Vestoj | THE DISMEMBERED BODY: NOTES ON FASHION, FETISH, AND SHAME

Department

Tutor documentation 2019-07-25

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, guest tutor at current Temporary Programme Challenging Jewellery (2019-2021), is the founder and editor-in-chief of Vestoj, a forum where academia, the museum world and the fashion industry can work together and with active communication. They write about the cultural phenomenon that is fashion in a manner that opens up for dialogue between theory and practice in order to raise awareness for fashion as a cultural phenomena and field of research and cultivate an even greater understanding for the discipline.

Vestoj recently published The Dismembered Body: Notes on Fashion, Fetish, and Shame by Marya Hornbacher

1. THE BODY, IN THEORY

ABSTRACT

The price on stripper shoes has dropped precipitously. From the display on the mirrored wall, I pick up an open-toed shoe in red satin, with a dainty ankle strap, a three-inch clear plastic platform sole, and a five-inch stiletto heel: $45. Insanely cheap. I take my own shoe off, put on this one, jack my pant leg up to my knee, and turn around to see if the shoe creates a nice wavy line from ankle to ass, which it does,

(as much as it can, really, considering; the shoe does its best with a body this age and at this point in the slow reverse-simian process by which we devolve from upright to hunchbacked to all fours to the belly-down slither back into the grave, where our rapid deconstruction from the complexities of self to the simplest sort of cell begins, proceeds, and ends with a maggot, a memory, a quark)—

which is to say that, as far as the shoes can make my ass look good, they do.

And they’re only forty-five bucks! Which I swear to Christ is half what the same shoes would have cost ten years ago — these ridiculous, anti-ambulatory shoes, which are worn in one industry only, but in that industry are universally worn, more stilt than shoe, unwearable outside the club or off the set — these are not your day-to-evening-wear shoes, ladies! These are special shoes, the shoes of fantasy and fetish. Watch this! I slip my foot into the red shoe: my clothes fly off! My face erases itself like an etch-a-sketch! These are the ruby slippers, the glass slippers, the magic shoes; they fit only Cinderella, Dorothy, and Barbie’s plastic arched tiptoeing foot. They are photo-op ready, a perfect fit for any form of theory and critique. They are Chinese foot binding and a corset and liposuction and a nose job all at once. They are a chastity belt, a push-up bra, a ball gag and a babydoll negligee. They are original sin, the fall of man, the failure of feminism, the fault of feminists, non-feminists, anti-feminists, post-feminists, deconstructionists and poststructuralists. They are the errors of Barthes and de Bouvier, they are beauty myth and backlash, they are postmodernist jabberwock nonsense. They are a blight on humanity, evidence of social decay, death of the nuclear family, loss of family values, they are not shoes! Duchamp! Tell us: when is a shoe not a shoe? When it is a picture of a shoe. Right! When it is not a shoe but a sign. When it is a signifier worn by a sign. Then riddle me this: when is a woman not really a woman, but merely a sign?

When she is wearing these shoes. These are stripper shoes. These are the shoes of shame.

But actually I like them, and I am going to buy them. Christmas is ten days away; the stripper store where I am picking through the racks is full of red. There are Santa velveteen bikinis with white fur trim, red and black lace Merry Widows, there are red satin boy-shorts with black Santa buckles, which could be worn with red-sequined pasties with red satin swag that, if you are both large-breasted and talented enough, you can make swing in tandem, or even in opposite directions at once—

NB: I am neither large-breasted nor talented enough—

so I skip the pasties, but take into the dressing room with me the boy shorts with black Santa belt, and the Santa bikini with white fur trim.

I close the door. I turn my back to the mirror. I unbutton, unzip, and strip.