It would be difficult for one to survive in a complete isolation from other people and therefore, it is a well-known fact, that people tend to socialize, interchange their experience and knowledge, cooperate and communicate in different spheres of their life. Territory, language, culture and certain traditions let people organize and unite into the groups, which are often defined as communities. Once a person identifies him- or herself with a community, accepts the existing norms and prescriptions in this group, he or she becomes a member of it. Fashion is a particular phenomenon, which is directly connected and dependent on people’s aesthetic tastes and preferences, makes people create a new style in their haircut, makeup, clothing, footwear, body or accessories. Moreover, fashion sets some trends and tendencies in these questions and therefore, people start reaching and striving for popularized ideals and images. Barry (2014) observes this notion in the context of mass consumption and states that “the goal of creating this unattainable image is to create desire and demand for fashion products” (Barry 2014, 176). Indeed, in the narrow context fashion has always aimed to make people follow, desire and buy. But fashion appears in different manifestations and can serve various functions, such as identification of a person’s status, social group belonging, personal uniqueness and others.
This paper is to illustrate how the depiction of certain fashion trends in the sitcom Friends throughout more than one decade has become a special means of humor in the film. Depiction of fashion in this comedy exists on two levels: on the basic one in order to create a certain image for a character and on the level of artistic expression to provide a comic effect. Fashion, mainly the hairstyle, clothes and accessories in the film allow to include retrospective elements and if one takes a look at all episodes shot in ten years, he is likely to be surprised, how the trends and fashion innovations quickly change over the time.
There are six basic characters in the Friends, each of which represents a unique personality with particular mindset, habits, preferences, way of speaking and visual image. The Barry’s (2014) notion of aspiration to fashion plays a crucial role in the director’s choice of means to design an image. A viewer is sure to associate himself with one of the characters and therefore, it is quite interesting, whether the style and appearance of the character influence this relation. Barry (2014) provides an aspiration taxonomy for women and shows how a woman perceives an image, but he admits, that men are also very active and important fashion consumers and a further research on the men’s aspiration is to be conducted (Barry 2014, 188). It is worth indicating some particular traits of each male character to demonstrate the whole range and variety of images in this sitcom.
Ross represents the image of the highly intelligent and at the same time attractive man, who has quite a good dress sense. He studies at the university, then works at the museum and eventually becomes a university professor. On the basic level he is portrayed as a stylish representative of academic community, wearing different kinds of blazers, official suits and shirts, which well present his character. However, humor is an innate and the most important feature of the comedy and therefore, his excessive primness are very often the subjects to irony. For example, in the 8 season (2002) in the episode 17 he appears to be extremely picky and exacting about the colors of his shirts. When he is looking for his “button-down, faded salmon” shirt, his sister Monica asks him whether he means his “pink” shirt, but Ross gets even offended by such a careless attitude of his sister. This moment clearly shows, how the director uses fashion and personal preferences in style to create a humorous effect.
Chandler Bing is known to be quite unlucky in his relationships with women, to be very sarcastic by himself and conform to the trends, proclaimed in the office style. He works as an executive in statistical analysis and his personality contrasts with the job he actually hates. He is the most careless character in the sense of fashion and style and the tie is a very obligatory accessory in his image. But there are some moments, which make the audience again associate their life and way of clothing in particular with the sitcom. In the season 4 episode 14 Chandler feels depressed and disappointed because of his girlfriend’s cheating and Joe, his friend, defines his wearing of “sweats” as the first phase of the hard period and says he will wait until Chandler stop wearing the sweats and is ready to look for a new girlfriend. It is also interesting how the director plays with his fear of becoming womanish and in the episode 15 of Season 4 he gets his nails with Rachel done and feels less manly. These facts exemplify, how strong the social stereotypes of clothing and appearance are.
As for Joe, he embodies an image of macho and always wears some trendy jeans, nice shirts, leather jackets and as an actor and womanizer, he always has some attractive details in his character. In the episode 12 of the season 5 Joe has to go to the audition, where everyone will wear “ultra-hip, high-fashion stuff” and asks Rachel, who works at the Ralph Lauren store to bring him something trendy. When she brings a woman-like purse and Joe refuses to take it, she convinces him “Trust me, all the men are carrying them in the spring catalog”. This case serves as an explicit evidence for the high reputation and authority of the fashion magazines in the American culture.
Jenß (2013) also analyzes the concept of fashion in the context of film production and considers film characters to have a considerable impact on fashion in real life. Just as in the Mad Men, which he describes, Friends also makes the audience reflect on the transitioning of nostalgia and one is able to observe different images and temporalities of fashion (Jenß 2013, 108). The creators of the sitcom David Crane and Martha Kauffman have managed to depict the transition of all six characters from the teenagers and school graduates into the attractive young people and later into ripe and mature family-oriented adults. Dressing of the characters in the retrospective episodes have enabled the director to represent the fashion trends in 90s. In the episode 14 of season 2 (1996) the friends watch a prom video, where Ross has moustache and girls are wearing trendy ball dress with funny hairdos. This element is directly connected with the episode 8 of the season 5, where they remember their Thanksgivings and Ross and Chandler appear to follow the newest wafts in fashion: have spiked hair and trendy sport jackets one year and a year later come with having parted their hair down in the middle, and solid tees under blue and white blazers. They wanted to be cool guys and therefore wore the most fashionable clothes at that period. Nevertheless, they look funny and even ridiculous in 1998 and such a move makes it easy for the director to create a comic effect.
The sitcom Friends is a very bright example of how films impact the mass fashion consumption and how social stereotypes influence one’s choice of the individual style. “The popularity of Friends has affected the American public in various ways, from the style of women’s hairdos to the use of language” (Quaglio 2009: 12). Aspiration to fashion is one of the basic phenomena the film producers refer to in order to make their product popular, desirable and extremely valuable for future generations.
REFERENCES
Ben Barry, “Selling whose dream? A taxonomy of aspiration in fashion imagery”, Fashion,
Heike Jenß, “Cross-temporal explorations: Notes on fashion and nostalgia”, Critical Studies in
Fashion & Beauty 4 (2013).
Paulo Quaglio, Television Dialogue: The sitcom Friends vs. Natural conversation.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company (2009).
