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Dress, in all its multiple and multifarious manifestations, performs various functions of which only the most obvious are practical. Dress protects us from the elements, however harsh or benign. It also protects our bodies from exposure to the gaze of others; it provides a replacement, a substitute, for that naked body, and in so doing, it idealises the body, distorts it, and most of all, articulates meaning.
Clothing can be seen as a structured interface between a private self and its context, allowing the presentation of a public self which both reveals my inner world (through the careful consumer choices I have made, putting together a ‘look’) and at the same time, disguises me. In other words, dress exposes and protects me, both giving my secrets away (like all social constructs, it can be decoded and analysed), and hiding me. It functions as an armour that is at the same time defensive, aggressive, and orthopaedic. That is, it holds me together, it holds you at bay, and it holds me up.
Jemima Wyman’s recent installation, Putting On (Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles, November–December 2008) invokes the complexity of our relations to dress in different ways. A ‘put on’ is a deception, a trick, which can be more or less unfriendly. It is also something you do with clothes, or a mask, or even (referring to make up) a face. (‘I’ll put on my face and then we can go…’) It suggests an identity which is hypothetical, temporary, or provisional; one puts on a costume, a ball gown, a uniform. Yet the idea that there is an (authentic) ‘inner self’ that is both represented and disguised by dress becomes harder and... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline