I. Intentions and Outcomes, continued

A. Wearers' intentions
B. Secondary agency of objects (Gell 1998)
C. Rosie's leather MaxMara skirt
D. Mumtaz's outfit for a wedding in France
E. Borrowing: like kula objects, clothing retains traces of owners
F. Constraints on dress

1. Limited domain of the wardrobe items
2. Agency of clothing, material and ideological
3. Internalization of how others will view us

G. Dressing is anxious, contingent, exciting

 

II. The Gaze and the Mirror

A. How does an "I" see a "me"?
B. Sadie's elaborate preparation to go out

1. Ideal vision of her "natural" self
2. Gaze can be welcome or unwelcome

C. Rules

1. Rules don't just constrain; lack of rules isn't liberating
2. Younger women more prone to particular looks
3. Older women can "compromise and recombine diverse facets of clothing" (121).
4. Too many possibilities can be paralyzing

D. Proximity

1. Seeing items on others allows one to interpret it
2. "In my ethnography, women's participation in fashion was always rooted in women's existing clothing, friendship groups and relationships" (133).

E. In Style magazine, What not to Wear: "Rather than hampering creativity, following fashion rules is often the very domain for the generation of innovatory looks" (134).
F. Habitual clothing: jeans

1. Introduce new items into wardrobe
2. Mold the body
3. Ubiquitous, yet personal

G. "Clothing, as a material form, gives women the sensation of having a self, including a self with agency" (150).

 

III. Fashion Blogging (Minh-Ha T. Pham)

A. Susanna Lau, a.k.a Susie Bubble: "party shirt time," December 30, 2011
B. Asian superbloggers (traffic, comments, subscribers or followers, public attention, collaborations): Lau, Bryan Grey Yambao, Rumi Neely, Aimee Song
C. What's missing from outfit posts? WORK!
D. Taste work = form of capital in particular historical, social, economic, political, and cultural contexts within hierarchies of class, gender, race, and sexuality
E. Key questions addressed in Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet

1. Why have Asian superbloggers become so prominent in the early 21st century?
2. Why are the tastes of Asian consumers now central to Western fashion economies?
3. How does bloggers' taste work transform their own gendered and racial bodily practices into forms of capital?

F. Bloggers' racialized labor compared to the labor of Asian manufacturing workers

1. Bloggers do creative work by consuming goods produced by manufacturing workers
2. Both groups are "positioned -- hierarchically -- in fashion's productive system as a racially gendered supply of unwaged or underwaged labor" (12).
3. Both "occupy a common fraught position as a model minority labor supply believed to be oriented to hard work, yet racial assumptions about their natural facility for hard and difficult work put them in a position where they must bear the burden of demands (often discourteously made) for unreasonable amounts of work" (32).

G. Why Asian superbloggers?

1. "cute culture" = feminized warmth, intimacy, approachability
2. Global economic shift to Asian design work
3. Social commerce --> direct connection to Asian consumers

H. "Legitimate difference" versus "racial aftertaste"

1. Race as trendy style
2. Accusations of untalented, self-promoting, fake, accepting bribes
3. Dynamics of racialization: "Attacks on bloggers that focus on the personal ethical failings of bloggers retain the discourse of progress while reasserting fashion's dominant racial order, in which white Euro-American experts and consumers are the true arbiters of fashion and style" (77).

I. Style story as written fashion

1. Legitimate difference: "the stories function to aestheticize Asianness by recasting racial difference as a style of Asianness that is distinct in terms of taste and, tacitly, class" (37).
2. Policing of knowledge by Suzy Menkes and conventional fashion press
3. Digital media work: text and coding to compose stories, create links, and monitor traffic --> sponsors and economic capital
4. Instability and risk, similar to Moon on LA's Jobber Market

J. Stylized race

1. Lau on Chinoiserie
2. Aimee Song, Song of Style fashion speak
3. Racial neoliberalism: "race and racialized markers of difference are tied to market logics of consumer sovereignty, personal branding, and freedom of expression through a free market of endless consumer choices" (97).
4. Racial camp, Bryan Boy Yambao

a. Exaggerates marginalization: queer, male, Filipino
b. Fights back

i. "Punk kid my ass when my Birkin bag is DEFINITELY more than their third world annual income" (100)
ii. French terms
iii. "screw Anna Wintour"
iv. Self-described "fashion whore"
v. Whiteness of men's runways

c. Attacked for being cheap, fake, tacky
d. Distances himself from "Asian at Duty Free"

K. Bloggers as racialized, undervalued fashion laborers
L. Do we actually see the labor?