Fetishism in Fashion.

A Book Review by Edith Lzr

In the Fashion Series
The intimate, skinned contact the body holds to clothing has been an inexhaustible source for the
fetishization of fashion, namely for teaming sexual arousal and pleasure with particular items.
Because of their power to formally structure, to cut upon the body in the same way retailed
costumes did, not to mention their sexual affiliation, restrictive type of clothing used in games of
discipline and levels of pleasure (mostly sado-masochism) were especially the ones swept out of
the private and developed into a popular inspiration stance. Repeated over and over again they
became nothing more than stereotype posters, the well-known clich of provocative fetish
fashion. Today more than ever, sex is anything but obscene, with stiletto hills, dominatrix and
bite marks, sexual contriving behaviour, symbolic out worn sex, lingerie, red lips and black
leather, as a long time influential paraphernalia in designing the body.
Lidewij Edelkoort, renowned trend forecaster and curator, has set herself a high-demanding task
with the curatorial project for the 2013 edition of the Fashion Biennale Arnhem, in outlining a
much diverse visual agenda of the relation fashion and fetishism bestow. The release of her
book, Fetishism in Fashion, edited by Philip Fimmano, the co-curator of the Biennale, was also a
joined-up. Published by FRAME in a hard-cover edition, with a rubber band to hold it tight and a
pink silky reading mark between its pages, the book certainly makes for a first impression. While
most of the materials that usually accompany such events are pointing to the artistic works
enclosed by exhibitions, Fetishism in Fashion turned out to be a curatorial project in itself,
without falling into the form of a classical catalogue. The work as envisioned by Edelkoort keeps
a good track of the medium of display as a different space, so she manages to create a shifting
imaginarium activated by a mixture of essays, text scraps and images, where the main unfolding
stands in the power of fetishs hybrid understandings. The main bridge between the projects is
confined by the series of 13 perspectives over fetishisms in fashion, the guidelines for the
exhibition as well. Merging nudism and sado-masochism to infantilism, niponism, spiritualism
and shamanism, nomadic dwellers, romantic and legend attitude inspiration, regionalism,
consumerism, nomadism and patriotism, all these ignite marks for soon to be fashion trends. But
the body of work is not constricted to naming or including designers, artists and writers in such
categories, it rather lets them transit fashions open-ended space freely. Thus, more than granting
an interpretation key, the book faces a myriad of intertwined features, spelled out in fascinating
visuals that exceed prevailing fetish illustrations.
With great fashion houses now fading in the light of massive image dispersion making visible
other practices going on in the fashion scene, other provocative and disruptive representations
have started to come forth in a salient way. Such a context makes for a fertile ground in rethinking the relationship between body and fashion artefacts, and Lidewij Edelkoort draws
attention to some influential and interesting aspects. In constructing such a scenario her main
endeavour falls on our encounter with the materiality of objects, part of it due to present tactile
turn, from touch-screen to touch-sensitive fabrics, a tendency that builds-up our requests from

