(or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Blog)
I have been thinking a lot about fashion criticism, and more particularly about why it is a field that hardly exists. That statement might seem false at first blush, but only because of terminology. When putting it one way, criticism of fashion is the only thing that seems to exist both on the web, and in print (but mostly on the web). When magazines and fashion blogs put up content about shows and trends they are essentially providing a lot of commentary and criticism as well. Even image-based blogs--the biggest of those being The Sartorialist, but even for example, Jak & Jil blog--pull in their fair share of hubbub because those who follow the blog can leave comments expressing like or dislike--essentially little critiques on an outfit or a type of look or even on blogging culture itself. Then you also have people like Judith Thurman, writing for The New Yorker and Guy Trebay for The New York Times who focus on designers and trends in their larger roles as cultural critics.
On the other hand, when I think about the type of criticism I read for my Art History courses, it seems that very little fashion criticism exists. Who in the world of fashion can be seen as the equivalent of Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss, or Hal Foster? Or in terms of cinema the equivalent of Eisenstein or Zizek? There are a lot of questions to be raised. Why does such critical discourse not yet exist?-- (especially when we consider the fact that humans have been dressing themselves far longer than they have been painting, writing literature, and making movies) Do we even need the equivalent of Krauss and Eisenstein? Which leads to the bigger question: is fashion even art? What would the implications be--if there were any at all--on the fashion industry if more literature was being written on race and gender and sustainability in relation to the industry? These are questions that I would like to see be answered by more people, but as for now I am merely a lowly undergrad who has neither the resources, the historical background, nor intellectual horsepower to tackle them all on my own. So instead I write on this blog.
on the left Clement Greenberg: early champion of modernism and artists like Jackson Pollock. He was once punched in the face by Willem de Kooning (it was awesome!) on the right Slavoj Zizek: our generation's celebrity philosopher, who has written on film theory and "the gaze". But his most important writing is probably this text he wrote for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue
What's your guys' response (yeah all of you out there in the ether of the internet)? Should we consider fashion an art? Is criticism even necessary? I'd love to hear more thoughts (other than my own) regarding these questions!
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