Articles

Bras As Outerwear.

Afterimage,  May, 2001  by Lucy Bowditch

Public And Private In Light Of Lingerie - bras as outerwear.

Let me start with a bra strap. This curious little stay that some of us have gone to great lengths to hide, disguise or eliminate altogether has in recent years surfaced in a big way, as a headband or in a very deliberate counterpoint with the skimpiest of tank tops. In fact, last year the valedictorian of my daughter's graduating New York State public high school class spoke about the big battle: the right to bear arms--that is to wear tank tops to school. If one has the full look down, bra straps--preferably some eye-catching color-are prominently displayed. How might one explain this curious shift of previously hidden, and at pains hidden underwear, to the domain of outerwear? How might one make meaningful "the references in fashion submerged in the ordinary," as art historian Anne Hollander has phrased it? [1]

As a fashion statement, underwear as outerwear is hardly breaking news; it possesses, as Valerie Steele and Hollander have observed, a long history. In fact, there was a fashion flurry In this direction almost a decade ago. In 1992 Essence Magazine ran an article on lingerie titled "The Secret is Out." Deborah Gregory and Meyer Kip wrote the copy which Included the phrases, "The inside story is bursting out.... Hook up innerwear with your favorite jeans and jacket." [2] In a May 1995 issue of People, a little piece titled "Slip Shtick" tells us "slips are only the latest undergarment to go public, after bras, corsets, and boxer shorts made the jump from inner to outerwear." [3]

The curious flip-flop of underwear to outerwear has at least a provocative paratactic relationship to the shifts that have occurred in our understanding of public and private domains. At its most grand, underwear as outerwear bears meaning in relation to the global shift in public versus private that is defined by the communication revolution, a revolution Inextricable from consumer culture or what I call the consumer vortex.

In order to describe the consumer vortex, we move from the microcosm to the macrocosm. The last few decades mark a critical phase in our understanding of "public" and "private." A credit card economy, the Internet and omni-present surveillance cameras are redefining--and In some cases erasing--earlier existing notions of public versus private. A few years ago, if one made a purchase, one could do it more or less anonymously, but today consumers are asked for zip codes, addresses and telephone numbers. And just try saying no. Because database creation is now part of the purchasing transaction, refusal to give a zip code is a deliberate act of resistance.

What other areas, linked to supposedly discreet identity, have shifted? For a small fee, one can do a credit search on anyone. Then there is the Internet. As we all know, it is hardly secure. When I received my college Internet account I was informed that the administration could read my mail- assuming of course that they would not. This was legal considering that all information on school owned machines is available to "the institution." Of course one can resort to snail mall--It is still illegal to open and read snail mail but fewer and fewer people are using it for regular communication.

Today, we Increasingly live under heightened surveillance, presumably created for our protection or convenience but in the process that same surveillance undermines our former sense of privacy. From the thruway easy pass to the swipe card for entering the office or hotel room, someone else can detect and effect our next step. In stores, at traffic lights and in the dark of night while checking a random Web site, our every move is potentially monitored. I need not mention the abuse of the social security number which is regularly used as an identification number by banks and schools.

Who is really concerned about this new exposed state of affairs? An admittedly random sample, the college students with whom I have discussed this take the monitoring and surveillance for granted. It is, in short, a non issue. But some are concerned because security systems for computer databases are a booming Industry, providing a product for those with deep pockets.

Almost two decades ago Jean Baudrillard registered great dismay in a well-known 1983 essay, "The Ecstasy of Communication." Allow me to quote him at length as the following passage describes the consumer vortex in detail. Responding to the telecommunication revolution, Baudrillard wrote:

Thus the body, the landscape, time all progressively disappear as scenes. And the same for public space: the theater of social and theater of politics are both reduced more and more to a large soft body with many hands. Advertising in its new version--which is no longer a more or less baroque, utopian or ecstatic scenario of objects and consumption, but the effect of an omnipresent visibility of enterprises, brands, social Interlocuters and the social virtues of communication--advertising in its new dimension invades everything, as public space (the street, monument, market, scene) disappears. It realizes, or if one prefers, it materializes in all its obscenity. [4]

Baudrillard closes his essay on a desperate note. He states, "It is the end of interiority and intimacy." [5] We are In a pathological state, reduced to nothing but "a switching center for all the networks of influence." [6] His hysterical pitch in the essay reminds one of the public response to the classic 1903 film by Edwin S. Porter, The Great Train Robbery. Seeing the large engine heading straight for members of the audience, viewers leapt up and ran terrified from the theater. Today, we exist in a different phase of the communication revolution.

The last 50 years of this great change may be divided into phases, which roughly correlate to decades. In the 1950s, one sees the introduction of television. The space program marks the '60s--a spin off is the personal computer. Computers are in institutions in the '60s and '70s--in homes by the '80s. The '90s witness the explosion of the Internet and the Web. To be born mid-twentieth century, say 1955, the year the credit card was introduced, is to straddle worlds, to know and feel this particular cultural change. It is not that what was once private Is now public, but rather the very definitions of public and private have shifted, slipped, become at times indistinguishable--not polar opposites but weirdly embedded within one another--somehow out in the same space, like the bra strap and the tank top. [7]

As a fashion statement, examining underwear as outerwear might be described as a Morellian device for understanding the times in which we live. Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891) was an art historian and a master of connoisseurship. Trained as a physician and expert in comparative anatomy, Morelli argued that if you really want to know an artist's work, look at the insignificant details--earlobes, nostrils and fingernails. A generation later, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) recommended examining the insignificant detail, i.e. the Freudian slip, to arrive at an understanding of the unconscious. Methodologically, attributing significance to apparently minor details has historical precedent to identify an artist, to identify unconscious motivations.

