Language Of Clothes Research Articles

Creative use of objects as signs in cinema: an analysis of Sergei Parajanov’s Hakob Hovnatanyan

The paper presents an analysis of Sergei Parajanov’s short film, Hakob Hovnatanyan (1967), and its significance as an example of poetic cinema within Soviet cinematography. Not only feature-length films of Parajanov, but also his short films hold an important place among his œuvre, as a multi-modal and multi-channel visualization of the past. Hakob Hovnatanyan is a prime example of poetic cinema in Soviet cinematography. A pioneer in this discourse in the Soviet Union was Andrei Tarkovsky with his film Andrei Rublev (1966). Examples of this discourse include the Parajanov’s films The Color of Pomegranates (orig. Nṙan gowynë, 1969), Arabesque on a Theme of Pirosmani (orig. Arabeskebi Pirosmanis temaze, 1985), and Etudes on Vrubel (orig. Etyudy on Vrubel, 1989), which was directed by Leonid Osyka (scriptwriter Parajanov). The paper explores Hakob Hovnatanyan as a converter of cultural memory and multimodal vehicle for the construction of the spirit of the city. While in the framework of the short film the city is presented in the open air, in the middle the interior, the everyday life, the hum of language, and the language of clothes and necklaces of Old Tbilisi, Georgia, are presented. The interior and spirit are presented not only on the visual level of paintings, carpets, and furniture (a dresser with a metronome) but also through auditory elements: sound, language, music, etc. Thus, through a multimodal visualization of the past Parajanov presents a new language of cinema (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (orig. Tini zabutykh predkiv, 1965), The Color of Pomegranates, The Legend of Suram Fortress (orig. Ambavi suramis tsikhisa, 1985), Ashik Kerib (orig. Ashik’-keribi, 1988, first director Dodo Abashidze)).

Queen Letizia’s Royal Fashion and Celebrity: From Curse to Asset

This article examines the crucial role of fashion in shaping the celebrity profile of Queen Letizia. Letizia will be scrutinized as a ‘celebrity text’ to expose how she became fluent in the language of clothing and accessories as a tool to fulfill her role as ambassador of the Spanish fashion industry, the tourism industry and, more broadly, of Spanish culture. In addition, she has used her ability to generate attention through fashion as an effective form of soft power to assert her status as a royal and, furthermore, to ameliorate the damaged image of the Spanish monarchic institution.

Blanche’s Clothes in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire: From Social Guise to Critique of the Film Medium

This article examines the language of clothes in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film A Streetcar Named Desire, focusing on the outfits of the main character, Blanche DuBois, portrayed by Vivien Leigh. Represented in contrast to the garments worn by other characters and especially her nemesis, Stanley Kowalski, Blanche’s clothes express complex messages with regard to social class and cultural identity, which feed into broader mid-century controversies around fashion in America, the performativity of clothing and its potential uses as a passing device. Another line of enquiry concerns the differences between Tennessee Williams’ descriptions of Blanche’s appearance in the play and their realization on screen, the “translation” of the playwright’s remarks into cinematic images, and the resulting visual narratives, which give weight to specific readings of the plot. Finally, the article approaches the image of Blanche as a reflexive commentary on the nature of film and a critique of Hollywood glamor. By emphasizing the constructedness of Blanche’s appearance: her “dressing for the part,” the use of setting, lighting and even music to enhance her social performance, the film questions its own artifice, while Vivien Leigh simultaneously embodies and deconstructs the image of blonde femininity, which dominated the cinema of the era.

‘That silken Priest’: Catholic disguise and anti-popery on the English Mission (1569–1640)*

Abstract Disguise was essential for gaining access to Roman Catholic sacraments in post-Reformation England. This article considers the role of such non-devotional materials in confessional conflict and Catholic religious life. It discusses how the materiality and language of clothing, accessories and personal appearance could be used to emphasize disguise, and its wearers, as a threatening force. It then analyses how anti-papal narratives compared to the reality of Catholic disguise strategies, before demonstrating how those strategies complicated Catholic self-representation. Both in conflict with Protestants and intra-Catholic disputes, the materiality of Catholic appearance could become a political weapon.

