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Chanel: The Order of Things

Article in Fashion Theory · June 2010

DOI: 10.2752/175174110X12665093381504

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Fashion Theory, Volume 14, Issue 2, pp. 135–158
DOI: 10.2752/175174110X12665093381504
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Chanel: The Order

Catherine Driscoll of Things
Catherine Driscoll is the Chair Abstract
of Gender and Cultural Studies
at the University of Sydney. She
is the author of Girls: Feminine This article considers the importance of fashion to both modernism and
Adolescence in Popular Culture and modernity and the importance of modernism to understanding fashion.
Cultural Theory (2002), Modernist It does so through a close consideration of the example of Chanel—not
Cultural Studies (2009), and
forthcoming books on teen film and the biographical woman Chanel, or even the label Chanel, but rather
on Australian country girlhood. the Modernist moment in fashion we have come to call “Chanel.” The
[email protected] position of ground-breaking innovator in the field of women’s fashion
that is widely assigned to Chanel is one form of the modernist break
that produces both “the avant-garde” and “the classic.” Using such an
understanding of Chanel, this article examines the intimacy between
136 Catherine Driscoll

fashion and modernity through Modernist aesthetics, modernist writing

on fashion and culture, and that critical attitude Michel Foucault calls
“modernism.”

KEYWORDS: Chanel, modernism, modernity, style

She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt and her hair
brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (2006[1926])

Despite the ease with which the term is used, there is little clear consen-
sus about what counts as “modernism.” There are two general types
of definition of modernism, although variations and hybridizations of
them abound, both of which pose some problems for useful discussion
of fashion and modernism. The first is an aesthetic definition, in which
the particular conventions of modernism—its use of ­“self-consciousness;
simultaneity, juxtaposition and montage; paradox, ambiguity, and un-
certainty; and the dehumanization of the subject” (Felski 1995: 25)—
are based on genres to which fashion rather uneasily conforms. And the
second is periodizing, where modernism is a stage of modernity stretch-
ing roughly from the late nineteenth century to World War II and re-
quires historical specificity into which particular designs and designers
sometimes fit but at the expense of other histories important to fashion.
In this respect, “fashion” is one example among many that calls for a
distinction between such definitions of modernism and that attitude to
modernity also captured in many crucial uses of the term “modern-
ism.” I propose that we need to distinguish between what we might call
“Modernism”—the now institutionalized assemblage of generally aes-
thetic forms and practices that appeared (roughly) in the early twentieth
century—and the “modernism,” which names an attitude to modernity
that has much less formal or temporal coherence. In this article, in an
argument that comes closer to thinking about modernity (rather than
postmodernity) as a philosophy of temporality, I will use Chanel as a
conjunction of and distinction between the concepts of “Modernism”
and “modernism” for thinking about fashion.
I draw this approach in part from Foucault’s provocation, in “What
is Enlightenment?,” that we think of modernity as an attitude rather
than an epoch. At the conclusion of an essay that spans Immanuel Kant,
Charles Baudelaire and “ourselves today” (in 1978), Foucault asks:

I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an

attitude than as a period of history. And by “attitude,” I mean
a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice
made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feel-
ing; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same
 Chanel 137

time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.

(Foucault 1984[1978]: 39)

For Baudelaire, this attitude could be detected in both art and the
­everyday, which combined in particularly significant ways in fashion.
In praising Constantin Guys’ attention to the everyday, Baudelaire also
sees the man of modernity as he who “makes it his business to extract
from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history”
(Baudelaire 1995[1863]: 12). This man of fashion writes the history of
the present and the history of himself in the various dimensions of his
performance of fashion and perception of fashion in others. Indeed,
Baudelaire stressed the importance of fashion as self-representation, as
in “the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior,
his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art” (Foucault
1984[1978]: 41).
Like many before him, Fredric Jameson credits Baudelaire with in-
venting our concept of modernity through the “category of the clas-
sical,” against which modernity is defined and which is “the birth of
historicity itself” (Jameson 2002: 22). But Jameson’s argument adds
something crucial in stressing that modernism is difficult to periodize
precisely because it is always claiming to break with something. This
is another way of expressing the critical attitude that constitutes
­modernism—reflection on the difference of today with regard to yester-
day. The position of ground-breaking innovator in the field of women’s
fashion that is widely assigned to Chanel is one form of this modernist
break. It is typical too in that such breaks are identified primarily by the
institutionalization of great names like “Chanel.” In fact it is in install-
ing a look that is both “classic” and “modern” that Chanel constitutes
a rupture: she claims to be a forceful periodization of fashion that delin-
eates what will always be true (in style). It is clear that Chanel is not the
single creator of, or even inspiration for, the transformations of fashion
in the Modernist period, and still less of modernist attitudes to fashion.
But in this I am not simply dismissing Chanel as less radical or innova-
tive than she is sometimes seen to be. Instead, I want to reconsider what
we want from the radical innovations of Modernism when we seek to
apply them to fashion and what we want, moreover, from the installa-
tion of Chanel as a classic.1
Fashion is modern. This might mean no more than that the condi-
tions of modern life, as George Simmel suggested in 1911, exacerbate
the starkest tendencies of fashion (2000[1911]: 191). Fashion partici-
pates in that popular (as well as canonical) image of Modernism as,
to quote Jennifer Craik’s The Face of Fashion, “a commitment to new
ways of living that explicitly rejected the old” (Craik 1994: 75). Eliza-
beth Wilson also prioritizes the “desire for the new” (2000: 63) in fash-
ion, but her Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (2003) adds to
this an emphasis on the relation between fashion and modernity. “The
138 Catherine Driscoll

concept of ‘modernity,’” she argues, “is useful in elucidating the rather

peculiar role played by fashion in acting as a kind of hinge between the
élitist and the popular” (2003: 60). In fashion, as Wilson records, we
can trace the impact of the industrial revolution and even the emerging
modes of thought that transformed morality, art, and science into rec-
ognizably modernist forms. The history of fashion, she suggests, is that
of modernity itself.
It is in part fashion’s capacity to reorder the world that Foucault
draws from Baudelaire as the critical attitude of modernity. He writes:

modernity in painting does not consist, for Baudelaire, in intro-

ducing black clothing onto the canvas. The modern painter is the
one who can show the dark frock-coat as “the necessary costume
of our time,” the one who knows how to make manifest, in the
fashion of the day, the essential, permanent, obsessive relation
that our age entertains with death. “The dress-coat and frock-
coat not only possess their political beauty, which is an expression
of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an ex-
pression of the public soul—an immense cortège of undertaker’s
mutes (mutes in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes ...). We are
each of us celebrating some funeral.” (Foucault 1984[1978]: 41,
quoting Baudelaire)

