Fashion and Modernism

Louise Wallenberg, Andrea Kollnitz, Louise Wallenberg, Andrea Kollnitz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350044517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Modedesign

Art and fashion have long gone hand in hand, but it was during the modernist period that fashion first gained equal value to – and took on the same aesthetic ideals as – painting, film, photography, dance, and literature. Combining high and low art forms, modernism turned fashion designers into artists and vice versa. Bringing together internationally renowned scholars across a range of disciplines, this vibrant volume explores the history and significance of the relationship between modernism and fashion and examines how the intimate connection between these fields remains evident today, with contemporary designers relating their work to art and artists problematizing fashion in their works. With chapters on a variety topics ranging from Russian constructionism and clothing to tango and fashion in the early 20th century, Fashion and Modernism is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, dress history, and art history alike. Contributors:
Patrizia Calefato, Caroline Evans, Ulrich Lehmann, Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Alessandra Vaccari, Olga Vainshtein, Sven-Olov Wallenstein

PART ONE

FASHION, CHANGE, MODERNISM

1

TARDE, SIMMEL, AND THE LOGIC OF FASHION

Sven-Olov Wallenstein
Translated by Rune Engebretsen

Introduction

The feeling of a thing being detached from its place, of a separation between the inner and the outer, and of everything solid being volatilized, is one of the basic experiences of early modernity. Fashion assumes a central role in this complex: At once a threat and a promise, it constitutes one of the concepts used in modern esthetic theory to describe one’s own shortcomings and breakthroughs. Within the theory of architecture, and in reflecting on the relation of the arts to the city, we first encounter an analysis of fashion’s logic as a loss of substance, soon, however, to be developed into a theory about a new relationship between the inner and the outer. When, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the social sciences assume shape, this experience has been incorporated into the very substance of the theory. In Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel, for instance, we encounter an understanding of the social dimension where fashion takes on an organizing role. In Tarde, this occurs in terms of a logic of imitation that is at once the birth and threatening catastrophe of social life; in Simmel, in terms of a process of socialization through which individuals and groups attain a balance between the tendency toward individualizing and universalizing.

Architecture’s dress

One of the early telling factors in this story about the apprehensiveness of the modern in facing the splitting of forms is the controversy about “the significance of style” that arose in Germany. It was inaugurated in 1828, with Heinrich Hübsch posing the question: “In which style shall we build?”¹

Style appearing as an open question can be seen as symptomatic of a historical transformation. In the field of architecture, this became manifest in the institutional divide that, at the threshold to the 1800s, arose between the old Academy and the new polytechnic institutes. The former held to a theory rooted in a tradition of beauty, order, and proportion, whereas the latter launched a new proto-functionalistic program based on the science of engineering. Initially, the issue of style may seem to have been of relatively limited scope. Yet it was a matter of whether the entire Vitruvian and classical canon, transmitted since the Renaissance, could be integrated with the newly gained expertise in engineering and industrial technology, or whether it simply had to be abandoned. Was there a style capable of expressing the new technique? And if so, could it restore to architecture the ability to express its era, even as architecture went through the same phase of uncertainty as the other genres of art, albeit more intensively?

The curious hold that Greek and Roman heritage continued to have on this time period became evident in its very idea of “style.” It still had to be conceptualized via Classical Antiquity, and the terminology for discussing and debating it was drawn from traditional academe. Two years before Hübsch posed his question, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, an architect of somewhat greater renown, had anticipated it. In his travels in England, he encountered the great landmarks of the industrial revolution, observing their effect on the city and the landscape. Upon returning to Germany, he asked himself when and how “our time” was going to engender its own style. Would it be able to express its own experience, while simultaneously taking its place within the style of Classical Antiquity?

Finding the emphasis on speed and novelty in contemporary life a risky matter, Schinkel linked this feeling of modernity to fashion, which became an expression for loss of place and natural order. Upon his return to Berlin in 1826, he wrote about “the new time making everything easier; no longer believing in anything permanent, it has lost its sense of the monument,” whereas architecture, the art of building, “first and foremost requires repose.” And he adds:

Woe to the times in which everything turns into motion, even that which should be the most enduring, to wit, the art of building, where the word fashion is hawked about within architecture, where forms, material, and every tool are considered but playthings to be handled at pleasure, where one is prone to try everything, since nothing is in its place and consequently nothing appears to be required.²

The issue of style’s place within the modern would later merge with the theory about “the tectonic,” that is, about the connection between the inner and the outer. This issue was given a more specific slant. The question of how the esthetic forms can retain their validity in the machine age becomes a question that turns on the relation between body and dress as a basic esthetic paradigm.³

