In this article, a photo story depicting "white trash" subjects in the act of defying middle-class proprieties of dress and manners serves as a case study for a critical exploration of the ...performative registers through which working-class bodies figure as agents of social sedition in the visual economy of fashion. The unglamorous and confrontational bodies in Memory-shot by Alexei Hay and Justine Parsons for Dutch in 2000-enact a parody of professional fashion models by exhibiting an exuberant, uncontained sexuality that cuts against the codes of "good taste" and decorum. The photo spread epitomizes how the vernacular aesthetic of "white trash" has been embraced by independent fashion magazines in order to unsettle the normative aesthetics associated with high fashion imagery and, more broadly, mainstream visual culture. Engaging with Giorgio Agamben's reflections on gesture and profanation, the article discusses the political effect of an overperformance of corporeality through prosaic, bawdy gestures and argues that the unboundedness of the bodies in the photo spread represents an affront to the capitalist regime of productivity from which these bodies are excluded. Finally, it highlights the contribution of the aesthetic category of "white trash" to the troubling of the representational conventions within the genre of editorial fashion photography and calls for a politically committed rethinking of the aesthetic consumption of fashion images.
This essay theorizes the fashion photographic image as a privileged site for queer sensory experience. It takes the stance that the aesthetic engagement with the fashion image occurs through ...sensation, and more precisely, through a haptic and periperformative experience that activates desires, meanings, and fantasies. Through the circulation of feelings sparked via the sensorial experiencing of the photo, queer subjects can sense belongings and form affiliations that bind them in an egalitarian community of sense exceeding sexual and social differences. A queer theory of fashion photography does not posit that the photographic image may foster propositional knowledge in the viewers, but rather that it moves them to engage corporeally with the image and triggers their imagination to configure new affective modes of being in the world.
This article is an analysis of critical fashion practices in Israel/Palestine based on interviews conducted with two design teams: Israeli-Palestinian brand ADISH and Palestinian brand tRASHY. These ...two brands share a commitment to fashion design and fashion image-making as tools of community building: a project that goes hand in hand with a rethinking of systems of production and labor. The aesthetic and political dimension of their practices, however, are inevitably marked by the different experiences and positionalities (as Israelis or Palestinians) of their respective founders. I situate their creative practices in the wake of the post-Oslo Accords and suggest that such practices should be understood as part of a broader creative solidarity movement that contests nationalism, oppression, and separation. The affective labor involved in the development of community-building design projects, the cooperative creative process, and the generation of capital used to support local female workers as well as refugee and/or LGBTQ populations in Palestine are the constituents of a larger grassroots mobilization aimed at fostering change. This article contributes to ongoing scholarly work on art practices of world-making and explores how fashion could provide a stage for rethinking both the aesthetic and the political in a contested sociopolitical landscape.
In the face of commercial fashion photography's contribution to the shaping of the gendered public fantasy of the child, this article quarries, through a perspective shaped by queer affect theory, ...the kinds of figurations that in independent fashion magazines have stimulated alternative ways of thinking and feeling in relation to children. The case study, or scene, through which this analysis is conducted is 'Juweeltje,' a fashion editorial spread shot by feminist photographer Cornelie Tollens for Dutch magazine in 1995. In the midst of a controversial period dominated by collective media anxiety and moral panic around child pornography, and underpinned by conservative sentimentalising efforts to safeguard the Child, Dutch, an independent fashion magazine published between 1994 and 2002, grappled with such discourses by forging a visual trajectory for rethinking childhood through a queer affective prism. This article ultimately seeks to animate discussions around queer childhood and expand the current affective taxonomies associated with the child by unearthing the rich affective scenarios enacted by feminist fashion photography.
On Sequins and Shit Filippello, Roberto
Third text,
01/2021, Volume:
35, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article explores the work of theorist, activist, and performer Mario Mieli through the lens of fashion, unearthing the central function that radical dress occupies in his gay communist project. ...I focus in particular on how, within Mieli's queer utopianism, radical transvestism operates as an ethico-political praxis with the purpose of challenging capitalism and liberating Eros. On the one hand, fashion is condemned by Mieli with arguments attuned to those used by the Frankfurt School against the culture industry. On the other, dress - intended as a signifier of politicised self-fashioning - emerges as a force incorporated by the crossdresser to establish modes of intersubjectivity rooted in polymorphous desire as well as collective forms of resistance against the Norm. For Mieli, critique is corporeally embodied. On this ground, dress permits the material articulation of embodied critical instances of queer insurrection. I conclude by explaining why, within Mieli's transsexual utopia, crossdressing should be read in alignment with non-normative sexual practices such as coprophagy.
On Sequins and Shit Filippello, Roberto
Third text,
01/2021, Volume:
35, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article explores the work of theorist, activist, and performer Mario Mieli through the lens of fashion, unearthing the central function that radical dress occupies in his gay communist project. ...I focus in particular on how, within Mieli's queer utopianism, radical transvestism operates as an ethico-political praxis with the purpose of challenging capitalism and liberating Eros. On the one hand, fashion is condemned by Mieli with arguments attuned to those used by the Frankfurt School against the culture industry. On the other, dress – intended as a signifier of politicised self-fashioning – emerges as a force incorporated by the crossdresser to establish modes of intersubjectivity rooted in polymorphous desire as well as collective forms of resistance against the Norm. For Mieli, critique is corporeally embodied. On this ground, dress permits the material articulation of embodied critical instances of queer insurrection. I conclude by explaining why, within Mieli's transsexual utopia, crossdressing should be read in alignment with non-normative sexual practices such as coprophagy.
This article addresses fashion photographs as a site for the visualization and mobilization of affects. It concentrates on the visual strategies that are employed to enact affective states that can ...be read and felt in an image and are manifested through postures, gestures, facial expressions, and clothing. By intertwining Roland Barthes's notes on the neutral with Lauren Berlant's work on flat affect, in my analysis of “Paradise Lost”—a fashion editorial spread shot by Steven Klein for Dutch magazine in 2002 and inspired by a documentary with the same title from 1996—I redeploy the concept of disaffection in terms of queer neutrality and think of its relation with queerness as a way to attend to the performative potential of affect in order to reconfigure styles of being together that collide with rhetorical protocols of emotional intelligibility.
This article proposes a critical reading of the photographic work of Hedi Slimane (Paris, FR, 968-) by teasing out the relation between his photographic (dis-) engagement with his subjects and the ...employment of an impersonal style of affect. I begin with an overview of the emergenceof the fashion creative director as a stardom figure at the turn of the 21st century, and I proceed with an inquiry into the auteurial iconography fabricated by Slimane in the last ten years. Tackling the intricate bond of style and masculinity against the backdrop of queer theoretical concerns,I offer an analysis of his main photographic anthologies from the last ten years. I conclude with a reflection on Slimane’s self-narratives in the context of the relationship between biography and historiography.
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