Kazys Varnelis - "Architecture after Couture"

This article is interesting because it makes those who may not closely follow the worlds of fashion or architecture recognize the link between them. I would not originally think that fashion and architecture have anything in common, besides them both requiring design and measurements. I would also not assume that changes in fashion directly affect modern architecture, but this article proves that apparently the two go hand in hand. Here are zee ways how....

"Architecture's mission, then, was a divine one: to announce the presence of the more holy, devout, or noble both to themselves and to the common. The excess expenditure that architecture produced in comparison to building vividly demonstrated class difference. Clothing played a similar role: the noble or the priest would don clothes that made visible their difference from the commoner. Certainly more expensive, the clothes of the nobles were frequently deliberately impractical, so as to underscore the impossibility of manual labor for the gentle classes."

When you think about it, both fashion and architecture (more simply, clothes and buildings) serve very simple functions - clothes to keep us warm and buildings to provide us shelter. But when seen from the viewpoint of "high fashion" .. haute couture.. and modernistic architecture, or old-fashioned very stylish architecure, gothic towers with gargoyles sticking out of the roofs, etc... any emphasis we put on the way our clothes look, and how much they cost, or the materials a structure is made out of and how expensive it is, are purely human devices - not really necessary to the functions they provide, all superficial for our own enjoyment, our own creation.

That's why I like that line that says "the clothes of nobles were frequently deliberately impractical, so as to underscore the impossibility of manual labor for the gentle classes." High fashion often is very impractical. It tends to look uncomfortable, or not the kind of thing you would wear in everyday life. But it's expensive and exciting and beautiful to look at. Highly stylized architecture also strives ahead of its simple purpose, to shelter, and becomes something much more elaborate and expensive than necessary, but is also beautiful to look at. Both fashion and architecture, necessities to everyday life (for we all must dress and we all must live somewhere), have similarily skyrocketed into something more: Art. Both fashion and architecture, due to the artistic auras they have taken on, and the association with money they involve, certainly function as dividers between the classes.

But the division of class that fashion creates has changed in a way that architecture has not, specifically because people, especially since the rebellious 1960s, have taken on their own looks and made them important, despite the fact that the clothes they wear are not as expensive, not as "couture."

"In London, the fashion boutique was developed, providing limited run clothing for a small group of urban youth that used this clothing to mark off their difference – not as a class but as a group with a shared, generational identity... Would a young British youthquaker of the early 60s trade her Mary Quant miniskirt for a Chanel dress? Probably not. From then on haute couture was doomed."

We can relate to this today, as I'm sure we all shop at places like these, because the bargains are so tasty!:

"[Couture] is positively undone by the middle-blow stores like Banana Republic or Target. These stores make clothes that look good, frequently setting trends or at least copying both boutique and couture in real-time, often in a more sensible manner. As these mass-produced clothes are significantly cheaper while generally well made, buying couture now seems to be purely indulgent. Even the rich can understand Target's appeal when its ads read "It's fashionable to pay less."

And Varnelis defines the link between this change from couture to affordable style and architecture as such:

"If architecture is still heavy, slow and expensive, it will have to become faster, cheaper, and more responsive. If architecture, still dominated by a couture culture of avant-gardist elitism, is to survive, it must realize that haute couture is doomed... Instead, architecture will have to find out how to take advantage of a society in which difference is no longer something only for the very rich, but is now for everyone."

This really doesn't seem like a bad thing, though, if architecture is a little behind the loop, because it means that style is now more equal among people, which only means that all of us have the opportunity to live more fabulous, stylish lives regardless of our place in society. I can definitely see a link between the art of architecture and fashion and today's reality tv. Particularly the Bravo network has made fashion and design a more popular obsession among the common masses, with shows regarding fashion design like Project Runway and Tim Gunn's Guide to Style, and Top Design, which focused on interior decorating and ties into the architecture aspect. Project Runway specifically has brought the idea of couture fashion into everyday life, and makes average people who shop at Target excited about runway shows and high fashion. Being able to be connected to the worlds of fashion and design in your own living room is wonderful, and breaks down style barriers between the classes even more.

High fashion meets funkiness thanks to the best reality show ever!

Stuart Hall - Encoding, decoding

"Densely theoretical" is putting it lightly in the introduction to this hiiiiiiiiiiighly difficult to comprehend article by Stuart Hall. Maybe I'm just simple, but the only paragraph I could instantly understand without using a dictionary every half a second was this, appropriately:

"No doubt misunderstandings of a literal kind do exist. The viewer does not know the terms employed, cannot follow the complex logic of argument or exposition, is unfamiliar with the language, finds the concepts too alien or difficult or is foxed by the expository narrative."

Hah! Because that's EXACTLY how I felt while reading this article, except replace "viewer" with "reader" and all that. Jeeeeeeeeeeeze.

But with that sad disclaimer about how all this feels disturbingly over my head, I'll try to give my take on the bits and pieces that did stand out with at least some clarity...

"...though the production structures of television originate the television discourse, they do not constitute a closed system. They draw topics, treatments...images of the audience...from other sources...within the wider socio-cultural and political structure of which they are a differentiated part. Philip Elliot has expressed this point succinctly (which I *wish* Hall would do..), within a more traditional framework, in his discussion of the way in which the audience is both the 'source' and the 'receiver' of the television message."

