Fashioning Identity: Status Ambivalence in Contemporary Fashion PDF by Maria Mackinney-Valentin

CONTENTS

PREFACE
As a child, my favorite time of year was when we boarded the Boeing 747 from Copenhagen to Charlotte, North Carolina, to spend Christmas with my maternal grandmother, Eloise. She had insisted on not being called Grandma. It cramped her style. So I called her “mormor,” pronounced “more- more,” Danish for mother’s mother. It was a linguistic coincidence, but the name sat well with her attitude to life, setting her firmly apart from what she saw as the frumpiness of grandmotherhood.

From her silver lame dress, worn whenever, to squirting bourbon from between her front teeth at people she found boring at cocktail parties, she was all about more fun, more parties, more fashion. An elegant rebel from 1911 to 1991. She had nothing but great ideas. She gave me a white rabbit– fur coat when I was 6. For a while, she drove a yellow Toyota with an “Eloise’s Taxi” sign on the roof just in case she felt like driving someone home. She had an English Setter, named Liz after her idol Elizabeth Taylor, who experienced an unplanned union with a frisky Boxer from the neighborhood. Always making the best of a situation, in this case a litter of six puppies, she named the special breed a “Sexer.” She had me parading down her stairs in party gowns far too big for me while she sang “Heeeeere she come, Miss Ameeeeerica . . . .” She was a Tiffany’s meets K- mart, “just- for- the- hellof- it” kind of a lady. An adult version of Kay Thompson’s children’s book namesake Eloise who lives at the Plaza Hotel in New York doing her own thing.

The sartorial enchantment I associated with Eloise was found in concentrated doses in the attic of her house on Hermitage Road where she kept old clothes from her youth, and from the youth of her parents and grandparents: towers of hatboxes, Edwardian wedding dresses, Chanel suits, and long mink coats. It also hid curious items I had to ask about, such as galoshes and corsets. I spent hours in that attic imagining the people and parties these clothes had seen. What did they talk about? What had happened to them? Were there traces of happy or sad memories in this top hat or that glamorous dress? But there was something eerie about the attic too. The clothes were bodiless, like specters. The fascination with the forgotten history and sensuous luxury of all that silk, lace, and fur coupled with the ghostly sense that life had abandoned these clothes stuck with me long after my grandmother had passed and most of the clothes were discarded. Being Eloise, she had only randomly thrown a couple of mothballs in the attic, which had of course not been enough to salvage the wonder of this ancestral archive of style stories.

I could never drape a silk scarf over my shoulder the way Eloise could, nor am I part of an era where you wore a hairnet and Pucci nightgown to bed as she did. But I put on diamonds when I am in a bad mood, as she taught me. And I still slip into her old silver lame dress for special occasions to give her a party once in a while, with my body as a proxy for hers. I aspire to be as daring as she was even at seventy- nine, and perhaps the closest I have come is writing this book, which in retrospect may have begun in that attic and with her sartorial pizzazz— to use one of her trademark expressions.

This private anecdote about Eloise is part of my personal motivation for writing this book, but it also highlights the importance of fashion narratives, both as personal statements and social performances.

Perhaps subconsciously, the fashion narrative about Eloise and her attic is reflected thematically at several levels in the book— from the vintage fashion that celebrates the value of heritage and memory to the rise of granny chic and geriatric starlets. The case of leopard print works as an example of a new perseverance in fashion trends, visualized by Eloise herself in a head- to- toe leopard outfit. While time, style revivals, and visual self- curation are central to this book, fashioning identity is also explored through a range of other topics that engage quite different fashion narratives, such as underplaying rather than overstating subcultural displays of identity and social aspirations communicated through fashion in a non- Western context.

A key challenge in the making of this book has been to handle the fact that writing about identity mechanisms in contemporary fashion is like trying to stop time. Fashion is often characterized by style change, which likens it to a visual time bomb designed to self- destruct every six months or so. Sociologist Fred Davis (1994: 162) referred to this as fashion holding the means of its own undoing. So it has seemed that every time my fingers hit the keyboard, I was tapping into the demise of my own work. As one friend said to me: “So really, you are writing fashion history?” To accommodate this issue, I have worked toward developing concepts as analytical tools to be used in further fashion and design studies. This effort echoes the work of Fred Davis, particularly Fashion, Culture, and Identity, the twenty- fifth anniversary of which provides the occasion for reconsidering his seminal work with the present book.