DOE S N ATI ONAL IDE NTI TY CRE ATE FAS HIO N?
A Case Study of Yohji Yamamoto and ‘Japaneseness’ Aya Hallberg
Department of Media Studies MA Thesis 30 hp Centre for Fashion Studies Stockholm University Spring 2020 Supervisor: Dr. Chiara Faggella
DOES NATIONAL IDENTITY CREATE FASHION?
A Case Study of Yohji Yamamoto and ‘Japaneseness’
Aya Hallberg
Department of Media Studies Centre for Fashion Studies
MA Thesis 30 hp Spring 2020 Stockholm University Supervisor: Dr. Chiara Faggella
ABSTRACT
This study explores the idea of national identity in the field of fashion by looking at the case of Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto. By examining Yamamoto’s emergence and the initial period of his career in the Western fashion industry, which largely impacted the later Western fashion, this thesis investigates if the designer’s national identity influenced his creations, such as his design and idea of the garments, as well as the establishment of his career in the West. The main focus of the study is textual analysis on both the Western discourses on Yamamoto’s fashion, which tend to lean towards the notion of national identity – ‘Japaneseness’, and the designer’s own views on his creations and his national identity in order to shed light on the gap between them. As research questions, the analysis especially delves into the following four points: how Western discourses addressed the national identity of Yohji Yamamoto in relation to his creations; if Yamamoto’s national identity played a roll in the process of the designer’s penetration into the Western fashion system; how Yohji Yamamoto himself addressed his own national identity as a Japanese designer in Paris; and if and how Yohji Yamamoto’s national identity was incorporated in his designs. The main findings of the study indicate that Western discourses often highlighted Yamamoto’s national identity and labeled him and his works as “the Japanese”, as well as grouped him with other Japanese designers.
However, it was also shown that receiving that label in the Western fashion industry worked in his favor to establish his position in the West. In contrast, Yamamoto himself often showed a detached attitude towards his identity as Japanese while he was proactively incorporating Japanese aesthetics and culture in his creations. As a result, Yamamoto’s national identity worked as one of the elements that defined his creations.
KEYWORDS: Yohji Yamamoto, Mode Japonais, national identity, fashion discourses, essentialism, national romanticism
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would first like to thank my great supervisor Chiara Faggella. Your clear, warm, and continuous feedback has been a big help, not only for pushing me in the right direction when I was off track, but also for motivating me to keep writing and finishing this thesis.
I would also like to thank Sofia Mähönen and Ngoc Kim for providing me with invaluable comments and feedback in the peer reviews.
I am thankful to Ivan Strandvik for his help with translating from French to English.
To my professor, Louise Wallenberg, thank you very much for making this thesis possible.
Lastly, I want to thank my husband Andreas for the all your encouragement and support during my studies and especially this thesis.
Aya Hallberg June 10, 2020
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ... 1
AIM AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS ... 5
DELIMITATION ... 6
PREVIOUS RESEARCH ... 6
Fashion and Identity ... 7
‘Shock Wave’ and Yohji Yamamoto ... 8
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ... 12
The Field of Cultural Production ... 12
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life ... 15
Design and National Identity ... 16
EMPIRICAL SOURCES ... 18
Western Media ... 19
Biographical Sources ... 19
Garment ... 20
METHODOLOGY ... 21
Critical Discourse Analysis ... 21
Critical Visual Analysis ... 22
Object-Based Analysis ... 24
OUTLINE ... 25
ANALYSIS ... 26
Part I – The Western Discourses ... 29
‘The Japanese’ ... 29
Legitimation by Powerful Agents ... 43
CONCLUSION ... 50
Part II – Yohji Yamamoto ... 52
Deconstruction ... 52
Uniform for Working Women ... 57
Body and Fabrics ... 59
Ambivalence in National Identity ... 61
CONCLUSION ... 66
Part III – National Identity in Visual Image and Garment ... 67
Visual Interpretations ... 67
Garment Interpretation ... 78
CONCLUSION ... 81
FINAL CONCLUSION ... 83
BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 86
BOOKS ... 86
NEWSPAPERS ... 87
MAGAZINES ... 89
ONLINE SOURCES ... 90
FILM ... 92
IMAGES ... 93
INTRODUCTION
The word itself gives me shivers. It rings of claim, comfort, contentedness. What is it, identity?
To know where you belong? To know your self worth?
To know who you are? How do you recognise identity?
We are creating an image of ourselves. We are attempting to resemble this image…
Is that what we call identity?
The accord between the image we have created of ourselves and…ourselves.
Just who is it, ‘ourselves’?1 – Wim Wenders
Japan has been keeping a unique position for several decades in the fashion industry, which is getting more and more international and diverse each day, yet still unquestionably Western dominated. In the 1970s and 1980s, notable Japanese fashion designers represented by Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, and Yohji Yamamoto suddenly appeared in Paris and strongly impacted the industry.2 The Denver Art Museum named the emergence of Japanese fashion ‘Shock Wave’ and in 2016 held a namesake exhibition about Japanese fashion design during the 1980s and 1990s. It is also still fresh in our minds that the renowned annual exhibition of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York featured Rei Kawakubo in 2017.
Toby Slade introduced Japan as “the first non-Western nation to fully engage with euromodernity, and the first to develop ways to integrate the Western fashion system into its own fashion system based on its indigenous clothing.”3 Melissa Marra-Alvarez, curator of the museum at Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), explained the impact of the ‘Shock Wave’ as “the garments shown by Kawakubo and Yamamoto in Paris represented a departure from the Western conventions of fashion design, challenging long held notions of gender and beauty.”4 As a specialized study, Bonnie English realized a fully dedicated research for analyzing the fashion created by the ‘Shock Wave’ designers in her book Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo (2011).
1 Wim Wenders, Notebook On Cities And Clothes (December 28, 1989; London: Axiom Films, February 28, 2011), DVD.
2 Bonnie English, Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakuboß (Oxford: Berg, 2011), 1.
3 Toby Slade, “Neither East Nor West: Japanese Fashion in Modernity,” Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity through Fashion (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 25.
