Word: fashionable
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...school cafeteria. There really is no explanation for the number of times this bad dance appears throughout the movie, save an unhealthy fixation on the writers' part. Equally unfunny is Will Ferrell in the role of a hippie Jesus that periodically enters Mary Katherine's dreams. The "fashion-time" break is equally painful. One gets the impression that the writers, lacking enough material to pack 90 minutes of film, randomly inserted these multiple sequences to add length. And the comic potential wasted in the roles of the father/ headmaster and the schoolteacher nuns is unforgivable...
Hollander's emphasis on social practice, however, does not mean that her approach is sociological. She is interested in aesthetics, not economics, envisioning fashion as an extraordinarily democratic art, and every clothed body as a poem. She speaks of fashion as literature, "a sequence of costumes illustrating a narrative of inward events" and everyone who gets dressed in the morning as an author, which is not to say that all are equally skilled; while geishas may be "advanced poets of dress," most of us are hacks or worse...
This analogy of fashion to literature allows Hollander one of her chief weapons in her struggle to make fashion criticism as respectable an endeavor as literary criticism. She insists on the personal and inward aspect of fashion, the poetic dimension, rather than seeing, as fashion's attackers do, mindless conformity to a current mode of consumption. For Hollander, clothing is "the conductor of the most intimate and personal dispositions, not only feelings but aesthetic choices with personal historical significance--not only the wearer's immediate surrounding world but the style of his self-perceptions within...
Speaking of clothing in such terms--the same terms T. S. Eliot uses when he describes the poetic process--lends fashion a prestige different from and greater than that of the cult of the couturier...
Hollander's argument for why fashion matters is the same argument people sometimes still make about literature; in her excellent Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (1994), she writes, "The important imaginative function, the spiritually enlarging character of fashion, is often blindly ignored so as to paint fashion as wicked, just as novels were once forbidden for being mere falsehoods." Spiritually enlarging or not, Hollander's close study of clothing yields surprising and insightful analyses. By this she demonstrates what she overstates elsewhere, the sharp illumination offered by passionate attention to the details of dress...