“WHAT FOREIGN FASHION MAGAZINES ARE NOT ABLE TO GIVE” THE POLITICALLY MOTIVATED LANGUAGE OF FASHION IN THE MAGAZINE NŐVILÁG IN 1859–1860

In the turn of the 1850’s and 1860’s a topic – which generated serious disputes in the reform era – flamed again in Hungary: it was the national clothing. With the slackening political rigour, the traditional Hungarian dress as a symbol of national togetherness was on the agenda yet again in Hungarian-language fashion magazines of Pest.The Nővilág [Woman’s World] edited by János Vajda aimed to work on women’s aesthetical education since the start of the magazine in 1857. The column named Original Fashion Report was written by the leader contributor of the magazine Júlia Jósika, who has been corresponded up to date French and Belgian fashion from Brussels. Popularity of her articles was unbroken until 1860. The Original Fashion Report in this name was published for the last time in the february of 1860; then the column was renamed, and of results of a slow process until the end of the year Júlia Jósika’s fashion reports frayed from the Nővilág. Her place was taken by a young writer with increasing publicity, Lenke Bajza, who made a stand for national fashion. She – likewise Júlia Jósika – worked for the magazine as fictionist and fashion professional.This change can be associated not with aesthetical but political decisions. Because of a delicate international political situation in the year 1859 Hungarian revisionists started to hope again in a new revolution for independence from Austria. With a press being stricktly supervised by the police, traditional Hungarian fashion became part of the language of national solidarity.In my paper I will confer the competition of French fashion and traditional Hungarian clothing through Júlia Jósika’s and Lenke Bajza’s confronting fashion reports and the alteration of Nővilág in the context of the politically charged alternative language of clothing.

Знаковые функции народной одежды в традиционной культуре башкир

Goals: The article studies traditional costumes in material and spiritual culture of the Bashkir people. The national clothes endowed with certain meanings would perform various sign functions thus determining differences in behavior and communication. The paper aims to identify and describe the mentioned sign functions of Bashkir clothes within a wide range of identities, including ethnic, geographical, gender, age, social ones, etc. Methods: Descriptive, structurally functional, comparative and typological research methods have been applied to identify semantic values of clothes in the Bashkir traditional culture and define the social relations attached to clothes, including affiliations with certain groups and typological parallels with other nations. Results: The research applies an integrated approach involving a comprehensive analysis of historical, philosophical, ethnographic works, and collected field data. The national costume had been endowed with certain semantic interpretations and showed a status of its owner, basically corresponding to beauty ideals accepted within a separate ethnic environment. The language of clothes indicated ethnic origins, gender, age, marital and social status of the interlocutor, including his / her belonging to a certain generation, his / her actual life cycle. The color map, fashion, ornaments and jewelry manifested the traditional beliefs about the universe, showed religious affiliation. Any detail of clothes was historically, mythologically, and economically — from household and practical perspectives — reasonable. The generation (life-cycle) affiliation was most vividly shown in dresses. Bright colors and diverse jewelry were typical for youth clothes, those of childbearing-aged women. Children’s garments contained a minimum of components. Reserved color scales and less jewelry characterize suits of elderly and aged women. Each element of clothes coupled with others conveyed an individual text to characterize the owner. Traditional society laid special emphasis upon clothes since any discrepancies gave rise to condemnation, sometimes mockery. Handling with different elements of clothes was closely connected with ancient beliefs, ideas about vital force, happiness, wellbeing (Bash. ‘ҡот’ / ‘qot’) therefore lucky clothes were not to be donated, men’s costumes were not to be used in household activities. Clothes of authoritative elderly people were used to extend their stamina, longevity, health to subsequent generations. The traditional etiquette, customs and traditions maintained such clothes-related practices that corresponded to practical, religious, sacral, esthetic, and ethical representations. Conclusions: In traditional society, costumes were a source of information, allowed to define unmistakably the gender, age, marital and social status, geographical, tribal, and even economic affiliations. All sign functions of clothes, being reference points, served as a criterion to pose the interlocutor within the binary opposition ‘we’ / ‘they’, facilitated regulation activities within family and society. The traditional costume served to transmit ethnic knowledge from one generation to another.

The Language of Clothing and the Law

Abstract Elizabeth I’s portraits span more than 40 years of her reign: during this time her courtiers commissioned paintings that developed both her own image and a complex set of symbols that transmitted her power. These paintings, together with other iconological representations of her sovereignty, embody her personal way to advertise her own power and keep her subjects within the fascination of her figure. By commissioning portraits of the Queen her courtiers both expressed their loyalty to her and helped to develop the wide range of emblems and visual devices through which her propaganda could be promulgated. The analysis of the symbols interwoven with the dresses which enwrapped the Queen in her portraits conveys both the social situation of the period and Elizabeth’s will to impose her figure as divine so as to stress her legitimacy to the throne. The problem of power, legitimacy and legality are all intertwined in the dresses: the yarn that is spun by the painter’s brush represents the rules that keep society together. It symbolises the legal system with all its paraphernalia and anticipates an awareness for those in power to advertise their image which typifies our age. The fundamental function of clothing in making or unmaking a person’s status within society is often used in Renaissance plays. In many passages of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, for example, clothing is clearly connected to authority and it becomes the central device in the taming process itself.