4 Melissa Marra-Alvarez, “When the West Wore East: Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto and The Rise of the Japanese Avant-Garde in Fashion,” DRESSTUDY Vol.57 (Spring 2010): 1.
As Slade explained “Japan occupies a unique position in the study of non-Western fashion”, the emergence and success of the Japanese fashion designers in the modern Western fashion industry have been strongly attracting fashion scholars.5 Subsequently, Japanese fashion has been featured frequently in the field of fashion studies. However, I found it quite peculiar that those researches eagerly tried to connect the designers’ works to their nationality: Japanese. In fact, as a Japanese person living in a Western country, I also often experience the same phenomenon: being linked to existing images of my home country as well as being analyzed against my cultural background. Needless to say, national identity and the culture of one’s home country definitely affect one’s thoughts and behaviors, but how about cultural production such as fashion? How does one’s national identity influence how one designs clothes? If national identities influence designers’ works, are they conscious about it? In the case of Japan, fashion scholar Yuniya Kawamura researched the advancement and success of Japanese designers in the Western fashion industry from the Western perspective and remarked as follows:
Fashion professionals recognize and accept their achievements because of their ‘Japaneseness’ reflected in their designs, and many called it ‘the Japanese fashion’ only because these clothes were definitely not Western in regard to construction, silhouettes, shapes, prints and fabric combinations.
The source of their design inspiration undoubtedly comes from products that symbolize Japanese culture, such as kabuki, Mount Fuji, geisha and cherry blossoms […].6
Although this is an interesting statement, I do not completely agree with it. Certainly, three of the designers discussed by Kawamura – Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto – all happened to be from Japan and became successful around the same time period in Paris as fashion designers. Yet, I argue, they each carried different aesthetics and concepts, which cannot simply be defined by their nationality and cultural background, and I deem it is too simple to analyze a specific fashion with the designer’s nationality as a basis. As a matter of fact, Yamamoto once mentioned that he was neither trying to represent Japan nor being very particular about his own nationality in the
5 Toby Slade, “Neither East Nor West: Japanese Fashion in Modernity,” Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity through Fashion, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 23.
6 Yuniya Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 92.
Western fashion industry. Furthermore, he was showing a quite critical attitude towards incorporating Japanese culture in fashion designs as a Japanese designer:
From the beginning, I didn’t mean [to represent] Japan[eseness] at all.
Because I was born in bombed Tokyo, so from my childhood, I had no feeling that I am Japanese. I had enough international something as memory.
When I noticed that I was Japanese? It was the time when I came to Paris;
they called me “Japanese.”7
There were several taboos I was inflicting on myself for showing clothes in Paris, and one of them was to use “Japanese exoticism”. I was thinking that it was the most shameful thing for Japanese designers to bring Kimono to Paris.8
These statements of Yohji Yamamoto greatly interested and motivated me to investigate if his national identity has been influencing his creations regardless whether he was conscious or not. Was his national identity really conveyed through his designs as the West understood it? How did the designer himself address his nationality through working as a foreign designer in Paris? This study explores and examines the emergence of Yohji Yamamoto and his initial period as a Japanese designer in the Western fashion industry to find answers for these questions.
National identity has always been an imperative factor in cultural production such as art and music. There are schools that are named after specific geographical areas, such as Flemish school in painting, or the first and second Viennese school in classical music.
Fashion is not an exception either. In the seventeenth century, for instance, king Louis XIV of France proactively developed the domestic industry of fashion and textile as a national force and established the country as the representative in the international fashion field.9 The king restricted people in his court from wearing other products than point de France – the domestic fine-lace production that the king established.10 In modern times, clothing labels and brand logos often indicate their region of origin such as
7 Frances Corner, “Yohji Yamamoto in conversation with Prof Frances Corner OBE,” interview video, October 7, 2011, https://www.francescorner.com/yohji-yamamoto/ (accessed: March 7, 2019)
8 Yohji Yamamoto and Izumi Miyachi, 服を作る – モードを越えて [Making Clothes – Beyond Mode], (Tokyo: Chuokoron-Shinsha, 2013), 84.
9 Agnes Rocamora, Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2009), 25.
10 James Laver, Costume and Fashion: A Concise History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 117.
Hermès “Paris”, Prada “Milano”, or Burberry “London, England”, and some fashion brands even include it in their brand names: Pringle of Scotland and Kate Spade New York to name a few. In the case of fashion designers, according to Kawamura, “Labeling and grouping based on their nationality is prevalent in press coverage”, and once a new designer emerges in the spotlight, his or her nationality always attracts public attention.11 A recent example is Demna Gvasalia (the founder of Vetements and creative director of Balenciaga since 2015) who, through his influence and fame, brought a lot of attention to Tbilisi in Georgia. The city was even called a possible new fashion capital simply because it was the origin of the designer, and also because it is one of the cities that led the ‘Post-Soviet Wave.’12
As a consequence, in the field of fashion studies, a number of studies on the relation between fashion and national identity have been done so far: The Englishness of English Dress (Breward et al. 2002), The American Look (Arnold 2009), and Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy (Paulicelli 2014) to name a few. Above all, the research of Fred Davis covers the topic by looking into how clothing reflects the wearer’s identity, including the person’s social and cultural background. Davis explains that clothing styles and fashions can be considered as semiotic hints that constitute a “code”, and that the code “must necessarily draw on the conventional visual and tactile symbols of a culture.”13 He also explains that it is difficult to interpret what a specific fashion meant to the broad range of fashion consumers, since interpretations can vary depending on the cultural and social group the person belongs to, and this means that fashion can be interpreted and perceived in multiple ways regardless of the actual designer’s intention.14 Furthermore, Javier Gimeno-Martínez, design historian and assistant professor at the Vrije University, Amsterdam, explored the relationship between design and national identity. He explains that national identity is a collective cultural identity functioning on the same basis as gender, social class, or religious identity, connecting individuals to a geographical location.15 The author additionally explains that the creation of a national identity is based on the effect of nationalism, and that “nationalism does not only inhabit the political sphere, but it also permeates the structure of social relationships and is underpinned through cultural production”.16 Therefore, whether the designer is conscious
11 Yuniya Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 94.
12 Nico Amarca. “How Vetements Is Helping Tbilisi Become the Next Fashion Hotspot,” Highsnobiety, https://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/05/25/vetements-tbilisi/ (accessed January 19, 2020).
