Fashion as cultural translation: knowledge, constrictions and transgressions on/of the female body

Abstract

In the last chapter of her book Primitive passions, Rey Chow focuses on cinema as a form of ethnography where cultural translation occurs in the postcolonial world. Chow develops Mulvey's perspective on visuality and gender in classical Hollywood film. In Mulvey's opinion, the act of looking at generates a male position where women are in the condition of being looked at. Similarly, in Chow's view, to look at corresponds to the western gaze, while non-western cultures are in the position of being looked at. This view lets Chow argue about the relation between the “original” and the “translation” among cultures: any such supposed “original” is but a construction founded on a sort of “to-be-looked-at-ness” that acts as an optical unconscious. I use Chow's model in relation to fashion, considered as the sociosemiotic performance of the clothed body. The clothed body is both a subject and an object of visuality: it looks at other bodies in the movement of imitation, and is looked at as a model of distinction. In this sense, clothing represents a sort of translation among bodies and among cultures.