Elaste

New York - China, and Munich seems to be right in the middle. So I dropped by and met my mates from Elaste having our annual Pils Out at Schuhmann’s. Thomas “It’s alright as long it looks good” Elsner, Ian ” I am an intellectual“ Moorse, Michael ”We need a manifesto“ Reinboth and I were sitting and debating a possible relaunch which most likely won’t ever happen. Why should we even bother after Thomas muses: ”Fashion is totally overrated. "In my polar opposition, I feel fashion is possibly underrated. (I think it is doing just fine). Fashion is an insane amount of creativity, it’s politics, business, logistics, social commentary and awareness, it marks history, it is style, craftsmanship, design, media, a big economic factor, the spearhead of globalization.

Why not quoting somebody who thinks of fashion seriously: In Showstudio Christopher Breward writes:

If politics is about the exercise and regulation of power in public and private life, then fashion would appear to be the ideal mirror of, and vehicle for political action. In all aspects of its production, dissemination and use the fashion product engages in a distinctive polity. Its materials relate to ethical values; its manufacture is informed by the legal and illegal practices of government and business; its promotion entails an engagement with a visual politics of persuasion; and its wearing ignites the fiercest moral debates. And yet….
The history of dress provides a familiar roll-call of self-consciously ‘politicised’ items, where an over-literal interpretation of ideology seems sometimes to leach the political life out of the very fabric. From the sans-culottes of Revolutionary France, through the utopian prozodezhda of constructivist Russia to Katherine Hamnett’s iconic anti-nuclear slogan t-shirts of the mid 1980s, the potential of clothing to act as a form of sartorial agit-prop, seems to me to have been fatally limited. When garment becomes bill-board, all the nuances of signification in which political meaning ultimately lies are amplified into a one-dimensional propagandist rant. Context, as ever, appears to be all. It’s the savage imagery of the sans-culotte in eighteenth-century satirical print-culture that terrifies; the face-to-face confrontation of Tory prime minister and campaigning fashion designer that inspires – not the item itself.
So, rather than embed the politics in the dress, far better to recognise the paradoxes and tensions which position fashion itself as paradigmatic of the broader politics of the time. Fashion at its most vibrant is in and of the political – and no more so than when its surfaces coalesce to ‘epater le bourgeois’. The provocations of Punk have often been cited in this respect. But in my view the Italians were doing it better and earlier. Anyone doubting this should turn to Paola Colaiacomo’s recent and excellent book ‘Factious Elegance: Pasolini and Male Fashion’ (Marsilio: 2007) and in particular to the illustration on its back inside.