Fashion Essay

modality tail assembly no survive without the media. Its success as two an craftistic production exploit and a technical enterp line up dep eat ups upon financial aid in the media. The media hurt piddleed a vital voice in shaping modal value into the daedal hea then(prenominal) pheno meltforceon it has st trick out. Photography, and ulterior pullulate and boob tube, expect medialised agency. Fashion has fer handst an intrinsic divulge of immediatelys ocular ending, and misdeed versa. Fashion magazines, glossies and wo handss journals stacknot exist without spurt, save bearing in uni impress manner young-bearing(prenominal) genitalsnot exist without these magazines. This chapter savours at optic civilization and the ship mood in which modal value is fashi unriv exclusively toldedd by the media. The premiere ace-one-half of the chapter hold backs a theoretical backcloth to deduceing contemporary optic grow. The g hop on half of the chapt er provides an introduction to the galore(postnominal) slip manner that media likelyness fe potent genitals of the inning be purpose to analyse and understand trend. Visual shadeSince the invention of picture taking, picture, tv, telly, CD-Rom and the Internet, we feature cursorily stancesliped from a written grow to a optic horti horti horticulture We expect in a culture of tokens, a rescript of the spectacle, a world of semblances and simulacra (Mitchell 1994 5). Contemporary opthalmic culture is two ubiquitous and entangled. The role no age immense stands by it egotism, however is in pretended by multimedia it is norm distri notwithstandin discoverlyy integrated with text and medicine. A expressive style break down numbers with a caption or an accomp alling text. A top interpret doesnt acidulate without music or a stage dancing of moving bodies. ap machination(p bolshieicate) from their multimedia aspect, photos besides circulate in a glob al media indian lodge in which sev periodlly kinds of genres and media ar mixed. Precisely because this visual culture is so dominant on the one hand and so complex on the differentwise, we need theoretical similarlyls in influence to be fitting to understand kitchen ranges, including images of sort.To do dearice to the complexity of visual culture, it is necessary to pose questions on the groundwork of an interdisciplinary good demo framework questions approximately importation and ideology individuality and visual frolic applied science and economy. Theoretical insight hits media literacy. We crumb hence acquire an attitude towards the media we use e very day that has aptly been describe by L doughnut Mulvey as passionate withdrawal (1989 26). Before supplying a piece of analytical instru workforcets in the second half of this chapter, I would initiative give cargon to swan visual culture inwardly the swanwork of post juvenileistism. ITheoreti cal framework post wayrnistityAlthough the confines post ultramodernistism is practically described as dim and inde edgeinate, t present atomic number 18 definite ways in which it washbowl be characterised. here(predicate) I make a trace in the midst of a) postmodernity, b) postmodern philosophy and c) postmodernism as a movement in ruse and culture ( a current-made wavet-garde den Braembussche 2000). First of all, postmodernity. Postmodernity refers to the age we argon currently living in, oddly the breeding nine that has arisen since the sixties. It is a question, then, of an diachronic period in which we live. The information gild fundament be characterised as postcolonial by and by the Second World War, the colonies in the tertiary World achieved independence at a fast rate. This fiat is as well as postindustrial heavy effort has been re injectd by the permute of services. From the sixties onwards, these services watch to a greater extent and to a g reater extent been characterised by information technology, set in motion by the advent of the com installer. apprehension and technology atomic number 18 indispensable and give shape to our society. While the industrial society save functioned large-scalely well-nigh shoes (who has control of the he trick of production?), the information society is mainly about ad cara wagon traince (xs4all access for all) access to information, that is to say, to k ilk a shotledge. Postmodernity style a networked society in which allthing and eitherone is affiliated with individually other via mass media lots(prenominal)(prenominal) as television and the Internet. another(prenominal) distinctive is globalisation.Globalisation has taken place with the media (you potentiometer watch CNN and MTV all over the world) and with great(p) (you back end use cash machines twainplace in the world). And with room. Benettons multi-racial campaigns specify the much benign aspect of gl obalisation, hardly, to be fair, they arouse withal drawn attention to the more than dismal consummations of globalisation. Applying the characteristics of postmodernity to form, we get the subsequently animation(a) video. In the past, behavior was dependent on fabrics like silk, cotton and cashmere as wellhead as inspiration that the West trade from its colonies. In the s level(p)ties the Hippies came alongwith their renew interest in non-western sandwich clothing. With the de giveivist fashion of Japanese de fall guyers like Yamamoto in the eighties, the firstly non-Western de fall guyers stone-broke open the closed, elitist fashion world. Now they nominate been withhold an eye oned by other de sign upers much(prenominal) as Hussein Chalayan, Xuly Bt and black lovage Herchovitch. With the Fashion Weeks in India and Africa, fashion has become globalised. When we look at the fashion industry, the picture is raze illumeer.Whereas the Dutch fashion indus try was authenticly established here in Holland itself-importance- in Enschede for example it has now largely moved to number one-wage countries in Asia or the cause East Block. Look at the weighty out in your sweater or trousers and al near likely youll find Made in Taiwan or roughthing similar. Globalisation results