. But there was no enormous gulf to bearticulated by a transformation from one style of dress to anotherwithin the Chanel look and her one foray into Hollywood design

156 Catherine Driscoil

(in 1931 for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.) was largely unsuccessful,although notable for being Gloria Swanson's first "talkie."

3. Technologies are always experienced as exchanges between theeveryday and novelty, a recognition that can be used to rethink fash-ion's relation to both consistency and novelty. A related frame ofreference for thinking about fashion as a technology is Foucault's"Technologies of the Self" (1988). While it lacks the same rela-tion to institutional power as "confession" and other technologiesidentified by Foucault, there are disciplinary effects disseminated byexpertise on and normalization of fashion. Craik's chapter on "Tech-nical Bodies and Technologies of the Self" explores some of theseconnotations.

4. Though often critiqued as overly deterministic and unreflective (seeButler and Bohman's essays in Shusterman's 1999 collection), habi-tus does not conceptually exclude the possibility of change or cri-tique. As Taylor explicates, "A bodily disposition is a habitus whenit encodes a certain cultural understanding. The habitus in this sensealways has an expressive dimension. It gives expression to certainmeanings that things and people have for us, and it is precisely bygiving such expression that it makes those meanings exist for us"(199911993]: 42).

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