Delft Blue to Denim Blue

Contemporary Dutch Fashion

Anneke Smelik, Anneke Smelik

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781838608347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Fashion & Textile Industry
• Index: Business

Contemporary fashion in the Netherlands shows a unique mix of playful individualism, conceptual strength, and organisational innovation. Delft Blue to Denim Blue maps the landscape of Dutch fashion in all its rich variety and complexity.Luxuriously illustrated in colour, the book uncovers the cultural roots of Dutch fashion in a globalized context. The authors debunk myths surrounding Dutch fashion, dig up new facts and stories, and explore the creative relation of fashion design to cultural heritage. Written by experts in the field, Delft Blue to Denim Blue gives a rich overview of designers, ranging from G-Star jeans, and affordable retailer C&A, to a savvy brand like Vanilia, and from the famous designer duo Viktor&Rolf to a futuristic designer like Iris van Herpen. The book assesses the diversity of Dutch fashion designers, firms and brands in their historical and cultural contexts.

1.

Introduction: The Paradoxes of Dutch Fashion

‘[F]ashion lends itself to being an optimal synthetic indicator of a nation’s position, amidst memory, mystification, and imaginary.’

—Simona Segre Reinach (2011: 271)

‘Today’s all-encompassing culture demands that you acquire the ability to change your identity […] as often, as fast and as efficiently as you change your shirt or your socks.’

—Zygmunt Bauman (2011: 25)

Anneke Smelik

Fashion in the Netherlands includes conceptual designer duo Viktor&Rolf as well as the affordable retailer C&A; it ranges from romantic designer Jan Taminiau to the popular jeans brand G-Star, and from colourful clothes by The People of the Labyrinths to the modernist designs by Alexander van Slobbe. For a country with hardly an established tradition in fashion, Dutch fashion has recently, and perhaps paradoxically, been remarkably successful. An array of designers, brands and businesses, some with international acclaim, shows the fascinating diversity of present-day Dutch fashion. A prominent designer like Iris van Herpen presents her shows in Paris, while Michael van der Ham shows in London and Lucas Ossendrijver works in Paris as the head designer for Lanvin’s men’s collection.

Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Contemporary Dutch Fashion maps the landscape of Dutch fashion in all its rich variety and dense complexity, both in its successes and its failures. The book is part and parcel of a recent interest in up-and-coming minor countries in the fashion world. The Netherlands is quite a small country that features several successful women’s brands, including Supertrash, Just B., Sandwich, Turnover, Claudia Sträter, –CoraKemperman and Vanilia, and some luxury men’s fashion designers such as Francisco van Benthum, Sjaak Hullekes, and Hans Ubbink. We could not study them all but have carefully selected case studies that we deemed the most relevant for the recent history of Dutch fashion. The case studies do not only feature success stories, but also contain failures and bankruptcies, including recent ones that happened after our research was finished, such as Mexx in December 2014 and –CoraKemperman in June 2016. Along with historical chapters and case studies of brands and designers, the present book also discusses the success of jeans in the Netherlands as well as the success of Dutch fashion photographers like Inez Van Lamsweerde and Erwin Olaf. The last chapter takes a peek into the future, by discussing the vanguard of wearable technology with the likes of designers Pauline van Dongen and Bart Hess.

Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Contemporary Dutch Fashion is the result of a large research project that the authors conducted together over five years from 2008 till 2013, financed by an extensive research programme on ‘Cultural Dynamics’ of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.¹ The aim of the multidisciplinary programme was to study the dynamic role of cultural heritage and the interaction between culture and society past and present, with a strong focus on the issue of ‘identity’ in times of social and economic crisis. For our project it involved the study of recent Dutch fashion and its relation to national identity, for example in the use of cultural heritage in fashion design. We chose to focus not only on the popular culture of fashion, but also on the cultural dynamics in fashion production and consumption. The present book brings together the results of our joint research.

The underlying idea of Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Contemporary Dutch Fashion is that the creative industry of fashion in the Netherlands has increasingly been able to capitalise on a unique mix of playful individualism, organisational innovation and a creative relation to cultural heritage. Because fashion is embedded in cultural values, the volume aims to understand the cultural roots of Dutch fashion in a globalised context. We approach Dutch fashion as a dynamic process that changes over time and as full of contradictions and paradoxes. We use the word ‘fashion’ in the broad sense of the term, as referring to dress, appearance and style. More specifically, we understand ‘style’ as something ‘that is accepted by a large group at a given time’ (Solomon and Rabolt, 2004: 6). The concept of style refers to a way of expressing oneself, which is characteristic for an individual, a period, a ‘school’, an identifiable group, and possibly even a nation. A style may be a more or less explicit dress code, but mostly we take stylistic codes as a tacit element of a particular culture (Rubinstein, 2001: 14-15).