Phrased in this poignant way, the modernity of fashion cannot be re-

duced to a cycle of death and rebirth, redundancy, and innovation. This
article examines this intimacy between fashion and critical reflection
on modernity in several different ways. The next two sections consider
Chanel and her aesthetic as manifesting both Modernist aesthetics and
that critical attitude Foucault calls “modernism.” The following section
considers Chanel as exemplifying modernism’s critical conjunction of
commodification and art as a perspective on both style and the con-
temporary, and the final section returns to Foucault’s suggestions about
fashion’s capacity to reorder the world, using Foucault’s concept of het-
erotopias to suggest that we might make quite radical claims about the
impact and ongoing significance of modernist fashion.
While fashion is generally excluded from the Modernist canon,
deemed too transient and too superficial to count among its central rev-
olutions, as Nancy Troy’s Couture Culture (2003) argues, and the 2005
Chanel exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (see Koda and Bolton
2005) attests, the contested borders of Modernism are now sometimes
extended to include high fashion. The name most persistently conjured
in this way is Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel. And there is no question that the
Chanel brand and “Coco Chanel” (her star status during her lifetime
and her iconic status after it) together form a key figure in renovating
relations between art, industry, leisure, consumer culture, and modern
identity.
 Chanel 139

Chanel

Apocryphally, Chanel once met fellow designer Paul Poiret in the street.
She was dressed in her own highly fashionable black and he asked who
she was in mourning for. She reputedly retorted, “For you, dear Mon-
sieur!” It is just as often quoted that Poiret dismissed the Chanel look as
“undernourished telegraph boys dressed in black jersey.” But Chanel’s
democratic “undertaker’s mutes,” to invoke Baudelaire again, are not
the sum of modernist fashion, which names instead the field in which
they appear. Even Modernist fashion is not confined to the simplicity
of the Chanel design any more than to the exotic, romantic, or surreal
styles of Poiret, Erté, or Elsa Schiaparelli. It also incorporates what the
new idea of the fashion designer meant and to whom. If the first strik-
ing thing about Chanel is how she dressed women at the leading edge
of changes to dominant fashion and gender norms, the second is that
there could be a “Chanel woman” for whom clothes spoke to new ways
of living and possible new styles. In fact, for the purposes of this ar-
ticle I am not discussing this biographical woman Chanel or even, more
strangely, the label Chanel, but rather the Modernist moment in fashion
we have come to call “Chanel.”
The early twentieth century—that period strongly identified with
Modernism—clearly saw dramatic changes in dominant standards of
dress and an expanding field of what could be called “fashion.” Fashion
pages, and the expanding genre of fashion magazines out of a blend of
dressmaking and society publications and the mass-distributed patterns
from this time all record a narrowed “silhouette,” a reduction of fabric
and clothing, and a new everyday place for the dramatic fashion state-
ment: the short dress of the flappers; the “medieval” drapery of Erté
in the 1920s; the tailored but feminine exaggeration that moves from
Adrian in the 1930s to Dior’s “New Look.” Describing these changes in
this way shows how they also drew on the expansion of haute couture—
the avant-garde of fashion, which, like other avant-gardes, has a strong,
but not an immutable, impact on dominant styles. As Craik claims, “Ev-
eryday fashion (dress codes, a sense of fashionability) does not simply
‘trickle down’ from the dictates of the self-proclaimed elite. At best, a
particular mode may tap into everyday sensibilities and be popularised”
(Craik 1994: ix). And as Valerie Steele puts it, “Couturiers like Worth,
Chanel, and Dior were not so much dictators or radical innovators as
they were astute barometers of fashion trends” (Steele 1998: 5).
As Steele elaborates, a range of broad social shifts and a collage of
other designs and designers contributed to what has come to be the
Chanel look:

most of the literature on Chanel is wildly inaccurate: she is said

to have abolished feminine frills, liberated women from the cor-
set, and almost singlehandedly introduced sportswear, the “poor
140 Catherine Driscoll

boy” look, bobbed hair, designer perfume, suntans, and the “little
black dress.” With a little research, however, it is easy to use the
facts of fashion history as sniper’s ammunition to pick off these
inflated claims. (Steele 1998: 247)

Chanel was and is often described as quintessentially modern: “Exer-

cise, diet, bathing in the sea, an uncorseted body ... the modern woman
was born. And she resembled Gabrielle Chanel in every detail” (Bau-
dot 1992: 12). In fact, Poiret was the leading figure in shifting fashion
away from the corseted image of the female body. But, as Harold Koda
argues, “The disjunction felt in the juxtaposition of a Poiret woman
viewing Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) evaporates if
she is imagined dressed by Chanel.” Koda thus aligns Chanel with “the
advancing aesthetic principles of art and architecture” (Koda 2005: 11)
and with the institutionalized media status crucial to iconic Modern-
ism. He also attributes to Chanel the capacity to perceive and insist
on something more fundamental behind the ornament of conventional
appearance.
But such Modernist claims to revolution would not, however, com-
prise the modernism of fashion—its critical attitude. We might thus
want to place Chanel and the Modernist transformations of fashion
alongside critical reflection on it. This article will sample a range of
modernist commentary on fashion—some now well known and some
not. Simmel, for example, saw in fashion a system of differentiation
in dialogue with conformity. In “The Philosophy of Fashion,” Simmel
argues that fashionable “individual appearance never clashes with the
general style, but always stands out from it” (2000[1911]: 191). He
thus presents fashion as a signifying system—without using that turn of
phrase, but with an understanding of the network of shared meanings
taken from fashion that intersects with Roland Barthes’ more famous
later discussion in The Fashion System (1967). Simmel argues that ur-
banization created a greater need for people to demonstrate individual
difference, particularly given the transient nature of urban relationships.
While in “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Simmel notes that urban
life demands that the subject exaggerate the “personal element in order
to remain audible even to himself” (2000[1903]: 184), in “The Philoso-
phy of Fashion,” he figures the main impetus behind the rapid changes
of fashion as a desire to belong:

it satisfies the need for distinction, the tendency towards differen-

tiation, change and individual contrast. It accomplishes the latter,
on the one hand, by the change in contents—which gives to the
fashions of today an individual stamp compared with those of
yesterday and of tomorrow—and even more energetically, on the
other hand, by the fact that fashions are always class fashions.
(Simmel 2000[1911]: 189)
 Chanel 141

But this argument, consistent in many but not all respects with Thor-
stein Veblen’s (1899[1965]) representation of fashion as conspicuous
consumption, does not work for Chanel, even if she should not be seen
as single-handedly having changed this system.
This sequence of new critical approaches to fashion insists that
choosing one or another fashionable item involves a complex social
positioning. Veblen and Simmel both stress that an economy of style
shapes one’s relations to strangers along lines that also support Baude-
laire’s conception of modern style as always performed in transit. But
after Chanel, fashion was not predominantly a statement of “pecuniary
strength,” “written in characters which he who runs may read” (Veblen
1899[1965]: 49). In fact, the expensiveness of Chanel required a cer-
tain skill to divine in others. This consciousness foregrounds from these
writers what Pierre Bourdieu would later describe as a system negoti-
ated by taste. Bourdieu writes:

every change in tastes resulting from a transformation of the con-

ditions of existence and of the corresponding dispositions will
tend to induce, directly or indirectly, a transformation of the field
of production, by favouring the success, within the struggle con-
stituting the field, of the producers best able to produce the needs
corresponding to the new dispositions. (Bourdieu 1986[1979]:
231)

This idea of dispositions clarifies not only how Chanel impacts on the
way fashion indexes social change, or what is generally presumed for
any individual, but also the way her style works. Taste, Bourdieu says,
is not a sign of something outside it (like access to what is beautiful) but
a classifying statement that “classifies the classifier” (1986[1979]: 6).
This denaturalization of taste—replacing beauty with style—is not a
“postmodern” product but part of the complexity of modernist dis-
course on fashion.
Images of fashion within the critical terrain of Modernism generally
focus on what style means, which is not to say there are not substan-
tial disagreements about that. Simmel’s interest in differentiation from
the mainstream via fashion is as typically modernist as the dismissal of
fashion by others. He argues that it is impossible to ignore fashion al-
together and that even those who claim to disdain fashion in fact make
fashion “statements” that situate them in relation to fashion in ways
that can not be reduced to a homogenizing “culture industry.” And even
those Modernists most stridently critical of mass culture acknowledge
fashion’s creativity. Adorno emphasizes the proximity of avant-garde
art and fashion:

The bourgeois religion of art would like to keep art neatly apart
from fashion. This is simply impossible. Ever since the aesthetic
142 Catherine Driscoll

subject began to take a polemical stand against society and its

objective spirit, it has maintained a secret link to that society
through the medium of fashion. (Adorno 1984[1970]: 436)

Modernism’s emphasis on renovation is well known, but it matters here

that Adorno’s aesthetic theory concedes how fashion materializes “in-
cisive individual impulses that are saturated with history ... It is no ac-
cident that in German and French the terms ‘fashion’ and ‘modernism’
are related etymologically” (1984[1970]: 437).
Yet another Modernist account of fashion can be found among the
newly visible psychologies. In 1929, psychologist Elizabeth Hurlock
discussed fashion, following Havelock Ellis, as a secondary sexual char-
acteristic. By her account, fashion progresses in line with “civilization,”
and she understands the twentieth-century decrease in ornamentation as
the maturation of modern women (Hurlock 1929: 145–64). Hurlock is
responding in particular to the success of Chanel, where she thinks that
“Perfect grooming demands that there be no ornamentation or display
of any sort, and even the artificially restricted figure has been replaced
by the natural one” (Hurlock 1929: 160). Her argument must also be
contextualized in relation to the architect Adolf Loos’ more famous ex-
hortation to extend the Modernist tendency to abandon ornament in
architecture to all decoration of surfaces as a remnant of primitivism:
“I have discovered the following truth and present it to the world: cul-
tural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles in
daily use” (Loos 1966[1908]: 226–7, emphasis in original). Hurlock’s
psychological approach nevertheless agrees that fashion is a system of
differentiation and coherence at once: that fashion and its changes are
both social and political. It is the sociological approaches to style which
more directly lead to Cultural Studies, however, only to be displaced
by the influential semiotic analysis of Barthes. The structure of fashion,
according to Barthes, is composed of the separate circulation of “image-
clothing,” “written clothing,” and “real clothing” (1983[1967]: 3–5),
and a change in any of these registers can affect all the others. There
are both precedents and crucial contemporary contexts for the impact
of Chanel’s sportswear and other lines, but the use of jersey, the shape
called “cardigan,” or the sign “little black dress” are not meaningful
in themselves but only within a system where jersey was not used in
women’s dresses, cardigans were practical warmth for working men,
and black was reserved for mourning.

Ready-to-Wear

As Steele indicates, a range of historical contexts are needed to make

sense of how Chanel became “Chanel.” She stresses the impact of
World War I and indeed the ready-to-wear clothing which enabled so
 Chanel 143

much of Chanel’s success—because it was possible to look like a Chanel

when one could not afford it—had initially been employed for uniforms
(see Wilson 2003: 74). And by the end of the nineteenth century, as
Wilson notes, women’s fashions had already begun to adapt the new
“sports” styles for women to modern city life, as men’s fashions had
done the century before (2003: 40). The adaptation for women’s fash-
ion of locknit and flannel from men’s sportswear and underwear, still in
the same muted colors (Wilson 2003: 40), did not so much invent new
pieces as rearrange how those pieces fit into the fashion system. Chanel
stands for the prewar experimentation with these conventionally mas-
culine fabrics, later extending to others like corduroy and tweed and
this new medium consciously inverted the gender and class distinctions
that had been central to fashionable style. Cardigans and trench coats
became fashionable accessories, loose fitting trousers became glamor-
ous rather than a practical necessity, and costume jewelry became a
desirable dressed-down look. The renovation in women’s clothing we
associate with Chanel certainly gave new functions to a range of com-
mon materials, but the stronger claim would be that it disrupted the
way fashion’s signifying practices had run parallel to, had mapped onto,
those of gender and class.
Pulling apart her iconic Modernist image as revolutionary style
leader in women’s clothing, Steele settles on one key to Chanel’s image:
“To her supporters, then and now, Chanel represented comfortable, re-
alistic, ‘classic’ dressing.” (Steele 1998: 247) As commentary on mo-
dernity from Baudelaire to Jameson has often suggested, it is precisely
the concept of the classical, as that which sits outside of modernity and
thus against which modernity is defined, that marks the emergence of
modernity—not only or even principally as that which is displaced by
modernity but as that endlessly reassembling continuum in relation to
which innovation is perceived and set aside. Fashion is a continually
self-reflexive attitude and can never settle on one thing as “fashion-
able.” There was not, in fact, one Chanel look, but there were some
unwavering Chanel principles. Understatement was one, reinforcing a
shift in the important distinction between day and evening wear and the
role of particular fabrics in articulating wealth and the conspicuousness
of fashion consumption.
After the war, “To appear to pay too much attention to clothes was
démodé, while to wear one’s clothes avec desinvolture, in a free and
easy manner, was the look of modernity. Because this remains true
today, we still admire Chanel” (Steele 1998: 248). As many writers have
noted, Chanel’s “poor look,” of which Figure 1 is a classic example,
was radical enough to be referred to as an “antifashion posture” (Davis
1994[1992]: 164), reversing the systemic copying of the upper classes
by the lower, which in 1911 Simmel could claim was structurally char-
acteristic of fashion (2000[1911]: 190). The changes of the Modernist
period depended upon the expanding mass production of ready-to-wear
144 Catherine Driscoll

