On 9 April 2014, whilst on a research trip in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, I was invited by Professor Rita Andrade to give a paper at the Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil. This is a short extract from my paper, which examined National Geographic’s representation of Brazil through dress since the magazine celebrated its centennial in September 1988.

Reproduced within the centennial edition of National Geographic in September 1988 were all of the magazine covers published to date, on a 2-metre wide double-sided pull-out section. The thick glossy pages unfolded as far as the arms could stretch and played with the affective capacities of the beholder. To view the covers in their entirety, the beholder was required to hold the magazine in their hands and realign their body in relation to it: to press their chest forwards, to move their face closer to inspect the small printed details, to achieve a sensory relation with the textured surface and smell of the recently printed pages. This article will argue that the centennial edition of National Geographic was designed not merely to be read, but to be felt too. It initiated a shift, in which the magazine has sought to communicate with its readership not only in terms of linguistic signification or effect, but through the sensations, memories, emotions or affect that images of Brazilian dress have evoked in the National Geographic viewer.

Within the article the then editor of National Geographic, Wilber E. Garrett (1980-1990) commented (my italics): ‘Though I can’t relate to all of them, these covers mark a century of holding up to the world our uniquely objective publishing mirror’. He then asserted a point of departure from the magazine’s previous editorial objectives, by declaring the need for ‘a once-in-a-century bit of introspection – holding up the mirror to ourselves for a change… we’re looking ahead to the next 100 years.’ Representation does not simply mirror but actively constructs, manufacturing the objects of its gaze as much as registering them: it is in this sense that each photograph reproduced in National Geographic has necessarily extended, altered and distorted the metaphorical ‘mirror’ originally held up by the National Geographic photographer or National Geographic author to his or her subject.

An example can be seen in a photograph that appeared in a National Geographic article in December 1988 entitled ‘Last Days of Eden: Rondonia’s Urueu-Wau-Wau Indians’. It captured a young girl as she stared at her reflection in a shiny silver and green balloon which she held in her right hand, whilst she traced the contours of her face with her left hand. A caption underneath the photograph read: ‘Captivated by her own image, an Urueu-Wau-Wau girl studies a plaything from another world at an outpost of Funai, Brazil’s National Foundation for the Indian’. Materiality is central to a viewer’s visual interpretation of this image. Viewers have a heightened awareness of their own bodies as they sit in quiet contemplation of the magazine, which is held in their hands or perhaps rested on their lap, and flip through the smooth, silky pages – possibly even handing them to another family member or friend for consideration. This bodily engaged way of viewing images in National Geographic focuses the act of looking, and draws attention to the act of looking being performed by the subject of the photograph, who stares at her own reflection in the shiny surface of the balloon whilst stroking her cheek. This engenders a feeling of identification between viewer and subject, despite the disparities in geographical location and generational experience, through the viewer’s own heightened awareness of being-in-the-world. As Eugenie Shinkle has pointed out, ‘So-called “mirror neurons” in the brain fire not only when we perform a particular action ourselves, but when we witness someone else performing it.’ Shinkle has examined the process by which, when we look at the postures and gestures made by a body (in this case, the girl tracing her reflection on the skin of her face) we do not simply read it in terms of a represented body, but we map these postures and gestures onto our own body. National Geographic self-reflexively plays with the performative nature of image-making through the use of gesture, which produces a heightened awareness of the process of looking in the National Geographic viewer. The use of gesture invites empathy between subject and viewer on a bodily level, as the subject movements are synchronized with the viewer’s own physical, emotional and intellectual being.

Sources:
Garrett, W. E. (1988) ‘Within the Yellow Border…’, National Geographic, 174:3, September,
p. 270-286.

McIntyre, L. (with photographs by W. Jesco von Puttkamer) (1988) ‘Last Days of Eden: Rondonia’s Urueu-Wau-Wau Indians’, National Geographic, 174:6, December, p. 804.

Shinkle, E. (2010) ‘The Line Between the Wall and the Floor: Reality and Affect in Contemporary Fashion Photography’, in Shinkle, ed., Fashion as Photograph: Viewing and Reviewing Images of Fashion, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, p. 220.

‘Hints on Making an Evening Dress from a Morning Frock’ is an excerpt from the 1926 cinemagazine Hints and Hobbies. The series, produced by A. E. Coleby and S. Mumford, consisted of several instalments that supplied audiences with advice on matters that ranged from the usefulness of jiu-jitsu to optimal suggestions on restyling a hat in six different ways. As the subject matter indicates, this new genre of film was targeted at women who made up the majority of cinemagoers in the interwar period. As a key source of fashion information, cinemagazines, along with newsreels, Hollywood films and printed magazines, provided women with a treasure trove of contemporary styles from which they could select what suited their budgets and needs. Their miscellaneous advice therefore reflected the diversification of female lifestyles in the interwar period, which stimulated the need for an adaptable wardrobe suited to the pursuit of dynamic modern interests.