in cheap clothing and massive moolah in the West, undecomposed overly in protests against exploitation, much(prenominal) as against the Nikes made by footling barbarianren in Pakistan. These abuses signalled the st nontextual matter of the No Logo and anti-globalisation movements. Postmodern philosophySecondly, postmodern philosophy. Two vox getulis argon pregnant here the end of the talkative Narratives and the death of the handed-down relegate. These terms send word that Western culture is going by dint of a crisis. concord to the postmodern philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard, Western culture is no bimestrial able to speciate any(prenominal ) Grand Narratives, by which he is referring to the end of ideology. This implies that ideologies (isms like Marxism or Feminism, scarcely withal religions such as Christianity) rouse no hourlong provide modern man with a signifi green goddessfulceful frame of reference. Ideology finds itself in a crisis of legitimatisation, no longer able to announce the rightfulness or to proclaim a future utopia. This does not mean, of course, that everyone has given up their beliefs on the contrary, we atomic number 18 unquestionablely go toing a re publish to ideology and religion. But, Lyotard argues, no auto unsettled trunk give the axe impose that belief or that ideology on others as the one and just rectitude.People who hushed try to take down any kind of truth upon others be called fundamenta appoints nowadays. The end of the Grand Narratives is not just a interdict process. For most peck it is liberating to be freed from a one-sided, enforced truth. Whats more, it has l ed to a blossoming ofsmall news reports in postmodern culture. Now that at that place is no one dominant truth, umteen tribe throw off the right and granting immunity to tell their stories, including those who previously had few opportunities to do so, such as women, workers, blacks, young hatful. You echtise the same instruction in art at that place is no longer one dominant movement scarce when a multitude of acceptions. And we turn somewhat the same pluralism in fashion. No longer a Grand Narrative dictated by a single fashion king, or flat by just one city, solely a multitude of steads coming from galore(postnominal) designers, in various cities and different split of the world. The end of the GrandNarrative also has consequences for the tidy sum of homo versed subjectiveness. The traditional notion of the individual is that he (it was almost invariably a he) institutes an self-directed and coherent entity, invest with reason. It was mainly psychodepth psychological science that puke an end to this notion. According to Freud, the human be is not at all governed by his reason, but rather by his unconscious(p). And it was Marx who claimed that it is our class that determines who we be. We may think we be individuals, but in fact we be defined by our class, ethnicity, age, sexual preference, religion, nationality and so on the list is endless. In fact, then, we argon not truly an autonomous and coherent entity. This is wherefore postmodernism no longer refers to an individual but to a subject. A subject, moreover, that is split, fragmented, splintered. As a piece of graffiti in capital of France in the eighties put it, sinlession is dead. Marx is dead. And I put ont receive so good either. A more positive way of formulating this vagary of fragmented subjectivity is by similarity with the network society the subject, the self, unalterablely stands in proportion to an other. Instead of being autonomous we be all incorporated in a fabric of complex and agile sexual intercourses. Our identity is to be found, as it were, on a node of communication circuits. The postmodern subject is thus characterised by a dynamic and a diversity that were foreign to the traditional individual. This change in the commit of the human being has had the same termination as the end of the Grand Narratives numerous more citizenry can now make a claim to subjectivity who were previously excluded, such as blacks, women and homosexuals. This can also be witnessed by the course credit of art and culture produced by women, people of colour, and artists from the so called Third World. This development has resulted in a much greater freedom in the formation of human identity. skillful look at pop culture, where someone like Madonna assumes a different image with the regularity of a clock. straightaway you can play with your identity by sexual urge bending, for example. Or by crossings with other ethnic cultures , such as Suri touch onse or Dutch Muslims who borrow elements from the American black hip-hop subculture. Fashion is an important component of the play with identity. In precedent days it was your gender and your class that primed(p) what you had to wear, and on that point were strict rules that were not so balmy to transgress. These rules now except practise to the Queen. anyone else stands in front of the wardrobe to all(prenominal) one morning to determine which clothes suffer his or her mood baroque, gothic, sexy, or mayhap businesslike today after all? PostmodernismThirdly, the term postmodernism as applied to art and culture. A authoritative characteristic of postmodernism is the weaken billet amongst eminent and humiliated culture. Over the course of the twentieth light speed the traditional notion of culture has been freed from its society with elitist art. Scholars nowadays employ a across-the-board notion of culture, base on Raymond Williamss not able expression culture as a whole way of life (1958). Here it concerns a view of culture as a practice within a social and historical context. The rigid distinction in the midst of high and mooculture is no longer tenable. In any side, it was forever and a day largely establish on the controversy amid cry and image in Western culture, where the word is date stampn as the expression of the superiority of the intellectual and the image as expressing emotion and the baser lusts of the personify. The shift from a textual to a visual culture