Katie Couric in Harper's Bazaar

I have finally returned from a far-too-long hiatus centered around a trip to Southeast Asia and the subsequent readjustment to normal life, which itself was interrupted by unprecedented snowstorms that have shut down the entire Washington area! Now, however, I'm back, and while my first intention is to write a post on the fabulous textiles I encountered in SE Asia, I've decided to begin instead with a brief post on an article by The Washington Post's Robin Givhan. The article focuses on a story in this month's Harper's Bazaar about CBS anchor (and UVa alumna, I might add) Katie Couric.

I have covered Givhan's reporting in the past (see these posts), and generally admire her writing and obersvation, although I feel that her lack of a fashion studies background is a handicap to her full understanding of some of the topics she covered. The article on Couric centers not on the text of the Bazaar article but on its photography, by François Dischinger. Givhan writes, "(The photos) are an audacious celebration of a powerful woman as a boldly sexy one, too.

There's nothing reserved or hesitant in the sex appeal on display in the four-page story about Couric. The images are a full-throated, even exaggerated, rebuke of the notion that a woman must dress in a prescribed manner -- Suze Orman suits, full-coverage blouses, sensible heels -- to protect her IQ, her résumé and her place in a male-dominated work culture.

Is Couric dressed in a manner appropriate for a network anchor? These images demand that viewers define -- or redefine -- their terms."

There are two main images of Couric that accompany the article (at least in the online coverage): one depicts her in a beige, one-shouldered, above-knee-length Calvin Klein collection dress sitting at a glass desk in a modernist white office, and the other shows her in a short, dark skirt and blazer by Giorgio Armani, black hose, and a pair of Louboutin booties. She clutches the blazer closed at her chest and no shirt is visible underneath. In this second picture, Couric stands boldly atop two TV sets, one showing her (in?)famous interview with Sarah Palin and one showing her interviewing President Obama.

It's obvious that the photographer wanted to convey confidence, power, and yes, sex appeal. Couric is, after all, the first woman to anchor the evening news solo on one of the "big three" broadcast networks. While the article seems to emphasize her interviewing prowess, she is portayed as the anti-Barbara Walters: young, modern, in-charge -- and sexy.

In fact, it seems as though leaving sex appeal out of the picture would diminish her powerful image. In our culture, sex appeal has become an essential part of a woman's strength; asexuality, dowdiness, or even the downplay of one's assets for the sake of propriety smacks of a lack of confidence and creates the sense that a woman is not at home with her femininity. This is not a particularly new idea, especially since Sex and the City brought almost-nymphomaniacally sexually aware third-wave/post-third-wave feminism to the forefront of popular culture.

Givhan takes this sex-appeal-as-power in a different direction, as well, recognizing the difficulties of maintaining this kind of fashionable image (particularly when it comes to shoes):

How can she walk in those? Pure grit-- that's the explanation. And yes, please infer that if those four-inch stilettos don't draw tears from the woman wearing them, then neither will some ambitious colleague's backstabbing ways. Fashion, in this sense, is power.

There is, of course, the depth of the phallic symbolism of high heels to be plumbed here as well, but plenty of articles have already been written on that subject. And, to be honest, I don't think that would be particularly pertinent in an examination of Katie Couric.

As Bazaar fashion/special projects director Laura Borwn phrases it, "When coming up in the industry, you tend to dress the way people think you should dress. (Couric) has earned the right to be sexy if she wants." In these photos, Couric is indeed participating in the dissemination of this idea. Yet Brown adds that, after all, Couric was "doing photos for a fashion magazine, not Newsweek." I think that any analysis of Couric in these photos, and not just the photos themselves, must acknowledge that Couric's participation here was mostly as a fashion model. These are not news photos, nor are they strictly fashion journalism; they are that frequently seen combination of portrait and fashion shoot that combines chosen aspects of a person's personality and appearance with other desirable attributes to create a celebrity image.

