Fashion As Masquerade

Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty focuses on issues of power, social positioning, ideologies and practices within the web of relationships between creators, producers, practitioners and end-users of fashion.

This book explores the contemporary meanings of masks, masking and masquerade. The editors argue that these concepts have been transformed over the centuries but they continue to serve as useful tools for critical cultural analysis. The history of fashion is a story of codification of visual appearance as a measure of rank and power. Historically it has been expressed in ways that secure a hegemonic reading of fashion signification as follows: 1) controlling what one can wear: Powerful agents (parents, pedagogues, religious leaders) or institu-tions (schools, army, religious institutions, civil service, health service, private enterprises) prescribe uniforms or ways of dressing and set rules for appropriate dress (manners and etiquette regarding what materials and styles are suitable for particular times and places). 2) controlling the gaze: Powerful agents (in homes and institutions, people with elected or appointed authority, celebrities) are usually the ones controlling the gaze in the sense of surveillance. But they are also the focus of the gaze in the sense of being in the public eye, and being publicly visible).

What counters these forms of hegemonic control is masking in its various forms as a conscious or unconscious form of behaviour. Masking provides a strategy for deconstructing meaning by reclaiming control over the construction of meaning. This it achieves by creating a space for resistance that is independent from either social prescriptions or the controlling gaze. It is in this sense that masking is deployed in this volume by the various authors.

Masking operates in two ways: (1) by adding ambivalence to dress codes, and (2) by increasing the gap between dress as a signifier and the social reality it signifies. Ambivalence is the result of blurring the clear unambiguous links between fashion and the social reality it indexes. It introduces a contextual and negotiated element to the meaning of clothing symbols over time (as in the shift in attitudes to fur from a sign of opulence to a sign of animal cruelty), or across increasingly fragmented social groups with their distinctive and fast-changing codes (Davis 1992; Tseëlon 1989, 2012). The second way in which masking resists the hegemonic meanings of fashion is captured in my analysis (Tseëlon [1995] 2000a) of fashion signification inspired by Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra. Using a linguistic analogy to analyse commodities, Baudrillard outlined a genealogy of sign structures consisting of three orders. The first order, founded on imitation characterizes the pre-modern period and presupposes a dualism where appearances reflect reality. In the second order, founded on production, appearances conceal reality. In the third order, founded on simulation, appearances deconstruct reality. No longer concerned with the real, the visual code is subverted from a language to a playful spectacle. It is this lack of a reference point that threatens the distinction between true and false.

Fashion and Masquerade showcases the articles from the third volume of Intellect’s journal Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty.