Fashion for Writers

Hi everyone! I just wanted to post the longer, original version of my Guardian blog post. Thanks to Minh-ha for alerting me that my Guardian post on Dior was included in the Business of Fashion Daily Digest. It was also picked up by The Atlantic’s blog, (The Atlantic Wire,) even though it seems like the consensus in the comments section is anything that happens in the fashion world is a ‘non-issue.’ Awesome. It’s not as if clothing and appearance have EVER had anything to do with the history and contemporary practice of racism, sexism, or classism.

I know my manner of writing is sometimes unnecessarily prolix and long-winded and lapses into rant and tangents. I don’t plan on changing my way of writing for anyone, and at the same time, I don’t expect everyone to want to read my writing, or to want to read so many blog posts on Dior, but I wanted to post the longer version of my Guardian article more for myself, so I can remember all the ideas I was fumbling with at the time when I was trying to write a follow-up to my original post on the Shanghai Dreamers campaign.

Some of the ideas ultimately cut from the final article include the time John Galliano used Masai fertility symbols as heels, and the time Marc Jacobs designed a bag for LV that looked exactly like the bags that Ghanaian refugees carried out of Nigeria, and also the bag that Chinese migrant workers use to lug their stuff.

So here it is in it’s glutted, unabridged, orotund glory:

What haute couture fashion can and can’t tell us about China (and the rest of the world.)
by Jenny Zhang

Given the history of Orientalism in Western sartorial practice, is it any surprise that Christian Dior’s latest ad campaign, “Shanghai Dreamers,” shot by Chinese artist, Quentin Shih, features a series of photos where a strikingly-styled white model clad in Dior couture towers over rows of digitally reproduced Chinese women and men dressed in Cultural Revolution drag? And no, your eyes have not deceived you—the Chinese people in the background literally all look the same.

The photos are a stark reminder that shameless Orientalism is still accepted in fashion. Edward Said writes in his seminal book, Orientalism, “The Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience… The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.” (By the way, the Oxford English Dictionary truly ought to list this photo under the entry for ‘Orientalism,’ but I know the chances are as slim as the United States including itself for once in its annual Human Rights Report.) What better way to affirm the modernity, individuality, and exceptionalism of the West than with the very material of Dior clothing on a white model contrasted against a backdrop of undifferentiated Chinese people in dated clothing?

Dior, true to form, since unveiling the campaign last month, has not acknowledged anything problematic about the display of these images on the windows of their Shanghai storefront.  After all, this is the same Dior whose head designer, John Galliano, sent shoes with carved Masai fertility symbols as heels down the Spring 2009 runway. Galliano declared the collection, “tribal chic,” one of those fashion buzz terms employed in articles that refer to the “African influence” on fashion as if Africa were a single country or tribe or culture. Fashion’s cavalier nonchalance and the mainstream media’s lack of response to fashion’s racial provocations might lead one to think that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with white models on a European runway quite literally stepping on the backs of an African tribe’s religious symbol.

Of course, fashion has always blithely forged ahead with little concern for blatant cultural appropriation (see: the past twenty years of Galliano’s fashion career) or cultural appropriateness (see: images of colonial and imperialist splendor in the return of plantation chic and harem chic.) But can and should they continue to get away with it?

Just last week, China’s economy surpassed that of Japan’s to become the second largest in the world. Business Week reported LVMH (Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton) SA, the company that owns Dior and LV among others as the world’s largest maker of luxury goods, saw a 53% rise in returns in 2010 so far, with a leading 21% sales gain in the Asian markets.

In considering Asian consumers, it would be wise to have less fashion moments like the Shanghai Dreamers ad campaign, or the plastic red and white plaid bags Marc Jacobs designed for LV in 2007, since that exact bag has long been carried by Chinese migrant workers, as well as Ghanaian refugees from Nigeria seeking asylum. But then again, fashion designers are not in the habit of actually learning about the places they take inspiration from.

Take Karl Lagerfield’s admission last December, “I haven’t left the hotel since I arrived in Shanghai, not that there is much of it left over,” before debuting a short video he directed, in which a fictionalized Coco Chanel visits the Shanghai of her dreams. It is precisely nothing more than a dream, because in what other reality could 1960’s Chinese labor camp workers possibly be played by Danish supermodel Freja Beha and Lagerfield’s French muse Baptiste Giabiconi? In one scene, Lara Stone as Coco Chanel enlightens the two actors in yellowface that “the Chinese invented quilting,” followed by one of the Chinese laborers lamenting, “I much prefer to have blue jeans.” The message couldn’t be clearer—the Chinese are ignorant of their own history, desire to imitate the West, and need a cultured European to educate them.

My reading of the Chanel film might seem hyperbolic until you take stock of the similarities between images in fashion portraying China and Chinese people as inscrutable, ignorant, backwards, jejune, and robotic, and the rhetoric currently employed by pundits who are predicting the Chinese do not know how to handle their growth and will inevitability crash and burn if they don’t change course (aka follow Western conventions.) The West is both transfixed and utterly horrified by China’s rapid development, and the fashion world, as much as it would like to see itself as the final frontier for nonconformity, is no different.

Whatever you think of China’s human rights record, economic policies, politics, culture, or social conditions, old-school racism just can’t fly. The mainstream media needs to put pressure on Dior to apologize for their embarrassing Shanghai Dreamers ad campaign. But they have been silent, with the exception of Art Info, who focused most of their critique on the photographer, Quentin Shih. Shih, a native Chinese artist, born in 1975, has gone on the record to say that the ad campaign was entirely his idea and that he meant no offense.

I believe his intentions completely, and had these photographs been presented in the context of an art gallery with other contemporary Chinese artists, the cheekiness and the humor of the replicated bodies would have come through. The blame is not to be shouldered by Shih, who is an artist and entitled to the contradictory, messy, ideologically unbound expansiveness that we crave in art. Rather, the blame is to be squarely placed on Dior and Galliano who should know better than to commission these photographs for their Shanghai storefront, who should have sent Chinese models for Shih to shoot, and who should understand that the modern Chinese Dior customer will not recognize herself or himself in these photographs.

The blame is also to be placed on the media and the fashion world for so openly accepting racism in fashion, whether it be genteel or overt. If fantasy is part of the appeal of fashion, then wouldn’t it be worthwhile for Dior, Chanel, and other couture houses to figure out how Chinese people fantasize and see themselves? Surely, the vision does not include wearing a Mao suit, carrying a migrant’s work bag, and dressing exactly like everyone else.

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And because I mean no disrespect to the work of Quentin Shih & feel terrible that there was possibly more backlash against him than against the house of Dior, & to add further happy complication to the question of authorship, intent, messages in art, and the art in messages, I’d like to include this kick-ass photo from an editorial he shot, “Stranger in the Glass Box,” as part of his first collaboration with Dior.

(Photo from Trendland.net)

With love,
Jenny