Abstract

What is it in "fashion" that naturalizes the image of the dying, dead or violated female body? Why do images that equate woman, fashion, aesthetics and death carry such a cachet in the fashion magazine? What is the communication that obtains when one pairs aesthetics and death? Can the aestheticization of death in the fashion magazine be seen as a site of rupture in the sign system of "the fashionable"; or simply a further entrenchment of the idea of woman as nothing more than body--her perfection, inevitability, her death? Death Becomes Her is a thesis about fashion and imagination. Fashion is, at once, a site of powerful hegemonic discourses about how we should understand and present our bodies, while at the same time being a terrain of debate, contestation, and reformulation in a larger cultural dialogue. This thesis, through the creation of an eclectic methodology which draws on the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Elizabeth Grosz and Elisabeth Bronfen, will engage the often slippery and capricious image-scape of the fashion advertisement in a dialogue. This dialogue seeks neither closure nor answers to the questions posed, but, rather, seeks to weave together a series of disparate texts into a textile that will present to you, the reader, a cloth woven of conflicted dreams. Fashion, we will see, is a Janus-faces super-model whose death is dreamt as a dream of perfection.