Volume 10, Issue 1 -

The analysis of the relationship between fashion and institutions could represent a new approach in the theoretical analysis of fashion. This article is an attempt to show how, from an analysis of Simmel, Lotman, Volli and Legendre and a semiotic-juridical perspective, the topic of fashion can be linked to an anthropological-juridical perspective and a juridical conception of fashion as a normative institution. Juridical knowledge appears to be essential for the anthropological understanding of the phenomenon of fashion and too many studies have forgotten the contribution of the juridical sciences to the theoretical configuration of the question. From a complex historical-juridical analysis of the notion of Corpus Iuris (Kantorowicz) emerges the value of the medieval notion of corpus mysticum as a fictional body, referring to a political context that is both liturgical and ritual. The reference to this idea thus passes from the Corpus Iuris Civilis of medieval canonical law to the modern aesthetic signification (fictional and iconic) of the notion of the political body, referring to the modern state, which is still to be found on the well-known frontispiece of Hobbes’ book the Leviathan and then to the fictional and stylised bodies of the models in a fashion show. Following the theories of Legendre, the conclusion of this article suggests to reintroduce the secularised juridical and theological lexis for the aesthetic relationship between the natural body and the fictitious body, seen as a mystical and political body, considered present in the practices of dressing and twentieth-century fashion. Fashion is one of the forms through which, in mobilising desire, the human being constructs that “second body”, fictitious, represented, parallel to the real body, which is constitutive of the subjective and collective identity of a society. This body is fashioned under the ritualised and institutionalised form of the garment that hides the body, concealing its animality, which gives access to a collective fictitious reality, of which, we could add, all the products of the semiosphere, including the juridical institutions, are formed.

Gender Studies have shown that gender is a social construct. In the paper, I argue that gender as a social construct should not hide its “Real” dimension: social constructs participate in what Lacan calls the Real. In this perspective, gender is conceived as a symptom built by the subject to protect itself against castration. The subject is therefore tied to its gender as it is tied to its symptom – in the psychoanalytical sense. It builds the image of gender in order to be able to enter in a relationship with the Other. In other words, the imaginarization of gender makes possible – paradoxically – for the subject to access the impossibility of a sexual relationship. Gender is therefore the result of the imaginarization of castration. Whereas the psychoanalytical reading has often been interpreted – especially in Gender Studies – through a structuralist view, I argue that the psychoanalytical approach to the construction of gender does not contradict its social determination. However, one may stress that social determination according to psychoanalysis cannot but be introduced by the symptom, that is by the subject itself and through the fantasied construction of its relationship with the Other. I suggest to read this psychoanalytical interpretation of gender with the notion of the institution as developed by Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s view of the institution is particularly relevant here for two reasons. First it overcomes the opposition between the subject and the social which are both instituted and instituting at the same time. Second, Lacan’s theory of sinthome which reads the symptom in terms of sexual relationship implicitly refers to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the institution. I will show to what extent the Merleau-Pontian notion of the institution helps to conceive of the Real in gender understood as an intertwining of social and subjective construct. I claim that this view overcomes both a structuralist approach – which represses the historicity of the social – and a view which represses the function of gender in the subject’s construction and its symptom.

“Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.” With this challenging innuendo, the American actress and author Mae West offers an insight into gender performativity and heteronormativity through marriage in a period, the “Roaring Twenties,” in which sexual and gender politics could not be put into scrutiny. Her vamp persona and the elaborated iconography that she crafted on her character gave birth to a meticulous semiotics of the body that eventually undermined the American social context of the time fostering on the one hand, an image of heterosexual desire, and on the other hand an appealing icon to a gay market. This article ventures a queer-oriented perspective on West’s charismatic character and on the intertwined effects that tie semiotics to body language, especially focussing on the plays Sex (1926) and The Drag (1927).

The essay examines how fashion mediates our knowledge of human relationships in Indian English literature from an anthropological perspective of the value of clothing in Indian culture. The first part of the essay analyses the importance that Gandhi’s khadi had for the independence of India and the role it plays in Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Untouchable (1935). The second part illustrates how sari and salwaar kameez shape Indian femininity and women’s dignity. Dress is viewed as a situated bodily practice which makes social and cultural values visually intelligible. In the study, I do not refer to clothing as “fashion”, but rather as dignity, human rights, discrimination, and justice. The purpose is to underline how a piece of garment can be highly identitarian of a single individual and highly identitarian of a political ideal.

This essay aims at analysing the contemporary revision of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast re-told by Angela Carter in “The Tiger’s Bride.” In my critical approach I will intertwine two distinct theoretical strands: one focused on the concept of ‘skin’ and its role as idiom of personhood and identity and the other focused on the notion of the dressed/undressed body, its political power and the manner in which clothing acts as a form of embodiment. I will be focusing on the idea of both body/skin and the dressed body as telling traces of the cultural negotiations of identity and difference by analysing the transformation of Beauty into an animal and the figure of The Beast, as a strange being in a dimension between human and animal. It is precisely the movement of these bodies- naked, clothed and masked- in a liminal zone, an area of exclusion, that makes them the powerful destroyers of the rules of normalcy and allows them to deconstruct the normative perspectives of biopolitics, defined by Michel Foucault as the extension of state control over both the physical and political bodies of a population.

