Fashion Criticism 101: Structures of Power
The first thing I realised when I rocked up to UAL as an 18 year old to study fashion criticism, was quickly that I was about to spend the next 3 years reading about things that weren’t fashion.
It makes sense really, there’s a difference between being a fashion expert and fashion critic. You could know every designer and the year of all their biggest collections, but if you aren’t up to date on thinking around gender, identity or politics to the point that you can formulate your own interpretation and reading of the collection - you aren’t a critic.
So I had to get to reading, and now I’m sharing some little introductions to the key theories that we studied at a BA level - we’re gonna hit gender studies, we’re gonna hit theories of taste, but today - we’re hitting structures of power with a whistle stop introduction to Michel Foucault who’s work on the Panopticon we got stuck into in year 1 of our studies.
Meet Michel Foucault
Who is the guy? He was a French philosopher, born in the 20s, and passing away in the early 80s, best known for his work on power, discourse and knowledge.
He had a few key works and theories in his time, but one that is digestible and really useful to apply to your thinking, whether you’re writing about beauty in the social media age or doing a shoot about the homogeneity of current trends, is the panopticon.
Introduced in his 1975 book ‘Discipline and Punish’ this theory is about behaviour under surveillance.
Enter the Panopticon
‘The panopticon’ is the name of a prison designed in the 1700s by an English Philosopher called Jeremy Bentham. His design was a circular building with walls of cells holding the prisoners, almost like a donut, and in the very centre was a guard tower so that technically the guards could be looking at all the prisoners all the time. It was designed with the goal of maximising surveillance, whilst minimising the actual staffing needs. The plot twist is that there wouldn’t be a bunch of guards in the tower, looking in all directions at all times - but even with one guard up there, glancing about as he pleased the prisoners would feel like they were being watched at all times.
With no way to tell when they were or were not being observed, they should behave on the default assumption that they were always being watched.
Panoptic Power
Enter Michel, taking the panopticon prison design as a metaphor to inform his latest theory. To put it in a nutshell - he used this idea of self-policing under perceived surveillance to describe a mode of social control. Introducing enough surveillance, to make everyone feel constantly perceived, would crate a docile, productive and self-disciplined society.
This was in the 70s remember, before we had the intense levels of digital survelliacne that we do today. You can see why he is still considered such an influential thinker.
Then, enter the danger.
If systems of power operate through observation, and gather knowledge on everything that they are able to exercise power on, it makes oppression a very real possibility, because one group controls all the knowledge.
Then, enter the questions that we need to be asking in relation to all those who observe us?
Who has collected knowledge on us, and what happens to it? There’s a line to be drawn between security and freedom - with one able to easily over shadow and void the other. What surveillance in our lives exists to help us, what surveillance modifies our behaviour? Who determines what our rights are in regards to being observed?