The paper is part of a talk given at the International Costume Conference "ENDYESTHAI (To Dress): Historical, sociological and methodological approaches", April 9-11, 2010, Benaki Musem, Athens. Forthcoming in "Endymatologika 5", Tribute to the International Fashion & Costume Conference entitled "Endyesthai (To Dress) - Historical, Sociological and Methodological Approaches"], 9-11 April 2010. Nafplion: Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation.
http://www.costume.gr/conference/indexen.html
The paper explores the concept of 'trace' and its relevance in contemporary fashion from a theoretical and curatorial perspective. Starting from the reflection on the 'trace', outlined by Jacques Derrida, the present contribution analyses the crucial role that such a concept plays today, in the work of designers, fashion theorists and curators. Individuating the 'traces' that a garment bears, listening to the narratives embedded in it, discloses in fact the possibility of drawing a constellation of references, both conceptual and historical. As masterfully exemplified by the reconstructive and deconstructive practices pursued by Hussein Chalayan, Maison Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Robert Cary-Williams, there is no objective standpoint, outside history, from which ideas, old concepts, as well as their manifestations, can be dismantled, repeated or reinterpreted. Engaged in a design as well in a semantic challenge, these designers have often performed a reflection on the concepts of 'trace' and 'patina', and more or less eloquently have suggested an irredeemable impurity of any fashion creation. Indeed, within contemporary fashion past and present promiscuously fuse and morph into the experimentations of designers, who paint a landscape constituted by an endless interweaving of references within other references. In fashion theory, the paradigm of the Tigersprung, the metaphor of history as a labyrinth, suggested by Benjamin, as well as the notion of trace and the horizon pointed to by a 'reflective' nostalgia have become staples, finally finding a translation within the experimental curatorial practice as well. Following the trajectory indicated by Benjamin's reflection, theorist Lehman and Evans have remarked that in fashion the past comes to the present as image, suddenly emergent, not adhering to a scheme of progression. The independence towards fixed and recognizable contents is indeed characteristic of fashion, which fragments the continuity of history and in its modality of quoting neutralizes the dichotomies permanent/transitory, enduring/ephemeral. Mirroring fashion theory, the experimental curatorial practice has progressively configured itself as a listening, interpreting, plotting and re-plotting.
In the specific domain of fashion exhibitions, an interpretation of the historical and a-historical references as well as a reflection on curating itself have been inaugurated by Malign Muses/Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back (ModeMuseum of Antwerp, 2004 - Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2005). Since then, several exhibitions have embraced a transversal perspective, not proposing a chronological or taxonomic organization but rather listening to the traces the garments bear, situating the pieces within a wide cultural context and creating tales. The spatial and temporal configurations sketched by exhibitions as Malign Muses/Spectres, or more recently by The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions (Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2009), are eminently metaphorical. Experiencing the connections between artifacts as 'resonances', not determined by any fixed logic, they exhibit thematic associations, mould a potentially infinite texture of genealogies, disinter the traces and evoke the ghosts of reciprocally haunted past and present. The curatorial project, thus highlighting the intersection of theory and practice, finally dismisses any authoritarian pretence, and its endless questioning itself is inscribed the richness of its hermeneutic potential.
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During a lecture given in 2002, at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, designer Hussein Chalayan stated: "the garment is a ghost of all the multiple lives it may have had. Nothing is shiny and new; everything has a history [...] The design is a wish or a curse that casts the garment and its wearer into a time warp through historical periods, like a sudden tumble through the sediment of an archeological dig".1 This affirmation is particularly significant as it alludes to fashion's impossibility, against its own rhetoric, to be 'innovative', or to reach a complete newness, without showing at the same time its dependence on the history of fashion. Indeed, the preoccupation with, and the reflection on, memory and the cultural artifact as a 'trace' have permeated fashion, with a special intensity in the last two decades.
As exemplified in recent years by the work of fashion theorists and curators, individuating the 'traces' that a garment bears, listening to the narratives embedded in it, discloses the possibility of drawing a constellation of both conceptual and historical references. The trace, in fact, is not simply the sign of a faded past, is not necessarily a historical reference, but can also be a mark of 'affiliation' or affinity, a sign of belonging, the starting point of a visual narrative.
