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Anne Hollander, Feeding the Eye: Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999) Reissued in paperback by University of California Press in 2000 This collection of essays offers cultural commentary on 20th-century celebrities, artists, literature, and cinema, as well as clothing in general, its social functions, and its cross-cultural significance. Hollander's jumping-off point is to argue for a paradigm shift in artistic perception since the advent of cinema: namely, the cultural tendency to perceive visual art as if it were in motion. Artists, she writes, invest their creativity less in fresco, canvas, and stagnant media now and more on film, tape, choreography, and in the fluid contours and styles of fashion. Yet she stresses that an artistic corpus - a historical bank of imagery with emotional force - pulses through all forms of fashion, no matter how whimsical, protean, or in flux. "Art has an endless life of created form, nourished and moved forward by individual makers, who are creatures of their own limited movement and give apt momentary significance to it." Fashion, in general, is a universal and evocative art form - created by designers, selected by wearers, interpreted by viewers, but ultimately an expression of the self: "a nexus of detached aesthetic effort, current social meaning, and individual sexuality." She chronicles the breakthroughs of fashion icons like Yves St. Laurent and Gabrielle Chanel, their alterations not only to garments but also to the mores that dress can both embody and propagate. (Chanel's flexible fabric and understated pieces "suggest an unaggressive physical sensuality, the deep pleasure of a self-contained bodily ease that demands no sacrifice of decorum or startling exoticism to be immediately alluring.") In a later essay, Hollander probes the sociological role of costume and dress; fashion reminds us that human stability is always threatened, chiefly by sexual expression. We have the duty, choice or whim - in many permutations - to cover, reveal, or accentuate our bodies. Dress as a metaphor for the soul has persisted throughout cultures and eras, especially in literature, and Hollander contends that fashion - though ostensibly worn for the spectator - is at its core intensely personal, "gestures of reassurance made toward the private consciousness." Kirkus Reviews writes: "What might have been an unstable mix of essays and reviews on a variety of art forms - dance, film, fashion, and painting - instead coalesces into a thematically sound and richly varied collection. Hollander knows how to link subjects - even those that seem to bear little or no relation to one another - by isolating underlying themes and teasing them to the legible surface." Hollander is also the author of Moving Pictures, Seeing Through Clothes and Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. Her latest work is Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting (Yale University Press, 2002). MORE: Catalog of articles Hollander has written for New York Review of Books Hollander's "Bra Story: A Tale of Uplift" on Slate |
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