Abstract
This chapter connects the rise of literary history in the Romantic age with the ambiguous place of history in fashion “authorship.” Drawing from Foucault’s account of the eighteenth-century divergence of scientific and literary authorship (and the new insistence that “every text of poetry or fiction […] state its author and the date, place, and circumstance of its writing”), I consider how fashion authorship differently complements literary production. Fashion’s weaker author function typically licenses the appropriation of older styles without much regard to provenance. But recent developments—particularly in the work of the designer Martin Margiela, who systematically deconstructs authorship via exacting replications of past styles and self-effacing returns to the intrinsic capacities of clothing materials—bring these questions of authorship and history full circle.
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Notes
- 1.
There are certainly relatively straightforward metaphorical applications of Foucault’s thinking to the material makings of artists, for instance, but in the lecture Foucault himself focuses carefully upon privileged moment(s) of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, and literature, or in the history and philosophy of science (115).
- 2.
In the case of the United States’ legal system, Foucault’s perspective is particularly significant, because (in contrast to authors who write) fashion designers receive no copyright protection as the “authors” of merely utilitarian objects. A significant consequence is the much more robust ecosystem of borrowing in fashion. See, for instance, Johanna Blakley.
- 3.
On an important early historical episode of fashion authorship, as distributed between Marie Antoinette and the “first couturier” Rose Bertin, see Caroline Weber’s chapter “The Pouf Ascendant.”
- 4.
I do not mean to suggest that fashion is fully unique in this respect, but rather that the intensification of general marketplace pressures in fashion (similar in kind to the commercial pressures evident in literary authorship from the eighteenth century) leads to especially acute and inescapable self-consciousness about these factors.
- 5.
Vintage and retro fashion can of course summon vague notions of a time of origin, but part of my point is that this works nothing like Margiela’s much more precise identification of the details of its original production.
- 6.
In this case the elusive garment further redoubles the elusive history of the eighteenth-century atrocity in the aftermath of the 1745–46 Jacobite Rebellion that McQueen references in the title.
- 7.
Notably, Margiela never appeared at his own fashion shows, a feature of the anti-authorship he practiced that I will discuss in the following section.
- 8.
See especially Evans, “Golden Dustman.” The title of the exhibition 9/4/1615 refers, respectively to the nine years’ work (eighteen semi-annual collections) from which Margiela recreated the designs; the four days the gowns spent in greenhouses to facilitate the growth of the mold and bacteria; and the number of hours’ duration of the exhibition (over the course of about two and a half months).
- 9.
The exhibition itself was preceded by laboratory experiments in the application of various bacteria, mold, and yeasts to sample garments.
- 10.
Evans fascinatingly explores the inversions of death and life in the exhibition. As against the ordinary case where “the living woman wears inorganic fashion” (and so evokes Walter Benjamin’s sense of the inorganic nature of dress as deathliness), here, “the mannequin (deathly specter …), rather than the living woman, … models the organic, in the form of molds, yeasts, and bacteria. The mannequin cannot reproduce but the dress is weirdly fecund, having acted as the growing medium for the molds and bacteria”; and “the living dress is worn by the tailor’s dummy” (“Golden Dustman” 91).
- 11.
On this problem, see Andrew Piper.
- 12.
As Nick Groom notes, a facsimile page of the supposed medieval manuscript was appended to the printed edition of Chatterton’s Rowley poems “displaying extravagantly archaic calligraphy, exotic Gothic lettering, and featuring illustrations of two heraldic shields” (279). See also Haywood.
- 13.
Partly in response to the recent explosion of digital and quantitative approaches to literary studies, there has been a proliferation of new scholarly work attending to the material stories of individual copies of literary texts and to material traces of the reading and use habits of ordinary persons. Notable examples include Aileen Douglas’s considerations of “the interaction of manual writing and print,” including the engraved facsimiles of script and autographs; Deidre Lynch’s examinations of collected “scraps” and archival blank books in her ongoing project “Paper Slips”; and Leah Price’s meditations on the many object-life fates of printed books.
- 14.
Margiela’s array of humble, ordinary, or abject materials is fascinatingly broad—ranging from “second-hand or army surplus clothing” (Evans , “Golden Dustman” 81), to broken pottery and plastic bags, to the components of his thrift-shop ensembles, like a dress made of haircombs, or various vests made of old belts, wigs, ski-gloves, playing cards, etc.
- 15.
The interlocutor I cite is Isobel Armstrong, in her prepublication review of Brown’s book.
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Campbell, T. (2020). “Style Description: / Provenance: / Period:”: Martin Margiela, Fashion Authorship, and Romantic Literary History. In: Egan, G. (eds) Fashion and Authorship. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26898-5_14
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