The concept of 'trace', the image of the ghost or spectre, the metaphors of history as a labyrinth and the Tigersprung, introduced in philosophy by Walter Benjamin, have become staples within contemporary fashion from both a theoretical and a curatorial perspective. Similarly, the landscape painted by fashion designers, at the start of the twenty-first century, seems to be constituted by an endless interweaving of references within other references. A question immediately emerges, that is, what is then a 'trace'? How could this notion be relevant for the theory of fashion and the curatorial perspective? In the attempt to answer these interrogatives, a presence suddenly manifests itself, that is, the spectre of Jacques Derrida, whose reflection on the concept of trace represents a fundamental contribution not only within philosophy but also for many design related areas, as architecture, graphic design, new media, and ultimately also fashion design. Derrida's relationship with the domain of aesthetics indeed runs alongside his deconstructive work practiced on contemporary philosophy.2 Through the decades, the possibility of a fertile dialogue between deconstruction and many domains of human creation has been encouraged and ensured by the a-systematic and transversal character of deconstruction itself, which does not belong to a sole specific discipline, and neither can be conceived as a body of specialistic knowledge.
During an interview filmed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, in 2002, Jacques Derrida declared: "not for immortality or eternity, but a trace rests... Rests: neither lives nor dies".3 For Derrida 'trace' has a meaning almost identical to that of 'spectre' and 'difference', indicating a "mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present" (Derrida 1976: xvii). The trace refers to something else, without ever being autonomously present, and without implying any chronological linearity or continuity. Questioning the dichotomy "absence/presence", the trace is then an "antistructuralist gesture", a bricolage that is destined to disclose different possibilities of signification and representation.4 It is exactly this absence of presence, named 'trace' by Derrida, the condition of any presence and experience. In order to access the present as such, there must be in fact an experience of the trace, a rapport to something else, to the 'other', which can be for instance the other 'past' or the other 'future'.
When looking at contemporary fashion, a peculiarity clearly emerges: past and present promiscuously fuse and morph into the experimentations of designers. Within fashion, designers as Hussein Chalayan, Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Martin Margiela, Robert Cary-Williams, Ma Ke, seem to have performed a reflection on the concepts of 'trace' and 'patina', and more or less eloquently have suggested an irredeemable impurity of any fashion creation. Their deconstructive and reconstructive practice of fashion has often manifested itself in creations that bear the signs of an organic alteration. In Chalayan's The Tangent Flows (S/S 1994) and in Ma Ke's WUYONG/The Earth (A/W 2007-2008) collections, for instance, dresses had been previously buried for several weeks and, when exhumed, preserved the sings of an intrinsic and impure individuality.5 Such a practice induces to draw associations with the process employed in Margiela's first personal exhibition, at Musem Bojimans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1997), for which garments had been treated with different strains of bacteria and mould, all isolated from the air and nurtured to provide varying colours and textures. Thus, the installation completely fused with the work of the designer and acquired a distinctive performative character. As stressed by Caroline Evans, in this exhibition the pieces were not conceived as neutral canvases, but were already "saturated with complex historical meanings" (Evans 1998: 81).6 On other occasions, Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo, Robert Cary-Williams, have dismembered and eventually reconstructed old clothes. Used materials, as silent witnesses of past times, were then reshaped to give life to new formations. In borrowing, recollecting or manipulating clothes form the past, these designers disinter the mechanics of dress structure, while showing at the same time that there is no objective standpoint, outside history, from which ideas, old concepts, as well as their manifestations, can be dismantled, repeated, or reinterpreted. One of their major contributions consists in fact in their endless challenging the relationship between memory and modernity, enduring and ephemeral.
In general terms, fashion in its endless quoting and borrowing from the past fragments the continuity of history and, as remarked by theorist Ulrich Lehmann, becomes both "transhistorical" and "transitory" (Lehman 2000: xx). The independence and irreverence towards fixed and recognizable contents is characteristic of fashion, and is precisely what expands the spectrum of its hermeneutic possibilities. The quotation is the defining characteristic of fashion, but the sartorial borrowing of fashion is irreverent and promiscuous, for it does not follow any continuity or linearity and rather appears as a tiger's leap, a Tigersprung, into the past. In his work Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin wrote: "[To the French Revolution] ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now...blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution...evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger's leap into the past" (Benjamin 1999a: 263). As a modality of quoting and borrowing from the past, the tiger's leap neutralizes the dichotomies permanent/transitory, enduring/ephemeral. Indeed, states Lehman, "the opposition between the eternal and the ephemeral is rendered obsolete by the leap that needs the past to continue the contemporary...Through the Tigersprung fashion is able to jump from the contemporary to the ancient and back without resting solely in one temporal or aesthetic configuration" (Lehman 2000: xviii).
