Hello, I'm Emma McClendon associate curator of costume at The Museum at FIT
and curator of Power Mode: The Force of Fashion an exhibition in the museum's
fashion and textile history gallery. Please join me as I walked through some
of the key themes and pieces from the show in this short video. The word power
gets thrown around a lot in relation to fashion. Power dressing, power heels, the
power suit. But what do these terms actually mean? What makes a garment
powerful and what type of power are we referring to when we use the word in
connection with fashion? The exhibition takes these complex questions as its
starting point to consider the power dynamics inherent in clothing across
five themes, military uniforms, status dressing, the suit, resistance or protest
dressing, and lastly sex and fetish wear and their relationship with power
dressing. A core idea that runs throughout the exhibition is that
clothing is a social language. Whether or not you are interested in fashion with a
capital F the moment you choose to put an item of clothing on your body be it a
leather jacket, a suit, a fur coat or even jeans and a t-shirt, you are making your
body socially legible to people around you. A goal of this exhibition is to help
visitors better understand the power dynamics inherent in all clothing that
we wear. In each section menswear and womenswear are shown side by side and
pieces from as early as the 18th century are juxtaposed with more contemporary
pieces. My hope in organizing the show in this way is that these pairings will
help bring out the layered meanings in each piece and help show how these meanings
have evolved over time. Also in each section there are pieces that will be
immediately recognizable to visitors, pieces that you will see and think yes I
understand why that's here. But then there are others that might seem
confusing at first which I hope will spark curiosity. For example, in the
military section that opens the exhibition on one side of the room
recognizable military uniforms are paired with fashion adaptations. Military
uniforms are perhaps the most obvious example of clothing designed with power in mind.
They combine tailoring with an elaborate visual code of patches, braiding,
stripes, colors, and metalwork that make the soldier a walking extension of the state's power.
The uniform signals the wearer is trained in combat and has access to weapons.
In the fashion versions, the same colors, textiles, buttons, etcetera
become visual shorthand for the authority of the military. But a company logo replaces
the state seal is the power of association.
On the opposite side of the room, two shiny silver ensembles,
by Phillip Plein and Gareth Pugh, might seem
surprising within the military section. They look futuristic and otherworldly.
Part superhero, part robot.
The two looks take inspiration from medieval suits of armor
and I wanted to include them here to highlight the power of fashion as
protection. The power of fashion isn't just offensive and aggressive.
It can also just as often be defensive power. As Bill Cunningham once said,
"fashion is the armor to survive everyday life." The next room of the exhibition
turns to consider status dressing. Here the power is economic,
rather than militant. One side of the room concentrates on the power of materials.
Ornately woven textiles like brocades and velvets, as well as furs,
fine metals, and jewels were all expensive and ostentatious. Wearing them
conveyed wealth, dominant social position, and therefore power. But the meaning of
materials changes over time. Today we do not think of textiles as status symbols
in the same way as they were viewed in the 18th century. In the 1700s textiles
were incredibly expensive and precious. They were handed down in wills and kept
for generations. So an ensemble like this robe a la francaise would have
immediately conveyed the wearer's wealth and power from the sheer amount of
costly brocade fabric used to create it. Today, brocades have been replaced by
logos, brand names, and it bags. From Chanel's distinctive wool suit, to a
recent Balenciaga puffer coat, the power of the object rests in its recognizable
connection to a luxury designer name. From status dressing, the exhibition then
moves to a deep dive into the suit. The suit is often considered synonymous with
power, but why? It connects back to the suits emergence as menswear during the
19th century – a period of strict gender roles. Men occupied positions of power in
politics and business while women were relegated to the home. As a result, the
suit became the de facto uniform within the spaces of power. It is therefore not
surprising that as women tried to infiltrate these spaces they would adopt
and adapt the suit. From the Suffragettes’ white suits to Yves
Saint Laurent's le smoking and pant suits, the suit clad woman has become a
potent power symbol, particularly again in recent years with Hillary Clinton's
white suit at the 2016 DNC or AOC's white suit at the 2019 State of the Union.
But the suit clad woman still uses a language of power defined by men and menswear.
In the next section the exhibition looks at the relationship
between fashion and resistance dressing. There is an immediate tension between
resistance clothing and fashion because true resistance clothing is seen as authentic,
whereas fashion versions are pushed aside as surface level
appropriation, empty commodification. And this view is not wrong.
Take the hippies of the 1960s for example. They started dressing in this way,
buying pre-worn or surplus denim from flea markets
and patching, embroidering, and personalizing it to immediately
convey their political ideology and opposition to the shiny disposable
post-war consumerist lifestyle they felt was destroying our society and planet.
Of course in so doing they created a distinctive look that got picked up by
the fashion industry and turned into hippie chic luxury products. For example,
the hippie chic jeans here from Tom Ford's 1999 collection for Gucci sold
for upwards of three thousand dollars.
But the relationship between fashion and resistance isn't so simple.
There are designers, like Kerby Jean Raymond for his brand Pyer Moss,
who used the runway as a site for protest.
Each one of his collections is a statement on the systemic racism and
racial inequality in the US. This look is from his fall 2018 collection for Pyer Moss.
He was inspired by the legacy of 19th century black cowboys who have largely been forgotten.
For the collection, he fused western wear details like yoking,
chaps, and wide brim hats with clothing that pejoratively is often
called street style, such as hoodies, tracksuits, t-shirts, and sneakers.
Each look has the biting slogan “AS USA AS U” blazoned across it – a comment on the
whitewashing of American culture. Positioned here between a MAGA and a
pussy hat, the grouping speaks to the political potency of clothing in our
current cultural moment. The exhibition then concludes in a section that
considers the relationship between sex and power dressing. It looks specifically
at items of fetish wear that have made their way into our fashion vocabulary.
Many of these items from the thigh high boots, leather pants, PVC, harnesses, and
exposed zippers have become mundane. But when they first began appearing on the
runway they caused polarizing reactions. For example, Gianni Versace's 1992
bondage collection outraged half the people who saw it. They were offended and
called it objectifying. But the other half thought the models looked like
Amazonian dominatrix warriors and thought it was incredibly empowering.
This speaks to the importance of interpretation in power dressing.
Power means different things to different people at different times. Sometimes even
at the same time. Whether a garment is understood as powerful depends on both
the wearer and observer. Take the high-heeled shoe,
one of the most vilified fashion objects within traditional feminist discourse.
It pitches the wearer up so she can't walk or run easily. It changes her gait so that
she sways her hips, emphasizing her curves and making herself into an object
for male visual enjoyment. This is all true but what's also true is that
countless women and men talked about the feeling of putting on a high heel.
The feeling of their foot in the shoe. The way it makes them taller. The way it
changes their walk and how this makes them feel powerful.
This is a key element of power dressing.
It's not just about how these garments look, but also about how they feel.
And this is true for all the sections in the show.
The feeling of putting on a uniform, a suit, wearing a leather jacket.
The feeling of fur against the skin.
All of this contributes to the psychological effect of clothing
and our understanding of clothing as powerful.
Thank you for listening and joining me on this tour of Power Mode
at The Museum at FIT.