Can the detail reveal a collective experience? Is there really any cause and effect between underwear as outerwear and the communication revolution? Are consumer habits and fashion moments generated by some shared spirit of the time or zeitgeist? Perhaps it is absurd to try to make such an argument. Perhaps the best we can do is to suggest that the fashion statement is both a metaphor and metonym for the slippage occurring in our time. Clearly a number of artists have in one way or another recognized this shift.

An extraordinary seer within the communication revolution, and specifically video art, is the Korean artist Nam June Paik, who in the 1950s was concerned with the one way nature of the television message. He wanted to interrupt the message, to talk back. The 1969 performance by Charlotte Moorman of Paik's piece TV Bra for Living Sculpture speaks to the public/private shift and uses TV monitors to accomplish this. Moorman, a classically trained cellist, is seen playing the instrument in a decidedly non classical manner. She is nude from the waist up except for a clear plastic bra made out of two mini-monitors. The breast, or its fetishized equivalent the bra, as the site of desire and attention, has been replaced by the TV Through the boob tube, the device used for mass communication replaces that which is private, intimate apparel.

Another play on the location, positioning and scale of intimate apparel is seen in a 1990 work by conceptual artist Vito Acconci titled Adaptable Wall Bra. It is made of steel bars, plaster, canvas and electric lights. For years, Acconci has been self-consciously concerned with the dynamic between public and private spaces, acts and objects. Here architectural devices for particular body parts become architectural elements for the entire body. Curious parallels emerge--protection, safety, intimacy and decoration are seen in both modes of support.

An American artist living in Amsterdam, Charlie Citron has recently created whimsical lingerie projects using mostly elastic bands. Underwear as outerwear is here taken to a playful extreme with rubber band bras extending over a foot out from the chest. One might also read this image as genderbending--an upward displacement of the phallus. In another case, Citron's ludic lingerie allows us to read the figure as ecto-skeletal: breast cup forms, made of wire and elastic bands, extending approximately eight inches from the body, no longer suggest support but rather an exterior, thin-boned armor.

Moving into mainstream pop culture of the last 15 years, Madonna is the obvious exponent of the shifting, collapsing and merging that exists between public and private. Her name itself is an example: she uses the highly recognizable-Madonna--Which was actually part of her girlhood name, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccione, In the film Truth or Dare (Alek Keshisian, 1991), her lover at the time, Warren Beatty, says, "She doesn't want to live off camera, much less talk." [8] And then, one can never underestimate the degree to which Madonna took the corset out of the closet and onto center stage.

Today, when the "innerwear as outerwear" look surfaces on the pages of fashion magazines, does it bear the deliberate intentionality of Paik's or Acconci's work? No and yes. At this point it is a style--a certain way of dressing, a sort, a type, a quality of imagination. A given style may gain attention, a certain degree of status that comes with the magazine page. It may not be status quo but it is hardly subversive in the manner of Paik and Acconci. Nonetheless, the fetishized bra strap still provokes attention. It is still, based on a random sampling of college students, associated with the sexual but not with the slovenly. The consumer vortex demands everyone's attention. Creating conditions of desire is therefore pervasive.

In the April 2000 issue of W, Karl Lagerfeld presents us with a skirt and matching yellow bratop worn with an open translucent blouse. [9] The same month, Mademoiselle shows us the bra-top with jeans. (The copy reads, "clothing worn by the cast of Roswell on the WB." [10]) In Liz Wedelbo's design, reproduced in Nylon, the bra and the tank have reversed positions and merged: global politics in a tank top. [11]

Can underwear as outerwear bear meaning in relation to the global shift in public versus private that is defined by the communication revolution, a revolution inextricable from the consumer vortex? One cannot argue that clothing styles are a direct symptom of significant cultural changes or necessarily part of a cause and effect dynamic. A certain style or stylistic gesture may not be but for a nanno-second self-consciously political but it can and does become remarkably meaningful in a distracted, apolitical way when looked at within the larger cultural context. [12]

LUCY BOWDITCH is Assistant Professor of Art History at the College of St. Rose in Albany. NY.

NOTES

(1.) Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). p. 16. Hollander writes, "Most of the meaningful references in fashion are submerged in the look of ordinary dressed persons at any given moment, because fashion is mainly engaged in acting out its own formal history, and reacts most vividly only to itself, like many modem arts."

(2.) Deborah Gregory and Meyer Kip, "The Secret is Out," in Essence (July 1992), p. 75.

(3.) Janice Min, "Style Watch: Slip Shtick," in People (May 29, 1995), p. 67.

(4.) Jean Baudrillard, "The Ecstasy of Communication in Hal Foster. ed., John Johnston, trans.. The Anti-Aesthetic Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), p. 129.

(5.) Ibid., p. 133.

(6.) Ibid.

(7.) The tank top was also underwear not so long ago.

(8.) Christopher Anderson, Madonna: Unauthorized (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), p.323.

(9.) W (April 2000), p 141.

(10.) Mademoiselle (May 2000), p. 11.

(11.) Nylon (April 2000), p. 141.

(12.) Paper presented on April 22, 2000 at the National Popular Culture Conference, New Orleans. Louisiana.