clothing for almost all modern urbanized subjects, a process furthered

by Chanel’s blend of haute couture, zeitgeist rhetoric, and class-mobile
styling. The use of the low and the poor translates the mobility of Chanel
into mobility across social contexts, as her use of men’s fabrics and ref-
erence to men’s tailoring translated into some mobility between gender
norms. This was “poverty de luxe,” but also echoed crucial modernist
motifs like urbanity, femininity, and banality: Chanel’s “black dress and
the slight suit were the apotheosis of the shopgirl’s uniform, or the ste-
nographer’s garb” (Wilson 2003: 41); “It was the look of the working
girl hitherto unknown to fashion” (Hollander 1999: 19).2 Whether or
not it was a unique innovation in her collections, Chanel’s “little black
dress” became the iconic representation of urbanely casual modern fem-
ininity: a new fashion grammar enabling new articulations. The phrase,
label, or slogan, “the little black dress” is now often cited, but usually
in forms long detached from what it was that Chanel’s first little black
dresses actually looked like (Figure 1 is an example c. 1927).
Chanel was neither functionalist nor minimalist. Layers and acces-
sories were both crucial to the Chanel look despite Chanel’s refusal of
what she deemed excessive ornamentation. We could compare this to
the fashion for and style of Imagist poetry. In 1913, soon after the ap-
pearance of Simmel’s essay and around the same time as Chanel’s first
successful sportswear lines, Ezra Pound abjured aspiring poets to “Use
no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something”

Figure 1
Coco Chanel (Chanel, Gabrielle,
1883–1971): Dress, c. 1927.
(Manufacturer: House of Chanel,
founded 1913.) New York,
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Silk,
wool, metal, (a) L. at center back
21¾ in. (55.2 cm). (b) L. at center
back: 40 in. (101.6 cm).
(c) L.: 40½ in. (102.9 cm). Marking:
[label] c) (on buckle) “Chanel.”
Purchase, the New-York Historical
Society, by exchange, 1984.
Acc.n.: 1984.28a–c. © 2007.
Image copyright The Metropolitan
Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala,
Florence.
 Chanel 145

(1972[1913]: 30). As Loos (1966[1908]) exemplifies, this avoidance of

what was seen as outdated or unnecessary ornamentation also charac-
terized contemporary architectural and interior designs. While, by con-
trast, the “Camellia Brooches” designed for Chanel by Gripoix (Koda
and Bolton 2005: 178–9) are without doubt ornamental, the dramatic
difference of Chanel’s look was that it confined ornament to what we
would now recognize as “accessories,” thus crafting a more mobile
basic style with exchangeable extras. Chanel’s use of costume jewelry
and ropes of fake pearls (see Figure 2) suggest that good ornament was
a purposeful stylistic statement rather than a display of wealth. While
this is not as obviously true of dresses crafted from sequins, exceptional
laces, or tiers of tulle—and not only was real Chanel prohibitively ex-
pensive but she did also design luxury evening wear—such designs add
the accessory of “luxury fabric” to what is otherwise a simple design.
That is, ornament has the function of indexing a Chanel design to a
particular use or moment. Chanel’s image, and thus the distribution
of her work, emphasized a “total look.” The Chanel woman was seen
to coordinate every element of her attire and lifestyle, from shoes to
drinks, for which Chanel was the model as artist and artist as model.
The Chanel look captured in Man Ray’s 1935 photograph of the de-
signer (see ­Figure 2) is such a moment of this hat and these pearls and
this cigarette and these bracelets, which also means it is this pose and
this attitude. What is often called modernist minimalism is actually an
openness to such assemblage rather than an ascetic approach to detail.
The famous 1925 Paris Exhibition des Arts Decoratifs, after which
the design category “Art Deco” was later named, featured Chanel and
other fashion designers alongside architecture, furniture, and domestic
design. Art Deco does exemplify Modernist art and design’s preference
for the geometric and the streamlined—the machinic—but always in
relation to movement and flow. In Chanel’s terms, movement within the
fabric required softness that complemented the design’s hard lines, and
give in the fabric belied her style’s geometric edges by undermining the
visible structure. Chanel “blurred the boundaries of [sic] the flou (dress-
making) and the tailleur (tailoring) by applying the dressmaker’s draped
effects to her suits and coats and the tailor’s pattern-driven precision to
her dresses” (Koda 2005: 11). All this speaks to the mobility of and in
Chanel’s designs. The Chanel look—for day or evening, work or play,
motoring, shopping, or dining—was an active orientation in the world.
Chanel was far from the only designer associated with this new active
woman. The overwhelming champion of women’s tennis in the 1920s,
Suzanne Lenglen, for example, was dressed by Jean Patou. But by the
late 1920s, a typical fashion photograph was as likely to capture move-
ment as it was a static pose—not only avoiding corseted and structured
styles but also embracing the movement that was crucial to the Chanel
woman. “When photographed for the leading fashion journals of the
day,” Koda points out, “the models in their Chanels run, pull back their
146 Catherine Driscoll

Figure 2
Man Ray, “Gabrielle Chanel,” 1935.
© 2009 Man Ray Trust/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP,
Paris.

