Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT: This essay draws on Paul Poiret's Orientalist fashions and fancy-dress party as a case study for exploring the relations of race, aesthetics, and technology particularly as they cohere around techno-Orientalism. It situates Poiret's fashions within the history of techno-Orientalism to demonstrate clothing's significance as a virtual technology, as well as a technology of racial virtuality. Focusing on this early instance of techno-Orientalism in French fashion, we see that virtuality does not simply name an externally produced sensorial effect. It is an ideological discourse or cultural system that mediates social relations and related social anxieties. Poiret's wearable virtual technologies provide a useful lens through which to examine the dia- lectical relations of race and virtuality in which virtual bodies are con- stituted through racial logics, and racial discourses function virtually.
On 24 June 1911, Paul Poiret, the French fashion designer who the American public dubbed the "King of Fashion" (a title he happily embraced) hosted a lavish "Thousand and Second Night" fancy-dress party in his Paris atelier. The event was inspired by the recent French premiere of the Ballet Russe production of Schéhérazade at the Opera Garnier.1 Poiret invited 300 guests, each of whom was carefully vet- ted at the door by, as he put it, "a squad of old gentlemen . . . who were no jokers."2 Guests who did not arrive in Oriental fashions were hastily escorted to another room, where they were outfitted with clothes from Poiret's latest collection. Poiret recalls, "I knew the carelessness of some of my friends, and I had taken measures to counteract it."3 His guests chose from "harem pantaloons" (jupes sultan) and an array of tunics and caftans, as well as "hobble skirts" (so named for the built-in sash that held ankles closely together, thus limiting the stride of the wearer in order to give her, through sarto- rial means, the experience of being a Chinese woman with bound feet or a Japanese geisha).
Once guests were appropriately dressed, they were ushered by "a half-naked negro, draped in Bokhara silk [across] a sanded court where, beneath a blue and gold tent, fountains gushed in porce- lain basins."4 Arriving at the other side of the court, guests "ma[d]e their obeisance according to the tradition of Islam" (per...