Fashioning the Public Sphere, Pt. 1
American model Renée Gunter modeling Haute Couture clothing in Japan in the 1970s (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
One way to assess and try to understand the freedom of thought that any society enjoys, protects, and promotes is to determine how robust its public sphere is. Of course, this answer itself depends, first, upon what specifically a public sphere is and, second, how to measure the freedom of thought promoted (or not) by that society. Already, with these two questions, fashion appears to be the odd one out, not only unrelated to the public sphere but also spuriously related, if at all, to freedom of thought. Where would fashion come into the conversation addressing the freedom of thought a society enjoy? Fashion seems, if anything, to accessorize and accompany but not affect substantially the relation between freedom of thought (assembly and expression) and the public sphere. I’d like to claim, in a preliminary manner, that fashion might provide not just a way to answer and understand both questions but the way to approach and apprehend both freedom of thought and the public sphere. Most importantly, from this perspective, I think fashion is able to accomplish this not just generally as a matter of information or data in textbooks or even as an abstract and esoteric concern but rather concretely and in a particular manner for today.
What, then, is the public sphere, and what does it mean to entangle fashion with it? How can fashion — understood narrowly as a specific industry focused on clothing, or broadly to encompass styles and manners of dress / speech / action — contribute to, constitute even, a public sphere? The public sphere is the space — physical, geographical, and virtual — and place that one is able to express oneself regarding issues and concerns that affect not just that person, specific to their own empirical proclivities and quirks, but the commons and common life, more generally. Or, to put it another way: it is the space where one’s personal empirical interests assume common social and political interest. It is the space that respects and honors the possibility for assembly and self-to-other-expression. This expression, moreover, is about issues that, in virtue of where and how they are expressed — in written form, verbally, gesturally, or otherwise — implicate social life.
One explicit form this account of the public sphere takes, then, is the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants not just the freedom of religion and freedom of speech, but the freedom of assembly. [1] In many ways, the freedoms granted regarding religious expression and speech require their assembly, physically or virtually, in order to be protected. That there are — now more than ever — capacities established for attendance in no way reduces the fact that all can and, if they so decide, should be there to actualize a right already theirs. Assembly is not only a gathering, but a gathering that is constitutive of the very right to be protected. It performs the very thing it stands for. The right for peaceful assembly is that which ensures the public sphere is realized, wherein the possibility — as feminism claims — of that which is most personal (seeming to deal with an individual’s existence) is shown to be political (of concern for all, as also their concern). Common life demands not an intrusion of privacy at all moments, but rather the space that respects — from the Latin respicere, meaning to “look back” and “regard” — and institutes the possibility of one’s practicing free expression to and for others.
“It is the space that respects and honors the possibility for assembly and self-to-other-expression.”
How, then, is one to understand this public sphere — as granting the space to assemble freely and express oneself in a free manner to concerns that address not just personal issues but public and common concerns — in relation to fashion? The most concrete and material form fashion assumes, in an everyday manner dealing with both individual expression and clothing choice, is the catwalk or runway. The catwalk is the specific runway, corridor, space, and platform where fashion is recognized as expressing itself. Most famously and in an iconic manner, it is the space used by fashion houses to showcase and feature, with world-renowned models, each new season’s clothing lines. The runway and catwalk, taken as the main attraction and central force of gravity for this affair, is one of the main social contexts and spaces for fashion to express itself.