jackets, and plunge their hands into their pockets, a clear counterpoint
to the static, stylized poses characteristic of the period” (2005: 12).
Wilson describes Chanel’s designs—“Agile and full of movement”—as
“the spirit of modernity and futurism” (2003: 41). Chanel’s star status
and the timeliness of her designs were simultaneously imported into
productions of timeliness, whether those were magazine pictorials, fash-
ion parades, or the collaborative art projects for which Chanel designed
costumes: for example, for Le Ballet Russe’s 1924 Le Train Bleu, both
new sports and leisure travel were referenced by the costumes Chanel
designed to complement Picasso’s sets. In Chanel’s mobile and stream-
lined designs, like avant-garde art and aesthetics but also popular cul-
ture and everyday life at the time (for example, in the rise of radio and
car cultures), we see the continued meaningfulness of an iconography of
the machine. Indeed, if a house is a “machine for living in,” as Le Cor-
busier claimed in L’Esprit Nouveau (Le Corbusier et al. 1981[1921]:
86), then fashion might also be described that way. Fashion as much
as modern architecture and design stresses the conjunction of machine
and subject (see also Wigley 2001[1995]). Just as the ideal modernist
cities (see Harvey 1989: 25–6) described networks of lives, and net-
works of cultures intersecting them, so Chanel addressed a conception
of the modern woman through fashion as technology.3 Innovation at
this level affects something like Bourdieu’s “habitus.” I find the account
of habitus that is linked back to Gottfried Leibniz most useful here: “an
 Chanel 147

agent’s disposition to do something regularly but in a spontaneous

way” (Shusterman 1999: 4). The changes we summarize as “Chanel”
impacted not only on what people wore but on how often and in what
ways people needed to change clothes, and how they could and would
deport themselves—even how they might stand or walk. Habitus means
more than recognizable expectations, describing influences on practice
and identity that exceed rules or reasoned judgment: influences based
in a learned disposition.4 If modernism is always a reflection on the
present it continually refers to those elements that can be consigned to
habitus and, at the same time, those openings in which things as they
are might be ordered differently. This is precisely why Chanel should be
understood as avant-garde. From Baudelaire to Chanel to Dick Hebdige
to Calvin Klein, modernist style is the interplay of the personal with the
masses—a relationship between singularity and field. And in the ap-
parent irrationality of fashion’s intervention in this relation we find its
capacity for heterology and for critical reflection on ourselves.

Commodity Art

If nineteenth-century trips to the theater or a ball were ways of map-

ping what was being worn by people whose culture one was presumed
to share or to want to emulate, the modernist emergence of movies and
magazines and mass-produced fashion apparently reversed this sense of
“going to see.” Benjamin’s (1969[1929]) argument about mechanical
reproduction and art could be reintroduced here and gives us another
perspective on why the Modernist Chanel can never be equal to the
modernist “Chanel.” The nineteenth-century designer Charles Worth
perhaps, but certainly Chanel and her peers, attempted to invest clothes
with a value that could not be easily reproduced. Returning to the more
literal example of Chanel as a corporate entity and a media image, both
the Chanel brand and Chanel’s name function to invest “fashion” with
something superficially like an aura (like that of movie stars). However,
this “aura” claims to be almost reproducible if the cost can be met. Sim-
mel argues, “the objects of fashion, embracing as they do the externali-
ties of life, are particularly accessible to the mere possession of money”
(2000[1911]: 190). Not despite but because of Chanel’s rejection of
some of the most visible elements of conspicuous consumption in dress,
only Chanel herself can exactly have—or be consumed as having—the
precise Chanel style.
Chanel was a modern celebrity in the mode of the stars among whom
she moved. Figures like Chanel and Man Ray exemplify an imagined
Modernism populated by superstars and shameless self-promoters. In
fact, the emergence of “high fashion” is precisely the emergence of the
auteur designer, a nineteenth-century history bound up, as traced by
Troy, in the increasing role of mass production in the clothing industry.
148 Catherine Driscoll

The couturier expressed opposition to mass-produced clothing. Troy

quotes Poiret: “I am not commercial. Ladies come to me for a gown as
they go to a distinguished painter to get their portraits put on canvas.
I am an artist not a dressmaker” (Troy 2003: 47). Nevertheless, in 1916,
Poiret traveled to the USA to promote a new clothing collection intended
for American women and described as “genuine reproductions” (Troy
2003: 302). Fashion produces a particular dialogue on the relation be-
tween art and mass culture in the distinction between haute couture
and prêt-à-porter. Other fields where Modernists worked across art and
mass culture (for example in Bauhaus design or in Corbusier’s expan-
sion into furniture) do not make this distinction so clearly. But as Troy
argues in Couture Culture (2003), and Richard Martin had already sug-
gested in Cubism and Fashion (1999), modernist fashion intersects with
modernist visual art in its approach to product differentiation and to
the merchandizing of taste as style.
Renato Poggioli (1968[1962]) argues that fashion is in fact what en-
ables the avant-garde to be seen and admired and thus also what defeats
it by inevitably drawing it into the mainstream. Hebdige (1979) makes
a similar argument with reference to the co-option of “cutting edge”
subcultural style by the popular mainstream and this similarity is di-
rectly due to the extent to which Hebdige borrows his idea of style from
Modernist avant-gardism. Poggioli insists that the concept of artistic
originality at stake in this dynamic is an entirely modern concept:

According to Baudelaire’s clever paradox, the chief task of genius

is precisely to invent a stereotype ... the modernity of the stereo-
type is worth emphasizing. The tacitly enunciated task of classic
art was the splendid repetition of the eternal maxims of ancient
wisdom; impossible, then, for it to conceive of the commonplace
pejoratively ... Classical thinking on art admits of only a single
negative category: the ugly ... the classical aesthetic, contrary to
the modern, was in no position to admit into the category of the
ugly those forms that might be said to have a not-new beauty.
(Poggioli 1968[1962]: 80–1)

As Rosalind Krauss (1985[1981]) has also argued, the attachment to

originality so crucial to defining Modernism always requires a solip-
sistic picture of the relationship between famous works and artists and
their historical and social contexts. It also obscures the relation between
art and the copy that was so pivotal to the iconic Modernists but ap-
peared in the realm of fashion in very different ways because it had not
been preceded there by the same history of Art.
Fashion thus has a privileged position when it comes to the art of
modernism. The continual replacement and co-option of old avant-
garde movements by “the new” defines avant-gardism as driven by
fashion: spurning the masses but requiring an audience of like-minded
 Chanel 149

“individuals” and spurning mere novelty while insisting on the new.

