covid19 – Culture Weekly

Zoom Fashion

By Anneke Smelik

The cover of The New Yorker of 7 Dec. 2020 features a telling cartoon of our daily life during the lockdowns induced by the COVID-19 pandemic: a woman sits in front of her laptop wearing a smart top, her hair in a nice bun, with lipstick and earrings, but underneath she wears sportive shorts showing hairy legs in fluffy slippers. This strange separation between our well-dressed upper parts of our body and relaxed if not partly undressed lower bodies, is so typical of our online lives in front of the camera. Smart from the waist up; relaxed from the waist down. It brings into sharp relief the performative aspect of the way we dress.

In the beginning of the pandemic, during the first lockdown, as teachers we shared slightly embarrassed exchanges about wearing sweatpants or pyjama bottoms that no one could see. Soon enough the internet was abounding with faux pas of people online wearing a suit, shirt and tie, but with their underpants showing when they got up. Teachers and students alike are quite conscious of their screen presence, which reveals only the top part of the body. Makeup and hair matter more, as do tops, while bottoms and shoes matter less and probably stay locked away in the cupboard. Staring at one’s own face among many others during the online meetings and classes requires new make-up and dressing routines. Combining nice tops that are in view with sweatpants for the part of the body that (hopefully) no one can see, reveals that dress is, after all, performative: we dress not only for ourselves but also for others (Smelik & Kaiser, 2020). We dress for the public gaze.

This performative aspect of fashion reminds me of the metaphor of the stage that sociologist Erving Goffman (1959) used to characterize presentations of self as performances in everyday life. As Efrat Tseëlon (2016) has shown, the theatrical metaphor of performance is particularly apt for the study of clothing and appearance. Goffman’s notion of a ‘front region’, the social role that people adopt in society, versus the ‘back region’, where people relax their looks and behaviour, is intimately connected with the ways we dress. The staged, edited and filtered selfies that we put on Instagram or Facebook are clearly intended for the ‘front region’, whereas we are usually reluctant to upload snapshots from the ‘back region’ when we lounge on our couch in a track suit without any make up on. Translating Goffman’s terms to the digital age of Zoom, Teams, virtual classrooms, and other digital meetings, perhaps we can better talk of an ‘upper region’ and a ‘lower region’! Now, the upper region of our body remains out there up front, while the lower part of the body can relax into the invisible back region.

Clothes are an important part of ‘impression management’, as it has come to be known. In the presence of others, Goffman argues, individuals will try to influence the situation by presenting themselves in a favourable light. In this respect, Goffman makes a difference between the impression that people give intentionally and the impression that they give off unintentionally. We may dress very carefully to make an impression for a Zoom meeting by doing our hair and applying makeup, putting on a nice top and jewellery, but may give off quite a different impression by getting up in haste showing a pyjama bottom, or worse, underwear. Our online lives are still sustained by normative expectations and tacit rules of embodied presentation: the performance goes on, even if the camera reduces us to ‘talking heads’.

I am probably not the only one who misses wearing (and showing off) beautiful shoes, and who is slightly fed up with wearing Uggs, however comfortable at home. It cannot be any coincidence that fashion designers have come up with ‘Zoom fashion’, focusing on the ‘waist-up’, with detailed necklines and relaxed trousers (Criddle, 2020). We may not be able to afford such expensive brands, but I have come across a fun solution for Zoom fashion: the work-at-home sweater that looks like a business suit. This certainly helps to create the right impression management. So, while the lockdown lasts, I will try to keep my desire for swirling skirts and smart trousers on hold, and have fun with Zoom fashion by mismatching business-like tops with totally relaxed bottoms.

References

Criddle, Cristina, ‘Fashion brands design ‘waist-up’ clothing for video calls’. BBC News, 20 september 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54327987

Goffman, Erving (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin.

Anneke Smelik and Susan Kaiser, ‘Performing fashion’. Editorial introduction to Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, vol 11 nr 2, 2020: 117-128. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/csfb_00012_2

Tseëlon, Efrat (2016), ‘Erving Goffman: Social science as an art of cultural observation’. In Agnès Rocamora & Anneke Smelik (eds.) Thinking Through Fashion. A Guide to Key Theorists. London: Bloomsbury, 149-164.

