This is a 'guest' blog; the author wishes to remain anonymous.
The spectacle appears at once as society
itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification. As a part of
society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges.
Being isolated—and precisely for that reason—this sector is the locus of
illusion and false consciousness; the unity it imposes is merely the official
language of generalised separation.
The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (1967).
Fashion significantly contributes to the spectacle of society,
but is situated outside of the academic discourse, and firmly in the realm of
consumerism. Unlike ‘art’, which is regarded as engaging with the world on an
elitist level, fashion is considered to be strictly for the masses. Even
couture, despite being elitist, is mediated to the masses via mass production
of look-a-like items. Museums hold costumes in specialist departments, but art
gallery spaces rarely (if ever) hang clothing on display in the manner that
they may construct a display of house bricks (Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII, 1972),
show an unmade bed complete with detritus including used condoms (Tracy
Emin’s My Bed,
1999) or plug in strip lighting (Dan Flavin’s Untitled [to
you…] series, 2006). Occasionally museums or art galleries stage exhibitions of
couture dresses and other one-off outfits created by Designers (always
capitalized), who might consider themselves to be Professional Artists, but
they are employed by major international corporations (Gucci, Chanel, Louis Vuitton etc.)
to produce consumer goods that will be sold in large numbers.
Any
concept of the ‘art of fashion’ is constrained by its sole motivation for being
to satisfy mass demand and a certain degree of utility. However, in the middle
of the last century a spontaneous and non-commercially-driven fashion developed
among a working class group of British teenage men that sparked a revolution in
fashion—and art. The ‘Teddy Boys’ of south, east and north London were a
disparate group of males who took to wearing clothes based loosely on an
Edwardian design, but which were amended using items of clothing and adornment
adopted from Hollywood Western and
Noir movies.
The resultant exhibition of found items were arranged and displayed on the
bodies of Teddy Boys in a wholly new and artistic manner.
The modification of dress by individuals for less than merely practical purposes has, since the advent of mass consumerism in the 19th century, involved intricate and subtle levels of artistry. Deprived of the means of artistic expression by class, position and education, the British working class male has, since the beginning of the Modern period at least, created their own fashion which reflects aspects of ‘beauty, truth, genius, civilization, form, status and taste’;[1] all the assumptions we make about works of art, according to John Berger.
Styles
of dress and the addition of purely decorative elements to an outfit have been
affected since the Middle Ages, and usually by men. Recent investigation into
the history of fashion has led to a reconsideration of a widely held idea that
fashion was a largely feminine concern. As Anne Hollander has pointed out, 'for
centuries male potency was expressed in erotic and vividly imaginative
clothing, and female charm was expressed in much simpler clothing that
primarily emphasized modesty. When women wanted to look more interesting, they
either cautiously exposed a small area of skin, or imitated men'.[2]
Hollander goes on to describe how little men’s fashion needed to change after the end of the 18th century though, because of improvements in the production and quality of lighter cloths, the mechanization of tailoring and growth of the middle class for whom ready made suits were acceptable because they were difficult to tell apart from the hand-made suits favoured by the wealthy and titled—at least at a glance, they were. ‘Fashion is meant to be read, not seen; fit and proportion matter less, signals matter more.’[3] The aspiring middle class of Victorian Britain could look like they were more affluent and successful than they might actually be.
Brent
Shannon’s original research into the growth of the male consumer of the 19th and early
20th centuries
cites the spread of the department store, the popular press and advertising, as
reasons for a middle class male adoption of fashion as more than a matter of
mere functionality. 'Much
of the machinery vital to the ascent of a modernized capitalist culture of
consumption—the large-scale urban department store, sophisticated advertising
and marketing strategies, the mass production of affordable ready-made
items—were not possible until the technological and commercial advances of the
machine age'.[4]
The
flourishing department stores thrived as hetero-social centres in which the
sexes could mix and consume in pairs or separately, but always within sight of
one other. Tailors ‘ shops were predominantly masculine spaces in which
customers were served by male staff. Department stores, points out Shannon,
‘were well-known sites of female employment and activity and therefore
already attracted a variety of eager and flirtatious male voyeurs, flaneurs,
and suitors.’[5] Such
a point is made by Henry James in The
Princess Casamassima (1886) in which its central male character
Hyacinth Robinson, who is courting a department store model (Millicent
Henning), comes to realise, as he watches her model a dress for a male on the
shop floor, that she is having an affair with the customer. Being working
class, Robinson only visits the department store to meet Millicent, and when he
does, he wears his ‘Sunday suit’.