Troy argues that the work of both Marcel Duchamp and Poiret circu-
lated around an uneasy distinction between the original work of art and
the mass-produced copy that comprises one of “the most recalcitrant
(and compelling)” problems “of the modern period” (Troy 2003: 292).
While Duchamp’s readymades extract art from the everyday, haute cou-
ture calls for the everyday to respond to its art. The relation between
the unique work of art and the copy is repeatedly given new inflection
by the way fashion expresses both similarity and difference, and it is
not the popularity of a style that leads to its devaluation in the realm of
fashion so much as its loss of specialization.
Wilson claims, “It was perhaps Chanel who announced the death
knell for old-style couture” (2003: 89). In her famous Vogue interview
on reopening in 1953, Chanel declared: “I am no longer interested in
dressing a few hundred women, private clients; I shall dress thousands
of women. But ... a widely repeated fashion, seen everywhere, cheaply
produced, must start from luxury.” Quoting this interview, Wilson
continues: “Soon the Chanel suit was being reproduced everywhere,
particularly in the United States, where, Cecil Beaton felt, it had indel-
ibly stamped the American ‘working girl’ of the fifties; while the bright,
sharp Mary Quant style of the 1960s was really a marrying of the style
of the Chelsea art student with Chanel” (2003: 89). If her particular
embrace of commodification shifted in Chanel’s “return” it had always
linked her interdisciplinary work in fashion, theater, design, and adver-
tising through her own name.
In general, Modernist avant-gardism is never opposed to branding
and selling its products and Jennifer Wicke insists on the broad sig-
nificance of advertising to modernism, remarking that “if advertising
did not literally bring about modern life, it may be its chief emblem,
a sign of the sign of the times” (1993: 593). Advertising is as ­modern
an art form as the newspaper or the photograph, and was not just
well placed to take advantage of modernism’s emphasis on speed and
ephemerality but centrally helped produce that experience of moder-
nity. Thus advertisers have quickly adopted the changing techniques of
modernist art—in fashion as everywhere else—precisely because from
the outset they shared a heavily stylized commitment to selling nov-
elty. The ground-breaking New York Armory show of 1913, featuring
many famous proponents of surrealism and dada, is reported to have
attracted “more than 10,000 visitors a day” (Harvey 1989: 28). Dra-
matically publicized by this show, Duchamp’s (or Man Ray’s) “ready-
mades” themselves comprised a kind of brand, manifesting a particular
mode of consumption—Bicycle Wheel and Cadeau are not in any literal
sense already “made” before they are taken up as art—and a fashion-
able style of Modernist art. Chanel’s style was both singularly hers and
a mass-producible model, an ideal image and a collectable set. She just
as often stressed the latter in advertisements, linking her designs to the
150 Catherine Driscoll

efficiency of streamlining associated with iconic slogans like “Less is

more” (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, quoted in Baudot 1992: 2–3). Troy
also compares Chanel to Corbusier in terms of their embrace of an “in-
ternational style” that explicitly relied on the commodification of that
style. Certainly both Chanel and Corbusier, well before Andy Warhol,
used their names to label a sphere of production that incorporated the
work of others.
In 1926, French Vogue labeled the little black dress “a Ford signed
Chanel.” Within the month, American Vogue reiterated: “The Chanel
‘Ford’—the frock that all the world will wear—is model ‘817,’ of black
crêpe de Chine.” The Ford image comprised style leadership, technolog-
ical innovation, reliable repeatability, and the combination of all these
images in that of “America.” The Europeanness of Chanel makes this
an interesting conjunction. On both side of the Atlantic it worked as
advertising: she was Paris for the Americans and Ford for the French.
Elizabeth Hawes’ Fashion Is Spinach (1938) claimed that the USA was
“the only country in the world which can produce garments in masses.
Any woman in America can buy a Chanel dress for whatever amount
she has to spend” (1938: 120). But Hawes also understood such fashion
as a middle-class copy of style: “Nobody ever told [the middle-class
woman] about style. She’s fashionable,—God help her” (1938: 127).
I have tried to suggest that Chanel’s relationship to this conception of
authentic style is complex but this, rather than her actual designs, may
be Chanel’s most radical legacy. She claimed, and her designs claim,
that “Chanel is a style,” but her explication that “A mode becomes
demoded. Style never does” (Troy 2005: 21; see also Davis 1994[1992]:
162) depends on a modernist context in which fashion and style can
be both entwined and opposed. Style, as recognizable and authorita-
tive command of a particular historically changing representational
­schema—whether painting, literature, dress, or ways of living—could
only be outmoded by fashion itself becoming redundant. But because
her art needed to be fashionable, Chanel also embraced the possibility
of being “copied” as a verification of her originality.
To be communicated as style, a “lifestyle” must always refer to fash-
ion and belong to an intensely present-tense set of distinctions. Like
all incarnations of “the New Woman,” Chanel’s version of her “gen-
eration” was a lifestyle that combines attachments to commodities and
practices (such as bicycles or cars, shirt-waists or cigarettes, cocktails
or lipstick). While scholarship and commentary on Chanel understand-
ably stresses the freedom of movement in her loose-fitting uncorseted
designs, this “freedom” nevertheless still participated in the imposition
of a fashionable body type and associated lifestyles. The body cultures
that emerged with modernism always intersected with fashion in this
way. In 1925, Rudolf Kayser could speak of the physical appearance
of European Americanism as a combination of body styles opposed to
the past even while they varied according to taste (1994[1925]: 395–7).
 Chanel 151

