Gagging Beauty

Abstract

The principle function of the mouth gag is to silence or limit speech. As an object, it has little or no place outside of sexual, medical or violent acts. While there are established functions of the gag within these frameworks, there appears a new category of use in what has recently been labelled as the ‘fashion gag’. Seen on the catwalk in a range of designer collections, fashion gags take various forms and are seen to obscure, stretch, clamp and constrict models’ mouths. In this context, the gag can be considered a form of fetishisation, depersonalising as it arouses vicarious desire in those that look on. Spectators wield a possessing gaze to fulfil the fantasy of owning the garment without the distracting business of identification. Conversely, the face and more specifically, the zone of the mouth becomes a locus of attention. Such focus retracts attention from the garment itself as spectators seek facial expressions that translate the conceptual underpinning of the designer’s work. Thus the fashion model becomes subject and object at one and the same time. If as Joanne B. Eicher states, fashion is a ‘system of nonverbal communication’, one might consider the fashion gag as unproblematic. Nonetheless, with its undercurrents of sex and violence, the fashion gag becomes a highly charged emblem of power play and suggestion worth critical attention. Drawing on theories of masquerade, this paper will investigate this perplexing addition within fashion collections by analysing a range of examples witnessed in the work of several fashion designers. Specifically, I will explore the potential of the fashion gag to ‘speak’ the fashion ensemble, without silencing its communicative power or negating the agentic position of its wearer.