The idea for this article began with this picture and the following comments posted over at The Sartorialist under the heading "
Let’s Discuss..... Sheer". What got me thinking wasn't really the picture, or Scott's brief but brilliant observation on the outfit, my interest was particularly piqued by these smart comments:
All this discussion of intimacy/truth and voyeurism reminded me of a text I had read for one of my comparative literature courses. One of the few that I enjoyed: "The Pleasure of the Text" by Roland Barthes. What does this have to do with fashion, you might ask? Well, Roland Barthes draws a parallel between the body and the text: he compares the pleasure of reading a text with the pleasure of viewing a body that partially reveals itself (because we can never know the text in its complex entirety, just as we can never know the body in its complex entirety, and this is what keeps our interest alive). His way of connecting body and text is still something I admire. It was a text I read after I decided to take fashion more seriously but before I could comprehend my growing belief that bodies always engage in representation, and thus they can also be "read". I ran into an excerpt of Barthes' text while leafing through my copy of "
Fashion Theory: A Reader". I reproduce it here, for your pleasure:
Where the Garment Gapes by Roland Bathes
Is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish description, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.
The pleasure of the text is not the pleasure of the corporeal striptease or of narrative suspense. In these cases, there is no tear, no edges: a gradual unveiling: the entire excitation takes refuge in the hope of seeing the sexual organ (schoolboy's dream) or in knowing the end of the story (novelistic satisfaction). Paradoxically (since it is mass-consumed), this is a far more intellectual pleasure than the other: an Oedipal pleasure (to denude, to know, to learn the origin and the end), if it is true that every narrative (every unveiling of the truth) is a staging of the (absent, hidden, or hypostatized) father- which would explain the solidarity of narrative forms, of family structures, and of prohibitions of nudity, all collected in our culture in the myth of Noah's sons covering his nakedness.
Even though the biblical myth about clothing that first comes to mind is the tale of how Adam and Eve, once they bate from the fruit of the tree God had forbidden them, realized their nakedness and felt shame, resorting to covering themselves with fig leaves and hiding from God, Barthes here quotes another biblical tale because he needs the family structure to link to the idea of Oedipal pleasure. But I think there is something that must be underlined from the first myth: Adam and Eve constitute their
selves, separate form God and each other -because they cover themselves before God actually finds them- , when they feel
shame at their nudity. The feeling of shame is at the root of the birth of their identities. Much like Derrida's befuddlement the moment he feels his cat's gaze on his naked body (described in his book "The Animal That Therefore I Am"), Adam and Eve feel the need to cover themselves from the other's gaze -whether those eyes belong to each other, God, or the animals matters little-. The feeling of shame Adam and Eve experienced separated them from the other animals; Derrida questions whether an animal can truly be naked. This question points at the charged nature of the human body. This charged nature is not constituted by an act of the person/body in question, this charged nature is part of our cultural baggage and each person inherits it from their upbringing. Women's buttocks, breasts, and vagina/men's buttocks and penis are the body parts that have the most erotic charge, those which are taboo to show in public. Generally there are less zones that are considered erogenous in men, more in women; women's bodies are highly sexualized. (Animal's bodies are not given the same meaning, there is no taboo associated with their "nudity".)
The use of sheer fabrics in clothing problematizes the coupling naked/clothed (associated with revealed/concealed, truth/lie) and the charged nature of the body. Technically, the woman in Scott's photograph
is clothed: she is wearing a blouse. But the blouse she is wearing is made of chiffon, the only parts made of an opaque fabric are the collar, the buttoned placket, the cuffs, and the pockets. These pockets happen to be conveniently placed so that they hide her breasts, since she opted to wear the blouse with nothing underneath, taking advantage of the fabric's transparency. Because of this transparency, the “long, sloping curve of the torso” is revealed, the fact that she is not wearing underwear emphasizing the illusion of nakedness and the erotic charge of her body ("the
hope of seeing the sexual organ"). Nevermind the fact that she has a coat over her shoulders, our mind's eye can complete the full picture of her revealed torso quite easily.What is suggested is just as -or even more- present to us as what is actually shown. This is "where the garment gapes" taken to its furthest possibilities, "the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance" has never been so fully realized. Certainly, when wearing sheer clothing, what you choose to hide is just as important as what you choose to reveal. The fact that the clothing here seems to work towards revealing instead of concealing is what problematizes the couplings listed above. I think that we can take away from this example that the coupling concealed/revealed is not mutually exclusive in fashion. When we dress our bodies, we are both concealing
and revealing them.
The question I can't shake is: if shame is at the origin of our identities and is what drove us to clothe our bodies, where does sheer clothing leave us? It must be assumed that the individual who chooses to wear sheer clothing feels little to no shame about his/her body. Once the identity is formed, can shame truly be discarded? Where has that shame gone? Maybe it has been momentarily suppressed by those individuals who, donning sheer clothing, choose to make a small, personal challenge against their culture, being fully aware of the charged nature of the body. Maybe it's been projected into the minds of the spectators, those who start to increasingly notice their own voyeurism, and even to those who choose to judge that manner of dress as unacceptable.
There were some people who followed this last mindset... There were some -let's say- "less-smart"comments on Scott's post which said something along the lines of "only someone with her body type can pull this off"; that women with "curvy"/"feminine" bodies would reveal too much, bringing them closer to "slutty" instead of "classy". Ironically enough, there seemed to be no consensus on what was "slutty" v.s. what was "classy". The terms are subjective, they can mean different things to different people in various cultures. I've actually started thinking that those who feel a certain body isn't being covered enough are translating their own "modesty" values/fears of their body. By this I mean certain parts they would personally not be comfortable showing, or parts they are ashamed of, transmitting their ideas of what parts/bodies are unacceptable unto another body. All this without first considering that what is acceptable/unacceptable varies by culture and by individual. The bodies of other individuals are used as our mirror, we bounce back our own images from them. We have a tendency to constitute our self image by noting the difference between our body and the body of the other. This has proven to be problematic, of course. (We've all heard of body dismorphia, which can cause a messed-up relationship with food and lead to eating disorders.) In this society, the transparency of fat bodies is unacceptable: the most common way of designing fashion for fat bodies is made to hide and de-sexualize them. (What other reason could there be for the existence of the muumuu?
But seriously, if you want examples, I'm sure others have written about it.)
These are a few thoughts I've been trying to shape, ever since the original photo was posted, and that have begun snowballing with the added influence taken from reading an essay about Derrida's "The Animal That Therefore I Am". I am not sure of the answers, I am not sure if the approximate analysis I have made has been clear and satisfactory, but I do know one thing: it is important to voice the questions. They are written here and the discussion has been opened, care to join?