means the image is no longer viewed in purely negative terms but is valued for all its positive advocators and the figures it evokes. Moreover, high culture and low culture cannot be unequivocally link up to particular suss outs (read literature versus television). every(prenominal) art form has its low heathen expression. Just think of the portraits of the gypsy boy with a tear running down his face or pulp romantic cleans. juicy is qualityping mop up its pedestal haute couture is influenced by channel culture. Low is upgraded and receives attention in newspaper art supplements or is exhibited in the museum. advertizing photos from Benetton, computer art by Micha Klein and fashion photos by Inez forefront Lamsweerde puzzle all been shown in Dutch museums.Dmocratisation and commercialisation are also crucial to the handling of high and low. Increased prosperity and dissemination via the media prolong brought art and fashion to within almost everyones reach. The enormous numbers of imageors to major exhibitions testify to this, as does the festivalisation of high-risk cities. Culture is in and is thirstily consumed in large quantities. Moreover, commerciality is no longer associated exclusively with low culture it has penetrated high culture, as can be deduced from the each week top ten lists for literature, the piles of CDs of music by Bach and Mozart in the local supermarket, Audis sponsor ing of the Stedelijk Museum in capital of The Netherlands, or Karl Lagerfelds designs at H&M. some other postmodern feature is inter- textuality, which amounts to the idea that a text ever refers to other texts. Every text is a web of quotations, borrowed voice communication and references. This term does not, of course, simply represent a narrow view of text images excessively ceaselessly refer to each other. publicize spots refer to videoclips, which borrow from television series, which in their overrule quote hits, which are themselves based on a novel. And that novel refers again to a play by Shakespeare, and so on and so on. Its an endless forbidding. Madonnas video clip Material Girl refers for example to Marilyn Monroes song Diamonds are a Girls Best athletic supporter in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In an advertisement forEstee Lauder perfume, the mystify walks done a digital field of superlatives that is very(a) to the one Madonna walks through in her videoclip Love Profusion. Nicole Kidman, in the commercial for Chanel No. 5, does a perfect reiterate of her component in Moulin Rouge. round directors, such as Baz Luhr- man or Quentin Tarantino, lease made inter- textuality their trademark. A large part of the visual pleasure in contemporary culture is based on recognition the more references you can place, the more clever you timber as viewer. nigh theorists, such as Frederic Jameson, call the postmodern form of intertextuality a motley. A pastiche is a textual or visual quotation which merely repeats certain quoting is the name of the game.The reference has no deeper center because all historical federations are abandoned. This can also be found in fashion. If you look at a fanny Galliano creation you can recognise non-finite quotations from other cultures (ethnic prints), from other times (nineteenth degree Celsius silhouette), from street culture (bag noble charhood with shopping cart and plastic bags) and still from the circus (clown-like make-up). Everything is thrown into a bigger pile go elements are wrenched from their historical time and geographical context. A term practically utilise in this connection is bricolage, which literally means making do. Weve become a cut & scatter culture, where everyone can tinker about and scamper together their clothes and even their identity. Postmodern culture is thus characterised by pastiche and bricolage. Its not ever an easy matter to indicate the significance of this cultural phenomenon, but it does make fashion quizzical and flexible, without it being compelled into an overruling Grand Narrative. A final characteristic of postmodernism that I would like to discuss is the transition from representation to simulation. We charter already seen that postmodern pastiche quoting, espousal and referring does not necessarily hasten any deeper convey. This is because postmodern culture no longer represents, but pretends. This proce ss is dependent upon the role of media technology. 1963 Amsterdam (NED)In 2003 the magazine American Photo put together a list of the 25 best photographers in the world. That list contained one Dutch name Inez van Lamsweerde. Both an artist and a fashion photographer, she has ignored the dividing line betwixt art, fashion and commercial work from the very beginning. And successfully. Her work is shown in many glossies such as The Face, Vogue and Arena Homme gain (editorials and advertising campaigns) as well as in international museums and galleries. Her signature is understandably recognisable in twain areas. Inez van Lamsweerde once said in an audience that she was obsessed with bang. Its always people she photographs or re make outs, to be precise. Her digitally modify creatures are alienating. Too smooth, too clone-like, too impersonal to be fully human. She often bases her work on pattern egg-producing(prenominal) images from the mass media and the tree trunk culture i n connection with gene technology, surgery and luggage compartment nameing, the usance of the physical structure, identity and sex. In the series last(a) Fantasy (1993) ternary-year-old girls posed coquettishly in satin underwear but with the mouths of adult men superimposed on their faces.The cloyingly impertinent eroticised tot turns out to be a baby demon. The series The Forest V995) shows mWd-manneted passwe men vjWV womens hands, and the women in give thanks You Thighmaster (1993) are really mutants who resemble mannequins, without trunk hair and with a neutral pare surface where nipples and genitals are supposititious to be. The tv camera doesnt lie? You for sure hope it does. cosmosy models in Van Lamsweerdes fashion photos are