1. Two royal dresses by Jan Taminiau for Queen Máxima at the inauguration of Willem-Alexander as King of the Netherlands, 30 April 2013 in Amsterdam.

We have researched Dutch fashion as material culture and as a symbolic system (cf. Kawamura, 2005), but also as a clothes and textile industry. The field of fashion is so interesting because it is part of a commercial industry producing and selling material commodities, while it also entails an intangible system of signification. A dress always has a material quality, whether it is designed by Viktor&Rolf or by C&A. In the first case it may be made of expensive cashmere and embroidered by hand, while an inexpensively bought T-shirt at an international retailer is likely to be made of a cheap mix of fibres. Whether haute couture or mass-produced, the dress will have a certain symbolic value in society depending on the age, class, gender or ethnicity of the consumers. Signs and meanings are more often than not created through representations in visual culture, for example in commercials on television or in glossies, or by fashion bloggers. Fashion is thus made of both material things and symbolic signs, produced by individual and collective agents, which all merge through practices of production, consumption, distribution and representation (cf. Rocamora and Smelik, 2016: 2). Our study of Dutch fashion therefore covers a wide terrain, ranging from production and consumption, to material culture, and systems of meaning and signification.

Its innovative contribution to fashion studies lies in opening up the under-researched field of Dutch fashion through the use of interdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies. The interdisciplinary research includes art history, cultural theory, sociology, social economics and human geography. In order to explore diverse styles and manifestations of Dutch fashion, the authors research Dutch fashion in its cultural and historical context, combining historical overviews and theoretical analyses with in-depth case studies. Some chapters pursue the postwar tradition of Dutch design and fashion and the textile industry, or fashion as a performance of local, global and ‘glocal’ identity, while other chapters explore fashion as a co-creation between brands and consumers of, for example, –CoraKemperman and Vanilia, or study the effects of globalisation on the organisation of the design and manufacture of fashion in the cases of Mexx and Van Gils.

With this book we hope to show that the Netherlands today creates genuine fashion, not just ‘clothing’. The chapters together aim to trace the process of legitimisation of Dutch fashion as a culturally meaningful product. This process is due to changes in external factors, such as the globalisation of the fashion industry; changes of factors internal to the Dutch fashion industry, such as national subsidy or policy instruments, or the creation of national fashion fairs or fashion weeks; or to a changing discourse in verbal and visual representations, such as journals or blogs. Some chapters discuss changes external to the fashion world, for example issues of globalisation in chapter 3 on the Dutch fashion industry, chapter 6 on Dutch denim industry, chapter 7 on Van Gils, chapter 8 on Mexx, and chapter 9 on Mac&Maggie and –CoraKemperman. Other chapters review changes internal to the Dutch clothing and fashion industry, such as chapter 2 on cultural heritage, chapter 10 on Vanilia, chapter 11 on Spijkers en Spijkers, and chapter 14 on wearable technology. Of course, many of those chapters in fact show a mix of external and internal factors, most notably the chapters on Van Gils and Mexx. Other chapters discuss the legitimating discourse that helped to create, develop and strengthen the view of Dutch fashion as ‘real’ fashion (Janssen, 2006; Van de Peer, 2014). This is particularly strong in chapter 4 on the fashion discourse in Dutch magazines, but can also be found in chapter 5 on global influences on the designs of Oilily, Mac&Maggie and –CoraKemperman, chapter 12 on Dutch fashion photography and chapter 13 on the materialist aesthetics of Viktor&Rolf. The three levels – external and internal factors and fashion discourse – have helped the cultural recognition and legitimisation of the field of Dutch fashion (Janssen, 2006). For their research the authors have made use of a wide range of different methods of analysis: archival research of journals and magazines; analysis of clothes and designs in archives and museums; analysis of visual material; archives of firms and chamber of commerce; and extensive interviews with consumers, journalists, shopping assistants, stylists, buyers, designers, producers and managers.

Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Contemporary Dutch Fashion belongs to a wider movement of what Lise Skov and Marie Riegels Melchior describe as ‘decentering the study of fashion’ (Skov and Melchior, 2011: 133, a special issue of Fashion Theory on minor fashion countries). This entails moving attention away from the dominant centres of fashion such as Paris, Milan, London and New York. The present book is part of that development, ‘by turning the gaze to small European countries, which, although unquestionably belonging to “the West”, have historically been marginal to the centralised dynamics of fashion’ (ibid.). José Teunissen argues that there has been an increased interest in different national fashion styles, which resulted in a proliferation of national fashion weeks and new fashion centres since the 1980s (Teunissen, 2005). As Lise Skov puts it, ‘fashion production has been split between a globalised clothing industry, which tends towards extreme centralisation, and localised designer fashion sectors, acting as intermediaries between international suppliers and national events, media, and public’ (Skov, 2011: 138). Due to globalisation, questions of individual, social or even national identity are increasingly urgent, and a small country like the Netherlands is no exception to this development.