13 Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 5.
14 Ibid., 8-10.
15 Javier Gimeno-Martínez, Design and National Identity (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 15.
16 Ibid., 11.
or subconscious, national identity is incorporated in cultural production in some form or way.
With regard to the ‘Shock Wave’, my hypothesis is that the national identity of the designers, the so called ‘Japaneseness’, was proactively emphasized and promoted by the West, mainly by authoritative institutions in the Western fashion system, rather than by the designers themselves. The national identity of the designers increased the attention towards both themselves and their works, and gave extra value to them.17 This thesis will shed light on the inconsistency between the Western perception and Yohji Yamamoto’s own view towards his fashion, and investigate whether or not national identity played a role in his successful penetration into the Western fashion industry.
AIM AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The main focus of this study is the relationship between fashion and national identity – if a designer’s national identity is incorporated and conveyed by his/her fashion – as well as how national identity of foreign designers work in the Western fashion system. In order to investigate the topic, the debut and success of Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto in the Western fashion industry will be researched as a case study. More specifically, the aim of this research is to discover inconsistencies between the Western discourses on the works of Yohji Yamamoto, which tend to emphasize ‘Japaneseness’ and connect his nationality to his works, and his own intentions and views on his clothes making.
Stemming from the focus of the research, analyzing if and how the designer’s national identity has influenced his works is also included in the aim.
In the research, I will address the following questions by analyzing multiple sources with three methodologies – critical discourse analysis, critical visual analysis, and object- based analysis.
• How did Western discourses address the national identity of Yohji Yamamoto in relation to his creations?
• Did Yamamoto’s national identity play a roll in the process of the designer’s penetration into the Western fashion system?
• How did Yohji Yamamoto himself address his own national identity as a Japanese designer in Paris?
• Was Yohji Yamamoto’s national identity incorporated in his designs?
DELIMITATION
Yamamoto has been active in the fashion industry for nearly five decades and he is eagerly releasing new collections to this day. Rather than his whole career, this research mainly addresses the initial period of his advancement to the international fashion industry, when he made his name as a Japanese fashion designer in the West. Therefore, the focus for analysis will start from 1981, when he opened the first shop of Yohji Yamamoto in Paris and held the first fashion show in the city. Additionally, given that Notebook on Cities and Clothes, a documentary film about Yamamoto that is an important source for this research, was released in 1989 and a garment that will be analyzed is also from the late 1980s to early 1990s, the target period for the analysis will mainly be this decade. However, I will also refer to works of Yamamoto and related events from outside of the period in order to support the result of analysis in Part I and Part II.
The languages of the materials are English, French, and Japanese in order to investigate how the Western fashion system and market interpreted Yamamoto and his creations, as well as to analyze his own words in Japanese and English in interviews and biographical sources. All translations are done by myself unless otherwise indicated.
PREVIOUS RESEARCH
As valuable reference for the research, previous studies on fashion and identity, the emergence of Japanese designers in Paris, as well as Yohji Yamamoto are acknowledged in order to understand what has been already investigated in relation to the topic.
Concerning the relation between fashion and cultural identity, i.e. how culture and personal identity influence the person’s choice of outfits and how the identity is conveyed through fashion, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (1994) by Fred Davis is taken into consideration. For the area of the emergence of Japanese designers in Paris and Yohji Yamamoto, two main studies by Yuniya Kawamura and Bonnie English about the Japanese designers who were involved in the phenomenon are examined.
Fashion and Identity
American sociologist Fred Davis published the book Fashion, Culture, and Identity in 1992, thoroughly investigating the relationship between fashion and cultural identity. As Davis writes, “that the clothes we wear make a statement is itself a statement that in this age of heightened self-consciousness has virtually become a cliché”: clothes are indeed broadly understood as instruments for self-expression.18 Nevertheless, we are quite unsure how the statements are conveyed and how other people perceive them.Do clothes really communicate the identities we aim to convey? In which processes are they communicated? How do we create meanings and connotations to convey in the first place? In the book, Davis carried out investigations for answering these questions, and addressed factors that we are unconsciously or subconsciously facing regarding fashion and identity such as identity ambivalence, gender, status, and anti-ism for fashion.
In relation to the research area of fashion and identity, Davis paid respect to the works of the early scholars, especially Veblen and Simmel – although he also criticized them for mostly focusing on social class – since they have established an essential principle:
“clothing styles and fashions do not mean the same things to all members of a society at the same time and that, because of this, what is worn lends itself easily to a symbolic upholding of class and status boundaries in society”.19 Davis explains that what cultural goods connote is different for different groups of people since it greatly depends on the context such as the identity of the user, the occasion, the place, the company, and so on.
According to his analysis, it is especially evident in the area of fashion:
In the symbolic realm of dress and appearance, however, “meanings” in a certain sense tend to be simultaneously both more ambiguous and more differentiated than in other expressive realms […]. Meanings are more ambiguous in that it is hard to get people in general to interpret the same clothing symbols in the same way; in semiotic terminology, the clothing sign’s signifier-signified relationship is quite unstable.20
Given that identities communicated through fashion can be unstable, ambiguous, and context sensitive, and that what is signified could differ between different groups of
18 Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 3.
19 Ibid., 9.
20 Ibid.
people, it is hardly surprising if a group’s perception of a certain fashion is different from the designer’s intention, especially when the designer and the observer have different cultural backgrounds.
Davis’ study mainly focuses on the wearers’ perspective, not the designers’, but his analysis does bring up the significance of clothes in general as a tool to reflect one’s identity. Starting from Davis’ viewpoint, this research explores and reflects further on the connotations of clothing. Such reflections are especially beneficial for considering an international circulation of fashion trends and influences.
