ADORNED IN DREAMSFashion and Modernity by...

ADORNED IN DREAMS

Fashion and Modernity by Elizabeth Wilson (University of California Press: $30, cloth; $9.95, paper)

Fashion covers up. Fashion is false pretense. Fashion is cloth deep. Elizabeth Wilson, an “applied social studies” lecturer at North London Polytechnic, cuts through these common assumptions, offering dramatically original ideas that make this a major work of anthropological scholarship and cultural criticism. Fashion “connects the biological being to the social being, private to public,” Wilson writes. “(It) forces us to recognize that the human body is more than a biological entity. It is an organism in culture, a cultural artifact even . . . . It is the frontier between the self and the not-self.”

While Wilson’s writing is too academic to come into popular vogue, “Adorned in Dreams” should find a wider audience than feminist works which dismiss fashion out of hand as evidence of “inauthenticity” or “false consciousness.” Fashion can dull self-expression, Wilson acknowledges: “The urbanity of fashion masks all emotions, save that of triumph; the demeanor of the fashionable person must always be blase--cool.” But just as fashion, in encouraging us to keep up with the Jordache’s, can cultivate the “mass man” identity of the 20th Century, so too it can enable counter-culture groups to maintain a sense of solidarity.

Wilson details the roles of “oppositional dress,” from zoot suits in the 1940s (“a statement of ethnic pride and the refusal of subservience”) to the “clone style” of gays in the ‘70s (lumber shirts, jeans and heavy boots that reassert manliness while mocking masculinity) and punk in the ‘80s (“the fashion equivalent of modernism in art”). Wilson’s study of punk clothing shows how “Adorned in Dreams,” sharply focused, consistently intelligent and broadly informative as history, ultimately focuses more on the societal than the sartorial: “Because of the freaked out feel of punk . . . there’s been a tendency to read it simplistically as an expression of angst about nuclear war and dread of the futility of post-industrial, post-modernist life . . . Yet to see punk in this light misses the possibility that to create one’s own identity in a shocking and deviant way . . . may actually contribute to the building of self-confidence, a sense of self and even optimism.”