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Initial thoughts on my sabbatical from July to December 2024.
I spent several weeks in Milan and Turin, in Salzburg and Vienna, as well as in Paris, during which I was able to circle the core of my project's questions: The project is based on the assumption that a (in)differentiated cultural practice has developed in Switzerland in the training of clothing designers and in the field of fashion design, which, unlike in France, Italy, Austria or Belgium, is only slowly leading to a positioning of the overall appearance of Swiss fashion (Mode Suisse, since 2012).
How could this extremely complex and difficult hypothesis and the possibilities of its approximate substantiation (or verification) be incorporated into an operationalisable study in a relatively short space of time? First of all, there was the freedom from my daily work as a study programme director. Plain and simple: I was observing. I was able to take my time to observe people - very happily in large squares, on the streets, in restaurants or on public transport.
What do people look like, how do they dress, what care and self-care do they put into their appearance? How do they handle their hair, what hairstyles do they wear, do they wear make-up? Does the colour of their clothes say something about them? What are shoes for people, what are accessories, bags, headgear? And does it all add up to something like a look that is different in Milan than in Vienna or Paris?
Of course, it was important not to fall into the dangerous traps of supposed national characteristics - European fashion theory and the fashion academies with their different cultural roots were full of them. But in times of a striking political re-ideologization of the national, I could not completely deny myself a look at this context. Giorgia Meloni intervenes massively in cultural policy in Italy.
On the day I travelled from Salzburg to Vienna, the National Council elections in Austria resulted in a resounding victory for the FPÖ under Herbert Kickl; during my stay in Paris, a coalition (vote of no confidence) of the opposition from the left-wing ‘La France insoumise’ and the right-wing populist ‘Rassemblement National’ under Marine Le Pen toppled Prime Minister Michel Barnier. Donald Trump's election victory in the USA is only briefly mentioned here.
So how are people organised, how do they move in the here and now, in our present, which cloaks the often meticulous search for the national in a sometimes massive criticism of democratic institutions (e.g. separation of powers). Contemporary currents are trying to give the national a face.
This leads me onto a first track.
After a few days in Milan - a highlight was the small exhibition ‘New Society’ on the performative work of Miranda July at the Fondazione Prada in the Milan Osservatorio - I spent a long time in Turin.
The Castello di Rivoli, a museum for contemporary art, is quite a long way from the centre of Turin, about 45 minutes away above the small town of Rivoli. The journey back to the city centre on a bus that was used almost exclusively by schoolchildren is still fresh in my mind. Young women and men almost all looked the same, mainly dressed in black (jeans and bomber jackets) and keen to stage a binary of the sexes both linguistically and physically. The paradigm of man vs. woman evidently has a strong social anchorage in the (Italian) public sphere, but the supposed enactment of recognised gender performances remains a game and thus reinforces the polarities. Obviously, Italian culture attaches great importance to gender oppositions: The young women invariably have long hair, which is styled with a centre parting and often coloured. My closer observations of the girls' faces revealed many facial cosmetic (plastic) operations; nose, chin, mouth, lips and eyebrows clearly followed something like an ideal of an attractive, “beautiful” appearance. And this at a youthful age well before the age of majority.
I made similar observations about facial cosmetics in Vienna and Paris, often among female tourists of all ages. I don't want to offend anyone at this point - cosmetic procedures naturally have different personal backgrounds, and there is often individual suffering behind them. However, I am concerned here with fundamental questions about the human body, the face and what characterises fashion and fashion design today. And this leads me to a central thesis/observation during my sabbatical: what specifically defines European fashion and its design, namely the dressing of the human body in aesthetically pleasing and advanced materials and textiles, has evidently undergone a striking transformation in the body and its face itself.
In other words, the culturally and historically determined semantics and definitions of fashion (including cut, silhouette, form, colour) have been transferred to cultural, medical and cosmetic body practices.[1]
Fashion is articulated less through the vestimentary than through cosmetics, hair, hairstyles and hair care.
