Fashioning a Strong Case for Clothes as Art

In “Feeding the Eye,” her accomplished new collection of essays, Anne Hollander focuses her astute, curious intelligence on a range of arts-related subjects that have come her way somewhat incidentally, by means of books assigned to her for review, and manages to turn them into a volume that sparkles with insight, learning and cohesiveness. This is no small achievement. Hollander has a gift for building a vivid essay around a book, even when she rather dislikes it, so that the potentially fleeting (a review) becomes instead an incisive biographical sketch, a critical dialogue or (frequently) a small, sly tract on a subject of abiding importance to her, the art of dress, and the way it has been sloppily or too casually handled by critics, historians, reviewers and writers of every kind.

The author of two previous books on fashion, “Sex and Suits” and “Seeing Through Clothes,” Hollander insists that dress is “the one art we have all been practicing since prehistory, gradually following the shifting flow of taste, feeling and custom, as we still are.” While she may not in the end, in this book at least, make an ironclad case for the art of dress standing on the same footing in the pantheon with the arts of literature, painting and dance, Hollander does something that may even be more interesting: She makes us constantly aware of the infinite complexity of fashion and its intricate relationship to novels, paintings, movies, sexuality and daily life.

Hollander finds the subject of dress hiding in the most unlikely of places. In an essay on Franz Kafka, for example, she reveals that the writer wore tailor-made clothes even when poor, was intrigued by gymnastics and acrobatics, and followed the body-culture systems popular in German society at the time, all in an attempt to harmonize his “too tall, too thin, too awkward and physically fragmented” self; yet when he wrote “Metamorphosis” the beetle Gregor, “clad in his functional carapace,” came to mock many of the old realities, including “the idea at the core of 19th century novels that clothes, just like facial and bodily traits, always correctly express character.”

She is especially good at locating these historic shifts and shadings, in fashion as in other arts. Writing about Chanel, she observes that “not many creators in the ephemeral arts have a chance to preside over their own rebirth” and then proceeds to explain why Chanel’s curious character and quirky steely endurance made this possible. Her review of Deirdre Bair’s biography of Simone de Beauvoir brims with understanding of just what it meant to be an independent intellectual and a woman in early 20th century France: “Before she could lead her famous life, she had to imagine it, and French precedents were conspicuously lacking,” Hollander observes, locating us at a moment when not only precedents for De Beauvoir’s intellectual life were lacking, but also those for her unprecedented partnership with Sartre, where there was “heavy emotional furniture that constantly needed dusting and shifting, often by her novelistic method.”

These abbreviations do an injustice to Hollander’s essays, which are many-faceted and full of the kinds of details that compress and animate long elaborate lives. Among her other strong portraits are those of the French designer Mme. Gres, Vaslav Nijinsky (she writes about his strange obsessive diaries) and Garbo. Hollander’s more theoretical essays are more specifically, but seldom narrowly, about fashion. In “Accounting for Fashion” she argues that dress looks “very much like art” (note the touch of conditionality) and proceeds to argue that messages sent by clothes are not always the messages received; that designers tend to follow rather than precede public taste; and that a keynote of fashion is its “subversive character, the requirement that no meaning stay the same, that no rule remain in force, that nothing ever become too comfortable to look at or too easy to grasp. Fashion has made itself into the image of the questing modern psyche in its permanently discontented state.”

Yes, well. Although the touch of the grand, perhaps even the grandiose, now and then slips into Hollander’s writing on fashion, for the most part it is full of thoughtful information and insights: how 16th century dress was inspired by such painters as Titian and Bronzino; how black, on men, was once worn by the powerful, now by the relatively powerless; how the corseted body was actually a symbol of freedom, not constriction. Interested in kimonos, androgyny, transvestism, the culture of flowers? Pick up “Feeding the Eye” and allow your own to be fed.