The Ouroboros of fashion
fashion, time and self-cannibalization
The other night, rather than falling asleep at a reasonable hour, I lay awake thinking about a conversation I recently had with a vendor at a popular vintage market that passes through Manhattan a few times a year. They were sharing their anxieties about the vintage and secondhand marketplace, worrying that if people suddenly stopped buying tomorrow, that the secondhand market would collapse in on itself, stating that the fashion world “feeds itself”. This isn’t a new idea entirely - the history of Western fashion is replete with self-referential designs and is, essentially, a pendulum that swings back and forth between popular silhouettes, fabrics, and thought processes behind those design choices. However, I had not made this connection when it came to vintage and secondhand fashion, and mulling this over, the image of the above Ouroboros took shape in my mind as I picked up my pen and started to sketch.
“Fashion is never finished…”, says Susan Kaiser in her book Fashion and Cultural Studies. In Fashion Studies, academics and scholars often use metaphors to think through the complexities of fashion. Most importantly, Kaiser argues for studying fashion as a “both/and, rather than an either/or, activity”. She says that fashion thrives on contradictions and ambivalences which in turn requires that we think, know, and feel through the both/and of fashion. One way she suggests doing this is by utilizing the Möbius strip to gain a sense of the both/and as a whole.
The Möbius strip, which was invented in the 19th century by mathematician Augustus Möbius, is a strip that, when twisted and attached to itself, results in a continuous surface, “There is a kind of convergence that results when there is no inside, no outside, no beginning, and no end”. If we then ascribe “Space” to one side of the ribbon and “Time” to the other, Kaiser argues that we can begin to see how fashion is an experience at the convergence of time and space, and that we cannot separate the who, where, what and whens of our everyday experience as it relates to fashion. Rather than disrupting fashion at the junction of both/and, Kaiser argues that the Möbius strip allows us to visualize “twos” as interdependent and convergent, rather than oppositional. It’s a kind of “chicken and the egg” situation - neither came first, but both need to exist for the other to continue its chicken-legged dance.
With the variety of other metaphors available to the field of fashion studies, I found it surprising that if one reads on into this book, or perhaps does a quick library search for the phrases “Ouroboros” and “Fashion”, not much comes up. This conversation of fashion “feeding” itself, or perhaps, feeding ON itself, immediately drew the Ouroboros to my mind, and I was shocked to draw somewhat of a blank in my searching for others that had felt the same. The Ouroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent (sometimes a dragon) eating its own tail, and has, in many iterations, been interpreted as a symbol for the cyclical nature of life, death and rebirth. It has also been said to represent infinity or wholeness - similar to the wholeness of the both/and of fashion that can be visualized by the Möbius strip.
Now, I am under no impression that thinking of fashion, and our contemporary iteration of the fashion system, as an Ouroboros is an original idea. In fact, a 2021 article by Marcus Jaye titled The fashion ouroboros: is fashion all out of ideas? describes this cyclical relationship of fashion in a cynical tone, namely in response to the increased presence of brand collaborations in that year's fashion season:
“Collabs have become the go-to to fill the gaps in fashion’s creativity and its continual appetite for product over the past decade. Are two empty heads always better than one? “Fashion is a cycle and like the Ouroboros, the ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail, it goes around and around. But, today, that coil has become so tight it has almost devoured itself.”
I’m not the first to point out that the runway has felt tired, perhaps trite or derivative of some golden age of the fashion industry in the “post” pandemic fashion landscape. Although, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out Maison Margiela’s most recent couture show full of porcelain doll faces and exaggerated feminine proportions, the excited reception it was met with across fashion publications, and how it has taken the fashion side of social media by storm. As much as I would love to gush with someone about this collection, this particular essay is not here to comment on the current comings and going of the fashion industry as New York Fashion Week kicks off, but is instead meant to address that gap where I felt the Ouroboros should be, and serve as a chance for conversation - to think through things together.
Now, for as much thinking as I have done about the idea of a metaphor, I should probably get to my own metaphor at some point. I am a very visual person, hence the drawing, but let me attempt to explain the reasoning behind this image.