In emerging discourses on health and fitness, in the physical education

of the nineteenth century merging with the moral tenor and zeitgeist
power of physical culture in the early twentieth, and in the glamorous
aesthetics of modern ballet or sport that proposed new subjectivities,
modernist body cultures express fashions in the body and clothing as
entwined practices. Their coherence comes from their regulatory claims,
rather than from the designs themselves, because the former not only
could be copied but were disseminated with the imperative that they
must be copied if one was to be truly modern. Simmel concludes his
essay on fashion by claiming that, while the “seeds of its own death” are
intrinsic to fashion, “this transitoriness does not degrade it totally but
actually adds a new attraction” (2000[1911]: 192)—fashion’s constitu-
tive openness to reinvention. But modernist fashion also openly frames
itself as ideological in order to ward off the image of its own ephemeral-
ity. Fashion must make a claim at the level of habitus, whether it is a
heterotopic one or not.
Craik’s caveat that icons of fashionable identity—such as the flapper
in the 1920s—cannot simply be translated into assumptions about actual
lives (Craik 1994: 75–6) is an important one. But it also presumes that
the modern “lifestyle” involves wholesale adoption. It is possible, if not
unavoidable, to have more than one lifestyle. It is true that few women
were “flappers,”, but few women were untouched by the changes to
images of women’s everyday lives and expectations that the flapper sig-
nified. For example, by 1925–6, the first years of Chanel’s iconic “little
black dress,” it was widely presumed by popular and public culture that
the bobbed-hair girl was everywhere. Some employers would not hire
women with bobbed hair, but while public voices debated whether they
were immoral, radical, foolishly derivative, or just the new common­
place, women also bobbed their hair to get a fashionable job or just to
be seen in a fashionable style. Bobbed hair signaled not only “flapper”
but a recognizable position in relation to the range of ways of living
available to women. Bobbed hair belonged to clubs, dancing, motor-
cars, and cocktails; identified artists, scholars, and professional or busi-
ness women; was a recognized declaration of independence in which the
avant-garde bohème met acceptable style.

The Order of Things

Discussing the Exposition culture that appeared in the late nineteenth

century and expanded in the early twentieth, Tom Gunning claims that
the dominant discourse of modernity “is not only one of innovation,
but precisely one of novelty, maximising the dazzling experience of
the new” (2004: 43). Most studies of fashion emphasize just such a
constitutive process of renovation and novelty. However, Gunning also
notes that in these Expositions, “the carefully arranged lay-out of space
152 Catherine Driscoll

and the logic of form and color in the architecture, evoke cultural as-
sociations and determine the temporal and spatial unfolding of vistas
and patterns” (2004: 43). While this may contribute to a novelty effect
by the combination of particulars, the elements themselves are already
known—as the phrase “evoke cultural associations” makes clear. They
rely on a preexisting order of things. This provides a new perspective
on how the set of changes we give the shorthand “Chanel” reordered
the expected forms of fashion to foreground new possibilities. Rather
than avant-garde, then, I want to try out another term for this Chanel:
heterotopic.
In The Order of Things, Foucault uses the term “heterotopic” to
signify an “other” ordering, an apparently disorderly order. Fashion
clearly has utopian forms, such as the modernist dress reform move-
ments (see Wilson 2003: 208–27), but like all utopias they work only in-
sofar as they do not come into being. In his lecture “Of Other Spaces,”
Foucault reuses the concept of heterotopia to distinguish sites where
“all the other real sites which can be found within the culture are si-
multaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (1986[1967]: 24).
Heterotopic fashion might form a particularly interesting juxtaposition
with “the utopia of the mirror” (1986[1967]: 24): a place, rather than
a non-place, where the self is reflected and suspected at once. This is a
concept worth pursuing because, while fashion is not a site in the same
sense as the garden, theater, or cemetery, and nor does it have the appar-
ent institutional stability of those spaces, it is “a simultaneously mythic
and real contestation of the space in which we live” (1986[1967]: 24),
requiring, on the one hand, certain efforts and “rituals” to enter and
installing, on the other, “hidden exclusions” (1986[1967]: 26). Consid-
ering the move from heteroclite to heterotopic in The Order of Things
(1973[1966]) and the above lecture (1986[1967]), it seems that het-
erotopic fashion would fail to fit, but still exist within, present fashion
categories and, at the same time, gesture to another place, order, and
history. Chanel’s reordering of the fashion system is not directed to-
ward any particular transformation but rather brings into question how
elements like “women,” “dress,” “trenchcoat,” and “Chanel” are in
an everyday way distinguished (or not) in relation to each other. The
phrases “she dressed for the evening” and “she put on a work dress”
mean something different after Chanel because the possibility of dis-
tinguishing a work dress from an evening dress is problematized and,
just as significantly, because distinguishing “dressed” from “put on” no
longer works in the same way.
Foucault’s early examples of the heteroclite and heterotopia are re-
vealing here and include the illogicality of Jorge Luis Borges’ “Chinese
Encyclopedia,” the incoherent patterns of an “aphasic” sorting colored
skeins, and the surrealist aphorism from Comte de Lautréamont via
André Breton: “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine
and an umbrella on a dissecting table” (Foucault 1973[1966]: v–viii).
 Chanel 153

These examples are linked by the impossibility of finding a locus for

ordering, and thus knowing, them. The “table where, for an instant,
perhaps forever, the umbrella encounters the sewing-machine” makes
strange the “table, a tabula, that enables thought to operate upon the
entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes,
to group them according to names that designate their similarities and
their differences” (Foucault 1973[1966]: xvii). To these terms together,
we might say that while the heteroclite is disorder that seems to have no
habitus (no knowable place in which it makes sense), the heterotopic is
the presence of disorder within the habitus. Thus Chanel does not have
to shock after the fashion of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in order to
constitute, at least for a time, a disruptive order.
Foucault foregrounds surrealism here because it surprises by prob-
lematizing the meanings classification gives to objects. In saying this
I make room for the claim that surrealism comprises a set of games
with meaning rather than a movement that is now finished. Even
Breton never settled on one manifesto for it. The art of Claude Cahun,
Hans Bellmer or Cindy Sherman works by defamiliarizing or disturb-
ing expected modes of representation: by staging in new media or new
aesthetic frames the styles and poses proliferating around them or the
foundational components of those styles. And it is with Cahun in par-
ticular, but also Sherman because, as Steele points out, many modernist
innovations are still contemporary for us, that I see an apt comparison
for Chanel. While many of Cahun and Sherman’s most famous images
are striking for their familiarity against the grain of habit rather than
for any shock value, they work by disrupting but remaining within the
existing order. For both gender and fashion are clearly intersecting lan-
guages for identity. While not as confrontational as Cahun, Chanel’s
cross-gender references contribute to the popular ground on which
Sherman works, including those self-portraits in which she posed as a
young man. In Cahun’s self-portraits and Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills,
a familiar image has a cutting edge because of some framing dislocation.
In Chanel the regularity we seek from fashion is twisted by including
only highly acceptable elements but excluding the literal representation
of capital that made fashion sense.
The violent edge of surrealism still present in Sherman also moved
along other trajectories in the twentieth century and touched other het-
erotopic forms. When Hebdige takes up Claude Lévi-Strauss’ bricoleur
to talk about the way youth culture styles open new symbolic spaces by
misrepresentation, he does so by making a direct comparison between
punk and surrealism, seeing in the punk style something heterological.
Hebdige’s punks provided “self-conscious commentaries on the notions
of modernity and taste” (1979: 107). They not only appropriated “com-
modities by placing them in a symbolic ensemble which served to erase
or subvert their original straight meanings” (Hebdige 1979: 104), they
also disturbed by ostentatiously refusing to fit into the world they drew
154 Catherine Driscoll

