The Material is the Message: Or, U.S. Democrats in Kente Cloth and the System of Fashion
Illustration by Mike Thompson.
I have recently been thinking a lot about the messages people aim to send, and aim not to send, with what they wear and choose not to wear; how those garments are interpreted by others, sometimes necessarily a result of the very fabric of clothing; how the delivery of the message does not always correspond, if ever smoothly and without a crease that one just cannot iron away, to that intention; how that message the garment sends can subvert the original intention and aim of the person that chooses to wear it; and how the subversion continues when the garment can, and does, undermine the gesture made by the body wearing it. When it comes to messages and interpretation, meaning and symbolism, fashion and clothing are not neutral, let alone stable, units. All of this, it might appear, is par for the course of being in social settings with aspects of one’s lived experience and social reality constantly being under interpreting gazes. And though that is true, some materials and garments send more of a message.
With that we come to the image of U.S. Democratic lawmakers wearing kente cloth stoles — graduation scarves — on June 8th, 2020. Whatever solidarity was aimed for in kneeling for 8 minutes and 46 seconds — the amount of time a police officer had his knee on George Floyd’s neck — was immediately undermined by what those kneeling U.S. Democrats wore: stoles made of kente cloth, a cloth that comes from Western Africa. Regardless of how one feels about the U.S. Democrats wearing the Ghanaian scarves, one thing is for sure: this photo op, a photographic opportunity, has operated against the optimism of those that wore such garments to expose instead a naked opportunism.
Much has already been written about this situation, including a scathing critique [1] of the theatrics of the moment, showing that the theatrics are not just of that moment; an informative response [2] addressing possible reader confusion; and one providing historical background [3] to both the photo op and kente cloth. And I hope more like those will continue to be written. Such articles, and others like it, are to be welcomed for providing concrete moments of education extending far beyond whatever these individuals may or may not have intended. And it remains to be seen whether that moment of education comes back to the mind of voters in November, in spite and because of what those voters choose to wear while voting.
“When it comes to messages and interpretation, meaning and symbolism, fashion and clothing are not neutral, let alone stable, units. ”
To be clear, I am not addressing here the important discussion and debate surrounding dress and cultural appropriation. Though that is at work here, in ways that might upset our neatly established categories of both culture and appropriation, I instead wish to focus on the ways in which fashion and clothing are deployed for politicized purposes. I use politicized in contrast to political, since the message the kente stole sent undermined both the solidarity that kneeling for George Floyd expressed as well as the political goal that current protests in response to George Floyd’s murder aim for. I am more interested in the fashionable aspect that resistance assumed in this photograph, a moment that politicians thought they could express what they took to be solidarity in the form of a politicized message that undermined the fundamentally political aspect of the moment.
In interpreting such fashioned photo ops, before forming one’s judgment, one should take account of the multiplicity of messages, sometimes contrary to one another. This does not entail acquiescence or agreement to those messages. These interpretations, while sometimes conveying confusion and contradictory positions, provide complexity and belie the claim that one can reduce a picture to a thousand words. One’s judgment, at the end of such interpretations, might always confirm what one already knew and initially thought (whether that be, “that’s a bad look”, or “right on!”); however, the process of taking account of these varied messages and issues enriches the background to that decision and aesthetic judgment, providing historical, sociological, and historical context. Clothing says more. Deployed in such a politicized manner — read politics made palatable and fashionable in an election year — it demands many more words.
Clothing is not exclusively determinable by those who wear it, if it even ever is. That is why the defense behind intentionality, while telling, remains unconvincing. This is also why wearing a uniform, some more than others, oftentimes says more about the person than whatever other information one would wish to know about that individual’s personal life. In virtue of existing in a social setting, clothing wears and expresses social and economic realities, political circumstances and ethical choices. Interpretation that is varied refers to the interpreted object as polyvalent and dispersed, scattered and not univocal, polyphonic yet also stretching the bounds of what we might consider, musically speaking, harmonious.
