Dying to be born again: Mortality, immortality and the fashion model

Abstract

The primary focus of this thesis is limited to the relationship between sartorial fashion and the fashion model within the world of representation. This includes the forms of fashion display and dissemination that existed prior to the establishment of the modern fashion system—fashion dolls, fashion plates and illustration and the mannequin de monde—as well as the fields where the fashion model as a modern phenomenon came into being—fashion photography and the fashion parade. While the portrait of feminine beauty and ideals in the fashion image betrays the imprint of the representation of the female body in art, pornography and the entertainment industries, this thesis argues for a reading of the fashion image and the fashion model specifically through the prism of fashion which, as a quasi-autonomous system, operates according to its own rules and has its own mode of being. Since its inception, fashion has frustrated its critics and delighted its proponents with a nonchalant rejection of the creations it had hitherto enthroned as essential. This dedication to perpetual change and the ephemeral—the ‘death-wish’ that ensures the continuation of fashion as a structure even as individual fashions are discarded—has fascinated both those who have seriously contemplated fashion and those who document the vicissitudes of fashion’s creations. For its critics, the sin fashion commits in refusing to manifest itself in a permanent form of beauty is compounded by its perceived attacks upon the body, cloaking it in a layer of artifice that distorts it into ‘unnatural’ forms. This imposition by fashion on the body made from flesh and blood is never fully realised. Rather it is only on the body in representation that fashion can begin to escape the limitations imposed upon it by the human form and give full reign to its creative impulse. In the fashion image the fundamental principles of fashion—change and artifice—are metaphorically expressed by the interplay of mortality and immortality on the body of the model which, ultimately, serves as the blank canvas where fashion is free to invent its imaginary self.