Accessorizing the Body is the first out of the four-volume series, entitled Habits of Being, which hosts a selection of essays from the ongoing research project Abito e Identità: Ricerche di Storia Letteraria e culturale. This vigorous study, edited by Cristina Giorcelli and Paula Rabinowitz, invites the reader, student or researcher to start a journey from the European capitals to the American continent during the riotous era of the First and the Second World War in order to investigate the ..

Feleki, Despoina

European Journal of American Studies

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European journal of American studies  
Reviews 2013-1
Giorcelli, Cristina and Paula Rabinowitz, eds.
Accessorizing the Body. 
Despoina Feleki
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URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/9973
ISSN: 1991-9336
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Giorcelli, Cristina and Paula
Rabinowitz, eds. Accessorizing the
Body. 
Despoina Feleki
REFERENCES
Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Pp.288. ISBN:
978-0-8166-7579-1. Paperback 
1 Accessorizing the Body is the first out of the four-volume series, entitled Habits of Being,
which hosts  a  selection of  essays  from the  ongoing research project  Abito  e  Identità:
Ricerche di Storia Letteraria e culturale. This vigorous study, edited by Cristina Giorcelli and
Paula Rabinowitz, invites the reader, student or researcher to start a journey from the
European capitals to the American continent during the riotous era of the First and the
Second World War in order to investigate the representational  potentials  of  clothing
garments  and  accessories  and  their  power  for  self-narration.  It  also  seeks  to  prove
fashion’s  transgressive  nature  by  creating  a  dialogue  between  clothing  and  the
construction of the self at the intersecting point where psychology, politics and the arts
meet.  Throughout  the  study  the  essentiality  of  accessories  is  sustained.  For  Micol
Fontana,  fashion  designer  and  director  of  the  Fontana  Foundation  in  Rome,  “the
accessory comes with the dress,  not before the dress” (20).  Based on Immanuel Kant’s
categorization of picture frames, the columns of building constructions and the clothes of
Greek  statues  as  parerga,  Jacques  Derrida’s  analogy  between the  “parergon”  and the
“ergon” is borrowed in order to explain how the first defines the second while at the
same time exposing its lack (3, 4). The "parergon," that is the accessory, gives meaning to
the "ergon," in other words the body; it is the “paratext” that defines the “text” and vice
versa.
Giorcelli, Cristina and Paula Rabinowitz, eds. Accessorizing the Body.
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2013-1
1
2 The  book  commences  as  a  psychological  investigation  of  the  meanings  attached  to
clothing by exploring Otherness and the playfulness of the gaze. This game takes the form
of a search for meaning, self-definition and canonization through the gaze of the Other.
Either when looking at a lifeless model body or when discerning the individuality of the
wearer’s body hidden underneath, clothes have the power to fragment as well as present
a reassembled image of the body. In a second thematic thread, fashion and clothing are
seen as  having the power to express  the individuality  and singularity  of  the subject
within social constructions. After accepting the truth in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s argument
that clothing plays an essential role in the construction of social hierarchy (7), its role in
maintaining social order is implied as well. When used as a medium to express political
ideologies  and  support  social  movements,  clothing  has  held  the  power  to  oppress
individual  voices  and drive  them to  conformity  to  social  totalitarian institutions.  By
building a bridge between fashion, art and life, the essays go on to explore modernist
clothing and accessories in tandem with popular art and the politics of consumerism in
an emergent capitalist society during the first half of the twentieth century. 
3 Manuela Fraire’s “No Frills, No-Body, Nobody” addresses the construction of the “I” and
the acquisition of its meaning in relation to that important Other as a dual process of
undressing  and  redressing  through  juxtaposition  and  surrender,  identification  and
disidentification. This “dismantlement of the self” (9) against the bareness of the maternal
body and its re-construction in the gaze of the Other reveals the unique individuality of
the self through a double process of openness to and protection from the world, that is
the Other.
4 Rather than seek for the Other’s gaze for meaning, Paola Colaiacomo speaks of a fashion
which can express the body and which is closely linked to art and life. Contrasted with
the belief in Renaissance and the Baroque style that clothing and body were one, early
modern dress initiates a dialogue with the body. In her investigation of the genealogy of
fashionable  wear,  dress  reveals  a  desire  for  emancipation  as  well  as  a  break  from
tradition. The relation of art with fashion as expressed in works and essays by Oscar
Wilde, Henry James and Walter Pater suggests not only looking at the clothes in relation
to the body in lifeless paintings but also looking through the dress and the body in an art
that is closely connected to life. 