The
working class in Victorian Britain did not shop in department stores, but they
aspired to. Without the means (or need) to dress other than for comfort, warmth
and protection while at work, workers who wanted to raise their sense of self
worth and to make a statement of intent about their social ambitions began to
watch their bosses at play, and to develop their own sense of sartorial taste
from them. James relates the late Victorian ritual of Sunday courting in
the novel, during which shop girls, maids and cooks walked in parks or more
often, along high streets to window shop with ‘their’ young men who were
similarly employed as bell boys, apprentices, factory hands or footmen. After a
morning spent in church, the single suit that the working class male possessed
would be retained in order that he could impress in public his respectability
as he walked with his partner. They would walk alongside carriages carrying the
upper classes, observing their clothes and accessories, enjoying and wanting to
be part of the spectacle of their society. They’d look through windows of
stores showing new styles of dress for both sexes, getting ideas of how to
produce their own versions at home (Robinson’s guardian in the novel is a seamstress
who makes items of clothing for girls and women in her neighborhood; her work
decreases as ready made clothing becomes cheaper, however).
In
the years leading up to WWI the British upper classes enjoyed what would prove
to be their last days of social superiority and absolute deference from the
working classes. Masculine styles of dress had become both more ornate and more
streamlined than in the late 1890s. Top hats were replaced as daywear by bowler
hats, morning tails had been replaced by frock coats with tapered waists and
flared edges, suits were slim-fitted and three-piece, of which the jacket hung
to fingertip length. Waistcoats were decorative rather than merely functional,
shirts lost their starched fronts and Eton collars. Pocket handkerchiefs flowed
from breast openings, trousers were tapered to the ankle and shoes were elegant
and always shone. Even the evening dress for men became less formal, with
dinner suits as well as, or rather than, tailcoats being considered de
rigeur.
The
cut and style of the upper class Edwardian male’s clothes were copied by as
many working class males as could afford to pay a tailor, or buy a ready-made
version. It was a look that, after two world wars and during a period of
austerity and rationing, would re-emerge in Britain, and be modified as fitted
the wearer.
It is commonly held that the British couturier Hardy Amies encouraged
Horseguard officers and young bankers to adopt the Edwardian dress style in the
early 1950s, in order that, ‘the average young man of position try to give an
air of substance without being stodgy’.[6] Savile Row tailors recreated suits and coats, hats and
accessories for the wealthy and privileged,
and the sharp look stood out against the loose, wide-lapelled, dour, demob
suits that dominated the streets of the capital at the time. Or, at least
dominated the City streets of the capital. In the poorer boroughs of London, a
different look was being worn by young working class males, many of whom had
been born just before (or during) WWII.
Most
commentators on the Teddy Boy phenomenon credit the development of the style to
being an aping of those upper class officers by working class males. As
Christopher Breward writes, Harry Hopkins’ The New Look: A
Social History of the Forties and Fifties (London, 1964),
supplied the approved account of the rise of the teddy style for successive
generations of academics and researchers. Hopkins ‘traces its origins as a whim
of upper class Mayfair playboys, its migration to the deprived boroughs of
south and east London, its importance as a mode of social resistance, and its
rapid commercialisation at the hands of a growing retail sector adapted to the
desires of the teenager, has become an oft-repeated mantra of sociologists and
historians of popular culture.’[7] However,
quoting a 1949 Mass Observation study, Breward suggests that by then,
The
Teddy Boy was rapidly emerging as a particular working-class London type;
Anglo-Irish or ‘cockney’ in his associations in contrast to the continental and
American preferences of London’s sizeable Italian and Maltese gang members.
Though he drew some inspiration from the ‘spivvy’ style … his look was far more
negotiated, deliberately differentiated and consequently more subversive than
that.[8]
With
their radically different physical appearance, the children of war heroes (or
cowards or ‘conshies’) sought to express themselves as individuals, outsiders
to society, but as belonging to a new society of their own making; that of the
Teddy Boy gang. Teddy Boys—who predated both the import of rock n roll music by
at last five years and the emergence of Elvis Presley by
seven—adapted and adopted elements of clothing and style from their
grandfathers and American cinema, by essentially including a ‘signature’ piece
to their outfits. That could be something as small as a ring worn on a finger,
a tattoo, a certain colour handkerchief, a delicately brocaded waistcoat or a
scarf. The addition of the original and unique item to the standard dress code
of fingertip-length ‘drape’ jacket, tapered trousers, brogue or thin crepe
soled shoes, bootlace tie and extravagantly quiffed hair enabled the Teddy Boy
to be one of the gang—usually defined by the neighbourhood in which members
lived—and an artist (without knowing it), utilising the only materials they
had. Their look was all-important, a visual statement which spoke far louder
and more articulately than they ever could with words.