Givhan states, "Certainly, some will see the pictures as further proof of why she is all wrong for the job. They will probably be the same people for whom Couric has accumulated a personal work wardrobe of blacks, grays and pinstripes -- a more sophisticated, yet still reserved, alternative to the news-anchor cliché of Crayola-colored blazers." These people, and perhaps Givhan as well, would do better to analyze Couric's personality, and personal image, through the clothing she wears on and off the job in public life. Those "blacks, grays and pinstripes" are far more telling about the real Couric, and her personal idea of what it means to be a powerful woman, than the outfits in which she was dressed by the Bazaar staff. How does sexuality play into this? Only a good look at Couric's wardrobe choices, which deserves more thought that I can give it here, would tell.

What do you think? How do you perceive Couric? How do you think our culture interprets sexuality and its relationship to feminine power?

Photo of Couric by Sylvain Gaboury for Life, 09 Mar 2000.

An Audrey Hepburn Auction, Louboutins, and Jennifer Lopez

On December 8, Kerry Taylor Auctions, an antique and vintage fashion and textile auction house out of London, held its "Passion for Fashion" sale, including items from the estates of Audrey Hepburn and 70s supermodel Marie Helvin. There were also touring exhibitions of highlights from the Audrey Hepburn collection, in New York and Paris in late November and early December.

Having worked for Augusta Auctions, a comparable American auction house, in the past, I am particularly interested in these items (and their sale prices)! Hepburn was Hubert de Givenchy's muse, so there are understandably a large amount of Givenchy pieces in the sale. There are also a number of earlier pieces, including some early Fortuny and Paquin pieces. Images and descriptions of the lots are available here and the final hammer prices are here. The two highest prices I could find were 20,000 and 50,000 pounds for lots 98 and 293, respectively.

Lot 98 (here) is a stunning Chanel couture cocktail dress from the 1920s made of over-printed lace (where the colors are printed over the floral design on the lace itself). It is listed as in "fine" condition, and this particular kind of lace in Chanels' work is rare. 20,000 is nearly four times the upper estimate of 4400 pounds, which means two people probably wanted this dress very much! I wonder if the Costume Institute at the Met and/or Cora Ginsburg in New York were represented at the sale.

Lot 293 (here) is a Givenchy couture cocktail dress and jacket in black chantilly lace, worn by Hepburn in "How to Steal a Million" (1966). Its 50,000 pound hammer price was over twice its upper estimate. Although a beautiful example of Givenchy's work, it seems as though most of the significace of this piece lies in its connection with the film; therefore, I suspect it was bought by a collector and not a museum (although I could be wrong).

On a sillier note, last night Jennifer Lopez performed her song "Louboutins" on the season finale of So You Think You Can Dance. The routine opened with Lopez (wearing silver or nude Louboutins-- it was hard to tell) on a bed attached to a giant shoe with a red sole. She calls Santa on the phone and asks him for a pair of Louboutins-- "you know, the ones with the high heels and the red bottoms." The song is about leaving a "part-time lover," and the chorus is a repetition of the phrase "I'm throwin' on my Louboutins, I'm throwin' on my Louboutins." While I personally think the song is pretty silly, this is a HUGE popular culture appearance for Loubs. They're quite well-known, for sure, but not only does Lopez use the designer's name as the title for her song and repeats it ad nauseum in the chorus, this performance (on the season finale of a show with an enormous viewership) is also supposed to mark her return to performance after a hiatus of about two years. The focus on Loubs is, as usual, about lifestyle and not quality or even appearance. The character in the song isn't "throwin' on her Louboutins" to go out and look sexy, she's putting them on to walk out the door on her lover (others might choose running shoes). I focus on Louboutins relatively frequently, so I'll not overanalyze all this, but I consider it a big step in the apotheosis of the Louboutin shoe as symbol of conspicuous consumption and glamourous lifestyle.

What do you think? Do you like the song and/or the performance? How do you feel about what this says about Louboutins?

Image of Audrey Hepburn holding her Roman Holiday Oscar by Ralph Morse for Life, 1954.

Report from Boston: Fashion and Popular Culture

A few weeks ago I attended the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association (MAPACA) conference in Boston to give a paper on The Jetsons and Space-Age fashion (for more on space-age fashion, see this post). Being a popular culture conference, there were presentations on all topics from Harry Potter to the decorative arts to popular architecture, and the keynote was on one of Boston's most beautiful cemeteries, Forest Hills. I heard a variety of wonderful presentations, including one on taxidermy in early twentieth-century interiors and one on sociobiology and the protagonists in children's fantasy literature, but I am going to focus my report on some of the research I heard having to do with fashion.

