Seriously Fashionable

Book Review

Feeding the Eye: Essays

352 pp., $27

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Nothing annoys independent critic Anne Hollander more than people who don't take fashion seriously. Fashion, she rather self-righteously laments, "bears a heavy weight of ancient discredit that still burdens many of those who work in it and write about it," such as herself.

Are fashion critics really so oppressed? After all, that splendid shrine, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, does include the Costume Institute, albeit tucked away in the basement. According to Hollander, such efforts miss the point: "Like stage costumes, couturiers' work is often embalmed in exhibitions that can be ghastly essays in necrophilia." She scorns equally "efforts to chain [fashion] up in Cultural Studies." In Feeding the Eye, a new collection of previously published essays, Hollander furthers her project of making the world safe for fashion criticism.

Hollander writes about clothing and its reflections in literature, dance, painting, film and photography in an exceptionally clear and modest prose style. She keeps herself as distant from fashion journalism chattiness and cattiness as from university-press obfuscation. Her miscellaneous subjects are bound together by the particular and consistent kind of attention she pays them. When discussing, for example, Kafka, she talks of his clothes and confidently and convincingly takes her argument from the well-cut suits he preferred to the bodily architecture of Gregor, the cockroach protagonist of The Metamorphosis.

Most of those who argue for the importance of fashion as art restrict their attention to the highest echelon of couture, judging value by such indications as the ingenuity of construction, level of detail, perfection of drape and splendor of textile. Such features may be exhibited as easily on a museum mannequin as on a living person; the animating spirit is the genius of the designer. But for Hollander, while she admires seminal figures like Chanel and St. Laurent, the couturier is a minor figure:

"Lacroix and the others burst theatrically on the scene at prescribed intervals and cause much talk, but most of their ideas die immediately. The ones that catch on are often improved, not debased, by the nonfamous designers who modify them for the public...[F]ashion is an art created by its wearers...and our sense of this primary truth has only lately been obscured by the famous fame of designers."

Thus the relation between a designer and his creations is utterly different from that between, say, a painter and his paintings. For Hollander, fashion matters when it is in use, on the body, in the streets.

Hollander's emphasis on social practice, however, does not mean that her approach is sociological. She is interested in aesthetics, not economics, envisioning fashion as an extraordinarily democratic art, and every clothed body as a poem. She speaks of fashion as literature, "a sequence of costumes illustrating a narrative of inward events" and everyone who gets dressed in the morning as an author, which is not to say that all are equally skilled; while geishas may be "advanced poets of dress," most of us are hacks or worse.

This analogy of fashion to literature allows Hollander one of her chief weapons in her struggle to make fashion criticism as respectable an endeavor as literary criticism. She insists on the personal and inward aspect of fashion, the poetic dimension, rather than seeing, as fashion's attackers do, mindless conformity to a current mode of consumption. For Hollander, clothing is "the conductor of the most intimate and personal dispositions, not only feelings but aesthetic choices with personal historical significance--not only the wearer's immediate surrounding world but the style of his self-perceptions within it."

Speaking of clothing in such terms--the same terms T. S. Eliot uses when he describes the poetic process--lends fashion a prestige different from and greater than that of the cult of the couturier.

Hollander's argument for why fashion matters is the same argument people sometimes still make about literature; in her excellent Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (1994), she writes, "The important imaginative function, the spiritually enlarging character of fashion, is often blindly ignored so as to paint fashion as wicked, just as novels were once forbidden for being mere falsehoods." Spiritually enlarging or not, Hollander's close study of clothing yields surprising and insightful analyses. By this she demonstrates what she overstates elsewhere, the sharp illumination offered by passionate attention to the details of dress.