Living & Arts

That other F-word

In print | February 14, 2008

While I am a devoted fan of the show Project Runway, this season has been a bit tepid for me. It has placed too much emphasis on catering to specific clients and as a result, has detracted from the designers being able to fully communicate their individual rhythm and style sense. Among their tasks for certain clientele have been: design an outfit for Sarah Jessica Parker’s line of clothing, a suit for Tiki Barber to wear on television and a prom dress for a 16-year-old. But this past week’s challenge was potentially the most cringe-worthy. The designers were led into a room where six women wrestlers, referred to as divas, were punching, kicking and grabbing each other. Tim Gunn, stately mentor to the designers, told them that they were to design wrestling outfits for these ladies. And later he took them to Spandex House to purchase their materials. Spandex House!

The episode would’ve completely lost my interest had it not been for the moment when Tim said, with reference to the divas, “Christian, to borrow a word from you, they are fierce indeed.” Not only was it great to see grandpa Tim co-opting the lingo of the show’s youngest designer, but it showed the extent to which Christian’s use of the word “fierce” has become ubiquitous. Indeed, the highlight of this season for me has to be Christian Siriano and all of his mousy yips (“I’m gonna die of barfness”), especially the way that he has given new life to the word “fierce,” a word I once regarded as fully played out due to Tyra Banks and her legion of wannabe models.

Christian does not just use the word “fierce” to describe his designs. He has taken “fierce” and his own spin-off of it, “ferosh,” and made them into a state of mind. He uses it to describe Tiki Barber’s wife, “Asians are fierce,” and his mood when he becomes defeated by his 16-year-old prom client, “I am not feeling fierce right now.” And in this past episode, he took what started out as a completely alien concept for fashion, the professional woman wrestler, and made it into something he could embrace by creating his own imagined wrestling diva alter-ego named Ferocia Coutura. “Her move is she sprays girls in the eyes with hairspray.”

Although occasionally it seems like he could benefit from some vocabulary enhancement, there is an advantage to using the word “fierce” in that it conveys a mood that literal descriptions of a garment alone cannot communicate. Sure, when Christian tells Sweet P that her garment is “a little Chewbacca” or that it looks like “tranny ice-cream,” you get a (somewhat) clear visual of what that means appearance-wise. But there is a visceral response to seeing a fashion creation that is hard to capture with merely descriptive words alone.

In his essay “Language and Historical Experience,” Frank Ankersmit discusses the problem of connecting the gap between how we experience aesthetic and historical experiences and how we talk about them. He focuses on the Dutch linguist-turned-historian Johan Huizinga’s attempts to confront this problem, pointing to the word “fierce” and its ability to bring us “to a level in our contact with reality that is prior to, or deeper than, both seeing and hearing.” Of course, since Huizinga was writing in the early 20th century, he did not intend this analysis to extend to the realm of fashion in the 21st century. But in both situations of recalling a particular moment in time and recalling a certain garment that one has seen, oftentimes it is hard to find words capable of communicating the many dimensions of that experience.

But inevitably, the overuse of the word “fierce” causes it to lose its punch. Certainly in the commercial world, advertisers like to capitalize on the mood that the word conveys by bombarding us with images of it to the degree where you no longer feel fierce, but rather numb. Or, recalling what one of the characters from David Byrne’s 1986 film “True Stories” intoned during a fashion show, “Shopping is a feeling. Sometimes I get a wobbly feeling.”

But then there are those moments when you can’t help but use the word. For example, in a previous episode of Project Runway, one in which they did not have to design for a certain client but rather used their model’s hairstyle as inspiration to create an avant-garde look, Christian’s team designed a couture gown composed of hundreds of organza layers creeping from the floor to the model’s neck, culminating in a dramatic petal-like expanse of organza ruffles that emanated from her left shoulder. It was part wedding-cake, part gramophone and thoroughly ferosh.

Meagan is a senior. You can reach her at mhu1@swarthmore.edu.