New Reference

Crucially, Travolta chose his ‘Fever’ costume himself, specifying that Manero’s suit should be a little out of date, thus giving more credence to the suburban nature of the story. He might have looked like a demi-God, strutting around the underlit, chequerboard dancefloors of Brooklyn with his blow-dried, pompadoured hair, thin gold neck-chain and three-piece white suit, but Manero was certainly no fashion leader, oh no, not never. Which was the whole point entirely. ‘Saturday Night Fever’ is one of thsoe films - by design this time, not by accident - in which the specifics of pop culture actually begin to blur, morphed by semi-representation into something else completely. Like Antonioni’s “Blow Up” (1966) … ‘Fever’ is a film which, although purporting to be a documental, pop cultural, snapshot, actually created its own succesful hybrid in the process. 

To wit: ‘Blow-Up’ is meant to be a portrait of Swinging London, disguised as a metaphysical thriller, it somehow fails on both counts. What it does achieve is probably more enduring, having captured both the vacuity, the pretence and urban paranoia of London in the mid-Sixties. Consequently, ‘Blow-Up’ is hardly a portrait of swinging London, or at least what we can remember of it. Similiarily, ‘Across 110th Street,’ which was pitched as a rather less gauche follow-up to ‘Shaft;’ if it fails in its ambition, it at least stands as an homage to all those blaxpoitation movies of the early Seventies, the ones littered with mauve fedoras, leopardskin ties and dirty-brown safari suits. Now, just the opening bars of Bobby Womack’s title track can conjure up the requisite images of a bustlin, cartoon Harlem, something Quentin Tarantino blatantly exploted in his own homage, the leisurely ‘Jackie Brown.’

Dylan Jones The Man in the White Suit

We live in an era driven by the desire to preserve everything in museums, to immobilize, to take life from things for fear they may change; and we freeze them forever. We have arrived at the paradox of not living in the present but filming it and reproducing it, postponing it and seeing it again afterwards. Often the present action exists only as a function of its future consumption. But in this case in fashion and the cinema, we find ourselves faced with two continuous actions, two means of expression whose raison d’etre lies only in continuity and perennial movement. They dominate time, by adopting a horizontal and continuous vision of it, but they continually break down conventional consequentiality, playing with it and flowing along the infinite line. Pasolini was a genius in this regard: his chronology or historical or geographical reconstructions only subtended codes of emotion. Fashion is equally undisciplined and enlightened, at times unwittingly, but the expressive mechanism is equally valid. 

Renata Molho, Reflections

Whilst these ironic investments in the uncool are therefore a characteristic of bourgeois knowingness, they nonetheless do still signal a confusion to long-held conceptualizations of taste in which high fashion and street style have been viewed as inhabiting quite separate imaginary worlds. As fashion editors urge us not to ‘even bother trying to be tasteful … the nerdy tanktop is making a comeback’ (Adams et al. 1999), the cultural politics of style are being furnished with new taste vocabularies that draw inspiration from subcultures, second-hand dressing and those commonly considered to be on the very margins of fashion consciousness. The spring/summer 2000 collections saw, for example, Issey Miyake giving a new lease of life to the dicky-bow, Copperwheat Blundell reviving the retro tracksuit and Kostas Murkudis, Wim Neel and Raf Simons all bringing back a version of the shell suit. The simple divide between fashion and anti-fashion is therefore ever more ambiguous as the trash aesthetic that we have seen in the foregoing discussion grows in influence.5 Contrary to traditional notions, then, fashion no longer seems to move in one direction, trickling down from an élite to the majority, but, rather, as we see here in these ironic strategies, there are multiple fashion systems moving in many directions at any one time.

Alison Goodrum, Chic Versus Greek: Locating Nation, Locating Taste

From the mid-1960s a distinctly Australian subculture, the sharpies, began to emerge, reaching its peak of popularity and style in the 1970s. Based mainly in Adelaide and Melbourne, they were predominantly working-class youth, many from low-income families, who gathered into suburban gangs and took on the skinhead mantle of street violence and intimidation, while developing a quite expensive and smart, “sharp,” style of dressing. The main components of their dress were commissioned from local clothing manufacturers and shoemakers. Sharpies formed a contradictory front, with their aggressive posturing and street violence yet feminine and fastidious dress style. By the 1970s they had become strictly ranked in territorial suburban gangs that roamed the streets fighting each other for fun.

Sharpies wore a mix of Crestknit brand sports shirts, Western-style shirts, or T-shirts featuring logos or gang names such as the Blackburn Sth Sharps, worn with tight straight-legged tweed or pinstriped tailored pants or high-waisted jeans by Levi, Lee, Wrangler, or local Melbourne brand Staggers. Pants and jeans were cut short in the leg and sometimes worn with suspenders. The most important element of their outfit was a tight-fitting, custom-made, machine-knitted pullover or cardigan. One of the best-known brands was the Connie cardigan many Melbourne sharpies preferred. Sourced from a local knitwear factory run by Greek migrants, sharpies ordered the front-buttoning cardigans with personally customized designs featuring blocks of color and thin and broad stripes over the body, sleeves, and collar. The outfit was finished with leather, handmade chisel-toe shoes with a basket-weave upper. These were also acquired from migrant shoemakers such as Venus and Acropolis Footwear. They used continental barbers to cut the distinctive sharpie haircut, very short on top with longer “rats tails” of hair at the back. All the elements of dress were worn short, tight, and undersize relative to contemporary dress.

Glynis Jones, Subcultural and Alternative Dress in Australia

The British ‘look’ is synonymous with a legacy of country weekends, tea drinking and sedate pastimes, a commodified set of national values that are infused with an idealized concept of Britishness. Within all of this, British fashion is tailored to the Japanese imagination and is confined to a partial vision revolving around the key notions of eccentricity, classic branding and exquisite standards. Therefore, along with the export of British clothing and fashion, we see an accompanying export of British signs, symbols and characteristics, all of which feed and fuel a geographical imagination in which Britishness is inextricably linked to a golden age of Empire. (Rosaldo 1993: 69) has termed this imagining ‘imperialist nostalgia’, a concept in which a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ is used both to capture people’s imagination and to conceal its complicity with, often brutal, domination. Not only is the commodification of imperialism within the fashion industry involved, therefore, with the nostalgic evocation of a glorious and romanticized bygone age, where Britain stood as a symbol of civility, progress and decency, but this imperialist nostalgia is also involved with a systematic forgetting, one where marginal histories go unheard and where ‘a mood of nostalgia makes’, for example, ‘racial domination appear innocent and pure’ (Rosaldo 1993: 68). So we see that a double commodity fetishism (Cook and Crang 1996; Sack 1993) operates within high-fashion exports, a fetishism in which products are ingrained both with value-adding knowledges that remember and celebrate an imperial past, but also with ignorances in which the darker side of British expansionism remains untold.