Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12:1 (2021), 1-5

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Introduction, Special Issue on Fashion
Jennifer R. Cohen and Michael Stone-Richards, Guest Editors

This special issue of the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas on fashion
and Surrealism emerges from a dialogue begun three years ago in the context of
a symposium on Chicago Surrealism supported by the Terra Foundation’s Art
Design Chicago initiative. Perhaps counter to expectation, it was in the context of
our exploration of the revolutionary politics of the Chicago group, particularly
between 1968 and 1972 but also far beyond, that our shared interest in Surrealism’s
foundational relationship with fashion came into view, particularly in relation to the
movement’s attention to cyclical historical change. While this relationship has been
described in formal terms—in the stylistic similarities between art, fashionable dress,
and fashion publicity from the 1930s forward—our growing conversations, which
we have aimed simply to initiate here, nonetheless felt like something of a beginning.
After the wave of attention to questions provoked by the “culture industry” on the
part of generations of scholars working in the wake of the Frankfurt School and
1968, and a great deal of distance that has been generated from the value judgments
that have adhered to media often deemed commercial, feminine, or otherwise
classified as minor, we believe there is still room to navigate and expand the field
with the benefit of new methodologies and new questions.
All scholars who seek to make progress in this area remain indebted to
Richard Martin’s pioneering curatorial work, primarily the exhibition “Fashion
and Surrealism” that took place in the Fashion Institute of Technology’s galleries
in 1987 and 1988. Martin approached the topic thematically, finding imagery of
metamorphosis, dandyism and nature, among many other motifs, in both surrealist
and Surrealism-inspired fashion designs and publicity, distinguishing between first
and second generations by their relative openness to participation in commercial
media. Martin’s thematic approach lives on, let’s say, in the way in which we might
Jennifer R. Cohen: jrosecohen@gmail.com;
Michael Stone-Richards: michaelstonerichards@gmail.com
Copyright © 2021 (Jennifer R. Cohen and Michael Stone-Richards). Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. Available at http://jsa.asu.edu/

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point to the language and conceptual moves of Surrealism (such as Reverdy’s
definition of the image as the bringing together of two otherwise distinct realities) as
they are taken up in advertising, film, and theatre—for example, in the use of dreamsequences in movies. Alternately, surrealist (or surrealist-adjacent) artists such as Max
Ernst, Man Ray, René Magritte, Eugène Atget, among others, have been described
in terms of their engagement with fashion as subject; or Salvador Dalí, in terms
of his collaboration with the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Still, many of the
objects and practices that might fall under this heading are generally understood to
be outside of the purview of Surrealism itself, employing its language and strategies
beyond practicing Surrealists—in photography (in everyday life as well as in fashion
magazines, whether we are thinking about, say, Cecil Beaton, André Kertész, or
Guy Bourdin’s fetishistic stagings of desire, or Rei Kawakubo’s research-based
dialogue with the culture of Surrealism in Six), or theater design (as in the work of
Pavel Tchelitchev all the way to Robert Wilson, forty years later). Whether anchored
in a surrealist form of life or not, this Surrealism-inflected iconography or even
world-making is often described as having a necessarily ambiguous and ambivalent
relationship to economies of commodities.
Gilles Lipovetsky’s L’Empire de l’éphémère (1987, translated 1994)
fundamentally transformed the field by making fashion not merely the object of
anthropological study or a materialist account based in Western Marxism, but
the means of an anthropology of modernity itself. Lipovetsky defined fashion
as the ephemeral, and as the technologization of seduction, which gave rise to a
system of cyclical changes in values most typically involving commodities with a
certain degree of autonomy from the physical stuff of clothing and textiles.That
is, fashion functioned as a vessel for Lipovetsky’s understanding of the temporality
of modernity—its characteristic transience and deliquescence—a concept which
owed much to Baudelaire and Surrealism. Something of this analytic of fashion
is already available in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” (1885), where Baudelaire
speaks of his aim, “to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical
envelope.” This notion of fashion as a window onto experience beyond the frame, in
movement, allowed theorists to access and describe concepts like the body and urban
experience. Most notably, Walter Benjamin grasped the importance of Baudelaire,
Surrealism, and a certain poetics of fashion, in the nascent methodology of the
Passagen-Werk (1927-40). Conceptually deploying this guise of fashion as a tool for
the consideration of modernity from Baudelaire to Surrealism, Ulrich Lehmann’s
Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (2000) articulated Benjamin’s recasting of the Marxist
leap to uncover an epistemology of fashion, modernity, and anachronistic modes
of historicity. We could call this mode of questioning a form of philosophical
anthropology, insisting on the value of the concept of fashion as such, and as apart
from the idea of style, a field of study unto itself.
Indeed, more recent methodological approaches to fashion and Surrealism

