Dirty fashion: Ma Ke's fashion ‘Useless’, Jia Zhangke's documentary Useless and cognitive mapping

Abstract

This article is part of my project that engages with visual and media cultures – fashion, cinema and documentary – to address Chinese consumer culture in the socialist and post-socialist periods. Focusing on haute couture, consumption and memory, the first part introduces an aspiring fashion designer, Ma Ke, and her latest fashion line, ‘Wuyong’/‘Useless’ (2007). Ma Ke intends to draw attention to the loss of the emotional bond between the maker and the user of clothes in the age of industrialized mass production and consumption. To help fashion recover this lost memory, Ma Ke buries her garment under dirt for a period of time. When the garment is unearthed, she reasons, it will find itself imbued with the imprint of the time and space of the soil. Presented at the Paris Fashion Week in February 2007, Ma Ke's haute couture exhibit ‘Useless’ was intended to be a critique of modern consumer culture. The second part engages with Jia Zhangke's documentary Wuyong/Useless (2007), a trans-media dialogue with Ma Ke's fashion design ‘Useless’. I argue that Jia Zhangke's engagement with Ma Ke's fashion is double-edged: although the director embraces some parts of ‘Useless’, he critiques other parts of her design. In particular, I show how the director introduces a new level of complexity to the artist's anti-fashion and anti-consumption gesture through the use of montage. The last part suggests that Jia Zhangke's documentary can be regarded as an exercise in what Fredric Jameson calls ‘cognitive mapping’, which attempts to capture the complexly mediated relationships between cultural representational form (e.g. fashion and documentary) and social totality within the context of global capitalism.