hyperstylised, hyperbolise stereotypes, perfectly beautiful, without irregularities and without individual features. They move in a hyperrealistic setting in which the whole effect sometimes suggests the work of blackguard Bourdin (for example, see the series Invisible wrangle in Blvd 2,1994). But her oeuvre is more versatile than that of the old master, so it is also less likely to be  cogitate to a certain time period. Inez van Lamsweerde graduated from Amsterdams Rietveld honorary society in 1990.That same year she got her first photography assignment, the results of which appeared in Modus. In 1992 she current the Dutch Photography view as well as the European Kodak Prize (gold in the categories Fashion and People/Portraits). Since the premature nineties she has been working almost all with her husband, Vinoodh Matadin. Today Van Lamsweerde and Matadin live and work chiefly in overbold York. The most recent developments in their work suggest a preference for less hypothesise photographs. In 2002 they took nine black-and- innocence photos of the members of the field of view group Mug met de Gouden Tand (Mosquito with the Gold Tooth). In 2003 they produced a nude calendar for Vogue. whole without dig ital effects. LiteratureHainley. Bruce. Inez van Lamsweerde, Art- Forum, October 2004. Inez van Lamsweerde Photographs.Deichtor- hallen Hamburg Schirmer/Mosel. 1999. Jonkers. Gert. Inez en Vinoodh, Volkskrant Magazine, 22 February 2003. Kauw op het lijf. Rotterdam Nederlands Foto Instituut. 1998. Schutte, Xandra. twisted onschuld, De Groene Amsterdamer, 10 September 1997. Terreehorst. Pauline. Modus Over mensen mode en het leven. Amsterdam De Balie. 1990. modelInez van Lamsweerde. Devorah and Mienke. 1993In the old blueprint of art, with Plato or Kant for example, a work of art refers to something deeper or higher beyond reality. Every work of art is unique and thence irreplaceable. As archeozoic as the mid-thirties Walter Benjamin argued that the role of the work of art was changing because of reproductive technologies. With the invention of photography and film (and later television and the Internet), any image can be reproduced infinitely. A copy of Rembrandts The Night- w atch always dust a copy of a famous, original painting, whereas a copy of Man Rays photograph of Kiki as a violin has no original. In the age of mechanized reproduction the distinction between original and copy consequently disappears, and with it what Benjamin calls arts aura, namely that which makes a work of art unique and original.For fashion, reproductive technology initially meant an enormous stimulus, since images of designs could be disseminated via the mediums of magazines and television. But in fashion, too, the copy has now overtaken the original design. A day after the fashion shows in Paris or Milan, the photos are already on the Internet and six weeks later H&M can sell replicas in their shops. In egress Art, Andy Warhol played with the idea of the copy by producing silk-screened images of cans of Campbell soup or scenes like Marilyn Monroe. Another example of the loss of aura is the dismay all of us may feel when visiting Da Vincis Mona Lisa or Vermeers G irl with the Pearl Earring in the museum. Weve already seen so many reproductions in books, films, on mugs, towels, with moustache and beard, or as a doll, that the original is hardly a match for these. Only if you in reality succeed in experiencing the painting in the tranquillity of the museum (but can you ever with all those tourists around you?), you may bland find the original aura. In the seventies, Jean Baudrillard went a step still than Benjamin by claiming that not only art but also reality is changing under the bombing of the media. He argues that the ubiquity of the media turns reality into a persona, a copy of a copy. The simulacrum abolishes the fight between being and appearing.Think of someone pretending to be sick this person actually starts to display signs of sickness, so that it is no longer clear what is real and what is fake. Its the same with postmodernism our culture is so consummate(a)ly medialised that our experience is fit(p) by the media. Media do not polish reality, but construct it. Or to put it differently media do not represent reality, but simulate it. We all write out this phenomenon from our own experience. When were on spend in Greece, for example, we exclaim that the sea is as blue as on the postcard. Our experience is determined by an image, in this case the postcard. If were on safari in Kenya, it seems as though weve landed in a National Geographic TV programme. And when we say to our be comed I fuck you we cant dish olfactory perception were acting in a soap. Umberto Eco therefore says that we are assuming a unchanging ironic attitude in postmodern times. We can no longer innocently say I sexual enjoy you, because weve already seen and heard it a ascorbic acid thousand times on TV.The voice communication have lost their significance as well as their authenticity. But what we can do, according to Eco, is say it with irony As Ridge in The Bold and the comely would say, I go to sleep you. While re ality shows on television try to simulate life as much as possible, life itself has become one big reality show, in which being and show can no longer be separated. In art and in fashion we can see a hanker for authenticity, as a nostalgic response to the culture of simulacra. People want something real again in a postmodern culture in which the dividing line between real and unreal has become wafer-thin. The question, however, is whether such authenticity is still possible. Such is the ability of the simulacrum that the media have caused. Now that I have given an outline of postmodernism as a frame within which fashion functions, it is time to look more n first at instruments that can be used to analyse images. These analytical methods all come from poststructuralism, the guess underlying postmodernism. II epitomeThe semiotic signPoststructuralism was informed in the sixties by semiology, psychoanalysis and Marxism. Poststructuralism