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are no longer pursuing a typology of so-called surrealistic effects, and are not
primarily concerned with style, or with aligning instantiations of a popular,
vernacular, or even high-fashion surrealist aesthetic to a so-called original or
authorized movement. Rather, we ask how fashion may expand the terms of
Surrealism in ways that might not yet correspond to the movement’s well-defined
terminology. In no small part,this may transform our notion of the domain of
Surrealism itself, even as the Paris-sanctioned surrealist group’s language remains
of great methodological value. Along these lines, we seek to build upon the crucial
contribution of Hannah Crawforth in her essay “Surrealism and the Fashion
Magazine” (2004), which found in the medium something structural that proved
such a compelling venue for surrealist contributions, and certainly opens onto a
host of adjacent cultural practices. That is, in addition to the contributions that
Surrealism brought to fashion—photographic techniques, collage, an aesthetic of
the unexpected, and so on— and like Crawforth, we would also seek to acknowledge
what the phenomenon of fashion meant for the movement as a structure for
understanding modern historicity and experience, and as a form of the dissemination
of its ideas, not only through clothing but also through something like a worldview
or anthropology.
Given the restrictions imposed under covid-19, which resulted in the
general closing of libraries and archives, the call for papers was not restricted to the
Americas. Yet it is clear that the phenomenon of fashion for the surrealist group
was transatlantic, not least because of the meteoric rise of the movement’s aesthetics
across Europe and the United States in the 1930s in magazines, exhibitions, and
increasingly in popular culture; it was also because of the status of the American
artist Man Ray as an early exemplar of successful surrealist work across industries in
Paris. A view of Surrealism that takes into account its fashionability also underscores
its role as a cosmopolitan worldwide movement—here, for example, one may think
of records of the self-presentation of Joyce Mansour between Egypt, England, and
Paris, or of Suzanne Césaire between Martinique, New York, and Paris, but also
of Toyen between Prague and Paris. Certain studies in this issue concentrate on
surrealist taste, while others address what may be characterized as an initial microhistory or ethnomethodology of fashion in Surrealism anchored in the everyday life
of the historic figures of the movement. Such methodologies—in a nascent stage,
drawing upon newly available letters, photography, archives, but also continuing to
mine those that are already very well known—might yet point to a rethinking of
surrealist practice. (We note that Georges Bataille, after all, did begin a document
titled “Le surréalisme au jour le jour” (1951)!)
Common threads that have emerged throughout this issue are the way
in which fashion and fashionability introduce a longer duration for the surrealist
movement than has been typically allowed, invoking an expanded timeline before
the first codification of surrealist practices in 1924 and including the postwar period.

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Further, the notion of fashion implies a more complicated temporality than that
estabished in the art historical narrative of the movement’s superlatives and “firsts,”
also incorporating interims, lags, or even lateness and decline. That is, the discussion
of the movement’s involvement in fashion both as idea and industry necessarily leads
to an account of its fashionability, as inherently subjective yet traceable through a
range of sources. For instance, Krzysztof Fijalkowski’s essay, anchored in concrete,
everyday realities of clothing (his preferred term) and based in a close reading of
the literature and first-hand accounts, introduces the topic programmatically at the
movement’s emergence, pointing to new methodological avenues for the description
and analysis of surrealist fashioning among its original practitioners in the social
surrounds of the journal Littérature through the 1930s. In the context of the
community of surrealist emigres in New York during the 1940s, Jennifer Cohen finds
a complex web of meaning in the three shop windows staged by Marcel Duchamp
in collaboration with a range of other figures, woven in such a way as to (somewhat)
obscure their role as a means of marketing texts meaningful to or by André Breton.
Both essays stage hyper-local sites and moments that see surrealist protagonists in a
process of self-fashioning, whether through clothing as such or in the self-conscious
utilization of commercial media.
Our collective experience across disciplines, from critical theory and
literary studies to making and museum work, has productively brought literary and
philosophical perspectives into dialogue with art historical and material methods.
To stage this encounter more formally, we have initiated two new formats for
contributions to the JSA in this issue: the object study and the interview. Both
significantly more concise than the standard academic essay, these new formats
provide an expanded forum for new, primary research emerging from objects and
period participants themselves. The first examples of these new formats bring this
project full-circle and back to the origin of this project in Chicago. In an interview
with Chicago Surrealist Penelope Rosemont, who memorably witnessed the
collectively authored assemblage of household objects titled The Consumer installed
at the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris in 1965, Abigail Susik explores
the unexpected importance of fashion and clothing to the movement’s many
appearances, from their own exhibitions and protests, to the 1971 Telos conference
in Buffalo, New York. Making use of the Art Institute of Chicago’s extensive
collection of books with unique bindings by Mary Reynolds, Jenny Harris inspects
what was likely the artist’s last rebinding treatment, Raymond Queneau’s Saint Glinglin
(1948). Through a close reading of the text and its décor, Harris shows the way
in which Reynolds made them mutually integral, using her avant-garde network to
advance the concept of the surrealist object into the postwar period while insisting
on the continued relevance of the unique object viewed in a domestic context, one
which is even now still gaining dimension as scholars do the painstaking work of
attending to these objects, one-by-one. These approaches, in our view, are the basis

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of a new set of questions that can extend from micro-studies of the infrastructure
of fashion in surrealist practices and spanning from before its inception to
well beyond the Parisian movement, allowing us to elucidate new aesthetic and
philosophical aspects at the heart of the expansion and internationalization of
Surrealism during the 1930s.

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