Category Archives: Fashion

In the mailbox

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"It's a Jungle Out There." Bodysuit by Alexander McQueen. Brown leather with bleached denim and taxidermy crocodile heads. 1997-98.

Contemporary Theatre Review‘s uniformed delivery boy was at my door at six this morning, bearing with him the new issue 21.4; my review of this summer’s Alexander McQueen exhibition at the Met appears in the “Backpages” section of this new issue, along with an essay on “New Women Playwrights” by Aleks Sierz, a history of Martin Crimp’s plays in Australia by Vicky Angelaki, and Philip Hager’s discussion of the protests in Athens. Indeed, this issue of the journal is just packed with goodies: before you get to “Backpages,” there is an extensive discussion of Tim Crouch’s play The Author, with contributions from Helen Iball, Chris Goode, Stephen Bottoms, and Crouch himself. The issue is available online here. My academic friends may be able to access this through their institutions — I’m afraid I can’t help the rest.

I first wrote about McQueen on 9 May 2011; that post is below.

People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don’t see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality.
Alexander McQueen

Elegance, glamour and couture are anathema to the progressive collectivist; in fashion, they exploit the individuality of the body, not its absorption into a mass; especially couture, clothing fitted for the specific individual and resistant to mass reproduction. In the 1990s many designers — several of them British — used fashion and couture to examine the close relationship of the body, eros and death, as several British dramatists used the theatre and drama to explore the same relationship. In her 2007 book Fashion at the Edge, Caroline Evans wrote about these designers:

[Fashion] can be a symptom of alienation, loss, mourning, fear of contagion and death, instability and change. Like psychoanalysis, it “investigates the domain and configuration of incoherence, discontinuity, distruption and disintegration.” …

Fashion, with its affinity for transformation, can act out instability and loss but it can also, and equally, stake out the terrain of “becoming” — new social and sexual identities, masquerade and performativity. … If the imagery of late twentieth-century fashion seemed dark or bleak, it may be because it signalled an attempt to chart new social identities in a period of rapid change, while reflecting contemporary concerns with death and decay.

This description especially applies to the work of Alexander McQueen (1969-2010), whose career is now being investigated and celebrated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, running through 31 July. The resemblance of fashion to drama in McQueen’s dark but highly sexualized and erotic collection was noted even by The New York Times‘ Holland Carter in a review of the show last week, headlined “Designer as dramatist, and the tales he left behind.” “Clothes [in McQueen's later career] become costumes,” Carter writes, “with sensuous, sumptuous lives of their own” — an admission of the erotically transformative effect of couture, clothes making the woman as well as the man. Carter also writes:

Mr. McQueen repeatedly said, as have many other designers before him, that his intention was to “empower women” through his designs, though the impression often is that he’s hobbling, even tormenting them. And while his insistence on political content is one of the more intriguing aspects of his work, it is also one of the slipperiest and least resolved.

Both fashion and theatre are fetish and metaphor, the object standing in for an abstraction. Carter above touches on but does not resolve or investigate the darker reaches and redefinitions of the empowerment of the bodies and individuals within these costumes, for it’s an empowerment and imagination that touches and even exceeds at times the taboo. There is a torment in the furthest reaches of ecstasy and desire: a giving-up of the self; through costume and theatre we play with the imaginations of this torment, as well as its furthest reaches of associated pleasure. In constriction and restraint there is a coursing of ecstasy in the body that, because restrained, can’t be released in gesture; instead it flows, again and again, over and over, circulating endlessly through the flesh, without respite. Far from objectifying the wearer, in the theatre the spectator, male or female, can participate in the erotic and subjective reconstruction of the wearer, provided they are open to the empathetic imagination. (If women can imaginatively participate in the “male gaze” that Molly Haskell identified in cinematic spectatorship in 1972, it’s certainly possible for men to participate in a similar “female gaze”: a more difficult project, however, for it requires an ever greater repudiation of a conventional sexual consciousness embedded in the Culture Industry and its products.) Erotic tragedy requires a costume designer who acknowledges the elitism of couture; the darker intersections of politics, culture, eros and death; and the possibilities of imaginative erotic expression through the clothed body.

There are other theatremakers, such as Jan Fabre in Belgium and Piotr Tomaszuk in Poland, who recognize couture’s erotic and tragic contribution to theatrical presentation. It is no surprise that the British dramatist closest to McQueen’s sensibility is Howard Barker. Barker, who designs the costumes for his own productions under the pseudonym Billie Kaiser, is keenly aware of the nexus of fashion, drama, tragedy and eros; his costumes, too, strain against the regimented conformity of everyday fashion in an attempt to touch on the tragic and erotic streams that run beneath experience and can empower new human possibilities of imagination. He acknowledges that this attempt requires a daring eroticization and surrender of the self through its cultural representation in clothing — one gives one’s self up to what one wears in a process of erotic transformation. In a 2010 interview with Mark Brown, included in the recent collection Howard Barker Interviews 1980-2010: Conversations in Catastrophe, Brown asks Barker about the subject of high heels in Barker’s work (“about which things have been written,” Barker laughingly responds):

BROWN: I’m intrigued by the use of high heels in much of your work. It subverts the vapid use of them as a mere fetish. It elevates  physically, of course, and enhances, for many actresses, their capacity for elegance.

BARKER: There are two stage aspects to this garment. One is that it gives height, obviously, and posture, because it alters a woman’s shape profoundly. Women have been wearing high heels since at least the third century BC; it’s well recorded. So, they’re inherent in European culture; there’s something profoundly historic about this garment.

You might say it has a symbolic relation with sexuality and its opposite, appearing and disappearing with climates of erotic expression and repression. Also — speaking purely artistically, purely of the stage and film — heels have a tremendous sonic value. The actress appearing and disappearing — announced and then the sound slowly decaying — must recall every child’s memory of the passage of women on the pavement, one of the deep resonances of infancy, and embedded in the sexual imagination.