The "area" I was speaking in was called "Fashion, Appearance, and Material Culture," which is a rather broad area but which made for some interesting dialog between presentations. One of my favorite presentations was by an artist and graphic designer named Donna Catanzaro, who collects images and creates digital collages that address topics such as feminism, war, and the environment while remaining riotously funny. The piece on which she focused her presentation was this one, called "Swimsuit Shopping." Catanzaro despises bikinis, and she shows a number of bikini-clad mannequins with their heads separated from their bodies being steamrolled by a group of waitresses in lobster suits (from an old Atlantic City restaurant), along with a mushroom cloud that references the bikini's name (taken from the Bikini Atoll, the site of America's Operation Crossroads nuclear testing in 1947).

Catanzaro commented that at first, she had chosen pictures of women in bikinis rather than mannequins, but when she dismembered them via photoshop for her image, the result looked too much like carnage. She also realized that removing the head from an image of a woman in a bikini depersonalized the image, so that it felt less like there were dead bodies strewn about her picture. The end result is a combination of headless female torsos and mannequins, both feeling equally artificial. Does this imply that the head of a woman is what makes her distinct, or human, and that just her body alone isn't enough to create an identity for her? It's a very interesting idea to explore. A number of her other images are at her website, http://www.donnacat.com/. Check it out!

Victoria Pass, a doctoral student researching fashion and Surrealism at the University of Rochester, discussed Chanel and Marcel Duchamp's female alter ego "Rrose Selavy." She focused on similarities in the ways in which they marketed their personal images in order to market their art and design. Chanel is not a designer that I would immediately connect with Surrealism, so the comparison was a very intriguing one. The idea of marketing the artist or designer themself in order to promote his or her work is one that has pervaded the twentieth century and twenty-first centuries, especially in the past few decades.

While I sometimes feel that Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick are overly discussed these days, I very much enjoyed the presentation of Yale doctoral student Madison Moore on Edie Sedgwick and her glamourous image. Moore's work focuses on glamour as performance, a deliberate act combining style and drama that creates an intentional "fabulousness." Instead of being something superficial or simply gaudy, Moore argues that glamour reveals our social and cultural anxieties. He's recently written a wonderful blog entry on Rihanna's image and how she and other style icons dress themselves as if they were on a photo shoot, in a sense creating fashion editorials before they are made. I would love to take a look at style icons throughout the century-- right now I'm thinking of Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor-- and examining the relationships between their public attire and concurrent, or subsequent, fashion editorials.

Bareket Kezwer, from the Parsons graduate program, gave a presentation on Louis Vuitton's brand image and the global art market. I was fascinated by how far-reaching the LVMH conglomerate is, and how wealthy and powerful its head is. It seems as though every part of LVMH's marketing kicks back to some other branch of the LVMH empire, and they really own a large part of the world's art market. Louis Vuitton itself has an incredible history, beginning in the nineteenth century (and one of the most amusing things about the LV logo is that it was originally conceived in order to prevent counterfeiting--it's now one of the world's most counterfeited logos).

Laura Camerlengo is looking at 19th century miser's purses, particularly examining their representation in a variety of literary sources including Sketches by Boz and Vanity Fair. Using literary sources can be a rich and challenging strategy for a fashion researcher, much like using art-- you must recognize the author's style, context, and creative license in order to glean meaning from their references, but the result can be a deep cultural understanding of fashions and objects that is nearly impossible to gain from other sources.

These notes are just a very shallow gloss on the research that was presented. I'm going to continue to follow all of these researchers in the future, knowing that they will be leading fashion studies down interesting and significant paths.

Which of these researchers' work do you find the most interesting? Are there other topics in fashion and popular culture that you' d like to see explored?

Image of woman in bikini by Alfred Eisenstaedt for Life, 1943. Image of bomb over Bikini Atoll by Frank Scherschel for Life, 1946.