objects. Now, design and adornments do not suffice, they have to be perfomative structures: they
need a materialization that performs for us and dresses us in a performance to be seen by others
concurrently. However, in this quest for new tactility, Edelkoort has sensed a more organic
apprehension, both in the choices individuals make and in creative practices. Fetishism in
Fashion looks at different ways of approaching fashion and the concept of fetish through the lens
of these organic hints, a complex and productive dialogue revolving around Edelkoorts opening
statement that: were all born in bondage, with a cord around our baby body. () This is where
the human quest for other forms of connections and bonds starts; unable to replace it, we will try
to re-enact or at least to remember the primal bond of life. She thus accounts for the body to be
something unfinished that always needs to find a counterpart, a kind of comfort zone, like the
blanket little children hold on to, where comfort surely means something very different for each
of us. At stake are the dress and fashion adornments, in their innate capacity to form and
transform the body, the way they come to be meaningful to us. This meaningful as a personal
response is where the idea of fetish gets its most powerful enactment from. And I must say,
Edelkoort approaches a primarily human body through an exquisite use of fetish as an advocate
for what attracts and drives us towards objects and imageries, along with their fleshy, sensed
tone.
Beyond the preponderant sexual acknowledgement of fetish, which is an obsessive interest for
particular objects, the curators understanding of it bears a much broader sense based on
anthropological perspectives that provided its terminology. The cultural practice and historical
trace of its appearance ground fetish as the term used by Portuguese, fetisso, to name African cult
objects that held magical power. Once ingested or carried, these objects could give people some
extraordinary personal powers and were capable of healing the body. To extrapolate, the objects
become animated, filled/fuelled with energy. There is a catch to it, nonetheless: also according to
anthropological suppositions, the way the body was dressed also combined an essentially magic
feature, with pieces of clothing having different roles in order to attract positive animist energies
and to guard the individual from ill omens. Dress, like fetishes, is then another example for the
human ability to disengage objects from their practical role and invest them with figurative
connotations (see Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick, Fashioning the frame. Boundaries,
Dress and Body, 2001 p.109).

It became a truism to speak of dress in terms of body substitute, likewise of fetish as surrogate
for symbolic loss. So, both have the role to complete the body or, in magical acceptance, to heal
it. From magical endowment, the shamanic figure is the next intrinsic mental correlation one can
make, which has to do with our collective memory of past radiant individuals. The shaman
performs rituals through which endowed objects are used to physically veil him and within this
veiling to attain a close communion with natural and spiritual forces, but the objects are also a
passage back to the community, to order. Rituals are neither more nor less than enactments, the
reactualization of a primal event that can never be repeated. One should be reminded that a
shamanic experience is both spiritual and bodily effected, and what is more, the ecstatic can be
easily replaced by the orgasmic, in other words the sexual encounter is part of the object
transfigurations too. However, fashion as is often perceived today rather orders, offers pregiven
identity mouldings and proclaims what should the body feel in them. Nonetheless, between the
ritualistic role objects/dress have in the shamanic experience and our new performative

requirements from objects, Edelkoort makes the connection to a contemporary animism, where
dress and fashion adornments still function as lucky charms, veiling, protection, invested with
our own beliefs. Animal prints, natural materials, bio food, leather, textures and their bodily
experience are reminiscent of a constant return to the environment and our organic bond with the
animal. If we also take into consideration the role of fetisso in healing and completing the body,
that could mean we feel threatened by our perception of a less corporal and much too
holographic body.
Resembling a trickster, the fetish in fashion/dress is then not the spiritual, nor the carnal, not
good, nor evil, but an intermediate, the bridge between dividing worlds, the personal and the
collective one, the carnal body and the symbolic, between what cannot be named but only felt,
and the one which evokes and remembers it. The bond, the exchange is to be sustained in the
way the artificial, manmade objects manufactures borrow human features similar to the
way individuals assume the items. And its a relationship that certainly does not lack tension,
since any borderline always involves negotiations and slips. Art (or lightly said any creative
process), which historically resides in the same rituals that invest images and objects with
figurative connotations and transfigure objects, is closely linked to the sameness of fetishes and
dress/fashion. From this perspective, Edelkoort tracks creative acts in order to step into an active
individual dimension, which also means that, among many other aspects, it brings with it a more
or less obvious critique of mass production fashion.
The cards of the curators fetish are thus to be played between these two points: the objects of
desire and the bodys reappropriation of multisensorial attributes, and she does so by stretching
the line between fashion, art and the sensuous body.
Therefore, the book is filled with metaphors of remarkable objects that evoke attachment to the
body, objects that structure it, elongate it, consume it, or let themselves be explored or embodied.
Whether part of a creative process or just commonly used, the objects are the perfect milieu due
to their ability to influence not only our body experiences, but also to shape our perception upon
life. Depending on our everyday experiences, we share much more profound bindings and
sometimes a conscious emotional attachment to objects, and then to discard them is a far more
difficult task than it would seem at first glance. Along these lines, the curator attempts a
restoration of the objects lost aura and brings back a sense of value.
Such a perspective is, I think, one of the leads for another advance of consumerism as Edelkoort
foresees it. It is a consumerism that is not consumerism in fact, rather courses of actions infused
with an awareness of fast production and its consequences. The practices that create corporal
garments by using garbage as a prime material speak loudly about the need for fashion to recycle
and recycle itself not only imagistically, but also materially, that is to slowdown the culture of
waste. In Fetisso Plays Brand, Brand Plays Fetisso, Dawid Wiener makes a short excursion into
the psychology of branding, where he explains how consumerism works with objects and
individuals in the same way fetish objects supposedly did. Insomuch that fetisso were cult
objects, they needed socially recognised rituals to enforce them, likewise consumerism uses
ritualistic practices to express desires toward objects, with advertising as a tool for social
agreement of their staged value. Same as fetisso, the brand promises to improve an individuals
persona through different objects, this time by making him achieve beauty or happiness, wealth

