Unfashionable Thoughts

Hilton Als won't go retro

...The Irish say your trouble is their

trouble and your

joy their joy? I wish

I could believe it;

I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.

? Marianne Moore, Spenser's Ireland

Whining its way through much art currently in fashion in New York is the banal but culturally powerful voice of self-help - the voice at the root of 'political correctness'. The creators of such work do not complicate it with analysis or self-questioning. Their work is a kind of specious autobiography driven by unsophisticated emotion and told in unsophisticated ways. It articulates a legacy of 'oppression' uninformed by history or a moribund 'feminism'. Its narrative is that of self-help manuals, alternately popular and forgotten. In order to appreciate such work, the viewer requires two things: to exist, and to have similarly unsophisticated emotions, untroubled by thought.

The musical corollary of this work is singer/songwriter Carole King's 70s LP Tapestry, one of the biggest selling albums to date, on which she warbled such now familiar standards as 'So Far Away,' and 'You've Got A Friend'. Like Carole King's songs, a great deal of the work heralded today is made by artists who feel far, far more than they are capable of thinking. Thinking as an activity, analysis, self-criticism - all have a tendency to interfere with life (or with the value of one's career). This work bemoans what the artists feel they are lacking: audience validation for the legitimacy of their 'difference.' That Carole King was especially popular in the 70s, that much current art mines that decade, and that the brand new fashion aesthetic (as exemplified by Anna Sui and Marc Jacobs) is 70s flash and trash, is no happy accident. Art, fashion and culture are referencing that period not because it was a kinder, gentler time, but because alluding to that decade conceals the actual rejection of thinking.

The Prada woman, in contrast, has no eyes, but she has a red mouth and an interest in the form current fashion takes. She walks slowly, in Prada heels of course - heels which are shaped somewhere between short and tall, fat and skinny. The Prada woman is composed of these things: a silk shift, a belted cardigan, cotton stockings, and no eyes. She sees nothing but herself, as world history encircles her Prada-encased feet like dead leaves. The Prada woman has no eyes because women in fashion (models, fashion editors, stylists, photographers) are not paid to see, they are paid to exist as someone else's vision; commerce sees for them. She had no eyes (i.e. no eye makeup) in the collection shown in New York last spring and her body was a set of quotation marks used for ironic emphasis around the words 'Woman of Fashion'. Where is she going, this woman, if anywhere? The Prada woman may not know either, but she is infected by history, knowing that history may be used as a road map toward finding the present.

The Prada woman is the creation of an Italian, Miuccia Prada. But it is my understanding that the line shown last spring was actually designed by a young black British man. In the Prada woman we see Italy in the 30s; schoolgirls and headmistresses running the country as men blunder toward fascism. While she may or may not agree with Italy's future, the Prada woman shapes its domestic present in clothes which do not interfere with what she has to do: they allow her the possibility of children, school chums, siblings, a semblance of daily life and comfort. But the Prada woman does not exist solely in Italy. She is modelled to some extent on moneyed West Indian women buying British clothing and adapting the silks, tweeds and stockings to their climate. Bill Cunningham, the esteemed fashion photographer, has commended the clothes for their 'necessary' quality. The clean line of the Prada woman is about history not interfering with her present.

One of the more compelling features of this collection was the reaction to it. A number of people were offended by what they gleaned as a 'fascist' element: black riding boots, not-cropped jackets, austerity, the unsmiling countenances of the models, their mouths red with disinterest in fashion as vogue. That viewers should interpret this expression as not politically correct was interesting. The Prada woman exists neither to be seen by politics, nor commerce, nor for the banality of one's response. She wears the clothes that suit her and, unlike everyone else, does not exist to exist by someone else's code. This November, Prada will be presenting its new line in New York. One stands assured that she will not exist in the current ugly maelstrom of 70s Yves Saint Laurent le smoking appropriation. Nor the image of the 'cruel woman' propagated by 70s fashion photographer, Guy Bourdin. One hopes that the Prada women will do a variation on the red mouth, the slow walk, the exemplary sense of fashion that is indigenous to art, culture, ideas - when that culture has any ideas at all.