I wish to follow up on my contribution to the 2020 Fall/Winter UFASHON MAGAZINE HAUTE COUTURE with a piece in which I set forth an idea concerning a contemporary ethnography of fashion.
My plan is to provide a series of brief monthly statements to illustrate this point of view. The months I intend to use are not drawn from the familiar Gregorian calendar introduced in 1582 by a pope of this name.
The Gregorian calendar was eventually adopted all over Europe, and became the international standard by the early twentieth century. Instead, I use the months deriving from the French republican calendar introduced in 1782, and later in the Papal States during the First Roman Republic between March 1798 and September 1799.
The spirit of this new calendar was to call to mind seasonal changes by adopting a terminology corresponding to the physical conditions of the various monthly activities linked to the agricultural cycle. The first month of the year was Vendémiaire, the harvest season, which effectively ended one annual cycle and started another. In Italy this month was called Vendemiaio, corresponding roughly to September.
It was followed by Brumaio, taking its name from the word for fog. The release of my previous contribution corresponds to the beginning of the new year, while this one corresponds to the second month. I adopt this nomenclature because I wish to explore the way natural elements find their way into human activity in any sphere including fashion. Inevitably human ingenuity has obscured the linkage between our physical condition and the annual round of cultural practices. But connections persist. Fashion seasons are an obvious expression of this correlation, about which much can be said. The alternation between seasons has profound anthropological implications for human experience.
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An illustrious study of the contrast between winter and summer is found in an essay published by Marcel Mauss in 1906 on the organization of Innuit communities in the Arctic north.
According to his findings, winter is focused on sacred activities correlated with spatial and demographic concentration. Summer by contrast is more fragmented, solitary and dispersed, associated with profane activities. The essay was a contribution to a broader European debate concerning whether Inuit society was collectivist or individualist.
The answer is that these orientations alternate on a seasonal basis. Even in modern times winter has a more collective and sacred character, as witnessed by sacred holidays which in the northern hemisphere are organized in this season. Summer is instead more frivolous and individualistic.
This encounter between physical and social worlds carries over into a host of cultural activities in ways which may, however, be difficult to discern. In fashion the deeper relevance of seasonal rhythms can be particularly obscure, given the supreme importance of creative innovation. Yet the two main fashion shows of the year are organized in the dead of the northern winter, in January, and in the midsummer heat of July.
Following Mauss’s intuition we might expect the winter season to be more reflexive with stronger attention to collective concerns, while the summer represents a liberation from these constraints. Inevitably, the contrast may inspire compliance or dissent, or simply be ignored. But in human experience at some level the contrast exists, and this subliminal perception may inform the deconstruction process which is so important in today’s fashion universe.
As we know, deconstruction destroys the world and reassembles it according to the whim and fancy of the designer. Transgression is a common ingredient in this process; yet this defiance against the present can only be effective when shared memory preserves a knowledge of the rules that need to be broken in the pursuit of a new aesthetic order.
The logic of seasonal alternation may be among these rules.
Gregory Overton Smith, D.Phil. (Oxford)
Temple University Roma