and sexual attractiveness, content. If others can recognise the objects abilities, they can also
recognise them as extensions of the person with whom the object is associated. But as I
mentioned earlier, if the point of attention has started to switch from glamorous fashion to other
practices, then the ritualistic moves are also starting to place themselves out of the advertising
imagery, namely into the everydayness, in the individuals creative investments. Accordingly,
other kinds of rituals can break the given identities as standard image adopting , the hailed
critique on fashion, and insist on individual practices. This is also the idea that transpires in
absurdisms infringements, by accepting chaos, the un-order: to use what is at hand (what we
already have), to play, that is to invent and initiate bonds, personal ones, depending on situations
and events. If, on the one hand, already used objects or clothes have a history of their own, which
we can trace or only imagine, and in this bricollage practice gets intertwined with ours, on the
other hand, in everyday life, to use what you already have also means improvisation, and sheds
light on how the symbolic and the actual function utility of an object can change from
something to something else that seems more necessary in that moment. The outlandish
theatrical mask absurdism could stir from such a play initiates a plethora of personae dramatis
that has nothing to do with readable identities (those related to advertising and mass-media). This
play also tackles an additional social issue, the hyper-visibility as form of surveillance. Mask in
shamanic rituals is that which releases the individual from the order of social identities and
transposes him somewhere else. In this sense, it also constitutes a get-away, even though this can
also mean a literary retreat in fabrics/objects. For German artist Damselfrau, reinterpretations of
burka in a highly decorative manner and with a twist of mexican death masks become exactly
such hiding places. The mask states that there is something hidden which resists or protects the
individual from the process of contemporary social ordering or exposure.
Without question, the physical body is always the ground stone for opening, extension and
recurrence. As it follows, the most private and intimate engagement with fashion concerns skin,
body fluids, and hair. Dress as second skin is definitely not new, but in The Complexion of
Culture, Edelkoort envisions a much higher impact and use of skin and alike textures, from
artificial membranes that enfold the body and extend themselves on objects, to recognizing and
wearing our own body skin in confidence, delving into a conscious nudelepsy. Such a triptych
image display with works of both artists and designers serves as an illustrative rite of passage
from the body to the object. First panel is starring Marcel van der Vlugt. His series of
photographs Skin Colour Card parade almost nude bodies, with items fading into skins colour.
Beige and bronze tonalities, along with sweating, cropped and revealing bodies corroborate to
trigger a highly charged and tensioned atmosphere. Without falling into the grotesque, sexuality
and eroticism behold a much carnal dimension that restores them as intimate and personal back
to private sphere even if, inevitably, it happens through voyeuristic lens. Then, on to a more
violent stadium, Jenny Savilles collaboration with Glen Luchford in Closed Contact torns the
artists body, presses it to the glass, moulds it, simultaneously showing the bodys possibilities of
being shaped and distorted. Geometrical frame constructions make for a fluid transit to the last
part of the triptych, which encapsulates the skin within a pillow shape. A pillow-like body and a
pillow like a body spill forth the corporeal influence in creativity. Once again an ethical
production principle is brought into discussion, since Studio Pepe Heykoops objects are
enveloped in discarded or found fabrics, the remains of other skins.

