The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
Since cinema, like fashion, mobilizes the gaze, inviting it to change, to
transform, it can narrate these metamorphoses, can narrate itself and display
the cultural and technical processes that generate meaning. In cinema, vision
encounters the other senses, and so the pleasure induced by the film is a
synaesthesic pleasure in which the senses become confused and the viewer is
initiated to an unfamiliar visual pleasure based on a mutual contamination
of the senses. In the most elementary act of perception the senses are not
subject to a hierarchy, whereas in our world the primacy of sight and seeing
(as the direct, fixed gaze, Lacan’s evil eye) has made us forget all the rest, all
the synaestheses and possible distractions from the visible.
The questions posed by Wenders about fashion directly concern vision
as representation, as a copy through which images think for us and
through which the sacred aura of the mass-produced, serialized work that
accompanies contemporary mythology (pace Benjamin) is constructed.
Fashion, too, has this aura, which makes it difficult to speak of fashion as
myth tout court, though in everyday language, when we refer to myth and
the mythical, it is the discourses of fashion and cinema that seem best to
fit such a definition. The star system in cinema corresponds to the top
model in fashion, and both discourses have to do with a system of objects
with which the body is clothed, whether in real or imaginary form. Think
of all the gadgets that come out with every new Disney movie, the T-shirts
with lines from famous films on them (from Casablanca to Dear Diary),
and the futuristic technological objects in films like To the End of the
World. This mythical aura seems to surround not only cinema and
fashion, but also what we (perhaps wrongly?) call ‘reality’. One such
instance of ‘the real’ is death: the myth of film stars untimely ripped from
life (for example, James Dean and Brandon Lee) is repeated, albeit in a
more solemn and sophisticated form, in the myths of Gianni Versace and
Moschino, whose memories are almost hallowed, whether it be in the
recognition of artistic quality, as in the case of Versace, or in the survival
of a name in support of humanitarian causes, as in the case of Moschino
with Aids.
Actually, in fashion and cinema, rather than myth as a closed system, we
are dealing with the mythical in the various social discourses through
which both systems are articulated. We are also dealing with widespread
intersemiotic practices, on the basis of which an image is directly measured
against corporeality, with its being presentation rather than representation;
that is, the way in which the body gives itself to the world as worked material,
style, sense-making performance, sign, text and object exposed to
unexpected forms of otherness, rather than as replicant closure within an
identical form. 11
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