FLEURS DU MAL: On the Repulsive/Precious in Rodarte’s Spring/Summer 2018 Collection

Abstract

Despite a number of recent developments in broadening of the discipline, the field of Fashion Studies at large to date has been largely predominated by a pair of prevailing paradigms. One of them is to address fashion as a monolithic phenomenon internally undifferentiated by diversity of creators, variety of production and distribution methods, and the evolving aesthetic tendencies. The other is to deny individual seasonal collections presented both in course, and outside the realms of, the international fashion week circuit, the agency to express complex concepts and sophisticated cultural critique through the encompassing medium of a fashion show or presentation in a manner such agency is readily granted to art exhibitions, dance and music performance, or literature. This article departs from both of the former tendencies by specifically addressing a unique seasonal fashion collection and the philosophical and critical questions developed within it. It will analyze the Spring/Summer 2018 Collection by Rodarte, presented as part of the Paris Haute Couture week on July 2, 2017, in the context of Georges Bataille’s thesis of the imperative of complimentary dialectic between homogeneity and heterogeneity. Developing this subject, the following text will also approach the broader interrelated issues of eco fetishism and paradoxically co-existing socio-cultural discourses of valorization and denigration of femininity as they were addressed in the collection and its presentation.