The Devil Wears Camo
(Page 2 of 2)
Utne Reader March / April 2007
Mark Dery
Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, has little patience with P.C. fulminations. 'The vast majority of [fashion designers] are responding purely to visual cues,' says Steele, 'which are much more likely to be in some hip movie that they're looking at than anything that's happening on the front page.'
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Besides, she argues, culture is a never-ending struggle for control of the meaning of social texts such as fashion fads. 'There isn't any meaning in camo at all,' she insists. 'It's all how it keeps being interpreted and reinterpreted by everybody, including everybody who has any kind of reaction when you wear it.'
But are all readings equally legitimate? If you lived the history behind an image, doesn't that give you a moral edge over those cultural amnesiacs who can only see that image through an aesthetic lens?
I asked some veterans, by e-mail, about their reactions to the sight of mall rats in camo. Derek Giffin, who served in the Army's first cavalry division in Iraq in 2004-05, calls camo chic a 'travesty.' To Giffin, 'The militarization of our culture is absolutely repugnant. Our money, foreign policy, and culture [are] invested in war, and the glamorization of camouflage is an offshoot of this paradigm. There is nothing sexy about camo. Granted, I cannot disassociate camo from blood and blown-apart body parts . . . '
Irony of ironies, the vagaries of fashion may be making antiwar style modish, according to Chas Davis, a conscientious objector and former member of the military police at Camp Page in Korea. 'I have a 16-year-old sister who has never taken any interest in the peace movement,' writes Davis. 'All of a sudden, the designer store Hollister has a new line of clothes with all these hippie statements: 'Love, Not War,' 'Peace,' etc. Now, out of the blue, she is telling her friends how proud she is that her brother is a conscientious objector, all because it's the popular thing to do.'
Antiwar activism with a designer label: the new, blithely apolitical fashion statement. It's all so confusing: Camo is paisley, war is peace, and we're at war with East Asia this year-or is it Eurasia? I can never remember.
A version of this article previously appeared in I.D. (Nov. 2006). Subscriptions: $30/yr. (8 issues) from Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142; www.idonline.com.
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