This as such is our current state of mental paralysis towards direct action. We are so enamoured by all there is to see that the act is nullified, à la McLuhan’s media massage, or perhaps Rancière’s referencing of our traditional understandings of the theatre spectator:

...looking is a bad thing, for two reasons. First, looking is deemed the opposite of knowing. It means standing before an appearance without knowing the conditions which produced that appearance or the reality that lies behind it. Second, looking is deemed the opposite of acting. He who looks at the spectacle remains motionless in his seat, lacking any power of intervention. Being a spectator means being passive. The spectator is separated from the capacity of knowing just as he is separated from the possibility of acting.[4]

But aside from a certain cynicism, we must clarify and further examine this obscure threshold implicated by our understanding of fashion. As the very beginning of the act, fashion bears a potentiality that exists conceptually beside acting, a middle space between a certain kind of consciousness and the means and will whereby such consciousness is put forth. It exists simultaneously in the realm of the visual, as presentation where looking and acting combine. Its breadth runs from a user-centric theatre—getting “dressed up”—to the paradoxical passivity of the wearer who never thinks about what he wears, for whom dress presents mere functionality.

If it were possible to relieve fashion from its stronghold in the realm of social critique and judgement, one’s clothing becomes, for the rest of us, a way of simply seeing one relative to the next, on smooth threads of association rather than the knotty judgements so bound in hierarchical inequality. In such case, even the idea of comfort becomes something presentable: visually apparent by outer layers (what is proffered by others relative to the individual) but also by their adherence to the wearer’s own sense of self (as a reflexively negotiatied view). This is a further layer intertwining the visual with being. What is visibly presented to others coincides in varying degrees with what is actual; increasing distance between the two leads to a greater sense of theatricality or simulation—or, in fashion terms, “fake”.

In the case of the man who has no regard for “fashion”, his daily routine of getting dressed involves a passive participation within society that cannot wholly be disregarded as ignorant or without self-awareness. In fact, donning a suit and tie to go to the office, or a having a wardrobe full of nothing but jeans and t-shirts, cannot help but be a certain self-awareness of oneself relative to a larger public (be it one of assimilation, acquiescence or rebellion), to one’s context and/or the occasion. To look at fashion in this sense runs parallel to Rancière’s emancipation of the spectator, as it presents “the blurring of the opposition between those who look and those who act, between those who are individuals and those who are members of a collective body.”[5] It is an ongoing exchange between what one appropriates as role and what one is given, the very “mass individualism” which exemplifies our hybridised and globalised condition.



To bring the discussion back to “the street”, a concrete example:


On the fourth of June, 2009, twenty years after the government instated military actions to quell the student movements of 1989, I visited Tiananmen Square in Beijing. What is unique about this square amidst our more commonly held ideas about public space, is that Tiananmen Square represents a theatre of control in contemporary China, no more viscerally made manifest than on this particular day. At such a place and time under such careful guard and surveillance by authorities, there is virtually no possibility of “the Act”. People stand on the square as theatrical props, each representing a particular segment of the urban socius under the regime of control: the blue-uniformed police task force, the green-uniformed army guard, the Chinese tourist, the foreign tourist, the umbrella-carrying plain-clothes unit, and—mixed in to varying degrees among each group—those who know what this day means. But in such a context, it does not matter what one knows or does not know; control surpasses any possibility to turn knowledge into something more manifest. There is only spectatorship, ranging from the gaze of the tourist to the roving eye of the surveillance camera, from my eyes in stunned observation to the look of acknowledgement between those who came to the square that day for a particular historical reason.

This is not meant as a railing against the hindrance of our abilities and freedoms to collect, to voice, to Act. The youth of today’s China wouldn’t anyway. Yet amidst such inaction, such stultifying silence, the rallying in other parts of the world outside the square was resounding. News reports, memorial marches, constant online discussion. These are exactly the kind of overt acts that the Chinese government can take swift measure to dispel: media censorship, bans against public gathering, nationalist propaganda. Here on Tiananmen Square, we are left with nothing but the sensory experience tied to our own personal knowledge and history related to the 1989 incident, or with nothing at all. Most of us have forgotten.

But here and there, small moments make themselves visible. A few people are dressed in white, the colour of mourning. One young man dons a white flower pinned to his chest. And another wears a t-shirt with the character “忘” (forget) silk-screened on the front. Of these variations, the man with the flower is swiftly accosted by guards and escorted away. The decorative still too overt. But the ambiguity of pure (non)colour and the word ‘forget’ make it by: they move precisely within this threshold between what is simply a part of the visual landscape and what is a conspicuous act of defiance, where one (the authorities, namely) cannot prove to the point of dismissal what is being presented or signified.[6] Such nuances are a manipulation of style rather than an acting upon or against. And style lies equally in the space conjoining the individual and the collective body, between what is presented (verb) and what is being presented (object).[7] It is given as a singularity, but can only be acknowledged relative to a body of other singularities, to the comparison of that which is around it in time and place.

Standing in the middle of the square for a long time, halfway between the mausoleum of Mao Zedong and the national flag, where most people are gathered to watch the daily flag-lowering ceremony, there is a tremendously paralysing weight of inaction. Here, twenty years later, nothing happens. One’s eyes dart back and forth, the paradox of the visual standing as a non-passive activity in franticness.

I don’t know.

Just a spectator.

Yet here, spectatorship (seeing and being seen) possesses the potential as an exercise, an open-ended strategy towards a creative process. Style becomes a shift of efficacy toward the subject, a means of finding oneself singularly with regard to an “in”. It is always responsive to an outside, yet increases with respect to its coherence to an inside. Were we to emancipate the word ‘fashion’, then, perhaps it would only be a matter of coming to something more reflexive between being and praxis, between self and other—in the smallest possible fashion.