However, the more visually disturbing stances were found elsewhere, in two disparate works that
also dealt with the transfer from human body onto objects, this time with an emphasis on hair. So
commonly adorned, the ritualistic aspect of hair goes unnoticed in usual practices of grooming
the body in everydayness. When fragmented or incorporated into other kinds of forming
materials, as it happens in the photograph of a XIX-th century indian scalp with braided hair, or
with Maayan Pesachs tea party miniatures (Food Stories Come Alive) made from a mixture
of bones, hair and skin , they give rise to uncanny object representations. But even in this shape,
both of them are reminiscent of something familiar, a glimpse upon a lived body compelled with
something of a childrens play.
This feeling of intimacy extends itself also onto representations and fashion creations of evident
erotic, pornographic or sado-masochist influence. Here the imaginarium is worked in a
metaphoric and poetic state as to reverse the process of body objectification and that of standard
representations. Not only the body but also the pieces that cover and linger on its surface are
rendered in a confessional and melancholic play. Aoi Kotsuhirois designs and visual
constructions are probably the ones that unfold in a sophisticated manner such a process, and
they also open up another door of perception. Melting fashion into photography, her designs are
haunting and dream-like, blurred, styled with dark patches of skulls, corns and crow feathers.
High heel shoes, head pieces and fragmented coverings are all bounded to the body with treads
and knots reminiscent of Japanese bondage techniques; deliberately made from organic
materials, they are body extensions. Sensations the environment and materials trigger in/on the
body can be easily transformed in a haiku, becoming what in her words should be an emotional
pornographer. In that high-awareness of body sensations the designer-artist constantly makes
appeal to, the objects tied to the body are in fact proponents for a kind of contemplative stance.
This transposing process is carried forward by Betony Vernon designer, author of The Boudoir
Bible and sexual anthropologist , whose presentation of erotic sex-games jewellery is classy
performed in fine art photography rules (obviously in black and white). Its interesting since she
makes an approach towards an aesthetic of love. Love which today hardly intersects with sex, all
the more so as love is often related to tenderness, the sentimental. By mixing sex (the body) and
love, Vernon exchanges the love for goods proclaimed in advertising into the love of/for the
body. It is in this way that the love for body spreads on objects, which in return can offer
pleasure (visual and bodily) whether they correspond or not to the usual pleasuring images we
have of them via mass-media.
Constant defiance of embedded representations likewise constitutes the high point in
approaching the most sexualised fashion items: corsetry and shoes; it avoids traditional accounts
and turns to more different perspectives and ironic voices. In contrast to high-heels imagery
which are scattered all over the book, the elevation strings are cut down to basic. The
juxtaposition of traditional costume and footwear engravings and new footwear creations call
attention not only to the shoes restrictive character upon the sensed body, but towards
something else, namely the revival of historical icons as an inspirational source. In this sense, it
appeals to art historys iconology since portraits have long been the medium for symbolic
identification of dress. Hereby, representations afford another sense to fashions use of the past
as tool in the creative process, fashioning a more assumed practice that tends to gradually
withdraw from the contemporary circus of references or, at least, to highlight that there is a core
for symbolic use that gets to be spread over uncharted territories. Even if they escape or mock