Materialities: a virus and face masks

Written by Anneke Smelik

Image: Duurzame Mode 025

The fashion and beauty industries are suffering financially from the corona crisis, but some clothing companies, including large fast fashion ones such as Zara (Spain) and H&M (Sweden), are converting to the production of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in the form of face masks and protective gowns. Now that face masks are slowly entering the streets of European cities, there is the critical issue of accessibility: where to buy them and how to remain fashionable? DIY videos instruct people how to
make do with materials on hand, from fabric and sheets to bras and T-shirts. Volunteers make masks for hospitals and nursing homes, while private consumers have become producers at home.

Luxury brands like Armani, Gucci and Prada in Italy and LVMH in France (Dior, Fendi, Louis Vuitton and Givenchy) resort to making face masks for their respective governments, while luxury perfume makers such as Bvlgari and Guerlain have pledged to make hand sanitizers (Bramley 2020). Fashion brands and collaborations between industry and government become sources of local and national pride in times of crisis. To address aesthetic concerns many smaller fashion brands or designers are making fashionable face masks, including sequined, 3D printed and recyclable ones (Philipkoski 2020). In the Netherlands designer Sjaak Hullekes (Hulle Kes) and tech-fashion designer Melanie Brown (Bybrown) make fashionable face masks, while The Fashion Filter designs them together with the Technical University of Eindhoven. In the region Arnhem-Nijmegen the platform for sustainable fashion has developed a project with local designers to produce sustainable face masks: ‘FACE MASKS 025’.

In an earlier contribution to this blog I wrote about new materialism. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, materials and materialities come into stark relief. As the virus spreads globally from body to body, the importance of material protection, along with ‘social distancing’, becomes paramount. Initial material shortages of face masks, protective gowns, ventilators and testing swabs presented life-threatening conditions due to sheer demand as well as supply chain disruptions. By the end of April, many countries were recommending or demanding cloth face masks for everyone in public spaces, with the clarification that medical masks should be reserved for healthcare workers.

The question whether ‘to mask or not to mask’ (Eikenberry et al. 2020) has become quite the topic of debate. There have been mixed and dramatically changing messages whether the general public should engage in mask-wearing. Cultural as well as material and medical factors had influenced some of the earlier advice for the public not to mask in Europe and the USA. In addition to concerns about material shortages and perceptions of a false sense of security, there had been concerns about stigmatization and discrimination (Tufekci et al. 2020). Unlike the invisible virus, the mask is highly visible and has not been customary in western cultures. Mask usage in public for health purposes is much more common in Asian countries, especially since the SARS outbreak in 2003. In China, mask-wearing
is a practice associated with modern material culture.

While there are benefits to individual wearers, depending on the particular material and fit issues associated with the mask, it is basically an act of generosity to others to don a cloth mask. Inasmuch as ‘western’ cultures have tended toward individualist rather than collectivist needs, compliance requires a transformation in meaning and thinking. As Austria began to mandate mask-wearing in public spaces such as grocery stores, for example, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz noted that it would be a ‘big adjustment’ as ‘masks are alien to our culture’ (Norimitsu 2020).

The pandemic reminds us that we are all material subjects (Smelik, 2018), dependent on fabrics, clothes, and other materials not only for protective, but also for aesthetic, cultural, and social reasons. When I donned a – very ordinary – face mask for the first time, I was struck how hot it was walking in the sun, how it itched behind my ears, and that my glasses got fogged up. As I realized that the highly visible face mask is a material object that protects me, us, from the material yet invisible Covid 19 virus, I felt acutely how our daily life is characterized by non-human actors invading as well as protecting our all-too-human (and hence vulnerable) bodies. We are material subjects made up of nonhuman and human components within the larger contexts of material culture, local circumstances and global circuits.

* This blog is based on a text that Susan Kaiser and I wrote together, “Materials and materialities: Viral and sheep-ish encounters with
fashion”. Editorial introduction to Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, vol 11 nr 1, in press June 2020.

References:

Bramley, Ellie Violet (2020), ‘Prada the latest brand to make medical face masks’, The Guardian, 24 March.

Eikenberry, Steffen E.; Mancuso, Marina; Iboi, Enahoro; Phan, Tin, Eikenberry, Keenan; Kuang, Yang; Kostelich, Eric; and Gumel, Abba B. (2020), ‘To mask or not to mask: Modeling the potential for face mask use by the general public to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic’: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.06.20055624

Onishi, Norimitsu, and Méhuet, Constant (2020), ‘Mask-wearing is a very new fashion in Paris (and a lot of other places)’, New York Times, 9 April.

Philipkoski, Kristen (2020), ‘30+ fashionbrands pivoting to make stylish coronavirus masks’, Forbes, 12 April.