5 After the appearance of professional model bodies in the second half of the nineteenth
century, the advent of the new visual technologies, such as photography, photomontage
and film in the twentieth century marks a more instrumental role of the model bodies in
western consumer culture until the ultimate dissociation of the body from sensibility due
to their “heavy narcissistic quality” (30). The individual essence of the model is lost while
wearer and wear become one again in commercial advertising. The gradual movement of
the body in theatrical and performative settings draws the human body with its jerky
movements closer to the machine, reminding one of “the cinematic freeze-frame effect”
(31). 
6 As contrasted to the lifelessness of the body that wears, in Cristina Giorcelli’s “Wearing
the Body over the Dress,” clothing constitutes the language that expresses a body in
context rather than a naked body in anonymity. Clothes become the signs that structure
our culture and give it its meaning. By drawing attention more to themselves than to the
lifeless brittle bodies of the models and their hollow eyes, they reveal economic, social
status as well as ethnic and religious origin. From the Birth to the Fall and the death of
the body  they  have  marked  man’s  disobedience  to  dictatorial  power  despite  man's
Giorcelli, Cristina and Paula Rabinowitz, eds. Accessorizing the Body.
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2013-1
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ultimate submission to the powerful dictatorship of the capital. Within the context of
mechanical reproduction of art and the “hellish repetition” (36) in fashion, proposed by
Walter  Benjamin,  Giorcelli  revisits  Martin Margiela’s  deconstruction of  garments  and
bodies  until  models  are  reduced to  lifeless  puppets.  By  contrast,  for  Sonia  Delaunay
fashion becomes an expression of art while playing with color, lines and the geometry of
shapes against an industrial background. Towards a celebration of the technicalities of
tailoring which bring the  body back to  life  and art  in  fashion,  Giorcelli  investigates
Delaunay’s fashion as a “synesthesia of the arts” (41), an intricate game of life and death,
art and commerce, human nature and mechanical artificiality. 
7 Against the creation of a new unitary space, where all artistic activities can intersect, the
male Futurist trends in fashion come to express male chauvinism of the Futurist regime
and Italian imperialism in the 1930s. Fashion is seen as a tool to channel the regime’s
ideological overload. In accord with The Futurist Reconstruction of Universe, the mechanical
revolution and the Fascist regime in Italy, Futurist fashion comes against bourgeois
mentality, uniformity, tradition and the mass production of the German Bauhaus. Franca
Zoccoli focuses on the semantic value of men’s accessories, concentrating on the tie, the
hat, the shawls and vests, made of metal or other lightweight materials in bright colors
and asymmetrical shapes. 
8 Martha Banta discusses female emancipation in a male world through clothing as well as
“the feminization of the masculine” (83) within an uproarious early twentieth century in
Europe and the United States. She investigates Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s advancement in
the male world of fashion in France and the changes in mores and mentality as penned by
F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby and Tender is  the Night.  The attire suggested by
Chanel breaks all bonds with the belle epoch, suggesting classlessness and femininity,
“independence of  moneyed  relations  with  men”  (87),  freedom  of  movement  and
emancipation for women of the 20s who find their way in the world through men and not
against them, as put by Fitzgerald (89). The Chanel woman coincides with the Flapper in
the United States and they both resist the morbid nature of the war.  Her “charming
tomboyishness” signals “female power” (92) and marks the erasure of gender roles and
lines, also influencing men’s wear intended to seduce a Chanel woman (93). Through the
examples of Gerald and Sara Murphy and Fitzgerald’s Divers in Tender is the Night, Banta
manages  to  show how consumption follows  mass  production of  the  times  while  art,
marketing and consumption become inseparable. 
9 Becky Peterson’s literary and political reading of Laura Riding’s use of accessories and
jewelry in her poetry and life examines her self-objectification strategies as a female
muse within Petrarchan tradition – before she renounces poetic writing altogether. Her
agonizing efforts to define Otherness are traced in the visual representation of her gold
tiara with the name Laura engraved on it. The tiara, evoking Petrarch’s muse Laura, tries
to  engulf  her  whole  essence  and  puns  with  “laurels”  to  crown  the  poet  (111).  Her
necklace, a scarf and a nun’s headdress are all articles of clothing which serve as a way to
position  herself  in  the  literary  canon. Simultaneously,  they  mark  her  status  as  an
“outsider” (111) within modernist tradition and initiate a discussion of the female poet-
muse until her ultimate rejection of both. Her self-objectification is regarded as part of a
more general struggle against the market in wear and poetry and reveals a tendency to
resist tradition while at the same time trying to secure “a place for her in poetic memory”
(113).  Ornamentation  stands  both  for  confinement  and  liberation  and  the  contrast
between the image of a trivial “needle” in her poem “Because of Clothes” and the gold
Giorcelli, Cristina and Paula Rabinowitz, eds. Accessorizing the Body.
