The Body as Ornament: A Fashion Classic: Michael Carter

It is no small claim to describe Michael Carter as one of the world’s most important fashion intellectuals. His curious, expansive and entertaining works around clothing, dress and fashion were groundbreaking at a time when fashion scholarship was struggling to find a place in academia. Carter’s cross-disciplinary thinking and observations about dress span art history, anthropology, film, philosophy and aesthetics to ask fundamental questions about dress and the clothed body. His work takes us into the realm of the imaginary, the utilitarian, the unconscious and on to the role that ornamentation and decoration play in the way we transform ourselves through dress. This paper turns to Carter’s longstanding interest in the ways that imagination, ornament and excess converge to think about what is going on in the extreme visions of the fashioned body seen on the catwalk and red carpet. Ridiculed and celebrated in equal measure, these are impractical, useless creations that go against all rational thought; alternatively, they are conceptual, experimental, avant-garde and explained away as ‘art’. Drawing on Carter’s rebuttal of what he calls Alfred Wallace’s ‘Iron Law of Utility’, wherein everything has a use, ‘even the apparently useless’ (Carter 2017: 108), this paper engages with ornament, excess and the useless as valid in their own right to explore the fashioned body as ‘an active transformation of the sensuous materiality of the world’ (Carter 2000: 60).