Schinkel’s and Hübsch’s question was subsequently carried forward by Karl Bötticher (who also succeeded Schinkel as professor in Berlin) and given programmatic impetus in his lecture on “The Principle of Hellenic and Germanic Architecture with a View to Its Application for Today’s Architecture” (1846). Bötticher here analyzes the esthetic predicament of his time in terms of the tension between Kernform, core form (technology), and Kunstform, art form (tradition). As for the possibility of a future style, he states that it could be attained only through a novel synthesis of the classical and the modern that would justify both elements. He had already outlined the rationale for this in his main work, Die Tektonik der Hellenen (The Tectonics of the Greeks), in which he examines the relation between the constructive statics in the Greek temple and its external form.⁴

Bötticher views Greek architecture essentially as a language where the forces, motions, and conflicts of statics are esthetically expressed. But his concern is not only historiographical, it is one of overcoming the contemporary antithesis between style and construction, that is, overcoming the very distinction that to Schinkel could be summed up in the concept of fashion. To the Greeks, according to Bötticher, there is, on the contrary, an inner connection, a “juncture” (Junktur) between the “sheath” (Hülle) and the core, and to them style is therefore a necessary expression, not an external choice.

In agreement with Johann Winckelmann, but also with an entire metaphysical tradition going back to Plato, Bötticher defines architectonic form as based on a “body image” (Körperbild), where the inner and the outer meld in an organic union of nature and construction. But, according to Bötticher, this body form is intrinsically double: Over against an inner constructive Kernform (core form)—which, by virtue of a “naked body undressed of its decorative attributes, is fully capable of expressing all architectonic functions”—stands an external and so-to-speak “dressed” Kunstform (art form), an esthetic manifestation that as such is architectonically superfluous but at the same time also has the task of showing the core in a transfigured and clarified way. Tectonics, says Bötticher, can therefore be characterized as that which actualizes the body image in its external augmentation by elevating the construction to art. The dress makes the body what it ought to be from the beginning but is incapable of presenting in its nakedness. What is presently lacking in the modern is, in other words, the intermediation, the conjuncture, that is supposed to unify the inner and the outer in supplementary contiguity, with the outer actualizing the inner and thereby making it the inner it should have been in the first place.

This supplementarity would soon turn out to be the condition for what we perceive as artistic truth, fidelity, and integrity, something that Adolf Göller would point out in a lecture from 1887, with the telling title of “Was ist Wahrheit in der Architektur?” (“What Is Truth in Architecture?”). The outer “style sleeve” (Stilhülse), states Göller, must express the inner “core,” making it sensate and palpable as a phenomenon, and truth is the harmonious relation between these two aspects.

In Göller, we see the concept of esthetics and beauty receiving a twist that would become decisive for developments in the early 1900s: on the one hand, truth is no longer defined via a system of representation but as direct fidelity, an expressivity that connects the inner and the outer, and does so by showing the structural elements inherent in the art form. In the case of architecture, this is about the relation between the forces (vectors) in the building, the texture of the material, etc. With the art of painting, it is about pigment, texture, brushstroke, and so on. Everything that in an earlier day was considered to be subordinate to the forms of representation and their stylistic hierarchies now comes to stand out as expressive in its own right. On the other hand, there is simultaneously the gnawing suspicion that this material expressivity is equally as much a rhetoric—that truth, regardless of whether it pertains to the system of representation or to the materiality of the construction, always is a play between what we see and what is hidden, and that all the metaphors we use to express this relation will be irremediably ambiguous.

The most developed and complex study of the tectonic concepts in this early phase is found in Gottfried Semper, in his theory about clothing or dressing (Bekleidung), where the dialectical implications become even clearer, as does the connection with the body expressed through a system of representative layers. Semper speaks of a building’s shell as “a dress,” and plays directly on the association between the German words for “wall” (Wand) and “garment” (Gewand).⁵ To Semper, it is textile, its ornamentation and veiling, that becomes the paradigm for the “wall” instead of the actual tectonic function, which he ascribes to “the brick wall” (Mauer). The dress conceals the structure while simultaneously giving it prominence, allowing it to come the fore by reminding the viewer of that which lies behind, in the interplay between the signifying (the shell, the veil) and the signified (the body, the structure). Buildings, says Mark Wigley in analyzing this aspect of Semper, are like clothes. They “are worn rather than simply occupied.”⁶

Semper’s theories aim at redefining the very question of architecture’s origin, and he wants to demonstrate how it has evolved from technology rather than from reflection on ideal forms—that is, from the “canon” and its entire attendant architectonic-philosophical culture. This canon was, for example, still valid to Bötticher, whereas Semper actually removes it altogether from the agenda. But the complexity of the new dressing metaphor also shows how the relationship between the inner and outer, tectonics and surface, appear more uncertain than ever because of the breakdown of the classical order. As Fritz Neumeyer has pointed out, the concept of the tectonic is always suspe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One Fashion, Change, Modernism
• Part Two Creators and Creations
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page