Eco, U. (1995) “Lumbar Thought” in Faith in fakes : travels in hyperreality. London: Minerva.
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Excerpts
A garment that squeezes the testicles makes a man think differently. Women during menstruation; people suffering from orchitis, victims of hermorrhoids, urethritis, prostate and similar ailments know to what extent pressures or obstacles in the sacro-iliac area influence one’s mood and mental agility.
Men have now come to realise that the noun of discipline, which no longer covers or conceals the body but clings to it, is also applicable to them. As a form of self-discipline regarding the body, jeans grip and tighten around the lumbar region. Is the feeling of tightness, the pressure, the same as the self-disciplinary consciousness — the mental pressure — that one must be able to wear clothes?
But the problem of my jeans led me to other observations. Not only did the garment impose a demeanour on me; by focusing my attention on demeanour, it obliged me to live towards the exterior world. It reduced, in other words, the exercise of my interior-ness.
How does clothing call society?
Women has been enslaved by fashion not only because, in obliging her to be attractive, to maintain an ethereal demeanor, to be pretty and stimulating, it made her a sex object, she has been enslaved chiefly because the clothing counselled for her forced her psychologically to live for the exterior.
Has liberation been achieved when men's clothing is offered to women? The disappearance of distinctions in clothing in terms of mobility, activity, and public space has brought about new sexualities, new youth or slimness, and new femininities. How did the jeans become Calvin Klein jeans? As equality became commodified, how did jeans that are not traditionally feminine become corsets?
A final reflection – in imposing an exterior demeanour, clothes are semiotic devices, machines for communicating. This was known, but there had been no attempt to illustrate the parallel with the syntactic structures of language, which, in the opinion of many people, influence our view of the world. The syntactic structures of fashion also influence our view of the world, and in a far more physical way than the consecutio tempomm or the existence of the subjunctive.
Is the denim jeans a syntactic structure? When denim jeans are said to carry meanings such as youth, labour, Americanism, sexuality, and casualness in context, how are various design elements like denim fabric, indigo dyeing, rivets, zippers, pockets, contrasting stitching, and the degree of distress reorganised? What movements and gestures do these create and transform? Does the use of a 'much more physical' approach commercialise the body, create specific postures, or…
Opening
Umberto Eco’s waist thinks as he loses weight and wears jeans again. Or perhaps it is the clothing that thinks. The jeans cling to the pelvis rather than the waist. Beneath the belt, the body alters its way of walking, sitting, turning: the mood of pressure and the degree of agility change. Clothing thinks for itself, and demands that the body exist in a particular way.
Jeans, the emblem of the anti-etiquette product, discipline our bodies in a casual manner. Comfort, informality, freedom: all performed. For Eco, who reads himself through the act of wearing jeans and performs his body so that others may read it too, jeans are a kind of wearable medium. Who has been wearing media, rather than clothes?
The subjection of women’s fashion lies in the fact that, no less than the sexualisation of Calvin Klein jeans, it has psychologically compelled women to live for outward appearance. Through fashion, gender becomes a habit of outward-facing self-surveillance. As though jeans were not everyday clothing, but a testbed on which casualness has to prove itself.
Fashion becomes a bodily syntax, pronounced through the pelvis, the stride, the posture. The corset, the stiff collar, the neatly arranged tie, perhaps even the armour of the medieval knight: jeans, the very byword for clothing after the abolition of discipline, return that discipline as a more everyday, more natural wearing sensation, and in a feminised form. They return it in the form of a bodily syntax that cannot be understood by the mind. In the form of an anachronism.
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