Fashion figures: Configurations of woman and modernity in geography, planning and design

For many feminists, the need to displace dominant images (or figures) of woman so that alternative constructions of women's everyday lives can take their place is what lies at the heart of the feminist movement. Fashion Figures engages this project on the terrain of critical spatial studies, an emergent field of inquiry at the intersection of critical human geography, and radical planning and design. Addressing important texts in the major debates that have occupied spatial theorists in the 1980s and early 1990s, the dissertation explores the issues of representation, identity and truth as they relate to woman, modernity and fashion in the West, and it does so in ways that are explicitly spatial. More specifically, it throws into question the metaphors of fashion that appear in the postmodern debate, in the debate on industrial policy, and in recent historical and geographical reinterpretations of Los Angeles. In a case study, one of these fashion figures is the object of a feminist historical-geographical inquiry in which the female stereotype is identified as a social and a spatial construct particular to Southern California's early fashion industry.; The point of departure for this project is a self-professed "geographical intervention" into the postmodern debate on the part of Alice Jardine, the feminist literary critic and author of Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). In a significant revision to her original concept of gynesis (a term referring to male theorists' need to put 'woman' and the 'feminine' into discourse in order to explore the "configurations our modernity in the West"), Jardine identifies two national variants of this masculinist writing process, a French version and an American one. Fashion Figures finds the American version of gynesis at work in several influential texts, all of which have been written by American male scholars. All the "male stories" examined make extensive use of fashion to thematize their critical narratives. In detailed textual analyses of Michael Piore and Charles Sabel's The Second Industrial Divide, David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, and Mike Davis's City of Quartz, two questions are then posed. How does the fashion model function in each narrative? And what does the (frequent) usage of this figure of woman imply for real women in the future? In the case study, the dissertation attempts to move beyond Jardine's (1985) analysis by understanding "fashion texts" (i.e., women's fashionable clothing), just like theoretical texts, to be local constructions fabricated overwhelmingly by men.