The Obscure and Uncertain Semiotics of Fashion

The New York Times

March 5, 2006
Ideas & Trends

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

ONE of the more striking trends at the Paris fashion shows last week was the obscuring, by masks, hoods, hats and swaths of fabric, of the radiant faces of the models.

The designs shown on many runways are often more symbolic than practical. To some art historians and scholars of gender studies, this shrouding of women by several designers was a sign of misogyny. To other commentators, it was a reflection of cultural anxiety — a response to anything from Islamic fundamentalism to bird flu. To others still, it was "only fashion."

Just how much meaning should be read into fashion is a matter of debate. But few would disagree that clothes have always reflected the exuberance, the gloom, even the chaos of the moment. As Barbara Bloemink, curatorial director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, put it, fashion can "both sense and influence."

For example, Anne Hollander, the author of "Seeing Through Clothes," said in an e-mail message that the French Revolution was heralded by the fashionable folk of the time. Women, before 1789, began to wear "simple, belted shifts," while men wore "plebeian garb" like "rough coats and unkempt neckwear."

In the 1920's, fashion — through tasseled dresses that revealed kneecaps and swung with the music — expressed the unbridled impulses of the jazz age, said Lisa Koenigsberg, president of Initiatives in Art and Culture, which organizes arts conferences. The fashions of the 60's did the same, giving shape and substance and color to the inarticulate impulses of the decade.

So what were the models in Paris saying, looking like the dead and buried, reanimated? Sarah Takesh, the founder of the Tarsian & Blinkley clothing company and a resident of Kabul, Afghanistan, said that a model's face was perhaps too beautiful to represent the moment. "There's such a dark blanket that has settled on the world right now," she said.

That may be, but when the masking of women is turned into fashion, said Suzanna Walters, the chairwoman of the gender studies department at Indiana University, there is the risk of turning violence against women into nothing more than a matter of style.

Ms. Hollander's reaction was similar: "The masking of the female heads strikes me as part of a general new anti-feminism. I read about it at the same moment that I read about fewer women entering the work force." The style, she said, was "muffled and hampered, taking off from the burka-clad idea; but it's essentially the same lack of female self-possession only in a different key."

However the events in Paris last week are analyzed, some cultural critics said that the designers may simply have been out to shock. In fashion these days, said Dr. Susan Bordo, the author of "Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body," "the correct attitude is to not make too much of anything."

"It was a kind of a joke," said the designer Jun Takahashi of his decision to wrap his models in eyeless cloth hoods. "I didn't want any distraction from the line."'

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