‘Shock Wave’ and Yohji Yamamoto
As ‘Shock Wave’ vigorously impacted the Western fashion industry, it became one of the topics to draw the attention of multiple fashion scholars and journalists. In the studies that address this phenomenon, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (2004) by Yuniya Kawamura and Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo (2011) by Bonnie English are listed as representative examples. Although both studies are dealing with the same topic, the authors employ different approaches.
Kawamura deeply explores the fashion culture and modern fashion system in France to investigate the Japanese designers involvement.21 Thus, the main focus of her study is rather French fashion culture and the fashion system, and her research on Japanese fashion designers in Paris is a case study for examining how the system treated
‘foreignness.’
Kawamura’s insight is based on Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production.
Fashion, Kawamura argues, is “a collective phenomenon which cannot be created by an individual designer”, as well as an “institutional system” that is a network of beliefs, customs, and formal procedures.22 23 More specifically, the network consists of institutions such as La Fédération française de la couture, du prêt-à-porter des couturiers et des créateurs de mode (French Federation of Fashion and of Ready-to-Wear Couturiers and Fashion Designers) and Association Nationale pour le Développement (ANDAM:
21 Yuniya Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004), 38.
22 Ibid., 4.
23 Ibid., 9.
National Association for the Development of the Fashion Arts), and individuals such as designers, journalists, and publicists, who together maintain the French fashion system.24 Kawamura mentions “it is crucial for each as an individual designer and also for the profit-making business, to be acknowledged and legitimated by the French fashion system”, and, in the case of the Japanese designers, their foreignness and novelty as Japanese designers in Paris, and the clothes they brought, worked in their favor.25 Kawamura further explains,
More importantly, what was new was designers from the East. […] The initial reception of some of these designers from fashion gatekeepers in the West was mixed since Japanese designers are working on foreign territory. Western clothing is fairly new to Japan, and thus, they could have been seen as
‘imitators’ […]. For the avant-garde designers, there was much criticism of their unconventional styles. However, Japanese designers continue to set trends all over the world, receiving the highest compliments in the fashion industry using, whether consciously or subconsciously, their cultural heritage as their forte.26
Thus, although the initial reactions towards the Japanese designers and their clothes were not fully positive according to Kawamura, they were at least successful in being acknowledged by the members of the system from the beginning of their activities in Paris. Would they have been receiving so much attention if they were not from Japan?
Considering the influence of the aesthetical trend Japonisme in the end of the nineteenth century and the Western appreciation and partiality for exoticism towards the East, as Kawamura pointed out, it is undeniable that the cultural background and nationality of the Japanese designers worked in favor of their acknowledgement and legitimation.27 This research will look further into this point: were the designers conscious about the significance of their national identity?
Regarding the designers’ clothes, Kawamura also noted that, as already mentioned earlier in the introduction, they reflect ‘Japaneseness’ and the source of the design
24 Yuniya Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004), 36 – 37.
25 Ibid., 92.
26 Ibid., 94.
27 Ibid., 92-93.
inspiration would come from Japanese culture.28 However, at the same time, the author acknowledges that the Japanese designers she featured in the book, including Yamamoto, were all from “the postwar generation”, which “needed to devalue Japanese ideology and value whatever came from the West”, and that Yamamoto did not intend to create and promote Japanese fashion when he advanced to the West.29 In fact, in her analysis of Miyake, Kawakubo, and Yamamoto’s designs, Kawamura mainly discusses features as avant-garde design, imperfectionism, gender neutrality, unconventional femininity, and unique and experimental ways of making fabrics, but she does not clearly explains the
‘Japaneseness’ of their designs.30 She partially mentions kimono and how the designers’
clothes reflect the characteristics of this Japanese traditional garment, but as I quoted earlier, at least Yamamoto did not have an intention to reflect Japanese culture on his clothes and he mentioned that it was even a taboo for him to bring the kimono to Paris at the time.31 In Part II of the analysis, I will look further into Yohji Yamamoto’s design sources and visions for his works.
In Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo (2011), Bonnie English also considers the Japanese culture as a key element and base aesthetic for the designers’ creations and their uniqueness.
However, compared to Kawamura’s analysis, English focuses much more on actual Japanese traditional aesthetics and attempts to connect those elements to the designs. For example, in the introduction, she introduces Japanese cultural heritage by explaining conventions such as the tea ceremony and kimono, analyzing their aesthetics as the base concepts for the Japanese designers’ creations. She explains, how “Throughout history, a love of restraint, a special type of subtle beauty, incomplete perfection, a cult of refinement based on simplicity and austerity have always been elements of Japanese aesthetics”.32 This could still be seen as generalizing the designers’ aesthetics, but her insight is clearly based on a thorough cultural research.
English’s study of Yohji Yamamoto is also detailed. The background of the designer, the characteristics of his design, his aesthetics, as well as his detached attitude towards both his nationality and the need to incorporate ‘Japaneseness’ in his designs, are properly introduced and discussed. However, what I question is that the author seems to
28 Yuniya Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004), 5.
29 Ibid., 97.
30 Ibid., 131-138.
31 Yohji Yamamoto and Izumi Miyachi, 服を作る – モードを越えて [Making Clothes – Beyond Mode], (Tokyo: Chuokoron- Shinsha, 2013), 84.
32 Bonnie English, Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2011), 2.
be considering Yamamoto and Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons to be similar in their concepts and aesthetics. The author often mentions “Yamamoto and Kawakubo” in the chapter and lumps them together. She also writes, “[…] the designers seemed to share the same vision, the same heritage, the same ambition and the same philosophy. In fact, it was difficult to tell their clothes apart.”33 Nevertheless, I personally consider that the two designers have different aesthetics and style, and the concepts of their clothing brands are different as well. As a matter of fact, although Yamamoto has been aware of that his and Kawakubo’s clothes are considered similar, he commented that he once had an argument with Kawakubo due to difference of thought towards clothing design at the early stages of their careers in Paris.34 He recalls,
Rei and I had to fight because she made a collection inspired by the Japanese kimono or something, and I hated it. Rei, I said, we are not souvenir designers.
