Scholarly designs - Style Conference in Bowling Green, Ohio in July 1997

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 1997 by Amelie Hastie

The Style Conference, organized by Ellen Berry and Laura Stempel Mumford, convened this summer in Bowling Green, Ohio, to display both the values and risks in recent work in cultural studies. Over 140 participants from the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia gathered for an event at which, said the organizers in their opening remarks, "everyone would talk about what everyone talks about anyway - what everyone's wearing and what's wrong with their hair." Considering this impetus and perhaps the season in which it was held, the conference consisted not only of delivered papers, but also of performance pieces, fiction readings, manifesto-leafleting, an art exhibition and access to astrological readings, massages and even a sale of vintage clothes.

Valerie Steele's keynote address, "Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power," set the primary tone for the weekend. While she offered a cursory historical review of the fetish, her paper focused primarily on its contemporary manifestations. In particular, she looked at the recent evolution of fetish items such as the corset and the stiletto heel from a "subcultural" or "transgressive" position to their present appearance in the mainstream fashion world. What does it mean, she asked, "when the woman of style dresses as a dominatrix"? Noting that symbols of clothing, like the fetish, are not static but take on new meanings as their historical context changes, her answer to this question was in part that such objects represent and are guided by general paradigm shifts. That is, as women's and men's roles have changed, what is considered "perverse" or "normal" has also been altered. In fact, she claimed we have been able more recently to witness the disappearance of boundaries between masculine and feminine modes and the "normal" and "perverse."

Like Steele, many others at the conference focused not only on clothing, but also on contemporary objects and seemingly "transgressive" styles. Certainly there were some exceptions: a number of papers also examined musical styles, and others looked at issues such as the relation between fashion and feminism and the stylization of national identities. Considering the fact that one definition of style is the way in which something is said or done as distinguished from its substance, it would have been appropriate for more papers to focus on close readings of objects - the words and the images that form and perform style and fashion. Unfortunately, many works simply lacked "substance." The unevenness of the papers in part seemed due to an overbooking of presenters, which made the conference ruled by quantity rather than quality. Certainly, accepting so many proposals might have been an economic decision since it would be the surest way to bring paying attendees to a summer conference. At the same time, a summer conference on style itself might have led people to take their scholarship less seriously

One particularly refreshing exception was a panel devoted to analyses of "19th-Century Senses of Style." In a fascinating piece, Jason Camlot examined how competing publishing styles in nineteenth-century England, specifically between the book and the magazine, influenced the rise and fall of literary forms. By focusing on The Street Companion: or, The Young Man's Guide and The Old Man's Comfort in the Choice of Shoes by the Reverend Thomas Froggie Dibbles (1825), Thomas DeQuincey's near plagiarism of The Library Companion: or, The Young Man's Guide and The Old Man's Comfort in the Choice of a Library (1924) by the bibliophile Thomas Frognall Dibdin (in which DeQuincey simply altered the text so that all references to books became references to footwear), Camlot found that "the success of the romantic idea of literature as a transparent, unmediated communication of emotion is very much dependent upon what words are wearing at the moment of their publication." Elana Crane similarly centered on words as she insightfully addressed how American journalist Jennie June made consumer culture an issue of discourse in her syndicated newspaper columns of the mid-nineteenth century. As a "tour guide" through fashion and, hence, urban space, June sought "to take fashion seriously." Through clearly exhaustive research, Crane argued that June's column illustrated overlaps between fashion, feminism and the Shopping industry in her day; as such, June's work attempted to redefine the "fashionable woman" as "one who has brains, along with a sense of style."

Concluding the above panel was Rob Schorman, who examined changing modes of dress in the late-nineteenth-century U.S. He showed how the clothing and advertising industries negotiated changes from old to new values produced through consumer culture. Also investigating advertising styles, Edie Thornton focused on how Edith Wharton's serialized novel The Mother's Recompense (1924-25), laid out next to ads for beauty products, "vied for discursive authority" in the magazines in which the fictional text and the ads were placed. Noting that the same illustrator who created the images for the ads also illustrated Wharton's novel in an identical artistic style, Thornton provocatively argued that these various illustrations created the precise uniformity of style that Wharton argued against.