Alongside the paradigm of the tiger's leap, Benjamin's metaphor of history as a labyrinth has deeply permeated fashion theory, finally finding a translation within the experimental curatorial practice as well. The metaphor indicates that moments apparently unrelated or distant within the temporal sequence can run alongside each other, crossing each other's path. As Evans explains, "fashion designers call up these ghosts of modernity and offer us a paradigm, remixing fragments of the past into something new and contemporary that will continue to resonate into the future" (Evans 2003: 9). Benjamin's reflection is then crucial, as it points to where exactly this resonance stems from. The images of the past and the present come together in a "critical constellation", and are both transformed in a new image, which draws "a previously concealed connection" (Evans 2003: 33).7 The past comes to the present as 'image', suddenly emergent, not adhering to a scheme of progression. While historicism searches for the continuity and sees the future as a product of past and present, a new method of doing history is unfolded by Benjamin: "the new dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth...Awakening is namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of remembrance" (Benjamin 1999b: 389).
Following the trajectory indicated by such reflection, the experimental curatorial practice, within fashion, has progressively configured itself as a listening, interpreting, plotting and re-plotting,8 accompanied by the consciousness that the connections between artifacts are not determined by any fixed logic, but rather can be experienced as 'resonances'. Talking about exhibiting unexplored thematic associations, experimental curator and exhibition maker Judith Clark clarifies: "there is no inevitable logic between any two objects, only temporary groupings, that can be called so many things - 'movements', 'collections' ... For experimental exhibition designer and architect Frederick Kiesler they were 'Galaxies'. For Picasso they became 'constellations'".9 The exhibition The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions, at Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen (2009), in particular, has drawn a warp of resonances that are thematic associations between the garments and the artworks displayed, thus creating a texture of 'allusions'. A seminal exhibition to which The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions eloquently refers to is A-Historical Sounds, curated by Harald Szeeman at the Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1988), which reinterpreted the collection of the museum experimenting with proximities and distances, correspondences and resonances, between the single pieces by Beuys, Knoebel, Nauman etc.
In the specific domain of fashion exhibitions, an interpretation of the historical and a-historical references, as well as a reflection on curating itself, has been offered by the pioneer exhibition Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back, at ModeMuseum of Antwerp, Belgium (2004), and at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2005), with the title Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back.10 After its opening to the public, the exhibition was reviewed in multiples international journals and art magazines - as Fashion Theory, History Workshop Journal, Selvedge, Frieze - and was topic of debate at the international 'Museum Quality' symposium at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York (2006). Its concept developed from a long series of conversations between Judith Clark, curator of the exhibition, and fashion theorist Caroline Evans about the relationship between fashion and its history, about nostalgia, quotation, history as muse, the problematic of repetition, visual narratives, fashion and the archive.
Significantly, in this "labyrinthine exhibition" (O'Neill 2008: 254) each thematic section is just one possible route. The drama does not reside in the individual pieces but in the patterns the pieces create when they are juxtaposed. The exhibition is therefore open to different interpretations and readings. The architectural elements and the optical distortions that form the installation do not serve just as backdrop for a dress, and rather embody the relationship, suggest the placing of two dresses in relation to one another. Here spatial metaphors as the labyrinth, the diorama, the telescope, the tiger's leap finally find a translation into three-dimensional form and shape the thematic sections of the exhibition, emblematically titled "Reappearances: Getting Things Back", "Nostalgia", "Locking In and Out", "Phantasmagoria: The Amazing Lost and Found", "A New Distress". In Antwerp a coda-section called "Garden of the Forking Paths",11 designed by Russian architect Yuri Avvakumov, articulated a utopian space populated by ladders conducting somewhere, or maybe just nowhere.
In Malign Muses/Spectres every garment is a trace that plays within a texture of analogies and differences. Each section is just one possible route, as different connections are always available. As Alistair O'Neill points out, the force of the "ocular experiments" constituting the point of departure of Malign Muses/Spectres "lies in how they undermine the authority of what we are looking at - not necessarily the integrity of the exhibits themselves, but the museological context" (O'Neill 2008: 258).