2. A billboard for G-Star at Waterloo Square in Amsterdam, 2006.

The very concept of ‘identity’ is full of ambivalences and paradoxes. One of the paradoxes of our research lies in opening up the field of Dutch fashion, which assumes the possibility of the qualifier ‘Dutch’, while we simultaneously do not believe in a given national style. By the term ‘identity’ we refer to an idealised construction of certain characteristics that change over time. Yet, in spite of, or perhaps because of, this definition, in our joint research project on Dutch fashion we have fiercely debated the complicated issue of a possible national identity in fashion. In discussing the particular characteristics of Dutch designers and firms, but also the question of a specific Dutch style in dressing, or in trading or retailing, we have come up against the difficulties of thinking through identity in all of its complexity. From an individual preference to collective trends, from the local to the global, and wavering between post-modern flexibility and sociological identification, we have sometimes embraced identity as a productive concept for understanding Dutch fashion, and at other times relegated it to the trash bin of modernity. This introduction traces some of the discussions on the complicated relation between identity and fashion.

Identity: A Dress Rehearsal

‘Identity’ is a slippery term. As Brubaker and Cooper put it: ‘Identity […] tends to mean too much […], too little […], or nothing at all’ (2000: 1). One of the complications of the term is that it refers both to individual and collective identity, i.e. to self and group – as Georg Simmel pointed out for fashion as early as 1904. In our book we follow Stephanie Lawler’s claim that ‘identity needs to be understood not as belonging “within” the individual person, but as produced between persons and within social relations’ (2008: 8). In other words, identity is always relational or ‘networked’ (Smelik, 2006: 155). The question of ‘who I am’ is never far removed from the question ‘who we are’. Lawler emphasises the interdependence between individual identity and the social world: ‘“Without you I’m nothing”: without a nexus of others, none of us could be “who we are”’ (2008: 8). We will come back to this important insight when discussing the relation between the global and the local in more detail below.

As Lawler points out, there is a paradox at the heart of the concept of identity. The very etymology of the word identity – from Latin idem – suggests that it refers to ‘sameness’, in the way in which people experience how they are identical to themselves but also how they belong to the same group, ranging from the local choir or football club, a nation, or to a global subculture like hipsters, skaters or emos (Muggleton, 2000; Stahl, 2003). At the same time the term identity also refers to ‘difference’, that is, to the way in which people differ from each other. They are, or at least perceive themselves as, unique individuals. While this simultaneous sameness and difference already comprises a paradox in itself, Zygmunt Bauman pushes the argument even further. He points to the paradox of contemporary ‘liquid’ modernity, where ‘To be an individual means to be like everyone else in the crowd’ (Bauman, 2005: 16, original emphasis). In other words, he refers to the contemporary phenomenon that sameness and difference are eroding in a globalised world.

As a result of social fragmentation and changing structures of modernity, identity is increasingly considered to be constructed, fluid and multiple, without an essential core (Sim, 1998: 367; Bauman, 2000: 82-83; Lipovetsky, 2005: 64). This take on identity as unstable and fluctuating has become quite dominant in social and cultural theory in the past decades. Brubaker and Cooper refer to this view of identity as ‘weak’ or ‘soft’, as opposed to the ‘strong’ or ‘hard’ view that preserves a ‘commonsense meaning’ of the term identity with an emphasis on sameness, homogeneity and group boundedness (2000: 10). Sociologists have tended to understand groups also in those ‘weak’ terms as temporary or virtual communities, by relating brand identities to concepts like ‘neo-tribes’ or ‘communities lite’ (Polhemus, 1994; Maffesoli, 1996; Duyvendak and Hurenkamp, 2004). In order to ‘unbundle the thick tangle of meanings that have accumulated around the term “identity”,’ Brubaker and Cooper propose instead a ‘processual, active term’: identification (2000: 14). The advantage of the term ‘identification’ is that it implies agency, an act of forming connections with others, whether short-lived or more lasting. As we shall see below, the Dutch government has also introduced this term in order to produce a more open and inclusive understanding of identity.

Rather than pursuing theoretical debates on identity, in the context of the topic of this book we further explore the work of sociologists who have written on identity in relation to consumption and fashion (see Bruggeman, 2014 for a sustained discussion of this issue). In this book we understand the practice of fashion as one of the myriad ways of (re)producing individual as well as collective identity. Gilles Lipovetsky has argued that ‘hypermodernity’, as an extension of post-modernity, is a liberal society that is characterised by ‘movement, fluidity and flexibility’ and dominated by the logic of fashion and consumption (2005: 11-12). The dynamics of fashion provid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: The Paradoxes of Dutch Fashion
• Part I: Dutch Fashion Culture
• Part II: Dutch Firms and Designers
• Part III: Novel Perspectives
• Bibliography
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Index
• eCopyright