‘Hints on Making an Evening Dress from a Morning Frock’ is a Cinderella story tailored to contemporary needs and desires. The young girl is quickly transformed by her mother’s dexterous adjustments, presumably allowing her to go out for an evening of dancing, one of the most popular leisure activities in the 1920s. This fictional re-enactment of a scene gleaned from everyday life illustrates contemporary attitudes towards fashion and entertainment. Instead of framing fashion as a novelty attraction, the economic adaptability of current styles is emphasised. Accessories such as the lace, buckles and fake flowers that are added to the garment would have been available for purchase at department stores such as John Lewis or Whiteleys, which catered to home dressmakers. Through alterations of their existing clothing, working and lower middle-class women could participate in the collective process of fashion and express their individuality in creative ways.

The transformation of the dress also serves as a pretext to promote inter-generational female bonding. Cinemagazines frequently showed mothers and daughters collaborating on making objects for and in a domestic setting as a popular pastime. The mother’s active role in transforming her daughter for a night of dancing suggests her approval, and downplays the rebellious potential of a young woman wearing revealing evening attire in an unchaperoned social setting. ‘Hints on Making an Evening Dress from a Morning Frock’ illustrates how fashion and mass media are inextricably linked. While many assume that modern media promotes passive consumption of commodities and images, these examples demonstrate that they also have the potential to foster a creative involvement with fashion. Instead of simply providing a reflection of what fashions dominated the latter half of the 1920s, ‘Hints on Making an Evening Dress from a Morning Frock’ signals what it meant to be fashionable and how this could be achieved.

See ‘Hints on Making an Evening Dress from a Morning Frock’ here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PXAFvOH3yg

Sources

Barnes, R., and Eicher, J. B., eds. (1993) Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning in Cultural Contexts, Oxford: Berg.

Buckley, V., and Fawcett, H. (2002) Fashioning the Feminine: Representation of Women’s Fashion from the Fin de Siecle to the Present, London: I.B. Tauris.

Hackney, F. (2006) ‘ Use Your Hands for Happiness ’: Home Craft and Make-do-and-Mend in British Women’s Magazines in the 1920s and 1930s,’ Journal of Design History Vol. 19 No. 1.

Hammerton, J. (2001) For Ladies Only? Eve’s Film Review: Pathe Cinemagazine 1921-33, Hastings: Projection Box.

Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory, London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

Some of the most unexpected discoveries during the course of my research on Russian émigré ballet and the body c.1920-50 have been the personal photographs in dancers’ archives.  Personal photographs, unlike the widely publicised media images, which typically feature the dancer in costume and attempt to restage a ballet’s choreography, are the snap-shots taken by a dancer’s family and friends.  Within these latter images, it has been interesting to consider how far the dancer’s self-image, and possession of the learned fluid mannerisms acquired from ballet training, influenced her body image in unofficial snapshots.

The personal photographs of Tanaquil Le Clercq, an American dancer who became a protégé of the Russian émigré choreographer George Balanchine from 1940, when she won a scholarship to the School of American Ballet (SAB), reveal an experimental approach to body image and identity.  Le Clercq, who had long tapering legs, a feline profile, and a playful, instinctive sense of musicality, embodied Balanchine’s ideal of an American ballerina.

Three distinctive genres emerge in Le Clercq’s 1940s photographs, which are stored at  the Tanaquil Le Clercq Personal Archive at the New York City Ballet Archive in New York: the diligent American ballet student,  the metropolitan ballet dancer,  and the ingénue exploring her identity.

A series of Le Clercq in exuberant poses, reflective of a typical American dancer, were taken around 1945 by her mother Edith Le Clercq when the family were on vacation in Cape Cod. In one photograph, Le Clecq wears a long, full-skirted patterned dress with a white petticoat and executes a high arabesque on toe, with her arms extended wide at a diagonal. The discrepancy between her legs’ balletic stance and her free arms evoked the naturalist vitality and elevation that were common in official representations of American dancers in dance interest magazines. However in one image, the blurry thrust of a raised leg, and the downcast-eyed, parted-lipped expression of intense concentration, which are different from the dancers’ unmannered ease in media photographs, document more realistically the dancer at work. This unofficial image thus countered the critic Edwin Denby’s myth of American dancers as carefree ‘boys and girls in exuberant health who are doing pretty much what the charming animals do, and are as unconscious of their grace as they…’, with a portrayal of an ambitious dancer on a conscious mission of self-improvement.

A 1946-48 image of a pony-tailed Le Clercq in a black leotard was taken on the SAB’s Madison Avenue rooftop by her then boyfriend Job Saunders. Her weight is slightly forward, her knees are bent playfully and her head is tipped away and twisted to the side as she attempts to synchronise her trained body with the urban context of New York City. Here Le Clercq’s syncopated, sleek body posture reflects Balanchine’s own aesthetic in mid-1940s ballets such as The Four Temperaments (1946); however, her ballet-jazz improvisation on the ballet school’s roof also indicates an independent exploration of her physicality, both as a dancer and as a woman. Interestingly, the boundaries between dance-wear and everyday wear had become looser after 1943, when the New York sportswear designer Mildred Orrick introduced a leotard similar to Le Clercq’s, thus encouraging women to imbue a dancer’s sinuous mobility in their everyday body image. In light of ballet’s fashionability, Saunders’ image of Le Clercq on the roof, perhaps unconsciously, positioned her as a hyper-visible City style icon.