Augmented Reality (AR) is increasingly changing our perception of the world. The spreading of Quick Response (QR), Radio Frequency (RFID) and AR tags has provided ways to enrich physical items with digital information. By a process of alignment the codes can be read by the cameras contained in handheld devices or special equipment and add computer-generated contents – including 3-D imagery – to real objects in real time. As a result, we feel we belong to a multi-layered dimension, to a mixed environment where the real and the virtual partly overlap. Fashion has been among the most responsive domains to this new technology. Applications of AR in the field have already been numerous and diverse: from Magic Mirrors in department stores to 3-D features in fashion magazines; from augmented fashion shows, where models are covered with tags or transformed into walking holograms, to advertisements consisting exclusively of more or less magnified QR codes. Bodies are thus at the same time augmented and encrypted, offered to the eye of the digital camera to be transfigured and turned into a secret language which, among other functions, can also have that of becoming a powerful tool to bypass censorship.

Elizabeth I’s portraits span more than 40 years of her reign: during this time her courtiers commissioned paintings that developed both her own image and a complex set of symbols that transmitted her power. These paintings, together with other iconological representations of her sovereignty, embody her personal way to advertise her own power and keep her subjects within the fascination of her figure. By commissioning portraits of the Queen her courtiers both expressed their loyalty to her and helped to develop the wide range of emblems and visual devices through which her propaganda could be promulgated. The analysis of the symbols interwoven with the dresses which enwrapped the Queen in her portraits conveys both the social situation of the period and Elizabeth’s will to impose her figure as divine so as to stress her legitimacy to the throne. The problem of power, legitimacy and legality are all intertwined in the dresses: the yarn that is spun by the painter’s brush represents the rules that keep society together. It symbolises the legal system with all its paraphernalia and anticipates an awareness for those in power to advertise their image which typifies our age. The fundamental function of clothing in making or unmaking a person’s status within society is often used in Renaissance plays. In many passages of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew , for example, clothing is clearly connected to authority and it becomes the central device in the taming process itself.

Instead of reading William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in standard terms of the boys’ descent from clothing to nakedness, or in terms of truth disguised in false appearance, this paper reads the novel in terms of the constancy of dress. The form of the dress may change from clothes to painted masks, but the fundamental fact of dress remains. The boys’ relationship to rules can be read in a similar way. Instead of reading their story in terms of descent from law and order to lawlessness and disorder, it is read in terms of the on-going presence of rules of some sort. The form of the rules changes, but the essential fact of government by rules remains. It is argued that dress and law are constant in the novel and that Golding is warning us, through the parallel performance of law and dress, that we should suspect that external indicators of civilization are hollow; that we should be cynical about all systems of norms established by society and look, instead, to be saved by individual insight and self-sacrifice.

The article discusses fashion advertising as a means to access and understand contemporary social imaginary significations of the body politic, focusing on an advertising for Louis Vuitton. The article suggest that one can read advertising as a form of continuous, running commentary that society makes of itself, and through which one can unearth the social imaginary. The article finds a plethora of meanings in the selected advertising for Louis Vuitton, but the central finding is that the fashion advertising represents community as an absence of community; in other words as a deficit that the brand somehow is able to rectify.

In his novel The White Earth , Andrew McGahan engages with an important chapter in the history of his country, namely the period of the famous Mabo case of 1992, which overturned the doctrine of terra nullius , and the subsequent Native Title Act of 1993. This novel of initiation with gothic features draws attention to both the woeful history of the dispossession, maltreatment and partial elimination of Australian Aborigines and to the issue of how white Australians cope with this past as well as the guilt, anxieties, and loss of orientation this may create. The novel thus turns into a critical engagement with the legal history of race relations in Australia and probes possible paths for future change.

Ian MacEwan’s The Children Act presents many interesting aspects of the often troubled relationship between childhood and the law. Fiona Maye, nearly 60, wise and respected judge of the High Court, faces the most dreadful family disputes and tries to solve them through fair decisions, showing expert and competent legal reasoning. The urgent case of a young boy, Jehovah’s Witness, suffering from leukaemia and refusing transfusion, leads Fiona to the most difficult decision, one that involves life and death, religious freedom and the child’s welfare. The novel constitutes the occasion for some reflections on the English Family Law system and minors’ protection – as settled by Parliament in The Children Act 1989 – and on the recent reforms of the Family Justice, aimed at improving the “private” resolution of family conflicts through mediation as a means of reducing the “expensive” Courts intervention.

This article reads Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover for the way it deals with the relation between justice and desire. The authors discuss how the film portrays, on the one hand, a desire for justice that seeks a theatrical mode of legal procedure in the form of a rule of law that is systematically ethical; and on the other hand, desire as justice as the expression of what Gilles Deleuze called the “ethics of becoming.” The two forms are brought in tension in the film’s final scene, which can be read either as a case presented to the viewer as audience in the judicial theatre, or as a feud that plays out on what the authors read as a Brechtian podium , a space characterized by its radical openness and accessibility. On the podium the procedure is not structured by an audience that needs to watch the proceedings as a check on its fairness, but in which the audience actively participates in determining the situation. Through formal, cinematographic elements, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover brings these two modes of desire and justice, and the ethical, theatrical and procedural forms they imply, in tension with one another. It makes the film a crucial jurisprudential text.