Zoot-Suits and the broad strokes of fashion rebellion: Lecture on Cosgrove's paper

Zoot suits were first popularized among marginalized youth in the late 30s and 40s.

Young Filipino Americans, Mexican Americans (especially in LA: “Pachucos”), African Americans, and Italian Americans, people who had no voice, who were pushed to the “margins” of society.

The zoot-suit looked like an exaggerated “English Drape” suit (in fact, initially called “drapes”):

• Wide trousers with tight cuffs
• long jacket with long, wide lapels and very wide padded shoulder
• "ducktail” hair style

(Tortora and Eubank. Survey of Historic Costume. NY: Fairchild, 2005. 415)

There are many stories as to where the zoot suit originated, most of which show more about the motivations of the teller, than the actual beginnings of the style:

• purchased by a black bus worker, Clyde Duncan, from a tailor’s shop in Georgia, inspired by Rhett Butler in “Gone with the Wind.”
• in Harlem jazz culture and exhibitionist stage costumes of band leaders
• derived from military uniforms and imported from Britain
• by Filipino men when they first immigrated to the United States, mostly in California.

What is important is that it caught on in youth minority groups, even in the face of L-85 war restrictions, which called the zoot-suit a wasteful use of fabric, and the widespread sentiment that disregarding these restrictions was unpatriotic. [That’s not to mention widespread racial prejudice]

So how did this style emerge in the face of all these negative pressures? Begin with collective selection ...

Who is involved in Blumer’s “collective” of collective selection? buyers, designers, and the “public.” Collectively, through their interactions, they decide what fashion will look like.

Fashion becomes a language by which to communicate ourselves to one another. Because fashion is what Blumer calls a “social happening,” it can never be truly individual, or expressive of our true inner selves. It is always a compromise between being legible (socially understood), and expressing our individuality (socially incomprehensible).

Through our interactions, this mode of communication changes and evolves, and rather quickly. (This happens in language as well, albeit over a longer period of time.) By this process, the "grammar" of clothing becomes highly socially inscribed; every seam and detail comes to have great meaning because of the myriad ways it has been worn by countless people. On the other hand, like any cliche, the more it appears, the less it seems to mean ... the more it comes to look like a uniform. The suit had been evolving since the 14th Century (origins in military dress, parallels with military vexation with its adulteration). The suit as it was in the 40s, was a result of a great deal of history. It had the character of a social given, while carrying the social energy of centuries of historical evolution.

This brings us back to Blumer’s model. If fashion history is the result of the interactions between designers, buyers, and the "public," who counts as the “public”? The BUYING public. The people who “count” are those who are willing and able to participate in the fashion process. So, if fashion is an inherently social process where participants constantly look for new and better ways to communicate (called changing collective taste), or together grope for the proximate future (Blumer, 6), this is only the taste and the future of their particular collectivity. The margins are distinctly missing from this picture.

Zoot-suiters could not exert their difference through their “own language,” because, being outside the system, no one would notice. Instead, they used the “grammar” of the society that was excluding them. Cliché (or classic) is at one time drained of meaning, and the only structure under which communication can take place. Suits asserted minorities' difference within mainstream society, simultaneously symbolizing their reliance upon it.

Aspects of the suit were exaggerated to the point of appearing “cartoonish” or extremely stylized. According to Cosgrove, “Zoot meant something worn or performed in an extravagant style” (1-2).

Etym. may come from rhyming slang, a rhyming descriptor for “suit.” It has also been said to come from the Mexican pronunciation of suit, where the s sounds like a z.

[Octavio Paz: “Their attitude reveals an obstinate, almost fanatical will-to-be, but this will affirms nothing spsecific except their determination … not to be like those around them” (Labyrinth, 5-6). Is difference/presence the only statement that can be made within a pattern?]

People found this style unsettling. Cosgrove talks about zoot-suiters not as much as fascinating (like a dandy would be) but as fearful: a “refusal” and a “subcultural gesture.” He quotes Ralph Ellison from “The Invisible Man”: “they were ‘the stewards of something uncomfortable’” (1). Zoot-suits were a much more powerful statement than, for instance, wearing extreme versions of clothing from the minorities' countries of historical origin. (the equivalent of screaming in your own interior language … you would either be ignored or end up in the psychiatric ward).

The "Zoot Suit Riots" took place in the early forties. There had been a long standing tension between zoot-suiters and American servicemen (the most patriotic versus seemingly the least). In the time surrounding and during the riots, zoot suiters were beaten and stripped of their clothes. Often the suit would be burned. The servicemen were not held responsible for these assaults, and were actually lauded as heroes, supported by the police. The police did, however, preemptively arrest the “Pachucos." The riots did not stop until the military prevented servicemen from entering Los Angeles.

Discussion:

What other exaggerated versions of “classic” or commonly seen clothing forms can you think of from the present or recent history? Who has worn these styles?