How, then, can fashion and the runway both operate as fashioning, or making, a public sphere, when the very example listed above brings to mind instances of the private sphere? And to what extent does this public sphere provide the space for freedom of expression? One place I’ve turned to, in order to think these questions, is Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (also translated as the “The Science of Joy”, or “The Science of Happiness”), a collection of songs, short paragraphs, aphorisms, and reflections on particular themes aiming to re-evaluate the values of society, whether those values be cultural, social, political, or aesthetic. In section 280, entitled “Architecture for those who wish to pursue knowledge” Nietzsche writes:
“One day, and probably soon, we will need some recognition of what is missing primarily in our big cities: quiet and wide, expansive places for reflection — places with long, high-ceilinged arcades for bad or all-too-sunny weather, where no shouts or noise from carriages can penetrate and where refined manners would prohibit even priests from praying aloud: a whole complex of buildings and sites that would give expression to the sublimity of contemplation and stepping aside.”[2]
This short quote, along with its title, deserves some of our attention. An initial thing to notice is the relation between art, in this case architecture, and knowledge. No longer serving a functional use, with a specified and pre-determined end, the architecture Nietzsche envisions serves the goals of individual thought and reflection, contemplation, and meditation. The space is an open physical form that allows diverse content and different ways of being. It is, importantly, not a personal or a private, in the sense of economic privatization, space that Nietzsche imagines. Rather, it is a large, expansive, public space for all to gather and be present, to contemplate beneath an arcade, along a public square, between awnings, across one another in a row benches, or congregating on porches, as the Ancient Greek Stoic philosophers would.
It is important to emphasize, and keep in mind, that Nietzsche’s thought is from a past moment invoking a future that either may or may not be our past, possibly even our future, a future that we must realize and practice. For Nietzsche, we need to look to our cities as an artist looks to their palate. The cities of the future — cities that think of and attempt to realize a future — need these spaces for individuals to contemplate, be present, and express themselves. The gathering that welcomes all for the express purpose “that would give expression to the sublimity of contemplation and stepping aside.” What does any of this have to do with fashion?
“Architecture facilitates the rendering, or fashioning, public of that which had been and is considered for many to be private: the fashion runway. ”
It appears to me that what Nietzsche describes here is a civic catwalk, a runway that operates as public sphere. “Architecture for those who wish to pursue knowledge” reveals a different imagining for what the runway can be, who can attend, and what can be seen and shown. Architecture facilitates the rendering, or fashioning, public of that which had been and is considered for many to be private: the fashion runway. For Nietzsche, art was a public and common good. It not only granted escape from one’s own personal existence, but also — and in concert with others — granted a space to revitalize one’s existence, create something new in common, and experience something beyond the bounds and limitations of functionalism, utilitarianism, or the reduction of individuals to social functions.
The architectural structure Nietzsche imagines is a catwalk that grants all to be present, to attend, and express themselves. Whether in silence or in whispers, one can attend and showcase their clothing, modeling it for others as well as attending to and rendering sensible — that is, meaningful in an embodied manner while focusing on sensation and texture — the fashion of others. There is, furthermore, no reason to assume that the lack of sound, or the imperative of silence, needs to followed at all times, and that we cannot provide a soundtrack, be it the cacophony of conversation, the mix of a DJ, or the movements of an orchestral piece. The catwalk imagined as public sphere necessitates a different choreography for social life and living in common. There are no restrictions on who can attend, and who can showcase their fashion. Whether one is an influencer modeling, a creator — whether musician, set or clothing designer — showcasing, someone looking for inspiration from others and connect — all are welcome and in virtue of this space of assembly can fashion a public sphere by way of fashion and clothing.
The aspects I value in Nietzsche’s assessment, and wish to emphasize, are his insistence that: (1) art is a social need need that offers something no other cultural production can offer, (2) everyone can attend this public space, and (3) that it is a requirement for the city to facilitate the sublimity of expression. Most notably, perhaps, for all of these is the fact that Nietzsche is quite vague about what this catwalk and runway as public sphere will look like. This vagueness and openness of form provides the space to be defined, constructed, and changed according to the needs of the current and future participants.
In a future installment I will explore the inherently non-neutral, and thus necessarily contested space of the public sphere. By focusing on the runway as a contested public sphere I will highlight specific issues addressing assembly and free expression. In contrast to thinking the space that grants assembly, in this case the Nietzschean catwalk, as something existing in perpetuity, I will show the (at least) two options available, the extremes of a privatized and policed catwalk, on the one hand, and the fundamentally cooperative and free-expression providing public sphere (as fashion runway), on the other.
Notes
[1] See Amendment 1 of the Bill of Rights: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transcript#toc-amendment-i
[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. Ed. Bernard Williams. Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p.159.