on and, at least for a time, gestured to some other place where they
might make sense. As it appears in fashion the disturbance of expected
orders, and even of common sense, is crucial to the humor still built
into haute couture. But even the illogicality of haute couture depends
on opening up fashion’s possibilities for representing not the body or
identity so much as life. And the interplay of recognition and disruption
is more important here than the cycle of death and renewal often used
to discuss fashion.
In an essay representative of many discussions of contemporary
fashion, Steele claims that, between 1950 and 2000, fashion was trans-
formed utterly, “fragmented into hundreds of competing looks—what
Ted Polhemus calls ‘style tribes.’” (Steele 2000: 7) Steele follows this
claim with a discussion of the ways in which Polhemus’s focus on youth/
street styles can be adapted to find adult “style tribes, epitomized by
different fashion labels” (Steele 2000: 7). This “stylistic proliferation”
means that no new encompassing “Look” can now be launched for
any fashion season and any such claim would be met by ridicule based
in the “antifashion” sentiment now thought to be a characteristic of
post­modernity (Steele 2000: 7–9). This postmodern version of design-
ers as barometers rather than originators—examples include Quant
and André Courrèges (Steele 2000: 10)—is distinguished from the great
Modernist names by stressing its debt to youth/street style, but whether
or not this argument for a “break” could be countered by talking about
the relation between Chanel and the flappers, sports stars, and shopgirls
around her ends up being irrelevant. Steele closes this essay with an ap-
propriate reprise of the continuity within which the emergence, instal-
lation, and critique of Modernism remains modernist: “fashion itself
remains alive and well, always new, always changing” (Steele 2000: 20).
The youthful look of the 1960s in many ways reprised the youthful look
of the 1920s and was just as readily displaced by more exotic and then
more tailored “work-related” styles in ongoing conversations between
society and personal style. But cycle is the wrong way to talk about
fashion because of its simultaneous dependence on continuity and dis-
ruption. Fashion enables a culture of ongoing consumption in which
clothes are not built to be worn for years, however “classic” they claim
to be, but rather take part in a system where particular components or
motifs are redeployed repeatedly.
All this comes after, it seems, “the end of style and the death of
the subject” (Jameson 2002: 5) presumed to mark the end of Mod-
ernism. But, as Jameson points out, “museums and the art galleries
can scarcely function” without a modernist sense of the “new” predi-
cated on innovative style (2002: 5), and Chanel has clearly been in-
stalled as a Modernist classic in the realm of fashion—still succeeding
first of all on the grounds of a recognizable style that is just disruptive
enough to generate excitement but clearly functioning within the pres-
ent system. In Chanel’s “classic” fashionable look we find a refusal
 Chanel 155

and an overt framing of the way fashion works to foreground time

as ­passing. “Fashion (as we conceive of it today),” Barthes explains,
“rests on a violent sensation of time” (2005[1967]: 106), but this time
can nevertheless be articulated differently. In an essay on Courrèges,
Barthes argued that “From Chanel to Courrèges, the grammar of ti-
mescales changes” (2005[1967]: 107); that time is a style for Chanel,
but a fashion for Courrèges (2005[1967]: 107). Chanel, he contends,
merely “varies” the same model from one line to the next like a musical
theme (2005[1967]: 106). Chanel’s designs are thus “classic” fashions
in an exclusively modernist sense: they both emphasize their timeliness
and claim to be timeless. What retains present usefulness or currency
from outside the now of fashion is a “classic,” whether in literature,
clothing, or music. One ongoing implication of “the classic,” then, is
that it will not pass away except in always being past in some sense.
And this pastness requires that the classic belong to a (closed) order.
Like the Modernist canon more generally, all “classics” are rhetorically
positioned as part of an order that cannot be reordered, despite all
evidence to the contrary (the Modernist canon has never been stable in
any medium). And this is the form of Chanel’s Modernism that brings
her into museum culture and becomes part of a sometimes nostalgic
sometimes politically and aesthetically fraught narrative about the clo-
sure of modernism itself.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Prudence Black for her comments on a draft of this article

and to the Museum of Modern Art, Scala, Man Ray Trust, ADAGP, and
the Artist Rights Society for permission to reproduce images.

Notes

1. My Modernist Cultural Studies (Driscoll 2009) argues at length that

the relationship between modernism and Cultural Studies is much
more specific than an intellectual inheritance within a broad Western
tradition. Drawing on the work of writers like Foucault, Raymond
Williams, and Jameson, it finds in Cultural Studies the ongoing
thread of a critical attitude best understood as “modernism.” This
article draws on that discussion, and in particular on Chapter 5 of
that text.
2. Chanel’s working-girl look seems to fit the exceptional stylishness of
some working girls on screen particularly well and thus the make-
over plots of Hollywood film. But there was no enormous gulf to be
­articulated by a transformation from one style of dress to another
within the Chanel look and her one foray into Hollywood design
156 Catherine Driscoll

(in 1931 for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.) was largely unsuccessful,

although notable for being Gloria Swanson’s first “talkie.”
3. Technologies are always experienced as exchanges between the
­ev­eryday and novelty, a recognition that can be used to rethink fash-
ion’s relation to both consistency and novelty. A related frame of
reference for thinking about fashion as a technology is Foucault’s
“Technologies of the Self” (1988). While it lacks the same rela-
tion to institutional power as “confession” and other technologies
identified by Foucault, there are disciplinary effects disseminated by
expertise on and normalization of fashion. Craik’s chapter on “Tech-
nical Bodies and Technologies of the Self” explores some of these
connotations.
4. Though often critiqued as overly deterministic and unreflective (see
Butler and Bohman’s essays in Shusterman’s 1999 collection), habi-
tus does not conceptually exclude the possibility of change or cri-
tique. As Taylor explicates, “A bodily disposition is a habitus when
it encodes a certain cultural understanding. The habitus in this sense
always has an expressive dimension. It gives expression to certain
meanings that things and people have for us, and it is precisely by
giving such expression that it makes those meanings exist for us”
(1999[1993]: 42).

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