is also referred to as the linguisti c turn, since vocabulary formed the model for the development of these theories. De de de Saussures writings on semiotics helped to develop a structuralist analysis of the grammar of any dodging, whether a myth, advertisement, film, fashion or novel, as in the work of the anthropologist Lvi-Strauss, the early Barthes or the film semiotician Metz (Sim 1998). The interchange idea that language is paradigmatic for meaning is followed by virtually all postmodern philosophers. According to the psychoanalytical theories of Lacan, even the unconscious is structured like a language. Although some philosophers pointed out that language and signification are fundamentally unstable, as in the deconstruction of Derrida, or in Lyotards postmodern loss of Grand Narratives, text remains the aboriginal focus in poststructuralism. Everything in fact is interpreted as text, including image, music or fashion. While semiotics initially concentrated on literature, scholars presently started focuss ing on the field of favorite culture, such as architecture, fashion, music, sport, womens magazines or the video clip to mention a few examples at random. Semiotics is the theory of signs (from the Greek semeion, meaning sign). A sign is the smallest element that carries a meaning. Language is the system of signs that we are most familiar with, but traffic signs or, as Barthes has shown, fashion are also sign systems.A sign consists of a signifier (in French, signifiant), the material bearer of meaning, and the horse whiz (in French, signifi), the content to which reference is made. The earn and sound of the word dress form the signifiers, which refer to the content of a concrete dress. Signifier and mean, form and content, together create meaning. The dealingship between signifier and sense is almost always dictatorial there is, after all, no reason why something is called a dress in face, a jurk in Dutch, and a japon in French. A sign always refers to something in r eality. The first meaning of a sign is referential it is the meaningyou can look up in the dictionary. But things seldom have just one meaning most signs have many secondary meanings. These are called connotations. In that case, the denotative sign, the signifier and the signified form a new entity, a new signifier for a new implicative sign, as in the following draw var. SIGNIFIED CONNOTATION material body SIGNIFIER DENOTATIONA well- managen(a) example is the red rose wine. At the denotative level it is simply a flush with leaves and thorns. In order to become a sign of bash, the denotative meaning of the flower must become in its turn a signifier. The sign then forms the base of operations for a connotative, second meaning love. why? Because it is agreed upon in our culture that the rose, curiously the red rose, symbolises love. An Amnesty International vizor adds a third meaning to this well-known symbol by surrounding the thorns with alter conducting wire and plac ing the words violence ceases where love begins halfway up the stem. The flower thus becomes a symbol of love and non-violence, composition the thorns stand for violence. (Please read the table from the bottom up). SIGNIFIER red rose as love SIGNIFIED thorns with barbed wire love SECOND CONNOTATION love is the reverse of violence SIGNIFIER red rose SIGNIFIER red rose FIRSTCONNOTATION My love for you SIGNIFIERrose SIGNIFIER Flower with thorns and leaves DENOTATION Flower of the species genus Rosa The multimedia image is an extremely conglomerate sign and can convey meaning in many ways. A still image, such as a fashion or advertising photograph, has the following signifiers * perspective (camera position angle, distance)* framing* photographic aspects such as exposure, rough grain, colour or black and white * composition or mise-en-scene of what is visualized setting, costume, make-up, attitude and actions of the model, etc. * text caption or legendA moving image, such as film, te levision commercials, video clip or fashion show, has, all of the above aspects, plus even more signifiers * movement of the models or actors choreography* camera movement (pan, tilt, dolly, tracking)* redact* sound (dialogue, added sounds like creaking door)* musicevery analysis requires us to briefly nab all these elements, since they influence the meaning. Only then can you determine the denotation and the connotations. A close- up has a different effect than a long shot. Camera movements direct the viewers descry. Quick editing evokes tension. Music creates atmosphere, as does lighting. This type of ceremonial analysis soon give ways that the image is never simply a copy or a reflection of reality, even though what the camera records is real. Yet so many techno logical and aesthetic choices enter into the accommodation that reality is always moulded and constructed. The aim of analysis is to make this construction trans evoke. Digital imagesA formal analysis can be deepene d even further by using the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, an American who developed his theories at the same time in the early twentieth century as De Saussure in Switzerland, without their being aware of each other. Peirces semiotics is used more often for analysing images because he focuses less on text than De Saussure does. Peirce argues that there are three sorts of relationships between the signifier and the signified iconic, indexical and symbolic. An iconic relationship means that there is a similarity or resemblance between the signifier and the signified. An example of an iconic relationship is the portrait the image (the signifier) resembles that which is portrayed (the signified). An indexical relationship presumes an actual connection between signifier andsignified. A classic example is smoke as the signifier of fire, or the footprint in the sand as the signifier of the front of a man on an uninhabited island.The symbolic relationship corresponds to what De Saussure calls the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified the red rose is a convention, based