The
group life and intense loyalty of the Teds can be seen as a reaffirmation of
traditional slum working-class values … to lads traditionally lacking in
status… there remained only the self, the cultural extension of the self
(dress, personal appearance).[9]
Certainly
some Teddy Boys sought to show off their lack of deference to the upper classes
by copying the style and form of the Edwardian look, and by having original
suits made by a chosen tailor, to who the Ted would give strict instruction on
length, width, materials etc. However, financial restrictions meant that the
majority of young men who would and could be a Ted—and many were still
either at school or
in apprenticeships and so earning little—took to having either their father or
more likely their grandfather’s Edwardian suits and coats adapted by mothers,
sisters, girlfriends or tailors, in order to fit them.
The
important distinction here between fashion as pure consumer product and as art
is the individuality of the Teddy Boy’s style—at least until the look was
commodified and mass produced to be sold in department stores. Even then, while
elements of the style could and were bought from stores ready-made, the
accessories applied to them and the meaning with which the wearer imbued them,
was a unique expression of what Richard Martin calls, ‘the maverick, bad-boy
self-expression that once was the province of the fine arts bohemianism and
Existentialist angst.’[10]
The
news media of the early 1950s took notice of the emergence of the Teddy Boy
after there had been several instances of ‘turf war’ battles between rival
gangs and the supposed ‘Teddy Boy murder’
of 1953 in Clapham, south London. Teds were reviled in print as being juvenile
delinquents and dangerous to society in general. The idea of the Ted as an
outlandishly dressed thug and/or rebel was disseminated across the UK in
newsreels, documentaries and made-up newspaper stories. The shock of the new
was such that even Americans began to take note, and the first rock n roll
musical hero of the era, Bill Haley And
His Comets, were re-dressed in specially made Teddy Boy outfits when
they arrived in Britain in 1957 for their first tour.
The
swift and effective exploitation of the Teddy Boy phenomenon by the fashion
industry was the beginning of a turn toward a new generation of consumers
hitherto unrecognised by the retail industries; the teenager. The anti-social
inference of the look, at least as it was interpreted by the media, was
identified by businessmen as being imperative to the success of their products.
It was a lesson not to be forgotten by the industry. ‘In our time, fashion
strives to provoke as readily as to appeal … In this capacity, fashion seeks to
disclaim society and to declaim the individuality of its single or exceptional
wearer.’[11]
The
spectacle that Teddy Boys created was an unarticulated artistic statement that,
because of its swift immersion into general acceptance by society was rendered
as invisible. The outline of the Teddy Boy, from his slicked-back quiff, down
to his crepe-soled feet became visual shorthand for a time and an attitude that
was temporally fixed. A closer examination of any Teddy Boy from
1951-1955 however, reveals something more subtle and complicated: an artist
working in unique materials.
[1]
Ways of Seeing, John Berger, p.11 (London, 1972)
[2]
The Modernization of Fashion, Anne Hollander, p.29 Design Quarterly, No. 154
(Winter, 1992), pp. 27-33
[3]
The Modernization of Fashion, Anne Hollander, p.33 Design Quarterly, No. 154
(Winter, 1992), pp. 27-33
[4]
Refashioning Men: Fashion, Masculinity, and the Cultivation of the Male
Consumer in Britain, 1860-1914, Brent Shannon p.626 Victorian Studies, Vol. 46,
No. 4 (Summer, 2004), pp. 597-630
[5]
Ibid, p.611
[6]
Just So Far, Hardy Amies, (Glasgow, 1954) quoted in Style And Substance,
Christopher Breward, p.190, Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical
Perspective (Oxford, 2003)
[7]
Style And Substance, Christopher Breward, p.194, Material Strategies: Dress and
Gender in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2003)
[8] Ibid, p.201
9]
Cultural Responses of the Teds, Tony Jefferson, p.367 The Men’s Fashion Reader,
eds. Peter McNeill and Vicki Karaminas (New York, 2009)
[10]
A Note: A Charismatic art The Balance of Ingratiation and Outrage in
Contemporary Fashion, Richard Martin p.310, The Men’s Fashion Reader, eds.
Peter MacNeill and Vicki Karaminas (New York, 2009)
[11]
Ibid