The spatial and temporal configurations sketched by the installation in both Malign Muses/Spectres and The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions are eminently metaphorical. They evoke other plots of time and reference, which are whispered only by means of illusions and allusions, not by following a sequence or linearity. They seem to engage the viewer in an experience that challenges his 'space of experience' and 'horizon of expectation'. These expressions, coined by the historian Reinhart Koselleck, and later borrowed by Svetlana Boym, indicate both a personal and interpersonal dimension: "the space of experience allows one to account for the assimilation of the past into the present [...] Horizon of expectation reveals the way of thinking about the future" (Boym 2001:10).12 Temporal categories as well as personal expectations and collective memories all flow into that peculiar experience that is the experience of nostalgia, which does not posses an exclusively individual nature.13
The theoretical perspective and curatorial practice exemplified by the aforementioned exhibitions are not instances of a simple remembering, but more of creating a never-ending texture of genealogies within which nostalgia plays a crucial role. Nostalgia, though, is not just a longing for a past that is forever gone. The etymology of 'nostalgia' refers in fact to the pain due to a condition of nomadic exile. The word 'nostalgia', coming from Greek, means 'returning home/back to homeland' (νόστος nostos) and 'pain', 'sorrow' (άλγος, algos). It evokes thus a physical and sensorial dimension of memory, which becomes even more evident in the affinity between the semantics of the Greek terms 'nostos' and 'nostimos' (tasty). This last word, as both Miller and Semeretakis underline, in Greek usually stands for the quality of being tasty, pleasant, that a thing or a person possesses as a consequence of a process of maturation (Semeretakis 1996: 4).14 In this sense, claims Semeretakis, "nostalhgìa is linked to the personal consequences of historicizing sensory experience which is conceived as a painful bodily and emotional journey" (Semeretakis 1996: 45). Besides the sensorial dimension it carries within itself, nostalgia shows another feature, which refers to its peculiar not being necessarily linked to any determinate place or moment in time. It is exactly what has been called its "utopian dimension" (Boym 2001: xv),15 or "moral ambiguity" (Wilson 2001: 101-102),16 or "ideological character" (Stewart 1993: 23)17 that resides in the longing for a place, or better, a time that perhaps never existed. A time that, as Susan Stewart suggests, may only have existed as a 'narrative' and that possesses only an "ideological" reality. Nostalgia cannot be interpreted just as the need to be reunited with a familiar time or a place that is no longer existent, but rather as a reflection or an evocation of 'other' possibilities.
Concerning the utopian or ideological face of nostalgia, interesting is the distinction, sharply drawn by Boym, between two opposite nostalgic tendencies: the restorative nostalgia that "attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home", and a reflective nostalgia that rather "thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays homecoming - wistfully, ironically, desperately" (Boym 2001: xviii). If the restorative nostalgia finds its fulfillment in the reconstruction of the past, hoping to revive its truth, the reflective nostalgia neglects the power of repetition and points to another place and another time.
In the past, the act of recollection has been conceived in varying ways and, throughout history, has taken on different nuances, being also embodied by differing spatial configurations. Raphael Samuel recalls that in the Renaissance, for instance, it was depicted as a 'theatre of memory', focused on a more intimate dimension in respect to the Hermetic-Cabbalistic tradition in which the 'theatre' was rather "build up layer by layer, like a pyramid, to capture the astral currents pouring down from above and use them for life and health" (Samuel 1994: viii-ix). During the Romantic period, the places of memory, such as childhood or home, used to compose a private and individual map, for the Romantic idea of memory did not contemplate that ascending to the stars and gaining from other heights a whole new vision of the nature of things. As Samuel remarks, it rather "pictured the mind not as watchtower but as a labyrinth, a subterranean place full of contrived corridors and hidden passages"(Samuel 1994: 14).18
The metaphor of the labyrinth, with its many entrances, in the last two decades has permeated, through Benjamin's reflection, both fashion theory and curation. It is a layered image populated by genealogies, traces, ghosts of reciprocally haunted past and present, and articulated in a way that is by no means that of a logical sequence or a linear succession. It has no authoritarian pretences, and rather gives life to plots that can be further developed, reinterpreted, even subverted.