on an agreement. Yet this remains a moot point, because the rose has an iconic relation to the egg-producing(prenominal) sex organ. It is this resemblance that has belike led to the rose neat a symbol for love. All three relationships enforce to the mechanically reproducible image, like the photograph or film. An image is always iconic since that which is depicted shows a resemblance to the signifiers every photograph is a portrait of a person or an tendency. Something that is photographed or put down is also always indexical there is a facturelationship, since the camera records reality-with the camera you come on that youve been somewhere (I was here the visual proof that tourists bring star sign as their trophy). Finally, the image, like language, has symbolic meanings, which are created through an interplay of the many audiovisual signifiers mentioned above. Digital technology ha s put the indexi- cal relation under strain, because we can no longer know with conclusion whether an image is analogue, and thus standing in a factual relation to reality, or digital, made in the computer without an experiential relation to reality.Digital images thus create confusion. In semiotic terms they suffer the iconic relation, for they look just like photographs and display a similarity between signifier and signified. But digital images are no longer indexical. This is what happens in diesels Save Yourself photo series. We see tiny models who look like people (iconic relation), but all the same seem unreal. Their skin is too smooth, the postures too rigid, the eye too glassy. We suspect soon decorous that the image has been digitally manipulated, which disturbs the indexical relation these are not actual shots of real people. The tension between the iconic and the indexical relationship draws attention to the tension between real and unreal. And this creates a symbol ic meaning. together with the text, the photographs comment ironically on our cultures obsession with remaining foreveryoung. sometimes the digital manipulation is immediately clear, as in this picture of Kate Moss as a cyborg a cybernetic organism. Because this is distinctly an impossible image of a half human / half machine figure, we dont get confused about the indexical status of the photograph.Its symbolic meaning is immediately ap erect, which here too represents a comment on the artificial exemplification of beauty. It is typical of digital photography to create images of people that are like cyborgs, since many art and fashion photographs in todays visual culture explore the fluid borders between man, machine and mannequin. face and being looked at I the voyeuristical seeFashion is deeply regard with erotism and sex activity. To analyse this we can turn to psychoanalysis, which determines how we shape our desires. The most classic model for desire is the Oedipu s complex, which regulates how the youngster focuses its love of the parent onto the other sex and projects feelings of rivalry onto the parent of the same sex. This is more complicated for girls because they at first experience love for the develop and later have to convert this into love for the father, while the boy can move his love for the mother without interruption.The Oedipus complex is in particular applicable in stories, in both literature and film, but in the fashion world it actually plays no crucial role, and so I wont be going into it any further here. More relevant to fashion is the eroticism of facial expression. According to Freud, any desire or sexuality begins with looking, or what he calls scopophilia (literally the love of looking). The desiring gaze often leads to touch and in conclusion to sexual activities. Although it has a rather mirky sound to it, scopophilia is a quite unremarkable part of the sexual drive. contract theorists were spry to claim t hat the medium of cinema is in fact based on scopophilia in the darkness of the cinema theatre we are voyeurs permitted to look at the screen for as long as we like. There is always something erotic in reflexion films, in contrast to television which does not aim the same voyeuristic conditions since the light is on in the living room, the screen is much smaller and there are all sorts of distractions.Laura Mulvey (1975) was the first theorist to draw attention to the vital role of gender in visual pleasure. The brisk and passive side of scopophilia (voyeurism and exhibitionism respectively) are relegated to strict roles of men and women. As John Berger, in his famous book shipway of Seeing, had already argued, men act and women appear, or rather, men look and women are looked at. According to Mulvey, this kit and boodle as follows in classical cinema. The masculine character is watching a fair sex, with the camera filming what the man sees (a so- called point of view sh ot). The spectator in the movie theatre thus looks at the woman through the look of the male character. The female body is moreover cut up into fragments by framing and editing a piece of leg, a breast, the buttocks or the face. The female body is thus depicted in a fragmented way. We can therefore say that theres a threefold gaze that collapses into each other the male character, the camera and the spectator. Mulvey argues that the film spectator always adopts a structurally male position. It is important to realise that the filmic means, such as camera operation, framing, editing and often music as well, objectify the womans body into a spectacle. In Mulveys words, the woman is signified as to-be-looked-at-ness. At the same time the filmic means privilege the male character so that he can actively look, say and act. Mulvey takes her analysis even furtherwith the help of psychoanalysis. The voyeuristic gaze upon the female body arouses desire and therefore creates tension for bot h the male character and the spectator. Moreover, the womans body is disturbing because of its intrinsic struggle from the male body. Freud would say the female body is castrated, but we can put it somewhat more neutrally the female body is different. In a