The Language of Clothes in “Sister Carrie” by Theodore Dreiser

The Language of Clothes in “Sister Carrie” by Theodore Dreiser

Book Reviews

American Artifacts of Personal Adornment, 1680‐1820 by Carolyn L. White. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005. 160 pp.Linda Baumgarten is Curator of Textiles and Costumes at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation where she has worked since 1978. She is the author of What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (Yale University Press, 2002) and (with John Watson) Costume Close‐Up: Clothing Construction and Pattern, 1750–1790 (Quite Specific Media Group, 2000).

Review: What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America

What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America Linda Baumgarten . The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, in association with Yale University Press , 2002. 278, 355 colour photographs, 36 b&w illus. $65.00 cloth. ISBN 0 87935 216 7

The Eloquent Sari

As part of India's aesthetically rich and politically complex textile tradition, saris are abundantly endowed with “the social life of things” as well as participating in the language of clothes. This article considers its representation in some Indian literary works as a focus for exploring acts of political and personal resistance against hegemonic authority. The sari can serve simultaneously as a sign both of the nation and of Indian womanhood while its rich array of associations has made it a valuable focal point for a number of Indian writers, both when representing major political events and when portraying the complexities of personal relationships and family life.

What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America

What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America

Susan Rather. Review of "What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America" by Linda Baumgarten.

Susan Rather. Review of "What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America" by Linda Baumgarten.

What clothes reveal: the language of clothing in Colonial and federal America

What clothes reveal: the language of clothing in Colonial and federal America

Conversations about Art: A Disruptive Model of Interpretation

Conversations about Art This article describes a disruptive model of interpretation, which explores positioning in discursive practices embedded in visual culture as a means of understanding self and difference. The model understands interpretation as a Foucauldian (Martin, Gutman, & Hutton, 1988) technique of the self, and its use may give art teachers and students strategies for understanding the social construction of interpretation, self, and difference through discursive positioning. In understanding this construction, students may be able to disrupt or resist 'where they are coming from'-their assumed discursive positions with, and interpretations of, the artwork-and explore self and difference. The term 'visual culture' acknowledges the inclusive and boundarycrossing aspects of postmodernism where the traditional high art canon of museum art-painting and sculpture-is de-fused. The `new canon,' if one still wants to name this reconfigured body of knowledge, becomes 're-fused' with the inclusion of all visual cultural images, that is, the visual arts and crafts including performance and installation, the popular mass media of television, film, advertising, music, and architecture. Disruption in Educational Practice To understand the term disruption in the sphere of postmodern, poststructuralist theory is to understand it as a critical dismantling of the concept of structures coming out of the writings of early 20th-century theorists, particularly Husserl and Heidegger. It evolves out of concern with the adequacy of the concepts of structuralism, that is with the analytic methodology concerned with structures and with the general rules by which structures work. At the heart of structuralism is a desire to uncover the rules, the linguistic systems which form the basis of human social and cultural practice. Structuralism is intimately concerned with the cultural phenomena of modernism under whose umbrella it sits and from where it assumes that the same underlying structures determine the language of social and cultural practices. Michael Lane (in Cherryholmes, 1988) states succinctly that: (Structuralism) is presented as a method whose scope includes all human social phenomena... social sciences... humanities... and the fine arts. This is made possible by the belief that all manifestations of social activity, whether it be the clothes that are worn, the books that are written or the system of kinship and marriage that are practices in any society, constitute languages, in a formal sense. Hence their regularities may be reduced to the same set of abstract rules that define and govern what we normally think of as language (p. 18) Therefore, the language of clothes or myths or the practices of education, can be analyzed for meaning in terms of their structures only. Structuralist ways of thought have dominated educational practices and made knowledge claims which, although questioned and critiqued (Cherryholmes, 1988; Geahigan, 1998; Wolcott, 1996) have remained intact in contemporary education. A major premise of structuralism in analyzing the structure of texts, works and practices is that the underlying structure is defined by the relationships between their constitutive parts. Objects can never be related outside their structure to their social and historical contexts. How an object has come into existence and continues to exist are not issues for meaning. It means that the human subject, the self, is excluded or decentered, the new centered subject being the structure itself. Eagleton (1983) emphasizes the anti-humanist position of structuralists, stating "that they reject the myth that meaning begins and ends in the individual's experience" (p. 113). Modernist metanarratives as structures appear to give us centers of authority or transcendental signifieds around which we can fix standards and goals. In educational structuralism such centers are concepts like 'excellence in education ' or 'equity in education ' or 'equity in education' or 'multiculturalism. …

The Language of Clothes.