According to French philosopher, semiologist, and cultural critic Roland Barthes, Fashion was a system. Barthes’s claim was an interesting one. It went something like this. It was possible to demarcate a field of study — in this case, women’s fashion made by famous fashion houses and written about in fashion magazines. The borders of this field demarcated the system, outside of which were items not useful to its analysis. Using the tools of semiology to examine the ways in which people wrote about such clothing (women’s garments, or the vestimentary system), as if it formed a system, could tell the examiner about that object of study and meanings it made, as much as it could about the society to, and for, which it meant something.
Although quick to undermine the efficacy of his own project and the overall process of object-construction by a specific field of study, Barthes raises a number of issues that are important for us in the interpretation of the deployment of fashion and clothing in such a politicized manner. He asks: what does clothing, as a sign, reveal about the system that it is a part of? What are the rules of this system, and what allows an article of clothing to say, mean, and do what it says, means, and does?
“The lawmakers that wore those stoles saw a political opportunity with these pieces of fabric, and opportunity to refer to the African roots of those targeted by police violence without donning any clothes referring implicitly and explicitly to Black Lives Matter.”
I bring up Barthes’s system not to criticize or mock it. In many respects, Barthes had already done that in the preface to his work. By showing what his object of study was — a fabricated, fictitious, and ideal one — Barthes aimed to reveal how one can examine fashion as one would examine language as a system. One wears clothing as one speaks, and there are rules for garment making independent of one’s wearing it as there are rules for speech and writing independent of one’s speaking and writing. I am more interested in the ways in which Barthes’s account of the fashion system returns and is alive and well, as demonstrated by those U.S. Democratic lawmakers. The lawmakers that wore those stoles saw a political opportunity with these pieces of fabric, and opportunity to refer to the African roots of those targeted by police violence without donning any clothes referring implicitly and explicitly to Black Lives Matter. The fashion system at work here thought that it could address black lives as Blacks, a univocal monolithic culture (instead of race) wherein if something that some black people wore — no matter that it came from Western Africa, and is worn by some black students at graduation events — is worn by politicians this, by a very shoddy transitive property, might mean that the politicians have solidarity with Black Lives Matter without saying as such. Instead the message sent by this photo op was precisely: how can we say we are thinking of black people without saying Black Lives Matter? The politicized fashion system today thinks in such simple ways, reducing individuals to the graphics of their demographics even though the very claims these individuals make are to stop being targeted based upon race. It claims theatricality can be used against the demand for solidarity. The fashion system is, in that regard, oblivious to race, culture, and politics — the very fabric that makes life matter.
The questions, when faced with this and other situations like this, one should ask are the following: what does one (need to) leave out or exclude in order to construct a system, thereby calling whatever is excluded non-systematic or un-systematizable, not welcome in the system? And second, what are ways to disrupt the monolithic vision, or univocal sound, of the system? The issue is specifically about acknowledging and talking about those very elements and aspects that refuse being taken up by a system without transforming, if not completely destroying it. Such acknowledgment requires a new vocabulary to talk about these moments, one that eschews this kind of systematicity. It is about addressing and responding to those very lived situations and experiences that in their refusal to being adopted and appropriated by a system require that system, in virtue of that refusal, to change. In other words, the task is to look to parts refused by the system — thus treated like refuse — and respond by adopting and wearing this refusal as a badge of honor, this time standing or kneeling as a refusal of at least this particular fashion system. Fashion is not politically neutral, and in this series I set myself the task of philosophically unpacking the relation between fashion and politics. I will also bring fashion into conversation with philosophy, with the aim of unpacking its political relevance.
Notes
[1] Doreen St. Félix, “The Embarrassment of Democrats Wearing Kente-Cloth Stoles,” The New Yorker, June 9, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-and-off-the-avenue/the-embarrassment-of-democrats-wearing-kente-cloth-stoles.
[2] “Why were US Democrats wearing Ghana’s kente cloth?,” BBC News, June 9, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-52978780.
[3] Isabella Gomez Sarmiento, “Kente Cloth: From Royals To Graduation Ceremonies … To Congress?,” npr, June 11, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/11/875054683/kente-cloth-from-royals-to-graduation-ceremonies-to-congress.