Give examples of forms of dress today or in the recent past that have been associated with physical violence.

Has anyone ever worn anything that made you mad?

Have you ever worn anything that was fashionable and thought-provoking at the same time?

Fashion as a Social Happening: Lecture on Blumer's Collective Selection

Who is Blumer?
A sociologist just like Simmel, but writing 70 years later. Unlike Simmel, he has observed the fashion industry first-hand.

Blumer asks that fashion be taken seriously by those studying society. This is because, as he argues,

• Fashion includes more than clothing (or “adornment”)

And it is usually not perceived as fashion, but as “superior practice,” or natural. “The fashions which we can now detect in the past history of philosophy, medicine, science, technological use and industrial practice did not appear as fashions to those who shared them. The fashions merely appeared to them as up-to-date achievements!” (11)

• Fashion is socially important

“For example, the styles in art, the themes and styles in literature, the forms and themes in entertainment, the perspectives in philosophy, the practices in business, and the preoccupations in science may be affected profoundly by fashion. These are not peripheral matters … where fashion operates it assumes an imperative position” (1).

• Fashion is a rational behavior

“While people may become excited over a fashion they respond primarily to its character of propriety and social distinction … Fashion has respectability” (3).

Simmel’s trickle-down theory provided some key ideas:

• The importance of prestige in the operation of fashion
• The identification of the essence of fashion as a process of change that is natural rather than aberrant

“Yet, despite the fact that his analysis still remains the best in the published literature, it failed to catch the character of fashion as a social happening” (4).

Simmel’s view that fashions come into style because of the “stamp of distinction conferred on them by the elite” misses that these styles are already in fashion. “It is not the prestige of the elite which makes the design fashionable, but instead, it is the suitability or potential fashionableness of the design which allows the prestige of the elite to be attached to it” (6).

• The elite strive to follow the direction of fashion rather than to set it.
• The elite have to choose between competing proposals of fashion, and their choice is not always based on the prestige of the fashion innovator.

People still conspicuously consume, etc., but do so not to show their prestige in the class structure, but rather to show their Fashionability.

Class structure in the 20th century was entirely different from the centuries that came before. Contemporary society has a more diverse class structure and an emphasis on modernity. By “modernity,” Blumer can be taken to mean the Zeitgeist, as we have used the word in this class.

Blumer expands on this increasingly diverse class structure by outlining the societal conditions for the appearance of fashion. Fashion emerges in societies

• “… with people ready to revise or discard old practices, beliefs, and attachments, and poised to adopt new social forms; there must be this thrust into the future” (9). Where being “up-to-date” brings social prestige.
• “…open to the recurrent presentation of models or proposals of new social forms” (10).
• where there is freedom to choose between competing models of fashion.
• where there is no truth or value that makes one of these competing models inherently better than the other.
• where prestige figures exist to promote on of the competing models.
• Where there is openness to the idea of the “new,” whether it be from the influence outside events, other people, or changes in social interactions.

The adherence to the Zeitgeist is demonstrated within in the setting of the fashion industry:

• “….the setting or determination of fashion takes place actually through an intense process of selection” (4) where buyers mediate the overwhelming number of options presented by designers to the consumers who buy them.
• “…buyers were immersed in and preoccupied with a remarkably common world of intense stimulation” (4). This allows them to evolve similar “sensitivities” and “appreciations” so that they make very similar buying decisions without knowledge of each others’ decisions. Through this process, “…the buyers became the unwitting surrogates of the fashion public. Their success, indeed their vocational fate, depended on their ability to sense the direction of taste in this public” (5).
• Fashion designers derive their ideas from
• Historical or exotic costume and
• Current and recent styles. This accounts for the historical continuity or the evolution of the fashion silhouette, so that very rarely does an extreme change take place. He calls fashion changes “trends,” and gives the name “fads” to popular adornments with no “forerunner” and no “successor.”
• Modernity or The Zeitgeist of the present: “…the most recent expressions of modernity as these were to be seen in such areas as the fine arts, recent literature, political debates and happenings, and discourse in the sophisticated world. The dress designers were engaged in translating themes from these areas and media into dress designs” (5).
  

There is more than one factor determining fashion change (more than the designer or the prestige figure). Fashion changes are collectively selected by the interplay between the changing (but as yet undetermined) taste of the public and the desire of the designer to give shape to “modernity” or the Zeitgeist, of which the public is part.

“Fashion appears much more as a collective groping for the proximate future than a channeled movement laid down by prestige full figures” (6).

This “collective groping” towards new forms of collective taste comes from the desire to connect socially with other people. It is a striving to communicate. This is why fashion change seems to happen more rapidly in places and societies where there is a chance to interact with more people, and more diverse people (and where this “newness” is valued, not feared).

Can be swayed by psychological motives, such as the desire to attractive, but this is by no means a determining factor in what is in fashion. Fashion is by nature social, not individual.