Though quite wordy, I don't think any of this is really surprising. It makes sense that the audience of a TV show or any form of entertainment would be the biggest influence on *how* the show is made in the first place. The producers are catering to the people who give them their ratings. It's all a big food chain, in which the audience is both at the top and the bottom. (that makes it sound like we're eating ourselves! AHH!)

Which goes back to the circuit, the loop, the general idea of broadcasting Hall is writing on and on about. It's all a cycle. The audience interprets what they see based on their personal opinions of life and their particular tastes based on the lives they've lived so far, and they decide whether or not to flip the channel and watch something else or get hooked to a new favorite series. The people who make the shows respond to this and try new ideas. Everything is voiced through language; language is of course symbols that mean things instantly in our heads for whatever reason, even though as Hall points out the written and spoken word "cow" sounds nothing like a real cow nor takes on the shape of that well-known farm animal that looks oh-so-cute in stuff-animal form. But when we hear cow we may instantly hear the sound "moo" in our heads or see a big white and black spotted beast calmly chewing on grass in a field, because we have learned to associate this symbol with the letters C, O, and W pushed together since we learned how to talk.

But symbols aren't really real, is what he also ?seems? to be saying... It all gets very deep and intense and scientific....

"...representations of violence on the TV screen 'are not violence but messages about violence': but we have continued to research the question of violence, for example, as if we were unable to comprehend this epistemological distinction."

Which is true, violence on TV isn't real, and the more gory it is the more it's usually a subtle message about how bad violence really is because we're cringing on our couches thinking, "God this awful, I'd never want to hurt another human being like that." So television violence isn't really promoting killing people, it's just making a powerful (or sometimes super-cool-awesome-fight-scene-wowza) statement.

BUT, this doesn't mean that there aren't people who will get the wrong ideas from these statements, 'cause that's what humans are all about: gettin' the wrong ideas. So, I disagree with his quandary about why we still research violence as if we don't understand the "epistemological distinction"... epistemological, btw, meaning "branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods and limits of human knowledge." Shpanks, dictionary.com. We still research violence not so much because we "don't get" that TV violence isn't real, but because we're concerned about stopping the lunatics who see anything and wanna copy it or think it's cool without being sane enough to realize the artistic statement being made.

"The television sign is a complex one. It is itself constituted by the combination of two types of discourse, visual and aural."

Totally! That's why films are such an INTENSE, powerful form of art. You can have ALL kinds of art in film - music, drawings, costume, theater, dance, anything you can hear and see. The communication is so rapid and in-your-face. No wonder we're so influenced by what we see on tv.


"..it is an iconic sign, in Peirce's terminology, because 'it possesses some of the properties of the thing represented.' This is a point which has led to a great deal of confusion and has provided the site of intense controversy in the study of visual language."

Then he talks about how TV is a 3D world put into a 2D image before our faces, so when a dog barks on screen you hear and feel the sound but you canNOT be bitten by that puppy (thankfully; who would wanna watch a show where they could get bitten?)

"Thus, there is no intelligable discourse without the operation of code," he writes. True, because code equals language (when we speak it's all one big code, each word meaning a different object, place, time, emotion, etc. on and on) and without language we're not really thinking intelligent beings, we'd all just be grunting at each other, I guess.

So of course when a show is broadcasted on tv into your home right through your eyes so you sit there and hear it and see it, it's one big code that you are interpreting and getting feelings from and enjoying or hating and feeling bored by or entertained by, but *that*, I believe, is the case with any kind of art or really anything that one experiences in life with their senses.

So maybe Hall's big picture is much bigger than I can unfortunately grasp - (them words he uses sure is big!) but I think, at least on a human level, I'm getting this idea about signs and codes and what it means to experience a visual art, from his article.

"...more often the broadcasters are concerned that the audience has failed to take the meaning as they - the broadcasters - intended."

Well, sure they are. They want to make money. But if the audience fails to take the meaning of a show or plotline as intended, I believe it is due more to change, popular taste, and most of all good writing, than to all these scientific definitions. But scientific defintions always work too, of course, and yes somewhere deep inside the human brain it's all about the "dominant" or "preferred" code that makes a person relate to or not relate to a show they watch, but most people watching a new show really don't think about the inner workings of their mind like that and either think the show "sucks" or is "awesome" or pretty much worth watching because there's nothing else on.

Mostly in this article, I am influenced by Hall's ideas into wondering just how deep and emotional signs and images and symbols of very subtle things can impact a scene or a piece of art.

Take for instance a simple towel in the movie The Silence of the Lambs. On Clarice's second visit to Lecter, she sits in the dark in front of his cell, wet from the rain. He doesn't speak and cannot be seen, but suddenly the tray from his cage pushes out and Clarice nervously peeks over to see a neatly folded white towel for her. This is a thoughtful gesture of his, for her to dry off, which she accepts.

The image of the towel changes everything, subtly, in the mind of the viewer, between the relationship of these characters. A towel symbolizes warmth, softness, cleansing, to us. The fact that it is white in color represents a kind of innocence, too. The act of giving her a towel entirely contradicts and enhances the relationship between this madman and this FBI trainee for the rest of the story.

He has offered her warmth, a dry place, the opposite of symbols like blood (slickness, wet, draining) and the damp dungeon that is his cell. And she has become cleansed in front of him, releasing facts about her past at his request, revealing her true self so that she may solve the crime, the main plot point of the film. And it's just a towel, a symbol, some sort of code in our brains that gives this scene it's underlying emotion, it's much deeper meaning, which is why movies like this win Academy Awards and get such raves. They symbolically reach out to their audiences.