The Language of Clothes.

Words, Acts, and Things: Visual Language in Coriolanus

W O R D S , A C T S , A N D T H I N G S : V IS U A L L A N G U A G E IN C O R I O L A N U S JEAN MACINTYRE University of Alberta \Joriolanus is not performed as often as other plays of Shakespeare’s matur­ ity and often it is cut, and then costumed, without great heed to its explicit directions about clothes and the actions that go with them. Perhaps this is why its use of costumes, properties, and stage movement has not received much critical attention, nor has its extensive clothing vocabulary. Yet in Coriolanus Shakespeare prescribes costumes and properties meticulously, making them part of the play’s action and expression and calling for more costume changes than is usual for him.1 The reader who ignores the costume directions and the clothing language, or the producer who cuts or alters them, deprives the play of important facts about characters and their deeds that come through dress and properties and the stage movement these require. To be sure, Shakespeare’s directions for costumes do not fully detail style and colour, though he must have written with a wardrobe inventory in his mind. But directions and dialogue do call for specific costumes and prop­ erties — a “gown of humility,” unfinished sewing, cushions, mourning gar­ ments, cloaks, hats, caps, and a garland. They also call for attire not strictly clothing, such as helmets and other pieces of armour, and the nameless Roman loot at Corioles. Many of these articles are connected with values, either what they are worth in themselves or the kind of worth they express. In the first class are the “Irons of a doit,” the doublets that hangmen would / Bury with those that wore them,” some object a looter “took. . . for silver”2 by mistake. These indirectly value the person who carries them, and echo later when Coriolanus, in exile, meditates on the worth of human attachments: “a dissension of a doit,” “some trick not worth an egg” (rv. iv. 17, 21). Such language, the play’s omnipresent “fiscal imagery,”8 extends well beyond clothing, but it remains merely verbal; we do not see doits and groats and eggs, but we do see garments and armour put to practical, often spectacular, use on the stage. In Coriolanus clothing becomes part of the “plot,” not just part of the “thought,” for the gown of humility and the oaken garland not only express value but cause action. Without these garEnglish Studies in Canada, x, i, March 1984 ments the play could not go forward. The same thing goes for the move­ ments of actors on stage; who moves, when, and how, at times causes action and, following patterns more familiar in the imagery of plays, communicates to the audience in ways usually reserved for the spoken word. In Coriolanus the most important class of garments is headgear. What a character wears on his head and what he does with it instantly shows his standing (or value) in Rome, and, it seems likely, in Corioles and Antium as well. Much of the language and action of headgear is likely to be cut in acting versions, usually because our conception of ancient Romans sees them bareheaded, except for heavy helmets with plumes that can hardly be used to gesture with. But to Shakespeare’s audience, headgear and its shape and fabric signaled the wearer’s status in his community; wearing, doffing, or gesturing with it expressed status relationships between the high and the low; and a crown (as many plays prove) held power bordering on the magi­ cal. Accordingly, Shakespeare incorporates the familiar associations of Eliza­ bethan headgear into the political and personal struggles of Coriolanus because of what they would automatically communicate. The social importance of the form and fabric of headgear shows in legis­ lation which we would call industrial or protective. “An Act for Uttering of Caps” (1566) includes a section declaring that “no man under the degree of a knight, or of a lord’s son, shall. . . wear any hat or upper cap of velvet, or covered with velvet.” 4 Another act...

Book Reviews: Fashion and Fetishism by Alison Lurie, London: Heineman, 1982, pp 256, £10 and xxiii + 359, $27.50 The Language of Clothes by David Kunzle, New Jersey: Roman and Littlefield, 1982, pp £5.95

Book Reviews: Fashion and Fetishism by Alison Lurie, London: Heineman, 1982, pp 256, £10 and xxiii + 359, $27.50 The Language of Clothes by David Kunzle, New Jersey: Roman and Littlefield, 1982, pp £5.95