mary ellen caroll

worn clothes or real clothes, the design of refuse

The most essential service to the City of New York is that 25.400.000 pounds of it are removed every day

If an average American weighs in at 150 pounds, this would mean that 176,000 individuals are removed from the City of New York on a daily basis. The Department of Sanitation oversees an essential service (one of the three—Fire, Police, and Sanitation) which we take for granted unless it is a balmy day in July, the Sanitation workers are on strike, and there is a formidable stench from the uncollected refuse creating an obstacle to our health and happiness as urban dwellers. This is when these questions arise: What does the trash look like? What does it go in? Where does it go? It is at these points that we realize trash is trash. It represents a physical chaos admonishing us for our consumption, and telling us that unnecessary packaging seduces us into excess. In these times, the image of the
Department of Sanitation enters our consciousness and makes us wonder, Where are they? In contrast to “Corporate America,” the primary function of the department is not the generation of profits or products, but the provision of a self-effacing service. But when trash collection is suspended, do we even become aware of this self-effacement? Lack of a prominent public

image for the Department of Sanitation is both a good and a bad thing, as it is a service that we utilize, but one which we want to remain invisible, unless there is a problem. The packaging of the Department of Sanitation (the design of refuse) is visible on the City’s white trucks with the borrowed ubiquitous Swiss-designed typeface spelling out the word sanitation on both sides. The lack of a cohesive historical identity is reflective of changing administrations and the fact that the commissioners, 39 men and one woman, tended not to cross party lines in the 114-year history. As we approach the next century it seems appropriate that the Department of Sanitation, originally known as the Department of Street Cleaning, has returned to its origins with an enhanced version of the 1929 logo, which is a modified version of the 60s logo, all of which employ the caduceus symbol. This medical symbol and the signification of health make us as modern individuals or intra-modern individuals recognize that risk and the alleviation of risk are based on the department’s promotion of health and not subjective environmentalism.

We as human beings need to be clothed, fed, and housed. More wealth, more consumption, should increase our general health and well-being. As consumers, we are provided with more time for the awareness of dangers that can conform to our lifestyle, or more time for less risky causes like the environment. It’s a safe venture because of the lack of interaction with animate objects—namely people. Our relationship to the city is based on 7,300,000 individuals living on an island. The reason it tends to work is that there is interaction—human interaction, as Jane Jacobs made clear to us 30 years ago in the Death and Life of Great American Cities. The question of who the people are that clean our environment and what they wear which allows us to identify them brings us to this discussion, which is about collection and fashion.

At the end of the last century, Colonel George Waring, the most prolific commissioner in the Department of Sanitation, was responsible for instituting waste removal procedures and efficiencies that mirror a number of the programs that we see today; these include recycling, street cleaning and the 7,300 uniformed sanitation workers and supervisors you see, but don’t see tooling around the City. The reissuance of the caduceus was an image that Waring also wanted to project. Waring was a political showman and understood the notion of publicity and the promotion of trash. Using his military background from the Civil War, he instituted a standard of dress and regiment within the department that would promote respectability and high visibility. The workers wore a white military-like uniform, and were called the “white wings.” How can a sanitation worker keep a white uniform clean, and how would the public, respond to such an image? Although this seemed foolish, it resulted in a favorable response by the public, who recognized the fashion, and made the association of the sanitation workers with doctors, nurses, and medical practitioners.

If we establish a model between language and speech, the uniforms that Waring produced were about speech. Something was communicated to the public by these individuals in white uniforms, picking up garbage in the streets as medical workers—a form of speech that wasn’t conveyed by the previous administration’s language of brown jumpers, hats, and coveralls. How many designers actually deal with the speech of fashion and not the language of fashion? As members of the street we were able to posit ourselves by the runway of Rei Kawakubo’s collections for 1984 and 1985, where we witnessed how language becomes speech in the collaboration of Sylvia Kolbowski and Peter Eisenman in Architectures of Display. The Comme des Garçon store is an island. It is a visual refuge where we witness the speech of fashion in the heap of garbage in the surrounding area south of Houston. Fashion was used as a framework for an installation where a garment becomes an architectural structure which speaks to us as viewers on the street. We were able to gaze in the windows at the fashion of architecture. The structure took garments from the collection and abstracted them to create an amorphous skeletal form which you could view from the outside and which you could wear if you walked within its interior because the marketplace literally became the garment.

A return to the streets from the runway presents us with parody, DSNY=DKNY. Was DSNY the creation of an anonymous worker at the Department of Sanitation who borrowed the Donna Karan logo for the department’s please–don’t–litter summer t-shirts? Was someone hauling a wire-mesh trash can in Times Square, looked up, saw the looming logo affixed to DKNY’s headquarters, and then realized that the mere substitution of one letter in the acronym for the Department of Sanitation would result in parody? The inversion of the relationship between fashion and the street is a point where fashion comes colliding into our world. The DKNY logo is a sign drawn from the language of fashion. The DSNY logo is a parody of the sign, and becomes speech through this transformation. The worker has a sense of humor that DKNY would not respond to. The Department of Sanitation has been using that logo since the 40s when the original “Please–Don’t–Litter” lithographs were produced to be wrapped around the exterior of garbage cans. Perhaps the substitution was purely coincidental and has nothing to do with parody, but DSNY did it first, and it is another case of fashion borrowing from the street.

Designers seem to have abandoned the street and are using other materials such as celluloid as their primary means to dictate fashion. Look at the response to KIDS, and the recent Calvin Klein controversy on the street, with kids, in the basement, a paneled rec room, that brings back adolescence and the discovery of trash. This is not being used in the pejorative, but in that Midnight Cowboy, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, sense of nostalgia. To try and wear it again 20 years later—it just doesn’t fit. The clothes become language where there is muted speech and this is when the promotion of the clothes becomes speech. America screams morality and decency. It is another case of ”I know it when I see it“ raising the symptom of pornography and the issue of censorship. The campaign as we are all aware created a great deal of hype that flooded the media and marketplace with more publicity than one broadsheet could ever hope to command, and then it was pulled. The effects were something to witness: On a subway car, a group of five 12-year-old boys (they could have been 18) were trading Calvin Klein postcards from the ”collection“ as if they were baseball cards. These ads created a delirious nostalgia that make us return to a point in that rec room to which we, as ”adults,“ cannot return. If we look at the street and the recent uniforms for the Department of Sanitation we see that rec room, slackeresque leisure attire, the orange t-shirt with the green caduceus symbol, a hooded zippered sweatshirt, and green work pants, begin to mirror fashion as a uniform. The civic image becomes language and there is silence that is achieved unless it is a balmy day in July and the trash is piled neck high and our health and happiness...

M. E. Carroll

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