Francesca Granata - Fashion Criticism: An Anthology

Fashion Criticism

Fashion Criticism

An Anthology

Edited by
Francesca Granata

CONTENTS

I am grateful to a number of people for their support for this book. First and foremost, my gratitude goes to the fashion critics (and in some cases their estates), for agreeing to be included in this anthology. A number of these critics have spoken in my classes and in roundtable discussions at Parsons, thus furthering my understanding of contemporary fashion criticism. I also thank the Andy Warhol Foundation, for letting me use Warhols image for the books cover.

The students from Parsons who attended my graduate seminar on Fashion Criticism have been a great sounding board for the ideas in this book, and their enthusiasm for the subject has been a motivating force throughout.

This anthology developed from an issue of Fashion Projects, the non-profit journal I edit and founded, on the topic of fashion criticism; I sincerely thank both the issues interviewees and contributors. The idea for the issue developed in conversation with my partner Jay Ruttenberg, a writer and music critic, whose enthusiasm for the subject of criticism and endless discussions about it were also indispensable to the bookas were his many hours of childcare for our daughter Corinna.

I also would like to extend a heartful thanks to my colleagues at the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, for their intellectual camaraderie. In particular, I would like to thank my colleagues in Fashion Studies: Hazel Clark, Heike Jenss, Charlene K. Lau, Rachel Lifter, and Christina Moon. A deep thanks also go to the schools deans Sarah E. Lawrence and Rhonda Garelick for their support and enthusiasm for the project. A number of research assistants have aided with the tasks of copyright clearance: Nick Stagliano, Maegan Stracy, and Yannise Jean.

My thanks also go to Van Dyke Lewis, Alice Twemlow, and Susan E. Thomas for inviting me to present on the topic of fashion criticism at, respectively, Cornell University, the School of Visual Arts, and the New York Art Book Fair. Part of the introduction was previously published in Fashion Theory, and I thank the journals editor Valerie Steele. My gratitude also goes to the anonymous reviewers, who gave feedback at the proposal stage and to this full manuscript, shaping this anthology tremendously. In conclusion, I also would like to thank the editors at Bloomsbury and in particular Frances Arnold, Rebecca Hamilton and Yvonne Thouroude for their tremendous and constant support of this book.

Film criticism has its Pauline Kaels and Andrew Sarrises, and music criticism its Robert Christgaus and Greil Marcusesyet fashion remains, in the words of one prominent fashion critic, culturally beneath regard (Ruttenberg, 2013, 28). How has such a rich and diverse area of criticism remained so understudied and undervalued?

This question has been percolating with me for quite some time. In 2004, I started a journal titled Fashion Projects, with the mission of highlighting the importance of fashion within current critical discourses. A non-profit journal, it was started with the intent to reach beyond the academy. (Unlike academic journals, it is distributed in newsstands and sold at a relatively low price.) In 2013, the same impetus behind starting Fashion Projects led me to the topic of its fourth issue: an investigation of fashion criticism, as articulated in journalistic writings. This issue was structured around interviews with fashion critics about the state of their field. Our subjects included Judith Thurman (a staff writer at The New Yorker), New York Times style writer Guy Trebay, Suzy Menkes (then at The International Herald Tribune), and Robin Givhan (The Washington Post). The issue was meant to highlight what I believed to be an important yet understudied area of criticism. The richness of the interviews and the interest it generated in publications ranging from The Columbia Journalism Review to Teen Vogue solidified the importance of the topic and led me to start working on this anthology. (Notably, writing on the topic of fashion criticism has greatly expanded in the relatively short period since the issue was published, further underscoring its importance.)

Delay in Legitimization

The central questions that animate my investigation on the topic are: Why has fashion criticism remained undervalued relative to other areas of cultural criticism? What has been its historical development vis--vis other fields of criticism? Is its delay in legitimization tied to its gender specificityby the fact that historically it has been written by and for women?

has published anthologies of most areas of cultural criticism from food to architecture, yet nothing on fashion to date (Granata, 2019, 554).

Partially explaining this delay in legitimization, philosopher Lars Svendsen points out that critical fashion writing and the developing of a robust field of fashion criticism have been hindered by the fashion press close relation with the industry. Svendsen argues that genuine fashion criticism sits somewhere between fashion reportage and fashion theory, and is always rigorous, clearly stated and historically informed (Svendsen, 2016, 115). Evaluationthe ability to move a positive or negative critiqueis central to criticism (Carroll, 2009; McNeil and Miller, 2014; Svendsen, 2016). Similarly, fashion scholars Kyung-Hee Choi and Van Dyk Lewis discuss criticism, in the context of fashion, as a process of judgment to use a language to heighten understanding and appreciation of a coded object and to communicate discourses on its value system (Choi and Lewis, 2018, 3). Bemoaning the lack of a critical approach to fashion is hardly a novel idea, as is advocating for it and for the importance of taking fashion seriously. As early as 1845, French novelist and literary critic Jules-Amde Barbey dAurevilly, writing under the female pseudonym Maximilienne de Syrne, complained in the pages of LeConstitutionnel how fashion reviews are often no more than trade shows of low style, shop windows offering barely more food for the mind than advertisements. And he (as she) adds, The idea of introducing a degree of objective honesty into these reports came to us out of love and respect for Fashion. [] We do not consider ourselves as frivolous as all that in describing Fashion as a matter of considerable import beneath its apparent triviality (Maximilienne de Syrne [Barbey dAurevilly], [1845] 2015).

Another hindrance to the formation of fashion criticism is the practice of fashion houses to ban fashion critics from shows in retaliation for negative pressa practice that has few counterparts in other fields of criticism (Svendsen, 2016, 109). Recent accounts of such attempts at censoring negative reporting have been noted in relation to Cathy Horyn (then at The New York Times). The anthology includes her 2004 review that caused her to be banned from Hedi Slimanes YSL show. Horyns article reads as a measured assessment of that seasons menswear collection in Parisits alleged affront was hailing the designer Raf Simons and giving a tepid review of work by Hedi Slimane, then designing menswear for Dior. However, the practice of banning critics from attending shows has a long, albeit poorly documented, history. Bill Cunningham reported in his collection coverage for Details magazine that in the mid-1980s, Womens Wear Daily was banned from the Yves Saint Laurent fashion shows, seemingly for the minor infraction of hailing Lacroixs shows over YSL. WWD also had been banned from the Balenciaga fashion shows from the late 1950s through the 1960s, although continued reporting on it was based on department stores sketches of the collections. As Cunningham points out, these were not isolated cases, rather it brings into focus the whole archaic process of commercial fashion houses setting themselves up as untouchable, censoring the press by excluding it from their show, a system that has worked for the smaller, private couture houses since the turn of the century (Cunningham, 1988, 188).