The mode of display in the exhibition Malign Muses/Spectres has had a significant impact on the audience, for it molded not only the visitors' perception but also the discourses that since then have sprung from it. The exhibition highlighted in fact the relationship between theory and practice, while questioning at the same time the curatorial project itself, consolidated traditions of exhibiting fashion, and the politics of display, not only in fashion, but across a wide spectrum of disciplines. Since then, exhibitions as Beyond Desire (MoMu Antwerp 2005), Anglomania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion (The Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006), Katharina Prospekt: The Russians by A.F.Vandevorst (MoMu Antwerp, 2005-2006) have all embraced a transversal perspective, proposing not a chronological or didactic view but rather listening to the traces the garments bear, situating the pieces within a wide cultural context, and creating tales. These narratives, as suggested by Spectres/Malign Muses, are of course all starting points of potentially infinite genealogies.
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1 Hussein Chalayan, quoted in C.Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness, New Haven-London, Yale University Press, 2003, p.57.
2 The deconstructive activity in the domain of aesthetics started with The Truth in Painting (1981), continued then with Memoires of the Blind (1990), and finally with La connaissance des textes. Lecture d'un manuscrit illisible (2001), written with Simon Hantai e Jean-Luc Nancy. However, it is only with Spectres of Marx (1993) that Derrida's idea of a spectral aesthetics achieves its full development.
3 Derrida -The Movie, by K.Dick and A.Ziering Kofman, Zeitgeist Film, 2002.
4 J.Derrida, "Letter to A Japanese Friend", in Derrida and Différance, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi, Warwick, Parousia, 1985, p. 2.
5 For his graduate collection from Central Saint Martins, in 1993, Hussein Chalayan buried silk garments in the ground for one and a half month, covered in iron filings. In 2007, Chinese designer Ma Ke performed a similar operation. Presenting at Paris Fashion Week her WUYONG/ The Earth collection, she covered the venue with soil from China and dressed up the models with clothes she had previously buried in sand.
6 Evans subtly suggests that, in contrast to the still and inorganic character attributed to fashion, in this installation the mannequin "models the organic, in the form of the molds, yeats and bacteria. The mannequin cannot reproduce the dress but the dress itself is weirdly fecund, having acted as the growing medium for the molds and bacteria. The living dress is worn by the tailor's dummy - another reversal of fashion", ibidem, p.90.
7 Regarding this, see also S.Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Archades Project, Cambridge MA and London, MIT Press, 1991, p.250.
8 On this point, see Backstage, ModeMuseum, Provincie Antwerpen, Ludion, 2002, Statement I, by Judith Clark.
9 Judith Clark's essay "Installing Allusions", in The Art of Fashion. Installing Allusions, Rotterdam, Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen, 2009, p.16.
10 Judith Clark, Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back, V&A Publishing, London, 2005.
11 Borges, who indeed inspired Clark's project, wrote "I imagines a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars...I saw it - The Garden of the Forking Paths was the chaotic novel...That fabrics of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities". J.L.Borges, "The Garden of the Forking Paths", cited in Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back, p.49
12 See also R.Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated by K.Tribe, Columbia University Press, New York, 2004.
13 As Svetlana Boym points out, nostalgia "remains an intermediary between collective and individual memory. Collective memory can be seen as a playground, not a graveyard of multiple individual recollections", S.Boym, ibid., p.54.
14 See D.Miller (ed.), Home possessions. Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, Berg, Oxford, 2001, p.89.
15 In respect to this aspect of nostalgia, Elizabeth Wilson recalls the word of Patrick Wright who sees utopia as "a vision of possibilities which resides in the real'", E.Wilson, The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women, Sage, London, 2001, p.101.
16 The "memory theatre", or "theatre of memory", was an aspect of the science of imagination practiced from Classical times up to the Renaissance. It was used, in particular, for the development of memory and also as a "mind-map", that is, a symbolic space, often represented as a building, which spanned the imaginative or conceptual faculty. In respect to this, F.A. Yates, The Art of Memory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001.
17 On this point, see Tseen Khoo and Kam Louie (eds.), Culture, Identity, Commodity. Diasporic Chinese Literature in English, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006, p.99.
18 As reminded by Samuel, the relegation of nostalgia to the realm of the sentimental and instinctual should be read within the specific denial of sensual memory as a form of history, which took place during European enlightenment.
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