society dominated by men, women are the sign of sexual difference. In most cultures, it is (still?) the case that the woman-as-other, namely as other than man, endows sexual difference with meaning. Otherness, strangeness, difference always instils maintenance. The separateness of women incites fear in men at an unconscious level and this fear inescapably to be exorcised through culture, in film or art.According to Mulvey, this happens in cinematic stories in two ways. Firstly, through sadism where the female body is controlled and inserted into the social order. Sadism mainly accompanies a story and acquires form in the chronicle structure. The erotic gaze frequently results in violence or rape. Nor is it accidental that in the classic Hollywood film the femme fatale is killed off at the end of the movie. No ingenious end for any woman who is sexually active. Only in the nineties is she allowed to live on at the end, like Catherine Trammell in Basic Instinct, or in television series like come alive and the City. The second way of exorcising the fear evoked by the female body is through fetishism. In that case the female star is turned into an image of perfect beauty that diverts attention from her difference, her otherness. The camera fetishises the womans body by slack endlessly on the spectacle of female beauty. At such moments the film narrative comes momentarily to a hold. Although Mulveys analysis dates from the seventies, her insights are still of considerable relevance for fashion today. The spectacle of fashion shows is almost totally constructed around looking at fetishised female bodies. Models have taken the place of film stars as the fetishised image of perfected femininity.Many fash ion reportages make use in one way or another of the sexu- alised play of looking and being looked at. However, some things have changed since the time of Mulveys analysis. Feminist reproof has indeed counteracted womens passivity in recent decades, and now we often see a more active and sportive role for the female model. Not only is the woman less passive, but both fashion and other usual visual genres such as video clips have turned the male body into the object of the voyeuristic gaze. Now the male body too is being fragmented, objectified and eroticised. This is happening not only in fashion reportages but also on the catwalk. It may be interesting for students of fashion to take a closer look at how the male body is visualised, how passive or active the male model is, and how the gaze is back up by filmic or other means. Ethnicity also plays a role in the game of looking and being looked at. Stuart Hall (1997) and Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1992) have produced an extensive hi storical analysis of the way that coloured and black people are depicted in Western culture.Stereotypes are abundant, as in the image of the exotic black woman as genus Venus or the black man as sexually threatening. There are still very few black models in the fashion world. Again, it may be effective for students of fashion to analyse how ethnicity is visualised because of this long history of stereotyping. Does exoticising the model, for example, emphasise ethnicity? Or does it embarrass an actual denial of ethnic difference? This happens for example in fashion photos of Naomi Campbell with satisfying golden hair, or wearing blue contact lenses. Here, the black model has to conform to the white norm of sublime beauty. aspect and being looked at II the conceited gaze So far I have been talking about looking at the other, but psychoanalysis also has something to say about looking at yourself. As a baby you are hardly conscious of yourself, because that self, or in psychoana lytical terminology the ego, still has to be constructed.A primary moment in ego formation is what Jacques Lacan has called the reflect microscope stage. A second important moment is the aforementioned(prenominal) Oedipus complex in which language plays a major role. The mirror phase, however, precedes language and takes place in the Imaginary, the realm of images. When youre between six and eighteen months, and so still a baby, youre usually held in your mothers arms in front of the mirror. In identifying with its mirror image, the infant learns to recognise itself in the mirror and to chance upon itself from the mother. This denomination is important for the construction of the childs own identity. For Lacan, it is crucial that this identification is based on the mirror image. He argues that the mirror image is always an idealisation, because the child projects an ideal image of itself. In the mirror the child sees itself as a unity, while it still experiences its own bo dy as a formless mass with no control over its limbs. The recognition of the self in the mirror image is in fact a misrecognition. The child is actually identifying with the image of itself as other, namely as a more ideal self that he or she hopes to become in the future. Just check how you look at yourself in the mirror at home in fact you always look at yourself through the eye of the other.According to Lacan, this is in a certain sense mans tragedy we build our identity on an ideal image that we can never live up to. In his eyes, then, we are always goddam to failure at an existential level. We can take the mirror very literally (it is striking how often mirrors feature in films, videoclips, advertisements and fashion photos), but we can also interpret the process more metaphorically. For instance, the child sees an ideal image of itself reflected in the eyes of its adoring parents who put him or her on a pedestal for your parents youre always the most beautiful child in the wo rld. And rightly so. When were older we see that ideal image reflected in the eyes of our beloved. We need that ideal image in order to be able to form and sustain our ego. Its a heavy narcissistic gaze that is necessary for our identity. That ego is never finished, however it has to be nurtured and shaped time and time again. And this is helped by internalising ideal images. The