Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Period styles course Twentieth century: modernity, avant-gardes, design industries, and postmodern eclecticism: Part 2: Dress codes and fashion in a consumer society

Both garments Chanel 1927 Images from Fashion (2002)from the Collection of Kyoto Costume Institute Taschen Books The dandy style was sober and restrained; dark clothes were associated with the rise of self-made men in the 19 th century, and Chanel has been credited with reinventing this style for women in the early years of the 20 th century, at a time of female emancipation and the development of their individual social and working aspirations,

Madeleine Vionnet Fashion house ran from Vionnet evolved a style of cutting that was very different from the masculine tailoring elements that marked the innovations of Chanel. Instead, she aimed to sculpt the fabric and shaped it around the body. Here is an example of the bias cutting she invented; this is cut on the stand. Bias cut satin created these sleek forms typical of 1930s glamour as seen on the Hollywood screen goddesses (Image from Fashion (2002)from the Collection of Kyoto Costume Institute Taschen Books)

The power of parody, pastiche and cross- dressing Women in suits: this Vivienne Westwood outfit picks up and references masculine clothing fashions for women that took off after the 1920s; here we see a reference to Marlene Dietrich’s deliberately transgressive style in the 1930s and 1940s

Lagerfeld 2000, for Chanel (Image from Fashion (2002)from the Collection of Kyoto Costume Institute Taschen Books) Historical references/ fashion house style /using the archive

Elsa Schiaparelli Her designs are always aware of the history of dress, and this discourse is manipulated with a sense of conscious play. Associated with the surrealists, and shares with them a strategy for assemblage and collage, often of bizarre elements

Historical references: the New Look has been criticised as a return to some Victorian elitist dream world and a way of driving women back into the past

The Wild One 1952

PUNK: Retro as refusal Style as bricolage –i.e. the subversion and overturning of ‘common sense’. Anything could be brought together but the anarchy had a common rule: as long as the rupture between the natural and constructed context was clearly visible –makeup was conspicuously applied; hairdye was obviously and coarsely applied, confronting the ‘natural and unforced’ aesthetic of normal social intercourse. Hence dancing – an interactive, usually coupling, form, became robotic, graceless, solitary Hebdige, Dick (1979) Subculture: The meaning of style: 105

PUNK: Retro as refusal. See also Evans and Thornton (1989) Women & Fashion Hebdige, Dick (1979) Subculture: The meaning of style

Vivienne Westwood b Her first clothes came out of the punk movement, as an alternative entrepreneur in the King’s Road, with shops let it Rock 1971, later re-named Sex other related themes include subculture, folk, bondage, etc. Later collections re-work culture and history through an intense process of research. The clothes present a philosophy of style as ventriloquism, but linked with recuperation of ‘outcast’ garments, such as the mini-crini In Westwood’s opinion, fashion works through excess and paradox

Westwood’s methods produce clothes that do not ‘fit’, which have been cut adrift from their familiar or symbolic role. In relation to the multiple references and the ironic distance from all styles and periods, we could contrast the ‘modernist’ concerns of Chanel or Vionnet with these more ‘postmodern’ design strategies

RETRO, recycling period styles

Ossie Clark dress 1971 Celia Birtwell ‘floating daisy’ print

The power of parody, pastiche and cross-dressing Women in suits

Historical reference or retro fashion? Image from

Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein: 1980s nostalgia and power dressing

Madonna: collaboration with Jean-Paul Gaultier for 1990 Blonde Ambition tour and film In Bed With Madonna

Hugo Boss late 1980s

Lagerfeld 2000 (Image from Fashion (2002)from the Collection of Kyoto Costume Institute Taschen Books) The house of CHANEL

Ronan Point collapse

Pop art, deliberately non-serious

Ettore Sottsass ‘Carlton’ room divider For Memphis design 1981

Postmodern eclecticism

Hussein Chalayan (2003) Place to passage (film still) From Lee, Suzanne (2005) Fashioning the future London: Thames & Hudson

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Period styles course THE END