LURVE Mag Notes

“you will see daulmonster as she lives
inside ur heart forever.

my life as daul was so miserable and lonely.
please join my loneliness in another world.

i love you all.

daul”

Kirsten Owen by Nick Knight.

In 1994, Cindy Sherman produced a series of photographs for the clothing company Comme des Garçons that break virtually every rule of fashion photography.
As philosopher Roland Barthes has observed, fashion photography is generally governed by a garment-photograph-caption formulation, an apt description that cannot, however, be applied to Shermans interpretation of Comme des Garçons clothes. Her photographs center on disjointed mannequins and bizarre characters, forcing the clothing itself into the background. The lithe, physically ideal fashion model, so integral to the pages of Vogue, Glamour, and Elle, is nowhere to be seen. In her place are a menagerie of confrontationally unpretty surrogates, like the garishly made-up mannequin in Shermans Untitled (#302).
The models excessive makeup, hair in wild disarray, and bruised flesh recall the sex-and-violence– saturated fashion photography of the 1970s. The figure is further complicated by the hollowed chest in which another vacant representation of the painted female face resides. At an unnatural interval, the legs appear wearing … what, exactly? Are the pants Comme des Garçons? Or is it the backdrop fabric that was designed by Kawakubo and misappropriated by Sherman? In Untitled (# 304) is the masked mannequin wearing a Comme des Garçons dress as originally designed by Kawakubo, or as altered by Sherman? And which are the Comme des Garçons clothes in Untitled (#300)? And why has Sherman has donned a gloomy, battered mask in place of the model’s traditional bright smile (or look of icy disdain, depending on the current style)? Even the pretty picture of the series, Untitled (#296), which features Sherman resplendent with well-lit feathers artfully arranged in her hair as she contemplates a mirror ball, is not about the clothes it purportedly features. They are instead a minor element in the overall atmosphere of the photograph.

These anti-fashion photographs effects are shocking and discombobulating, particularly when viewed in the light of conventional fashion photography. They are not, however, out of place in the context of Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubos approach to the business of fashion design, which is strongly inspired by the values of the contemporary art world. Her first big success in the West came in 1981 with her inaugural Paris show, which made her an overnight sensation and unapologetically illustrated her resolutely modernist philosophy of clothing design. She claimed she wanted to start from zero,reexamining clothes as if the entire history of costume did not exist. The garments in the initial Paris show seemingly accomplished that goal. With her deconstructed and shapeless dresses in infinite shades of black, Kawakubo questioned all the conventional assumptions of Western fashion, in particular, that clothes should conform to or reshape the body. She simply refused to pander to the usual drama of concealing or revealing the body. In turn, Kawakubo and her intellectuality-imbued schmattes were enthusiastically embraced by devotees of the avant-garde, especially in the New York art community.

While Kawakubo was being embraced as an artists fashion designer, Cindy Sherman was made welcome in fashion industry circles. Her Untitled Film Stills series had established her as an able manipulator and interpreter of mass media icons of femininity. Shermans forays into fashion photography included a series of photographs for the Paris-based fashion house Dorothée Bis and another for Diane Benson, an American retail entrepreneur who later opened the first Comme des Garçons store in New York City. Sherman also created photographs for both Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Indeed, it was a Harpers Bazaar layout that precipitated her collaboration with Kawakubo. After seeing that layout in 1993, Kawakubo contacted Sherman and provided her with clothing from each of the Comme des Garçons collections, to be photographed however Sherman wished. The resulting images were then used in the direct-mail campaign for the Comme des Garçons autumn/winter 1994–95 collections and also displayed in the companys SoHo boutique. These photographs are less depictions of saleable product than challenges to the expectation of what a fashion photograph should be.

If Shermans take on Kawakubos designs is difficult to discuss as fashion photography, that difficulty is mirrored in the fashion press’s attempts to come to terms with Comme des Garçons clothes. Kawakubo has played both the creative genius and the saboteur in the fashion industry. She has rejected most traditional fashion conventions in the design of her clothes, in the decoration and layout of her shops, in her unorthodox advertising campaigns, and in her sometimes confrontational runway shows. In the Comme des Garçons fashion collections, Kawakubo has offered shirts with extra sleeves and neck holes, jackets cut to be misbuttoned, skirts and dresses with wildly irregular hemlines, jackets with slits up the length of the sleeve, jackets bearing only one shoulder, clothing with exposed seams, or asymmetrical padding in unconventional places, and knitwear with holes used to decorative effect: such clothes cannot be discussed in conventional fashion terms. In the early 1980s her stores broke every rule of merchandising, displaying clothing sparsely and under uninvitingly harsh fluorescent light; now this aesthetic has been appropriated or adapted by many others. Her latest shops in New York and Tokyo are the complete opposite—cluttered with wildly assymetrical and curved walls, they invoke carnival fun houses. This rejection of conventional fashion merchandising extends to Comme des Garçons advertising; Shermans photographs are only one of many examples. Kawakubos catalogues feature minimal fashion content, sometimes omitting the clothing altogether and instead employing an image meant, in an oblique way, to capture the meaning of the collection, such as a sunflower.

In the context of Kawakubos destabilizing approach to the established way of doing business in the fashion industry, her collaboration with Cindy Sherman, whose work also undermines the reality of particular images, seems almost predestined.
The two are well matched in the paradoxical nature of their endeavors. Sherman is a noncommercial artist whose work welcomes and converses with commercial appropriation. Kawakubo manages a financial empire in the most commercial of industries while rigorously impressing an artistically informed sensibility on all of her products. Both Kawakubo as a fashion designer and Sherman as an artist have used their work to question assumptions about what constitutes self-presentation. Though their mediums and the attendant demands of their work are vastly different, both women subvert traditional images of and ideas about femininity. This kinship renders the Sherman-Kawakubo collaboration a rare example of the successful bridging of the art-commerce divide.

Jessica Glasscock, M.A. Candidate, Costume Studies, Visual Culture Program, Department of Art and Art Professions, School of Education, New York University

A poster created by the Czechoslovakian artist Olga Poláčková-Vyleťalová for the movie Une Femme douce by Robert Bresson.

Year : F/W 1988 1989 
Brand : Yohji Yamamoto
Photographer : Nick Knight
Art Direction by Mark Ascoli
Design by Peter Saville Associates

Dress, Spring/Summer 1994 by Issey Miyake. Pleated polyester. Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute. gift of the Miyake Design Studio .AC11613 2007-2. Photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto 2007.

Damien Hirst, False Idol
Pop Life: Art in a Material World
Tate Modern