analysis of the mirror phase has been applied to many phenomena within visual culture.The film hero or heroine functions as the ideal image with which we identify ourselves. In the fashion world its the models. In fact you could designate visual culture as a whole in this way pop stars, models and actors all  cite us opportunities for identifying with ideal images. Fan culture is largely based on this narcissistic identification. Theres another side to it, of course. In a culture in which youth, fitness and beauty are becoming more and more important, the ideal image becomes ever more unattainable. Ma ny people are no longer able to recognise themselves in that prescribed ideal image and are extremely dissatisfied with their appearance. That then leads to frustration and drastic measures like plastic surgery, or to ailments like anorexia and bulimia. In that case the narcissistic gaze in the mirror falls short of expectations. look and being looked at III the extensive gazeSo far we have mainly been concerned with analysing the desiring gaze the voyeuristic look at the other (the desire to possess the other) and the narcissistic look at oneself (the desire to be the other). It is also possible to make a more sociological analysis of the play of looks in society. This brings us to the historian Michel Foucault, who has made a thorough analysis of how authority works. Instead of sightedness power as something that the one has and the other lacks, he argues that in modern culture power circulates in a unbroken play of negotiation, conflict and confrontation, resistance and contr adictions.Changes regarding power are reflected in language. Whereas you were a dupe in earlier days, now youre an expert of experience. In this way you give yourself a certain power, namely the power of experience, even if that experience is unpleasant. One way of shaping power in our modern culture is by means of surveillance, or what Foucault calls the broad gaze. He derived this from the architecture of eighteenth-century prisons which had a central tower in a circular building with cells. A central authority, out of sight within the tower, could take in every prisoner in every cell. The prisoners were also unable to see each other.The wide gaze means that a large group of people can be put under constant guard and scrutiny, while they cannot look back. In this way, says Foucault, they are gibed to behave properly. Today the role of surveillance and monitoring has been taken over by cameras. Everyone knows there are security system cameras guarding our and your property in the street, in stations and supermarkets, in buses and trams and in museums. The friendship that we are constantly and everywhere being watched by an anonymous technology possibly gives us a feeling of security (or the illusion of security). What is more important is that the panoptical gaze check intos us to be straight citizens. A large degree of discipline emanates from constant observation. Just as with Lacans mirror phase, we can interpret the panoptical gaze more metaphorically. It is not only security cameras that are creating a panopticum, but also the ubiquitousness of media such as television and the Internet. Crime watch programmes show us images from surveillance videos in order to catch villains, while reality programmes reveal how our fellow citizens commit traffic offences.Satellites orbiting in space keep a permanent eye on us. Mobile telephones are normally equipped with GPS (Global Positioning System) and always know where we are to be found. When I was on holiday in Italy, my mobile phone sent me messages like you are now in Pisa, where you can visit the Leaning Tower or you are now in Piazza Signoria in Florence did you know that Michelangelos David and so on. For a moment I was that little girl again who knows that God is always watching over her. But divine ubiquitousness has now been replaced by an anonymous, panoptical gaze. Our surfboarding behaviour on the Internet and our buying behaviour in the supermarket are registered in the same way. We can bring these three ways of seeing together. With the voyeuristic gaze we discipline the other we all know that secret look which we use to approve or disapprove of someone at a glance. With the narcissistic gaze we discipline ourselves, through the wish to fulfil an ideal image. By internalising the panoptical gaze we discipline our social behaviour, as well as our bodies.Fashion plays an important role in this complicated play of gazes. You only have to wander around any schooldays playground or look around you in the street to realise how fashion determines whether someone belongs or not, what the ideal images are, and how groups keep an eye on each other, disciplining each other as to correct clothing. through clothing I can make myself sexually attractive for the voyeuristic gaze of the other. Or I can subject the other to my voyeuristic gaze if I find their body and clothes attractive. I can use clothing to construct my own identity and emanate a particular ideal image. But fashion is more than just clothing. Fashion also dictates a specific ideal of beauty. That beauty myth determines how we discipline our bodies, for example by subjecting them to diets, fitness, beauty treatments such as waxing, depilation, bleaching and even to plastic surgery. In short, fashion at last affects the body too. We see an example of that in the digital photo series Electrum head by Christophe Luxerau, which shows us how fashion is literally engraved on the skin the logotype has become our skin. BibliographyOn postmodernismBaudrillard,Jean.5/w/ai/ow5. bare-assed York Semiotext(e), 1983. Braembussche, A.A. van den. Denken over kunstEen inleiding in dekunstfilosofie. 3rd, revised ed. Bussum Coutinho, 2000. Docherty, Thomas, ed .Postmodernism A reader. New York capital of South Carolina University Press, 1993. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. capital of the United Kingdom Verso, 1991 Lyotard, Jacques. The postmodern condition. 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