On Blackness and Fashion in Denmark

Amidst the sea of whiteness at Copenhagen Fashion Week, “Clothes Make the Man,” by Helle Fulsang, served as a powerful—if sometimes technically challenged—investigation of the intersection of race and fashion. “Clothes Make the Man” was an exploration of both the presence of African women in Copenhagen Fashion Week, and the ways that clothes shape identity and inform perceptions of minorities. The hour-long performance piece took place in Koncert Kirken in Blagardsplads, an old and impressive church. The stage on which most of the performance was premiered was the characteristic t-shape of a runway stage—the familiar board from which the piece’s investigation of clothing and minority bodies sprung.

“Clothes Make the Man” started with an impressive and upsetting violation of the clothes-making process. An African woman stood at the front of the stage wrapped in white cloth, treating her body as a bolt of fabric. As she turned and unraveled the long sheet, a group of ‘workers’ fed it through a sewing machine and cut it into small strips. These pieces were then pinned and tied into 

Photo by Dylan Nguyen

a dress—she was almost simultaneously undressed and dressed onstage, subverting the process of dressmaking. This curious and almost violent process was highlighted by a well-mixed, cacophonous live audio track of the sewing machine’s industrial whirs and clanks combined with the model’s incoherent and manic whispering, crying, and laughing. These sounds climaxed in a repetitive nightmarish scream from the model when the dress was completed, which was followed by her immediate descent into a dreamy performance of a presumably tribal African song and dance. This scene was palpably uncomfortable to watch, with many of the audience members becoming visibly agitated and commenting nervously to their peers. In some ways, the performance may have benefitted from a continuing reference to, or at least consideration of, the power of such a scene and its success in moving the audience to consider the relationship between fashion and black bodies.

Perhaps simply from shellshock after this scene’s dreamy terror, the other chapters seemed underwhelming. A quartet of hip-hop dancers exchanging blazers onstage was, while visually pleasing, not particularly powerful—any symbolic weight of the blazers was lost on me, and the dance felt like a whimsical reprieve. A comical battle for attention between a black woman and a white puppet served as a successful reminder of the impossibly white standard of beauty, and the puppet’s grotesque appearance drew uncomfortable reference to minstrel shows’ caricatures of black people. The comedy, though perhaps a bit slapstick, was well-received and well executed.

The third chapter in the show, involving a man in characteristically black urban clothing lounging onstage while trash bags were lowered from the ceiling, was successful in its visual simplicity. The music that accompanied this act, however, felt obtuse and distracting to the visual’s simple poignancy. The pop song with lyrics about feeling good in a new coat competed too much with the action (or rather, non-action) of the performer onstage, and left one craving more of the abstracted soundscapes of the first act. I was patently more interested in the sounds of the trash bags’ pulleys squeaking than I was in the song’s heavy handed lyrics about clothing.

The show then transitioned—ultimately unsuccessfully—into a chaotic reference to a magazine cover photo shoot. Performers stood in front of a green screen and a video was live-streamed onto a screen onstage, framing the performers in a mock magazine cover. This was admittedly an extremely ambitious task, but the technical difficulties were distracting enough to cause me to lose focus. The performers weren’t framed well on the green screen, often with half of their bodies being cut out. The audience could easily recognize the performers receiving corrections from a backstage stagehand, as they weren’t very subtle in looking backstage and quickly adjusting their poses. When finally the projection stopped working, all that remained onstage was an average onstage performer singing over a pre-recorded track. It was after this chapter of the show that my own personal health needs usurped my ability to watch the show: a nasty head cold, combined with my impression that this chapter may have been the last, moved me to leave the performance a few minutes early.   

Ultimately, “Clothes Make the Man” was an entertaining and thought-provoking performance. The piece seemed to peak extremely early with the powerful and disturbing imagery of the first chapter looming over the rest of the evening. The show’s most conspicuous shortcomings came in the uninteresting music tracks after the first chapter, and the glaring technical mishaps. Perhaps more of an effort should have been made to carry on the careful and eerie audio of the first chapter, and to reference the violence and terror of the dressmaking scene.