Japanese designers bringing Japanese ideas to Paris is not comfortable for me.
I don’t want to explain Japan to the world.35
With such a comment from Yamamoto in mind, I suspect that the classification of English’s towards the two designers’ creations might be considered as an extension of the other-race effect, a psychological phenomenon that makes it hard to distinguish between the people of races different from our own, and that English’s view was affected by the nationality of the designers.36
By reviewing these two main studies on the Japanese designers, we can consider that Japanese designers have often been labeled, grouped, and categorized mainly with their nationality and cultural background. This study will look at those Western generalizations and labeling towards the Japanese designers from a critical angle, and also take a deeper look into how the labeling ‘Japanese’ impacted Yamamoto’s career as a fashion designer in the Western fashion industry.
33 Bonnie English, Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2011), 37.
34 Yohji Yamamoto and Izumi Miyachi, 服を作る – モードを越えて [Making Clothes – Beyond Mode], (Tokyo: Chuokoron- Shinsha, 2013), 47.
35 Nick Knight, Peter Lindbergh, et al., Yohji Yamamoto: Talking to Myself (Göttingen: Gerhard Steidl Druckerei und Verlag, 2002).
36 Steven Ross Pomeroy, “They All Look Alike': The Other-Race Effect”, Forbes.com (June 28, 2014),
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosspomeroy/2014/01/28/think-they-all-look-alike-thats-just-the-other-race-effect/#3b5005f53819 (accessed February 25, 2020).
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The research is carried out within a theoretical framework composed of three theories:
Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, Erving Goffman’s self-presentation theory, and Javier Gimeno-Martínez’s theory for design and national identity.
Bourdieu’s field theory is imperative to understand how the Western fashion industry functions, as well as how new designers are approved and legitimated there. Indeed, fashion is both symbolic and material production, but in this study, I will mainly look into its symbolic value and the use of the theory that explains the concept of symbolic production in details will be beneficial. The field theory will be applied in Part I for the analysis of the Western discourse regarding Yamamoto’s creations as well as for the analysis of the designer’s emergence in the Western fashion system. Part I also employs Javier Gimeno-Martínez’s theory on the relationship between design and national identity in order to investigate how Yamamoto’s national identity in his designs was defined and reasoned by the media.
In the second part of the analysis, in order to examine the designer’s views of himself and his creations, including his national identity, biographical materials such as an autobiography, documentary film, and interviews will be studied with the help of Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis on self-presentation, as well as the aforementioned theory by Gimeno-Martínez.
In Part III of the analysis, whether, as the West believe, Yamamoto’s national identity was reflected on his clothing designs or not will be considered through investigating materials such as a video from a fashion show and advertising images, as well as a physical garment he designed.
The Field of Cultural Production
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the field of cultural production is integral to understand how the Western fashion system works as well as how new designers are approved and legitimated in the system. By referring to the theory, I will examine why the ‘Shock Wave’ designers became successful in the fashion field in Paris and if their nationality and cultural background became an asset.
In his book The Field of Cultural Production, Bourdieu argued that the artistic fields, such as art, literature, and fashion, are supported and maintained by positions called agents: individuals, groups, or institutions, along with their capitals.37 The field of cultural production (‘3’) exists in the field of power (‘2’), which is also contained within the field of class relations (‘1’) (Figure 1).38 Therefore, the field of cultural production is “the site of the double hierarchy”; the class- system and power, and the agents that have valuable capitals, especially economical and political, are able to influence and have exclusive power over the field.39 In the case study examined here, Yamamoto succeeded in participating in the field of fashion with his own brand and consequently became one of the agents there. How did he manage to enter the highly hierarchical field as a newcomer without a capital? Or did he already have valuable capitals?
Additionally, and most importantly, Bourdieu defined works of art as symbolic production, not only material production, and explained that their value is based on belief in the value:
Given that works of art exist as symbolic objects only if they are known and recognized, that is, socially instituted as works of art and received by spectators capable of knowing and recognizing them as such, the sociology of art and literature has to take as its object not only the material production but also the symbolic production of the work, i.e. the production of the value of the work or, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work.40
Now, whose belief defines the value of a work of art? Bourdieu argues there are three competing principles of legitimacy. The first principle is the legitimacy of producers who produce for other producers – art for ‘artists’. The second is the principle of legitimacy
37 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29- 30.
38 Ibid., 37-38.
39 Ibid., 29-38.
40 Ibid., 37.
Figure 1: field of cultural production, power, and
class relations
corresponding to the taste of the dominant class – art for ‘bourgeois’. The last is the principle of legitimacy of ‘popular’ – art for ‘mass audience’.41 These three principles are not always necessarily competing, but they can happen simultaneously or in phases. In fact, according to Yamamoto, his works received a number of harsh and negative reactions from the West at the beginning of his career in Paris. The designer recalls,
Some of the journalist said after looking my outfits […] [D]irty, broken. My favorite critique was WWD [WWD]. A big newspaper and one side there was a CDG [Comme des Garçons] outfit and on the other side my outfit, and they just crossed it out and underneath they wrote – “Sayonara” (Figure 2).42 I loved it, didn’t hate it, it was a total no thanks, but that kind of a criticism coming as a joke is nice. Then 10 years after my fashion shows, people started calling me Maestro! What? I was making dirty outfits.43
41 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 50- 51. 42 Caption for figure 2: “Paris – this was Japan’s contribution to the recent rtw here, a look inspired by residents of railroad stations and bus depots. WWD calls it Terminal Fashion”, Title: “Intellectual Bag Ladies”, Women's Wear Daily, April 4th, 1983. The actual headline of the article was “Intellectual Bag Ladies”, not “Sayonara”. Yamamoto might have confused this with WWD’s other article, which evaluated his Fall/Winter 1986 collection as “Sayonara” (Women’s Wear Daily, Vol. 151, March 21, 1986).