Smelik, Anneke (2018), ‘New materialism: A theoretical framework for fashion in the age of technological innovation’, International Journal of Fashion Studies, 5(1), pp. 31-52.

Tufekci, Zeynep; Howard, Jeremy; and Greenhalgh, Trish (2020), ‘The real reason to wear a mask’, The Atlantic, 22 April.

The Pandemic Sublime

Written by

László Munteán

Now that staying home has become the new norm, the bulk of my contact with the outside world is channeled through the screen and the microphone of my laptop. Within the confines of the home, the Internet remains an umbilical cord to information, social life, and entertainment. Overwhelmed, frustrated, and at once obsessed with the visual culture of the pandemic burgeoning online, I am intrigued by the proliferation of drone videos featuring cities under lockdown, featuring (in alphabetical
order) Boston, Budapest, Chicago, Istanbul, Mumbai, New York, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, and San Francisco. The most recent one is a 48-mintue superbly edited footage of New York augmented by a moving soundtrack resembling cinematic establishing shots. There are many more out there and presumably even more to come in the near future. Regardless of the differences among these cities, the videos share an aesthetic repertoire, which employs soothingly uplifting music as an atmospheric background to panoramic views of empty streets forming embroidery patterns on a gigantic carpet unfolding without end. Viewers, including myself, are
mesmerized, as evidenced by the acclaim they receive on YouTube.

There is, however, nothing new about their aesthetic repertoire. The increasing affordability and ubiquity of ever more sophisticated personal drones had yielded a plethora of similar videos long before COVID-19. From the drone’s bird’s eye perspective, humans and traffic are rendered almost invisible, allowing the city to emerge as an artificial landscape dazzling in its variety of detail and at once fathomable from above. These drone videos celebrate cities in terms of what David Nye calls the ‘technological sublime’. Updating earlier conceptualizations of the sublime, Nye traces its manifestations in such emblems of American modernity as skyscrapers, railroads, bridges. As an example of the technological sublime, Nye also mentions Consolidated Edison’s City of Lights diorama of New York, which, at the 1939 World Fair, was the largest in the world. Similarly, urban drone videos also turn cities into a sublime artifact, human-made and at once beyond human scale, overwhelming and at once uplifting to survey from above.

The drone videos of cities besieged by the pandemic add a poignant edge to the technological sublime. The overwhelming sight of the modern city, which translates Kant’s dynamical and mathematical sublime into Babel-like visions of technological wonder, is here compromised by the invisible but overwhelming presence of the virus. The drone’s elevated perspective, otherwise enacting the Kantian transcendence of reason as key to the experience of the sublime, gestures to the technological sublime as a
nostalgic memory in the midst of angst and loss. Being at a safe remove from the threatening object, which Burke sees as indispensable for the experience of the sublime, is likewise illusory, uncannily recalling measures of social distancing, which has left streets vacant.

This is not to say, however, that the videos’ depressing context undermines the pleasure of viewing them. Quite the contrary, they cater to the kind of pleasure generally ascribed to the apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic imaginaries. Cinematic destructions of American metropolises in countless Hollywood blockbusters or the abandoned New York of I Am Legend (2007) all celebrate the greatness and beauty of these cities by way of fantasizing about their decay. Projected into the distant future, these (post-)apocalyptic imaginaries mobilize the technological sublime in an inverse fashion, generating a nostalgia for the present. But the cities under lockdown are neither ruined nor abandoned. The disaster at stake is no fantasy, it is not awesome but awful. If there is a ruin to be seen through the drones’ eyes, it is that of the liveliness of public space. What unfolds in front of our eyes is a diorama-city with a few ghostly passersby: distressing and yet stunningly beautiful. If these videos bring anything new, they do so by mapping a familiar aesthetic onto a new urban reality, eliciting the experience of a pandemic sublime.

The pandemic sublime taps into the daunting reality of the lockdown but it does so in a way that allows the city, captured in the vocabulary of the technological sublime, to take the upper hand. The sense of pleasure to be felt is not guaranteed by any spatial or temporal distance because the viewer, no matter where he or she watches these videos, remains at risk. Instead, the drone’s eye caters to the desire to leave the limits of the home, while the sight of abandoned streets foster a sense of togetherness in isolation. The pandemic sublime locates the source of threat in the unfathomable proportions of the pandemic and mobilizes the aerial view to
celebrate the city as a metonym for its inhabitants confined to their homes,
that is, those lucky enough to have homes to stay in, jobs to work at from a
distance, the technology to watch these videos, and the health to carry on.