But first, an aside: “With Respect, Fashion Marches On”
This comes straight from an article heading, titled “With Respect, Fashion Marches On” that I had carefully cut out from some newspaper pulled from the depths of my friend’s collage supplies bucket, and now serves as the front and center message of my bookmark. Perhaps an odd place to find inspiration, but this bookmark follows me around every day, encouraging me to think about fashion in different contexts as it holds my place among the words that create fantastical places to visit, adventures to follow, and of course, fashion to examine. I wish I had thought to take a picture of the article before I eviscerated it with my scissors, but alas all I have left of this night of playful bricolage is a fish-eye view of a pile of paper.
Fun summer nights with friends trying (and failing) to forget about my Master’s thesis and focus on anything other than fashion aside, let us examine the Ouroboros a little more closely. I suggest that we look at the Fashion Ouroboros as an exercise in that both/and thinking that Susan Kaiser laid out in her book. Starting at the head, representing fashion’s future, we can travel down the first curve of the moire covered snake, tracing the contours of the fashion present. Around the second curve, we find fashion past which quickly dovetails (snaketails?) into fashion death as the tail is consumed by the head. Additionally, I have labelled the head with actors in the fashion system which drive fashion’s future, and the parts of the fashion industry which are consumed as it (not so respectfully) marches on:
Fashion’s future makers include, but are not limited to: the industry as a whole, designers, design students, design educators, and the consumer.
Fashion’s deaths include, but are not limited to: planetary resources, humans (through dangerous work conditions, environmental abuses, etc.), and secondhand clothing.
In one way, this very much echoes Jaye’s cynical article - that as the speed of fashion production increases, flying at breakneck speeds no one should be able to keep up with, the coil of Ouroboros will tighten, coiling in on itself until it devours every fiber. As fashion eats itself, moments in fashion history will all but be erased as we turn back to reference the past again and again until it is unrecognizable - or, more dangerously, simply choose to ignore the history that makes fashion what it is. Further, the Ouroboros represents the consumption of all planetary resources in the search for newness and future. Perhaps that is what the Ouroboros truly means in the context of fashion - that fashion has, and will always, consume itself.
On the other hand, perhaps the more theoretical hand, it allows us to illuminate what Susan Kaiser illustrates in her book - the interconnected relationship between time, place and context. As stated earlier, the Ouroboros, in some cases, represents wholeness. Through this lens, the infinite convergence of the Ouroboros’ head and tail becomes a point of articulation between fashion’s past and fashion’s future, creating a wholeness of fashion. As the head devours the tail, the past is ingested, reconfigured, and articulated by the mixing and matching of different elements from fashion’s past. As this new articulation passes through fashion present, it allows us to see how that articulation can, “formulate temporary expressions about who [we] are, or more accurately, are becoming”, at particular moments in time. I suppose what I am attempting to describe is the articulation of time in fashion.
At this point, I would love to provide an example, but I am infamous in my social circles for having big abstract thoughts with what I would call little ability to ground those abstract thoughts in some real-world context. However, I do find that talking things out usually helps me come to some version of an example that I can go forth with, so with that in mind, I turn to you. Dear reader, what do you think of the Ouroboros of fashion - not simply as a system intent on devouring itself and the planet along with it, but as a metaphor for understanding the passage of time and the continual revisiting of the past? What would you add to the list of actors that push fashion forward, and who is consumed in fashion’s death?
P.S.
Thank you so much for reading! This is my first public essay that was not hastily thought out-loud on Instagram stories, or delivered through a script in a YouTube video. There is something so vulnerable to me about sharing my written word in that written form that I avoid sharing it. But this is my attempt to share some of the swirling and urgent thoughts I constantly have on my mind in an attempt to not only quiet my braincase, but also have the chance to share those thoughts with another person and, hopefully, to talk about them. I make no promises of consistency going forward, but I have some ideas for a few series that have been percolating for a few months that I look forward to sharing. Additionally, I am hopeful that I can utilize this space as a place for my half-formed thoughts that are not appropriate for my research but need to get out of my head. Anyways, thank you again for reading, and I’ll chat with you in the next one!
-Katie