43 Katarina Djoric, “The Anti-Fashion Design Formula Of Yohji Yamamoto”, MMSCENE (July 25, 2018), https://www.malemodelscene.net/brands/yohji-yamamoto/yohji-yamamoto/ (Accessed April 15, 2020).
Figure 2: “Intellectual Bag Ladies” by Women’s Wear Daily
Considering the drastic change in Western media’s evaluation towards Yamamoto later on (he even received multiple authoritative awards for his contribution to the Western fashion world including the Chevalier and Commandeur of L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, which are honorary titles administered by the French Minister of Culture.
‘Commandeur’ is the highest status in the three titles: Commandeur, Officier, and Chevalier), it raises the question: what turned the tide?
By examining the Western discourse on Yamamoto, created by the representative institutions of the field such as fashion media, this research will investigate how, and by whose power, the designer was incorporated in the strict field of cultural production.
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), American-Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman advocated a dramaturgical approach for analyzing human interactions in everyday life situations. According to Goffman, individuals are all presenting themselves and performing multiple parts according to the situation in their lives, such as workplace and school, just like performers act on a stage. Goffman explains:
Defining social role as the enactment of rights and duties attached to a given status, we can say that a social role will involve one or more parts and that each of these different parts may be presented by the performer on a series of occasions to the same kinds of audience or to an audience of the same persons.44
Goffman writes that there is also a ‘back region’ (backstage), not only a ‘front region’
(front stage), where people prepare for performing roles.45 Thus, according to Goffman, we are always moving between front stages and backstage to perform multiple parts in ideal ways according to the circumstance, and trying to control the impressions of ourselves that other people receive.46
I chose this theory as one of the main theories for this study since I found the concept closely linked to the words in the opening credits of the documentary film – Notebook on Cities and Clothes – that featured Yamamoto:
44 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1956), 9.
45 Ibid., 69-70.
46 Ibid., 23-29.
The word itself gives me shivers. It rings of claim, comfort, contentedness.
What is it, identity? To know where you belong? To know your self worth?
To know who you are? How do you recognise identity? We are creating an image of ourselves. We are attempting to resemble this image… Is that what we call identity? The accord between the image we have created of ourselves and…ourselves. Just who is it, ‘ourselves’? […]
We move from one city to another, from one country to another. We change languages, we change habits, we change opinions, we change clothes, we change everything. Everything changes. And fast. Images above all. 47
Although the above quote is a statement from the director Wim Wenders, Yamamoto, in contrast with the Western excitement for his foreignness, also has been showing his cynical attitude towards his identity as a Japanese designer in Paris. However, taking Goffman’s theory into account, Yamamoto’s nonchalance itself could be interpreted as a performance and he might have been performing his ideal self as ‘Western clothing designer Yohji Yamamoto.’ By analyzing his statements and behaviors in different languages and situations from the angle of impression management, I aim to identify his different ‘masks’ for each stage.
Design and National Identity
The relationship between design and national identity is recently researched thoroughly by design historian Javier Gimeno-Martínez, and the research result is well consolidated in his book Design and National Identity (2016). According to Gimeno-Martínez, national identity is generated by cultural phenomena: “nations and nationalism”, and therefore, it does not only belong to political contexts, but it also has a strong relation to cultural field.48 Although nationality is a universal concept, and national identity is considered as a representative “collective cultural identity”, which may partially standardize one’s culture and identity regardless of the feelings of the individual, it is not uncommon that there are different understandings for the nationality depending on the individual even within a group where people share a nationality.49 The reason for this is
47 Wim Wenders, Notebook On Cities And Clothes, (December 28, 1989; London: Axiom Films, February 28, 2011), DVD.
48 Javier Gimeno-Martínez, Design and National Identity (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 10-11.
49 Ibid., 13, 15-17.
explained by Gimeno-Martínez: “individual identity can be seen as a ‘mosaic’, formed by singular pieces of collective identity, each with a given social ‘shape’”, and therefore, it may differ for each individual.50 He also explains that, for each individual, we have multiple identities and they are often situational and temporal, as we use those identities –
“of family, gender, class, region, religion, ethnic group and nation”, for instance – depending on the situation.51 This argument shares elements with Goffman’s theory of self-presentation, and the combination of these two theories would lead us to an intimate relationship between national identity and self-presentation especially when one’s national identity receives enormous attention like Yamamoto’s case.
Gimeno-Martínez admits that sartorial characteristics, similarly to literature, are
“powerful conveyers of national ideas.”52 As we have some ideas for specific countries’
stereotypical fashion, “both tradition and the construction of discourse fuel stereotypes in the field of design in general, and in fashion in particular.”53 Historically, especially among European countries, this ‘nation-characterization’ started to increase its significance in the mid-seventeenth century, and design, as well as language, food, and customs, became important elements in order to characterize a country and indicate differences from other European nations.54 The author explains further:
[T]hese myriad characteristics [clothing, manners, style of beauty, eating habits, language, religion, etc.] were captured morally in types of character and disposition, whereby external characteristics were motivated by a nation’s internal essence[…]. Nations were forced to be essentially different in every single respect […]. European nations were considered to be distinctive and different from each other; their identity resided in difference.
Common traits were ignored, as if they did not contribute to defining the identity of a nation.55
He also argues that “The characterization of the nation can point in different directions, stressing the nation’s past or its future. Whether the nature of the products, national labels, imposed by national-building process, transform them in representations of
50 Javier Gimeno-Martínez, Design and National Identity (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 15.
51 Ibid., 15.
52 Ibid., 34.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 36.
55 Ibid.
nationhood.”56 Although the historical consideration particularly describes European countries, these accounts of Gimeno-Martínez help us to understand the nature of the essentialism in Western discourses on Yamamoto, which tend to emphasize and focus on his national identity. Moreover, if both tradition and the construction of discourse fuel stereotypes, this is likely the case of Yamamoto as well.
