Fantasy in the Sweatshop

In reading Elizabeth Nielsen’s Handmaidens of Glamour Culture, I am struck by the nearly-scripted poetic quality of the immediate proximity of fixed and transformative identities in her study of early Hollywood costumers. In numerous descriptions of the endlessly labyrinthine interior of Western Costume, the racks and rows and shelves and hooks are filled with thousands upon tens of thousands of possibilities, so many the exact number of which “even Western doesn’t know,” while the article itself follows the realities of the women locked into their own places in support of this engine of transformation.
Throughout the semester, we have repeatedly returned to the idea of fashion as a site for (at least the potential) fluidity of identity, and in the final weeks we have explored both the historical and contemporary apparatus enabling that site of possibility. Like any good motion picture production history, Nielsen’s article contrasts the gritty, technical aspects of production with the magic of onscreen fantasy. In the case of the costumer however, there is an especially hypocritical relationship between the workers, often members of at least one and frequently multiple minority groups possessing limited options for employment, survival and social identity, and the fantastic transformations that they enable, both on the level of the character and the career and persona of the actor.
The relationship of reality and transformation/fantasy is also clearly explored in a more classed context in Real Women Have Curves. The female members of Ana’s family toil to create evening dresses for the social posturing of upper class women while the workers have no use for the goods they make and possess few other options for basic survival. The very title of the film with its semantic focus on “real women” highlights both the working, classed reality of the film’s characters as well as their deviation from the compressed, starved media-generated fantasy of women, particularly as they relate to fashion. Ana is the only character who is ultimately able to access the transformative power of the fashion fantasy and escapes the sweatshop. Most of the garment workers in Real Women Have Curves, Nielsen’s article and No Sweat are not lucky enough to try on that special red dress.

On a related side note, I also appreciate the Industrial Revolution era visual motif of machinery and mechanization running through much of the treatment of the issue of garment manufacturing. The contrast of the soft, intimacy of textiles and inhuman austerity of metal machinery is admittedly compelling. The clanging of metal and grinding of machinery is a nearly constant element of the soundscape in Real Women Have Curves, and many of the photographs in No Sweat feature workers dwarfed by machines or themselves appearing as virtual cogs in the apparatus. I think that man/machine imagery has taken on a mildly nostalgic quality in the modern era and while this tension may not hold the same cultural resonance it did in the context of industrialization in the late nineteenth century or science fiction in the nineteen fifties, I think globalization has created a new brand of insignificance that leaves people feeling threatened and small.