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• 1 2020-09-14T15:31:10-04:00 Ideals of Consumption: Deviant Fashion 32 Unessay plain 2020-12-09T20:59:45-05:00               From the neoclassical era (1790-1819), which saw the beginning of the “fashion diathesis” of tuberculosis, to romanticism (1820-1840s), an era in which tuberculosis emphasized moral passions, to sentimentalism (1840s-1850s), in which tuberculosis’s meaning shifted from intellectual genius to fragility, fashion and tuberculosis became inextricably linked – a connection which is still seen today. Fashion was not only a diathesis of tuberculosis, but also a way to emulate the beauty and moral superiority associated with tuberculosis. Fashion of the early 19^th century was a scapegoat for tubercular sociocultural anxieties. Tuberculosis gave meaning to middle- and upper-class women, while fashion created an aesthetic distance from middle- and upper-class women to working-class women.
  
              Through the cultural construction of tuberculosis, the disease was acquired through extremes—one example is the acquisition through “excessive dancing, or—on the opposite side of the spectrum—the lack of exercise” (Day, 32). In emulating tuberculosis, women were emulating extremes. The “norms” of women’s fashion were, then, deviant from general ideals of the population.
  
             
            One link between fashion of the 19^th century and tuberculosis was the corset. During this time thinness became associated with intelligence, morality, and sensibility, whereas fat and stupid became synonymous, causing the romantic and sentimental eras to place great emphasis on slimming the waist (Day, 82).The corset was another extreme through which tuberculosis could be acquired or prevented. Corsets could correct posture but could also create spinal deformities. They could suspend tuberculosis by placing pressure on the womb but could cause women to be more susceptible to the disease. Debates over tight-lacing corsets raged from the 1830s to the 1850s, with doctors urging women to stop. Corsets, however, remained staples in a woman’s wardrobe. The idea of the waist as an object to control has carried over into the 20^th and 21^st centuries with diet, exercise, constraint, and manipulation as means to achieve a thinner look (Day, 115).
  
              The ideals of thinness carried over into the 1920s, with an emphasis on a “lean and androgynous” look (Cole and Deihl, 136). Women’s bodies were more exposed than ever before, dresses took on a “shapeless” form, hemlines rose and fell, and hair was cut shorter. Fashion of the 1920s deviated from full skirts and womanly figures towards freedom and movement; it became a “visual fantasy of female liberation” (Roberts, 661). The visual aspects of female liberation—through fashion—were grounded in the romanticization of masculine ideals and became a scapegoat for anxieties surrounding the blurring of gender roles in the post-war period. Victor Margueritte, in his novel La garҫonne, says of the fashion of short hair, “Once Delilah emasculated Samson by cutting his hair. Today, she believes she can make herself virile by cutting hers.” In attempting to gain virility and masculine strength from the shifting of feminine fashion to masculine silhouettes, the female body was inherently fragile, disempowered, and submissive. Freedom, movement, and liberation are masculine ideals that women defiantly strove to embody through fashion and changing sociocultural norms.
  
  
            The connections between romanticizing tuberculosis and fashion have shifted to encompass other illnesses, from HIV to eating disorders and drug abuse. This romanticization is most prominent with the “heroin chic” look of the 1990s. Heroin chic was a look of “anti-glamour” that reflected the upsurge of heroin use (Cole and Diehl, 380). There are many parallels between tuberculosis fashion and heroin chic. The heroin chic look became synonymous with the “classic, tortured artist” a trend that was seen with tuberculosis (Ledford, 18). Heroin chic fashion was a means to show authenticity, whether real or perceived, much in the same way tuberculosis fashion supposedly showed innate goodness. The deviant subculture of heroin chic distanced women from anxieties of objectification and consumerism, while tuberculosis fashion was a way to distance oneself from the working class and unknowns of tuberculosis.
  
              Fashion, from the neoclassical era to today, has been a way to express social and cultural anxieties by deviating from norms and ideals. Fashion influenced by consumption was a way to show moral superiority in the face of an “unknown” disease. The fashion of the 1920s romanticized masculinity as a means to subvert anxieties on shifting gender roles, thus perpetuating the female body as weak and disempowered. Heroin chic was a way to express anxieties of consumerism and objectification by the denial of nourishment and an adult figure (Rizzo). The ill and fragile body, then, is a metaphor for femininity.
  
             Fashion and illness are timeless—they have and will each continue to exist and persist in the future. Fashion and illness have been intertwined since the romanticization of tuberculosis, a cycle that has yet to be broken, rendering the female body as ill and weak. As Susan Sontag said in her work, Illness as Metaphor, “What was once the fashion for aristocratic femmes fatales and aspiring young artists became, eventually, the province of fashion as such” (29). The medium of a collage allows for the boundaries of time to be crossed. The fashions of the 1830s, 1920s, and 1990s are visible in a perpetually cycling wheel of time that has women emulating illness. That woman is deviant to the norms of a “healthy femininity” constructed by a patriarchal society.
  
  
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  Works Cited
  Cole, Daniel James, and Nancy Deihl. The History of Modern Fashion, Laurence King Publishing,
         2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,
         https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/swarthmore/detail.action?docID=4394127.
  
  Day, Carolyn A. CONSUMPTIVE CHIC: a History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease. BLOOMSBURY
         VISUAL ARTS, 2019.
  
  Ledford, Jenna. “From Dirty Realism to Heroin Chic: How Fashion Becomes a Scapegoat for Cultural
         Anxieties.” (2007).
  
  Rizzo, Mary. “Embodying Withdrawal: Abjection and the Popularity of Heroin Chic.” Desire, vol. 15, 2001,
         doi:http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.ark5583.0015.004.
  
  Roberts, Mary Louise. “Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Women's Fashion in 1920s France.” The
          American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 3, 1993, pp. 657–684. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2167545.
         Accessed 9 Dec. 2020.
  
  Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Penguin Books, 2002.