Gimeno-Martínez mentions national romanticism as an important factor for understanding the relationship between design and national identity. National romanticism is an art movement around the end of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century in Europe, where interest in the past was linked to a search for national identity. It was a resistance against the Enlightenment, and more specifically, it was a revival of craft traditions such as folk art and primitivism in design, as well as a
“celebration of the nation (defined in its language history, and cultural character) as an inspiring ideal artistic expression”.57 In relation to Japan, the author takes Mingei (Japanese folk art) as an example of national romanticism in the country, although this Japanese case was a contrasted example; the Mingei movement was initiated and developed by Sotetsu Yanagi, Japanese artist and craft theorist, and it ended up being used as political propaganda by the country for enhancing citizens’ nationalism.58 Mingei is a Japanese traditional genre of art and design, similar to kimono, and interestingly, just as Gimeno-Martínez discusses “[a] nation’s uniqueness could only be understood in a historical context” to explain the ideology of national romanticism, Western discourses on Yamamoto often try to link his designs with Japanese traditional culture and aesthetics.59 National romanticism and its associated essentialism are, I argue, important key elements for analyzing Western discourses on Yamamoto. These elements will be explored further in depth in the analysis of the Western discourses in Part I and Part III, with considering Gimeno-Martínez’s suggestion that both cultural and chronological primitivism should be examined as two facets of National Romanticism.60
EMPIRICAL SOURCES
As mentioned earlier, the research materials include Western media: reviews, news, and editorials in French and American newspapers and magazines; biographical sources:
56 Javier Gimeno-Martínez, Design and National Identity (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 25.
57 Ibid., 51-52.
58 Ibid., 47, 65.
59 Ibid., 52.
60 Ibid.
autobiographies, interviews, documentary films, campaign images, and show films; as well as a garment designed by Yamamoto. These materials are analyzed with suitable theories and methods in the analytical part.
Western Media
In order to assess a variety of Western discourses regarding Yamamoto, the materials are collected from diverse sources: American/French newspapers, American/French fashion magazines, and an American trade journal. With the following main materials, main discourses on Yamamoto’s clothing in the West are evaluated from multiple angles.
• Le Figaro (French newspaper, October 21, 1982)
• Vogue Paris (French fashion magazine, November 1982)
• WWD (American fashion industry trade journal, multiple issues between 1981 to 1990)
• The New York Times (American newspaper, multiple issues between 1982 to 1990)
• Vogue (American fashion magazine, multiple issues between 1982 to 1990)
Biographical Sources
Biographical sources regarding Yamamoto are the core materials for researching his self- views towards his identity and also his creative sources. The main materials are his two autobiographies in Japanese and English, as well as a documentary film directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders in 1989. There is another documentary film of Yamamoto named Dressmaker, released in 2016, but since this documentary film’s focus is mainly outside of the target period of this study, it will not be included in the materials.
• 服をつくる – モードを越えて (Making Clothes - Beyond Mode, Japanese autobiography, 2013)
• Yohji Yamamoto: My Dear Bomb (English autobiography, 2011)
• Notebook on Cities and Clothes (English/Japanese documentary film, 1989)
In order to address the designer’s thoughts and comments that were expressed through interviews and his texts, the following book and special feature magazine, as well as interview video by Business of Fashion are also be examined:
• 山本耀司。モードの記録。モードの意味を変えた山本耀司の足跡
を探して。(All About Yohji Yamamoto from 1968, Japanese book about Yamamoto, 2014)
• Fashion News vol.161 (special issue of a Japanese fashion Magazine about Yamamoto, 2011)
• “Inside Yohji Yamamoto's Fashion Philosophy” (English interview video by The Business of Fashion, 2016)
As visual materials, a fashion show video and multiple campaign images from the brand’s official catalogues are examined. The fashion show, Yohji Yamamoto Collection at Den-en Colosseum – Friday 13 November 1981, was held in Tokyo, not in Paris, but it was a triumphal show to celebrate the success of the first collection showing in Paris, and the clothes were from the same collection as shown there with the 1982 Spring/Summer collection. The two visual images were chosen as they are the representative and most famous official campaign images from the initial period of Yamamoto’s penetration into the West.
• Yohji Yamamoto Collection at Den-en Colosseum – Friday 13 November 1981, fashion show video, 1981
• Campaign image for Fall/Winter 1984-85, by Max Vadukul
• The Red Bustle, catalogue image for Fall/Winter 1986-87, by Nick Knight
Garment
As a physical garment material, a dress of Y’s – the original domestic line of Yohji Yamamoto – made between the late 1980s to early 1990s is analyzed. The dress was purchased by the previous owner (my mother) at a department store in Tokyo, and had been worn and carefully taken care of for approximately thirty years. I inherited it from her and will study it on its sartorial features from the perspective of national identity.
Unfortunately, the previous owner does not remember the precise information such as which year and collection the dress was from, although it is certain that it is from the period mentioned earlier. In Part III, with object-based analysis, that missing information, as well as if and how the dress conveys Yamamoto’s national identity, will thoroughly be investigated.
METHODOLOGY
In order to analyze the sources from different angles, multiple methodologies are applied in this study. As an interpretive approach is taken for the research, qualitative methods are suitable for the aim. Considering that the initial purpose of the study is an analysis of the Western discourse on Yamamoto’s fashion in relation to national identity from a critical perspective, and that a critical approach should also be taken to analyze self- expressing materials such as autobiography, the main method for the research is the analysis of textual, visual, and audiovisual materials foregrounded by critical theory.
The submethod of the study is object-based analysis. As explained earlier in the section of empirical sources, a dress designed by Yamamoto is used for assessing the relation of his design and his national identity.
Critical Discourse Analysis
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is, as stated in Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (2001) by Ruth Wodak, an analytical framework that “aims to investigate critically social inequality as it is expressed, signaled, constituted, legitimized and so on by language use (or in discourse)”, and therefore, it “particularly takes a strong interest in the relation between language and power.”61 CDA enables us to analyze structures based on unequal relationships that were established as social conventions, and provides us with
“possibilities of resistance” to them.62 The method is based on the premises that discourse is structured by dominance, and social conventions are stabilized and naturalized by dominant structures.63 In order to apply CDA to research, Michael Meyer points out, it is significant to determine which theories the research refers to, as there are various forms of understanding of CDA, which strongly rely on different theories.64 For my research, I
61 Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (Los Angels: SAGE Publications, 2001), 1-2.
