Prudence Black

The Detail: Setting Fashion Systems in Motion

Abstract Each “season” the fashion industry marks time with an illusion of novelty and spontaneity. As consumers, we are meant to be enticed and respond to the fashionable element at the level of detail that gives a garment its tension or significance in the fashion system. In The Fashion System (1967), Roland Barthes analyzes fashion at a complex level of “substances,” which included looking at the material, the photography, and the language. And certainly more than most scholars of fashion he wrote about the actual detail of the garment, prefiguring his later use of the concept of the punctum. How we think about fashion today, perhaps always, is not at the level of the perception of a total system, but with the experience of accretion of detail. It is the detail that takes your eye; the tear in the shirt, the stain, the ruffled collar. The detail pierces through the appearance; the smoothness of the image. This article, after direct observation of street fashion in Paris during the Summer of 2006, will analyze the accretion of details and their relationship with time.

Lines of Flight: The Female Flight Attendant Uniform

Abstract The combination of new technology facilitating international travel, along with postwar prosperity and modernist aesthetics led to the expansion of a relatively new profession for young women: the flight hostess (later named flight attendant). At one time a profession as glamorous as modeling, today there are hundreds of thousands of uniformed women in movement around the world branding international and domestic airlines as corporate/national identities. Certain structured combinations of items define the paradigm of such uniforms, with particular variations that respond to keeping up a national image in cosmopolitan contexts. This article uses the Qantas flight hostess uniforms as an example to signal both its practicality and its articulation of a new cosmopolitan modernism. Being modern in this respect also meant “talking a uniform language” and responding to the constraints of comfort and safety.

Tracksuit or business suit: what should a woman wear coming out of prison?

In 2004, American businesswoman and television celebrity Martha Stewart was imprisoned for insider trading. By 2005, she was reinstalled in her television world of promoting domestic fantasy and class mobility through her products. Her 17 February 2011 show titled ‘Redo, Renew and Recycle’ (as well as including ‘bathroom make-over ideas’ and a ‘leather handbag how-to’) promoted Dress For Success, a charity with over 125 affiliates across the world. Dress for Success is a non-profit organization that raises money with the aim of providing economic independence for disadvantaged women by dressing them for work. Stewart may not have needed the services of Dress for Success when she left prison, but for many women who have been incarcerated, are in refuges or are part of the long-term unemployed, Dress for Success becomes an important link in the preparation for reintegration into the workforce. Their major service is to supply women with a business suit to attend interviews or commence work. In a corrective service centre, the service provides clothes for inmates to attend court, or to meet the outside world with some civilian clothes. Through interviews undertaken with clients and staff at Dress for Success, this paper examines the role of the organization in providing clothing for women as they enter the workforce or prepare for court appearances. The paper also analyses the iconic role of the business suit as an instance of material rhetoric and as an important symbol of work readiness.