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Stefan Lindl
FASHION AND TOTEMISM
Fashion designers are often viewed a bit strangely by people who are neither admirers of nor cogs in the fashion world. This is because they seem to bravely indulge in draping forms, symbols and textures as senselessly, but as beautifully around the body, as possible. Freedom of design is then discussed, if the design is in itself aesthetically cohesive but other-wise points to absolutely no political, societal, artistic levels of meaning and wants nothing to do with the conventional or usual associations with its aesthetic. Rhetorical figures are used, as well as irony. It is supremely ironic when Chanel designs such accessories as handbags in the form of music cassettes or Kubrick’s Rubik’s Cube: the appearance promises what the content doesn’t want to achieve. It is amusing, possibly mischievous and bears witness to an easy playfulness. Desire for the superficial is ultimately what makes it all go around.
Of course, fashion design only looks completely meaningless or senseless when observed on a certain level. Well-designed collections are always coherent and create a visually logical system. Stylistically, the parts of a collection fit together and display significant design characteristics, like those of an epoch of lifestyle, for example. The meaning discloses itself less in detailed knowledge of sociopolitical contexts, which a symbolic system completely originally represented, than in the logic of the represented forms of the symbolic system itself. Excellent collections by good fashion designers are distinguished by their visual logic and coherence. A designer attempts to realize a thought, an aesthetic idea in a playful way in several garments and accessories. Here, it is important that texture, colour, forms stand in rational relationships with each other and to the appropriateness of the clothing. Totem design
Without a fashion label’s reputation or “aura”, a collection is a long way from being good and well received, although it may be of extremely high quality and be excellently designed. It therefore requires time to position itself through the fashion label’s content. Only if the label continues to evoke attention does it receive an aura – whatever kind of thing this aura may be, whether Westwood punk or Armani cool or Chanel elegance or Girbaud snootiness. Only when the aura has been created is the label a label; only then is it economically viable; only then does it possess market value. So a collection needs it legends, its stories and its heroes. Chanel without the legends of Karl Lagerfeld and Coco Chanel – what would the collection be worth? What would be the Dior homme line be without the ingeniously notorious, rock music-obsessed sometime photographer Hedi Slimane, a lover of the skinny, gangly male form? It is the eternal reproduction of the legends that creates desire.
A good example of the importance of legends is visible at www.vogue.de. There, under the "Who is Who” menu header, is a veritable Legenda Aurea of fashion design, a library of saints’ lives and miracle stories. Karl Lagerfeld, once corpulently, even Baroquely formed, lost 42 kilos with a high-protein diet consisting of caviar, crabs and oysters. A wonder of discipline, endurance, self-design. And why did he do this? For health? For the sake of his constantly touchy pancreas? Not even close: Karl lost weight merely to be able to fit into Hedi Slimane’s slim suits. A double helix legend that serves both. If one has purchased even one garment from such a legend’s creative collections, one slips into a kind of brandeum, a touch relic. Brandeum is the name of any material that once came into contact with a saint’s grave and, through this contact, became holy itself. By donning this second skin, the wearer becomes the design of the star designer. With the power of his creativity, the designer forms the body of the wearer, who becomes his creation. The label, the creative designer, lives in this part of the collection, like in the activated totemic world of animism. Just as Oceanic cultures measure stones’ value as currency according to the legends they carry, a collection’s garment possesses the totemic value of the label made up of legends. In every garment in a famous designer’s collection, one slips int an invisible legend and narration, in a brandeum. It is the archaic functions of animism and totemism that determine the value of the label; that unleash desire for certain brands and labels even in the hearts of children and that lead to peer pressure.
UCD Inversion
The principal designer of the United Collection of Dorrer (UCD) label inverts everything that guarantees market value and profit in the fashion system. Completely incidentally, playfully and unnoticeably, Angela Dorrer questions a fashion system that has evolved over decades. She overwrites the original meaning of the fashion system’s elements and assigns the system new tasks not previously assigned to it. The legends, the participation in the legends, the designer’s totemic brand thinking, the customers – all these elements are redefined to a new sum called UCD. In contrast to the collection of label of major fashion houses, UCD is a collection of labels. There is no seasonal direction in the collection; no pompous, glamorous events in Milan or Paris. No, UCD is quieter, more definite. The label appears, for example, as a retail store in Amstetten, Austria or in a tavern in Graz. This is not because the world press and wealthy buyers lurk here. This is where the Dorrers live. Nowhere else are there so many Dorrers as in Amstetten in Lower Austria. Reason enough for UCD to strike. Dorrers are everything to this label. They are the designers, the legend-makers, the models who present the fashion. One of them assembles the collection. UCD – United Collection of Dorrer. The collection emerges in opposition to the practices of star designers who try to bring unity into their collections. The UCD collection expands through chaos theory.
Artist Angela Dorrer asked people all over the world with the same surname whether they would send her a garment, a kind of representative that accompanied and “dressed” each of them for years. They did not send old clothing, but rather pieces that represented formative, important, pivotal phases in their lives. They are aura-infused garments instilled with individual legends. UCD is a collection of legends and not the collection of a legend. Whoever puts on these garments slips into something that is not his own. The memories keep their distance; do not represent the person dressed in them at that moment. He or she does not fit with these garments and above all not with their memories. They keep their distance. Strangers in the clothing, in foreign representation, in foreign memories, UCD produces the feeling of foreignness. The clothing rises above its wearers. It forever remains above its wearers. In contrast, the suits of a Slimane of a Lagerfeld are new, except for stories of their creation and legends and their respective totemic value. They are still waiting for their wearers’ individual legends. At some point, when the wearer’s style and habitus corresponds to the designer piece, the foreign will be over. As long as a piece of clothing from the UCD collection is inseparably woven with its legend, the distance will not stop. The stories, the legends and the corresponding authentic piece divide, keep distant, do no allow reciprocal representation.
Here is where it is obvious how multilayered the Project United Collection of Dorrer is. It appears as superficial as a fashion label. But the UCD store actually functions as a parliamentary democracy. It is where representatives find a possible clanship, the representatives of the Dorrers. A smorgasbord, an archive, a museum full of individual, moving stories that bear witness to success, development, personal destinies. What is impressive is the authentic, the true correspondence between a genuine garment and a personal story. Through the exhibition pieces’ nakedness and directness, through their auras, UCD gains a strength that not even the beautiful legends of the fashion-makers reach. But exactly this characteristic trait of the UCD collection does not create a Dorrer unity. While representatives of people carrying the Dorrer name are indeed collected in a room, a clanlike gathering, a unity, a solid bundle does not emerge. The diversity of the Dorrers remains: everyone for himself, everyone in his untouchable dignity. In this way, the UCD art project also opens a level of reflection on the discourse of the community. Community does not have to mean the destruction or annihilation of diversity; it can, rather, receive and retain the dignity of every individual without affecting it. As in dramatic comedy, UCD culminates in a party, a short, pleasant meeting of differences. UCD networks the foreign without dominating it through a thought.
Translation: Kimberly Bradley
From: “U C D - United Collection of Dorrer”, 160 Seiten, 82 Farbseiten, German/English, essays by Thomas Macho, Andreas Kühne, Hannes Fehringer und Stefan Lindl, Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg 2005
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