Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Fashion as Cultural Translation in the Hyperconnected World
- Supplement to the Introduction: Fashion, the Hyperconnected World and Coronavirus
- 1 Time
- 2 Spaces
- 3 Fashion as Cultural Tradition: Italian Style
- 4 Fashion as Cultural Translation
- 5 Clothed Bodies
- 6 The Body as Text
- 7 Humans and Beyond
- 8 Fashion and the ‘Second Nature’
- 9 Fashion, Communication and Converging Media
- 10 Fashion Narratives in Visual Culture
- Conclusions: Fashion as an Idea about the Future
- References
- Index
7 - Humans and Beyond
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Fashion as Cultural Translation in the Hyperconnected World
- Supplement to the Introduction: Fashion, the Hyperconnected World and Coronavirus
- 1 Time
- 2 Spaces
- 3 Fashion as Cultural Tradition: Italian Style
- 4 Fashion as Cultural Translation
- 5 Clothed Bodies
- 6 The Body as Text
- 7 Humans and Beyond
- 8 Fashion and the ‘Second Nature’
- 9 Fashion, Communication and Converging Media
- 10 Fashion Narratives in Visual Culture
- Conclusions: Fashion as an Idea about the Future
- References
- Index
Summary
Porn Fashion
The fashion system has always had a strong relationship with eros. Dresses, make-up and body decorations have an integral function of attracting sexual attention. In particular, some clothing practices allude to or evoke the performativity of sex and eros by quoting explicit actions. Think, for example, of the role of high-heeled shoes in the Venice of the eighteenth century, worn by court ladies to indicate, emblematically, a social function defined through sexual practice. Another historical example is the nineteenth-century corset, which was simultaneously an object for the physical and cultural constriction of women, and a highly erotic garment. Women's garments have been particularly charged with these meanings despite the fact that erotic function of the clothed body is a characteristic of both sexes. This chapter seeks to go beyond the mere definition of the erotic dimension of clothing. Instead, it proposes to focus on the ambivalent strategies and the liminal territories from which erotism – even the extreme erotism of pornography – emerges through fashion as a complex aspect of contemporary cultures.
As a special genre of erotic staging, pornography represents an important ‘reserve’ from which fashion draws its signs. Today, in the age of the technological reproduction of images, the signs of pornographic imagery – more or less explicit – have rooted steadily in everyday fashion and styles. Furthermore, a pornographic ‘style’ characterises some communication forms in an increasingly explicit way, including the language of advertisements and television, of which fashion represents a symbol and an emblem. There are garments, fantasies, fabrics and colours which are particularly charged with erotism. They become compulsory in pornographic performances as if they were authentic scene costumes. Some of these garments influence fashion outside the context of pornography.
Different elements have contributed to the semiotic exchange which has lately established itself between fashion and pornography. Firstly, the popularity in the broader mediatic scene – that is to say, beyond pornography – of ‘star’ figures who have created styles and full-blown looks. Another important element is the incursion of pornographic imagery and imagination in everyday aspects of audiovisual communication, from advertisement to TV and podcasts, namely in all those genres in which fashion plays the essential role of bodily performance.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Fashion as Cultural TranslationSigns, Images, Narratives, pp. 67 - 78Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2021