Fellow-dancer Patricia McBride’s 1944-5 photograph of a loose-haired Le Clercq, crouching in a black leotard and holding a round mirror that reflects her face, presents a more mysterious view of the dancer. The Polaroid frame, which crops Le Clercq’s body from both ends, provides a cloistered perspective, while the abundant wavy hair flowing down her back suggests a semi-erotic state of abandon and perhaps even evokes John Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). Significantly, the fashion photographer Richard Avedon adopted the figure of Alice in a February 1947 issue of Junior Bazaar, where a modern version of Carroll’s protagonist undertakes a journey of self-realisation through adopting new fashions. While Avedon’s commercial imagery lacks the intimacy of Le Clercq’s, collectively the images imply that the sense of ludic self-discovery represented by an Alice figure was relevant to women’s fluctuating sense of identity in the 1940s – a decade in which women had to adjust to men’s absence during the war years and their reinvigorated presence in peace-time. In Le Clercq’s case especially the mirror could recall the ballet studio ritual, but it is also a poetic device that alludes to an unseen dimension within the subject.  While McBride’s photograph in itself insufficiently explains the young dancers’ self-image, it implies that some aspects of identity were explored through fantasy in a girlish, coterie atmosphere. Interestingly, this dynamic mirrored that of the late 1940s Junior Bazaar photographer Lillian Bassman and her models, who would share their personal experiences and fantasies rather than engage in the camera seduction of photographic sittings dominated by male photographers. Additionally the sense of engaging with something that mattered to the sitter, evident in Mc Bride’s photograph, also applied to Bassman’s introspective soft focus images which portrayed women engaged in private reveries or rituals.

Although they vary in subject-matter and mood, collectively, Le Clercq’s personal photographs indicated that her sense of identity in the mid-1940s was plural and adolescent as she expressed Balanchine’s vision of the American ballerina alongside other more personal aspects of feminine identity. The parallels with contemporary fashion images in Le Clercq’s photographs position her within the collective of young American women who engaged with forming a public persona, whilst they simultaneously cultivated a personal self-image.

Source:

Denby, E. (1949) ‘Against Meaning in Ballet’, in Looking at the Dance, New York: Curtis Books.

I first discovered Francesca Woodman’s photographs whilst I was working at the company Phillips de Pury. I was sorting through some catalogues and came across the work, Self Portrait at Thirteen, Boulder, Colorado, 1972. I was struck by her age and the estimated price. Untitled, Rome, 1977-78 sold for $170, 500 on the 4th April 2012. Her self-awareness struck me as being immediately of our time. Both her playfulness with the camera and her seeming insistence to photograph herself held my gaze. As I paused to gather my thoughts, what also collapsed time and made me connect so viscerally with the photograph, was the medium of dress.

Here is an extract from an essay I wrote this year in Dr. Rebecca Arnold’s History of Dress MA. The extract discusses ‘After My Grandmothers Funeral’, a photograph that helps to communicate how Woodman’s understanding of fashion offers a narrative possibility to her images hereto unexplored.

“The cinematic qualities of the image were elucidated by the curator Lynne Cooke in the exhibition Ellipsis who celebrates connections between Woodman and the filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. The term ‘ellipsis’ makes reference to an important formal device used in modernist film in which an element of film narrative which does not need to be shown or stated is removed from screen. Antonioni’s use of ellipsis is distinct in that he extended the use in order to mark moments of uncertainty in films such as L’Eclisse (1962) and L’Aventura (1960). Here, Woodman appears like an Antonioni heroine, her dress signals an awareness of fashion and the filmic qualities of the image exacerbate the fictional qualities of Woodman’s fashionable attire.

The image thus concedes to the cinematic device ellipsis that echoes the use of dress as creating an ambiguous narrative or missing link, caught between a protective covering and a simultaneous statement of a fragile interior state of mind. The etched pencil title, ‘After my grandmothers funeral’ tints the image with a ceremonial, ritualistic event, that is not present in the photograph. The fur coat encases Woodman in a way that is seems both protective and defensive perhaps embodying Woodman’s ambiguity towards Fashion as either an extension of thought or rationally separating dress and thought. Whilst the colour black evokes an interior consciousness, mimicking a solemn state of mourning on the outside, Woodman’s clothing suggests the sensory quality of touch.

Through this image dress becomes a mechanism for Woodman to reconfigure the narrative possibilities of objects. In her photographs concerning her grandmother, Woodman’s characteristic use of clothing as lining, becoming an extension of skin, is replaced by a more complex relationship to the clothing. Clothing takes on an element of agency itself. The objects embody her absent grandmother and rather than relishing in a characteristic blur, Woodman can be seen to archive the objects by integrating them into her own work and associating them with her own living body.

This essay tries to capture how Francesca loved fashion and little, if no critical consideration is given to her clothes. They add something to the images, and in part attracted me to her astounding body of work.”