familiar structures, designs are nonetheless reminiscent of traditional acceptance and reliquary,
and we usually come to understand them as such.
Also in a provocative way, Valerie Steels essay over the misleading of fashion studies
concerning laced-up corsetry, a garment which is neither strictly disciplinary nor just erotic,
rather similar to underwear garments (often both, but in different levels), gets to be placed along
Iris van Herpens experimental designs. However, the focus is not on objects per se, rather on the
details, on manufacturing, in that visual promise of a tactile experience that lures us towards
another skin, covered in pearls, reinforced, sculptured and mapped by stitches and patches,
perfectly cut. It becomes a plate. You never know where the garment ends and the body starts, if
the body is there or you only believe it to be there. Later inserts of Alexander McQueens
designs, who along with Iris van Herpen is among the few star designers the book covers, stress
this outstanding relation of garments and body; corsets which can be considered a moulded
extension of ribs are transfigured in metallic spines and plates that can bring unsettling emotions
as they outgrow the body. In a dark symbolism, McQueen covers the body with an imagined one,
a feared one, comparable to fantastic medieval representations. But, the imaginative extension of
the body is never without physical effects. Because it is always cast in materiality, it triggers
sensations across the body or more often heightens the individuals consciousness over his own
body movements, sometimes through a restrictiveness that almost cuts the skin.
The aforementioned darkish resonance belongs in fact to black fetish which is, so to speak, the
thread, that kind of knot never to be undone, a constant reminder of the thanatos death, the
pain, and the scary fascination for unknown or maybe, the elegant as a death for fashion frills.
But if we were to mix it with those numerous interventions over black culture, it becomes part of
a search for a more lively and free felt body, like jazz era which found comfort in primitivism, in
a burst of imagination and spiritual retreat. Such a statement is not without ground, since the
book repeatedly makes account for contemporary types of new primitivism forms whether they
are textually stated, or just by entailing visuals of rituals as well as some rough organic materials.
Spirituality is brought back next to the body, not as an overdoing but as its complement.
By always making and unmaking bodies through odd and unusual analogies, the curator plays
with the relation between perception as empathetic response, comfort stances and creativity. The
ever present organic succeeds in underlining the diversity and a depth for the courses of our
desires, bonding us together more often that we would like to admit it. It can be said that
Edelkoort traces the body as a common bond, where the commodified body is not an opposition,
a source of alienation that should be brushed away, but a point of departure to creativity.
Nonetheless, this constant mixture of elements caught in the creative process reinforces the old
western perspective over fashion. Regionalism and patriotism were surely supposed to avoid
such excursions, given that they shine light on local historic and cultural heritage. Yet, the Asian
turn does not step out of the image-band of clichs, conforming to stereotype images we are all
used to: niponism exemplifies the kimono as prime example for fetish folding and unfolding of
materials, Asian beauty falls particularly on geisha, while infantilism makes reference to
Japanese Lolita Doll looks. If, on the one hand, such a perspective is understandable should we
consider todays repetitive plethora of images inspired by Asian culture, on the other hand, the
previously mentioned local appositions do niponism an utterly substantial disservice.

In a different key, but falling into the same trap of western-centrism, is Malu Halasas text and
image archive, No Sex Please, Were Syrian: Confessions from the Lingerie Drawer, an obvious
presence due to heightened political attention Syria holds. The text makes for an entertaining
reading, with funny and ironic notes which aim at unveiling Syrians sex life, to make a break
through the so-called taboo of Arabic sexual restrictions. However, it puts such a repeated
emphasis on their sexual normal activity and kinky lingerie that ends up by subduing oriental
experiences to western cheeky lifestyle.
Its also a pity that, even if the book treats the body and design at an experiential level, it misses
out precisely the cyborgization, as the juxtaposition of the visceral body and the wired one,
namely the frequent imbrication of technology and human body. As Ive already mentioned, the
curatorial endeavour tackles the paradigm of skin and identity in shapes of the body, but it is
more connected to the idea of wraps-around, without approaching more futuristic representations
or embodiments. Technology is mainly a tool, where the techno-body not only goes further with
the sculptural task the garments hold, it also achieves a more symbiotic relationship with the
body and its functions, extending its possibilities in terms of sensibility and communication
skills. After all, it much resembles the way fetisso objects were supposed to render personal
powers to the individuals embodying them. It goes from make-believe to make possible. From
this point of view, it would have been interesting to see how humanity because this is the key
stone holding all fetishisms connexions could be discussed on the verge of fashion and
prosthetisation as another defying of fashion images, something that could resemble a selfcontained body.
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