What fashion once was in the vestimentary sense has moved into the physical design (the design of the body) and has been transformed. Interestingly, Demna Gvasalia, Creative Director at Balenciaga since 2015, compared the creative craft of couture to plastic surgery on the occasion of his first haute couture collection for the house in 2021: ‘Couture is like plastic surgery, only with textiles!’.[2]
I'm not talking about labelling cosmetic and surgical procedures on the face as trendy or ‘fashionable’ - no: vestimentary fashion has migrated to the human face. And this certainly has to do with digital practices and the use of social media. Because there is a rupture, a transformation at work here: cosmetics (ranging from creams to perfumes) have always been a strong economic basis for all fashion labels, not just in the luxury segment. I am not referring to these cosmetics and their industries. I have found support for my observations and thesis by reading a small, recently published book by Andrea Köhler. Köhler's book ‘Vom Antlitz zum Cyberface. Das Gesicht im Zeitalter seiner technischen Manipulierbarkeit’ was only known to me after my return from Turin and Vienna. In the context of ‘aesthetic surgery’, Andrea Köhler speaks of a significant loss of reference ‘to realistic physiognomy’ in large parts of the population. Unfortunately, the quote now reproduced in detail applies to my observation of young schoolgirls in Turin (and not only there):
‘Under the growing influence of teenage influencers, the ideal of beauty, even among the youngest, has been distorted into a sexualised image in which a grotesquely inflated pout, false eyelashes and high-puffed cheekbones obliterate any individual trait. It seems that younger and younger women want to look like everyone else.’[3]
What do I make of these observations and how do they relate to the curriculum of a fashion design degree programme in Switzerland?
Firstly, I advocate training our observation/perception: what conclusions do we draw from observing people, from the way they dress - and is it true that the semantics of fashion have been transferred to the digital-cosmetic and plastic-surgical designs of the face (and body)?
If this is the case, what is fashion design or a specific content of it today, what does ‘doing fashion’ mean?
The title of our degree programme goes back to a text I wrote in 2009; as part of my diploma at the time, I wanted to emphasise the performative aspect of fashion making when describing various final projects.[4]Don't we all (still) have a certain ideal of fashion and fashion design in our heads, an image of fashion and the people who wear it?
Certainly, this imaginary (also ideal) of fashion and its bodies and embodiments structures the draft and the design. Because advanced fashion brings out the person and persona (the mask on the face) of a person in the first place, forms them, while fashion as clothing design often reinforces, emphasises and expresses what he/she (binarity of the sexes) has long been (in terms of character). But the real thing about people, the ‘essence of our humanity’ (Andrea Köhler) is empathy:
‘Because the face is the key to the ability to recognise the other person's pain as our own.’[5]
Not just the other person's pain, but also their well-being: To be continued!
[1] Ozempic, the injection originally used for the medical treatment of diabetes, has now become a worldwide means of achieving an ‘optimised’, slim body.
[2] Braatz, Dennis, Interview: Demna Gvasalia: «Couture ist wie plastische Chirurgie, nur mit Textilien!», in: Vogue Germany. 02.09.2021, https://www.vogue.de/mode/artikel/demna-gvasalia-balenciaga-haute-couture-interview _ 20.02.2025. Vgl. auch https://www.wmagazine.com/fashion/demna-gvasalia-balenciaga-couture-interview-2021 _ 20.02.2025.
[3] Köhler, Andrea, Vom Antlitz zum Cyberface. Das Gesicht im Zeitalter seiner technischen Manipulierbarkeit, Springe: zu Klampen 2024 (= Reihe zu Klampen Essay), S. 65. Jessica DeFino (‘The Politics of Beauty’) makes a similar argument, and her criticism of the ‘beauty industry’ is increasingly reaching a wider audience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAJCKMZrZ_Q _ 18.12.2024.
[4] Wiesel, Jörg, Doing Fashion, in: Diplomkatalog Institut Mode-Design HGK FHNW, Basel 2009, S. 17–20.
[5] Köhler 2024, S. 119.