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2013-1
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“tiara” that accompanies her poetry and life symbolizes another struggle between mind
and body. It is proposed as an explanation for her double nature as a Jewish daughter of
parents  working  in  the  garment  industry  and a  poet  acquiring  status  in  the  Anglo-
American literary world with her double role as the idealized muse of the male poet and
the female writer still not settled (121-22).
10 Freedom and oppression as expressed through clothing are the issues around which the
following essays evolve. In “Spanish Women’s Clothing during the Long Post-Civil War
Period,”  clothing  poses  as  “the  mirror  of  the  soul”  (128)  within  Catholic  tradition,
supported by the autarchic regime of Francisco Franco, which fights against Republican
emancipation and the influences coming from post WWII France and North America.
Alternatively, it signals a return to arms on the Republican front. Thus the female body of
the Spanish woman becomes the contested ground in a battle against foreign intrusion
until the early 40s, when the advent of Modernity and the influences from abroad, the
movies and the magazines mark a more timid reconciliation between the idea of female
modesty and manly habits.
11 By drawing a parallel with Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter Zsófia Bán hopes to
explain for the accessorization of the Yellow Star by people in concentration camps. In
her analysis of the ironic discourse in Fatelessness by Imre Kertész as well as in Ernö Szép’s
Holocaust writing, acceptance of the star is seen as a way of self-identification within an
oppressive system. In a total state of “unreflectiveness” (154), identifying with the star
and the letters or numbers embroidered on it  marks a process of  self-definition and
acceptance of the given system by the wearer, posing as a natural process within a totally
unnatural situation. The star works as a signal of both oppression and homogenization
while its acceptance informs the mind and the language of the incamps, creating its own
reality. In Fatelessness, the boy begins to assimilate with the reality in the camp and the
star from very early on, appropriating his language accordingly. The star in the shop
offering items for a labor camp even looks “attractive”: “As best as I could make out, it
was their innovative twist to have the material stretched over some cardboard base, so
that way, of course, it looked more attractive, plus the arms of the stars weren’t cut in
such a ludicrously clumsy fashion as some of the homemade ones that were to be seen”
(10). A similar process of “naturalization” and familiarization is traced in Szep’s The Smell
of Humans, where the star becomes an object of adoration for the incamps with the ironic
use of detailed descriptions of rituals and the contrasts between colors and textiles: “All
summer long I had watched how those yellow stars were cared for; washed and ironed,
cleaned with spot remover if stained, then reversed and sewn back on. And some ladies
and gentlemen used lemon yellow, some yellow ochre, depending on what went well with
the coat. And certainly finicky dames and dandies wore yellow silk, much more elegant
than the linen or cotton ones” (50). 
12 While  in  the  Holocaust  stories  language  serves  as  a  means  of  rationalization  and
naturalization of a depleted mentality and a hateful state of oppression on the verge
between  life  and  death,  Jeffrey   C.  Stewart  proposes  “the  politics  of  hatdom”  (172),
expressed by black female novelist Zora Neale Hurston as her way to tackle oppression
and segregation.  By refusing verbal confrontation with White violence,  the setting of
Zora’s hat at a particular turned angle signifies the “tightrope act” (172) of the blacks
making their way into the segregated white world.
13 Last but not least, the ambiguous nature of the shoe is taken up by Paula Rabinowitz
through representations of sexuality and death in film noir, novels and popular culture,
Giorcelli, Cristina and Paula Rabinowitz, eds. Accessorizing the Body.
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2013-1
4
focusing on contradictions between freedom and constraint, vulnerability and menace,
magic  and  lowliness.  The  female  shoe  is  placed  in  sharp  contrast  with  Van  Gogh’s
working boots, Samuel Beckett’s torn out boots in Waiting for Godot and images of shoes in
Holocaust narratives. She explores the lowliness of the garment and its connection to
images of death and birth, the creation of sexual desire, the pursuit of freedom and the
ultimate return to death. At the same time, its “magical” nature, which transforms its
use-value into exchange-value and distances it from the labor and the laborer is revealed
(191). 
14 By taking into consideration political beliefs, artistic tendencies and marketing policies,
this  vigorous  collection  manages  to  capture  the  reader's  attention  from  the  very
beginning. All essays seem to imply that clothes, which have proven to oscillate between
consumerism and political activism, can only acquire meaning in relation to place, time
and person.  Eventually,  they  become the  skin  that  covers  and protects  the  body  or
questions its integrity and have the power to turn from mere objects into magical fetishes
which reveal the truth of the wearing subject and its life story within a social context. 
AUTHOR
DESPOINA FELEKI
PhD candidate at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Giorcelli, Cristina and Paula Rabinowitz, eds. Accessorizing the Body.
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2013-1
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Giorcelli, Cristina and Paula Rabinowitz, eds. Accessorizing the Body.

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