62 Ibid., 3.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid., 17.
will employ Norman Fairclough’s theory for CDA since it focuses especially on sociological and cultural power relationships, including power ‘in’ and ‘behind’
discourse, which generates discourses and social conventions. Fairclough describes,
I focus upon two major aspects of the power/language relationship, power in discourse, and power behind discourse. […] The section on power in discourse is concerned with discourse as a place where relations of power are actually exercised and enacted; I discuss power in ‘face-to-face’ spoken discourse, power in ‘cross cultural’ discourse where participants belong to different ethnic groupings, and the ‘hidden power’ of the discourse of the mass media.65
With employing his account as the basis, I will investigate the relationship between Yamamoto and Western media, as well as how the Western media’s interpretations of the designer’s clothes were standardized as discourse. Combined with Bourdieu’s field theory of cultural production, considered by the sociologist to be composed of a hierarchical structure (‘capitals’ and ‘agents’) and legitimations of authorities, use of CDA based on Fairclough’s account that sees discourse as a production of social power relationships is useful for the analysis of the Western discourses with regards to Yamamoto’s creations.
Critical Visual Analysis
Visual analysis is a research method that aims to discover and explore meanings of an image, such as those embedded in photographs, websites, films and so on, by analyzing and interpreting them.66 In his essay Rhetoric of the Image, Roland Barthes argued that, at least in advertising, we can never encounter an image in a pure state, and even if a photograph looks like completely naive, it would immediately get a connotation of
‘naivety.’67 More importantly, he also emphasized that the symbolic messages conveyed by an image can be multiple and varied depending on the individual (interpreter); it is determined by the interpreters’ knowledge or lexicon: e.g. practice, nationality, culture, aesthetic, etc. Therefore, the language of the image, or the
65 Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 43.
66 Jonathan E. Schroeder, “Critical Visual Analysis”, Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006), 2.
67 Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image”, Image Music Text (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1977), 42.
interpretation, is composed of not only the messages intended by the creator, but also how that message is perceived by the observer.68 Additionally, Kerry E. Howell mentions that “most critical theorists consider that individual assumptions are influenced by social and historical forces” in Critical Theory (2013).69
Jonathan E. Schroeder describes critical visual analysis, from the perspective of marketing, as an interdisciplinary method to enable researchers to understand and contextualize images.70 Schroeder continues,
Visual representations in marketing can be considered sociopolitical artifacts, creating meaning within the circuit of culture beyond strategic intention, invoking a range of issues formerly reserved for the political sphere and widely circulating information about the social world. Cultural codes, ideological discourse, consumers’ background knowledge and rhetorical processes have been cited as influences in branding and in consumers’
relationships to advertising, brands and mass media.71
Since fashion is an area that particularly puts significance on visuals and most of marketing strategies are based on visual expressions, this method benefits my research by helping me to understand how Yamamoto’s fashion impacted the Western fashion system and how it was perceived there.
As a practical procedure, Schroeder explains that critical visual analysis usually starts with description as the first step. Description is a data-gathering process, which is, for instance, identification of features of the image, such as formal properties of composition, color, tone and contrast as well as placing the image within a genre or type, identifying and describing people, objects, places, or events in the image.72 Interpretation and evaluation follow as the second and third steps. In the analysis, a collection video and advertising images of the brand Yohji Yamamoto will be investigated through the explained research procedure.
Schroeder concludes the article Critical Visual Analysis as “Critical visual analysis affords new perspectives for investigating specific cultural and historical references in
68 Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image”, Image Music Text (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1977), 47.
69 Kerry E. Howell, “Critical Theory”, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Methodology (Los Angels: SAGE Publications, 2013), 77.
70 Jonathan E. Schroeder, “Critical Visual Analysis”, Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006), 303.
71 Ibid., 304.
72 Ibid.
contemporary images.”73 With this method, I aim to investigate what culture, or cultures, is incorporated in visual materials of the fashion brand Yohji Yamamoto.
Object-Based Analysis
The last method introduced here is object-based analysis. This method was chosen in order to address clothes designed by Yamamoto not only visually and conceptually, but also from a perspective of materiality. Giorgio Riello, historian and chair of early modern global history at the European University Institute, writes that fashion should be studied from both immaterial and material angles since it is simultaneously concept and object, and that material study assists researchers to identify “precious indications on the social and cultural meaning” of the artifact as well as other attributes, such as “the evolution of forms and styles, changes in colors.”74 Hence, object-based analysis leads this study to deeper understandings of the meanings and connotations of Yamamoto’s works.
As a research framework, I will employ Jules David Prown’s method for material culture studies advocated in “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method” (1982). It is based on cultural study and puts the main focus on studying cultural aspects of objects. The procedure of the method is composed of three main sections – description, deduction, and speculation, and with this method, the target material will be analyzed from multiple different angles: physicality, sensibility, formality, intellectuality, emotionality, etc. As a point to be noted for the use of the method, Prown writes “Perhaps the most difficult problem to recognize and surmount in cultural studies is that of cultural stance or cultural perspective”.75 He explains further:
The evidence we study is the product of a particular cultural environment. We, the interpreters, are products of a different cultural environment. We are pervaded by the beliefs of our own social groups - nation, locality, class, religion, politics, occupation, gender, age, race, ethnicity beliefs in the form of assumptions that we make unconsciously.76
73 Jonathan E. Schroeder, “Critical Visual Analysis”, Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006), 319.
74 Giorgio. Riello, “The object of fashion: methodological approaches to the history of fashion”, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 3, no.
1 (2011), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/jac.v3i0.8865.
75 Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method”, Winterthur Portfolio, 17, no. 1 (Spring, 1982): 4.
76 Ibid.