BROWN: Some actresses seem to grasp this from your work, almost instinctively. I discovered this recently, whilst working on … [a] reading of your (Uncle) Vanya. The young actress Nicola Daley — although she was, in fact, playing Chekhov — talked about her sense that she required high heels. Even playing a male role, she sensed from the play the need for her, as a woman on the stage, to have that elevation and authority. It wasn’t being required of her; she herself suggested it.

BARKER: … There was a generation of feminists who regarded high heels as the purest manifestation of enslavement to a sexual stereotype. These ideas seem less influential now. A new generation of women just sees them as part of the great cultural tradition of being a woman, which, first and foremost, elevates your arse.

The metaphysical and ideological implications of arse-elevation aside, Barker’s comments can be interpreted to encompass more of couture than footwear, of course. There is a fine online preview of the Met’s exhibition here.

Alexander McQueen, dramatist

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"It's a Jungle Out There." Bodysuit by Alexander McQueen. Brown leather with bleached denim and taxidermy crocodile heads. 1997-98.

People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don’t see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality.
Alexander McQueen

Elegance, glamour and couture are anathema to the progressive collectivist; in fashion, they exploit the individuality of the body, not its absorption into a mass; especially couture, clothing fitted for the specific individual and resistant to mass reproduction. In the 1990s many designers — several of them British — used fashion and couture to examine the close relationship of the body, eros and death, as several British dramatists used the theatre and drama to explore the same relationship. In her 2007 book Fashion at the Edge, Caroline Evans wrote about these designers:

[Fashion] can be a symptom of alienation, loss, mourning, fear of contagion and death, instability and change. Like psychoanalysis, it “investigates the domain and configuration of incoherence, discontinuity, distruption and disintegration.” …

Fashion, with its affinity for transformation, can act out instability and loss but it can also, and equally, stake out the terrain of “becoming” — new social and sexual identities, masquerade and performativity. … If the imagery of late twentieth-century fashion seemed dark or bleak, it may be because it signalled an attempt to chart new social identities in a period of rapid change, while reflecting contemporary concerns with death and decay.

This description especially applies to the work of Alexander McQueen (1969-2010), whose career is now being investigated and celebrated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, running through 31 July. The resemblance of fashion to drama in McQueen’s dark but highly sexualized and erotic collection was noted even by The New York Times‘ Holland Carter in a review of the show last week, headlined “Designer as dramatist, and the tales he left behind.” “Clothes [in McQueen's later career] become costumes,” Carter writes, “with sensuous, sumptuous lives of their own” — an admission of the erotically transformative effect of couture, clothes making the woman as well as the man. Carter also writes:

Mr. McQueen repeatedly said, as have many other designers before him, that his intention was to “empower women” through his designs, though the impression often is that he’s hobbling, even tormenting them. And while his insistence on political content is one of the more intriguing aspects of his work, it is also one of the slipperiest and least resolved.

Both fashion and theatre are fetish and metaphor, the object standing in for an abstraction. Carter above touches on but does not resolve or investigate the darker reaches and redefinitions of the empowerment of the bodies and individuals within these costumes, for it’s an empowerment and imagination that touches and even exceeds at times the taboo. There is a torment in the furthest reaches of ecstasy and desire: a giving-up of the self; through costume and theatre we play with the imaginations of this torment, as well as its furthest reaches of associated pleasure. In constriction and restraint there is a coursing of ecstasy in the body that, because restrained, can’t be released in gesture; instead it flows, again and again, over and over, circulating endlessly through the flesh, without respite. Far from objectifying the wearer, in the theatre the spectator, male or female, can participate in the erotic and subjective reconstruction of the wearer, provided they are open to the empathetic imagination. (If women can imaginatively participate in the “male gaze” that Molly Haskell identified in cinematic spectatorship in 1972, it’s certainly possible for men to participate in a similar “female gaze”: a more difficult project, however, for it requires an ever greater repudiation of a conventional sexual consciousness embedded in the Culture Industry and its products.) Erotic tragedy requires a costume designer who acknowledges the elitism of couture; the darker intersections of politics, culture, eros and death; and the possibilities of imaginative erotic expression through the clothed body.

There are other theatremakers, such as Jan Fabre in Belgium and Piotr Tomaszuk in Poland, who recognize couture’s erotic and tragic contribution to theatrical presentation. It is no surprise that the British dramatist closest to McQueen’s sensibility is Howard Barker. Barker, who designs the costumes for his own productions under the pseudonym Billie Kaiser, is keenly aware of the nexus of fashion, drama, tragedy and eros; his costumes, too, strain against the regimented conformity of everyday fashion in an attempt to touch on the tragic and erotic streams that run beneath experience and can empower new human possibilities of imagination. He acknowledges that this attempt requires a daring eroticization and surrender of the self through its cultural representation in clothing — one gives one’s self up to what one wears in a process of erotic transformation. In a 2010 interview with Mark Brown, included in the recent collection Howard Barker Interviews 1980-2010: Conversations in Catastrophe, Brown asks Barker about the subject of high heels in Barker’s work (“about which things have been written,” Barker laughingly responds):

BROWN: I’m intrigued by the use of high heels in much of your work. It subverts the vapid use of them as a mere fetish. It elevates  physically, of course, and enhances, for many actresses, their capacity for elegance.

BARKER: There are two stage aspects to this garment. One is that it gives height, obviously, and posture, because it alters a woman’s shape profoundly. Women have been wearing high heels since at least the third century BC; it’s well recorded. So, they’re inherent in European culture; there’s something profoundly historic about this garment.

You might say it has a symbolic relation with sexuality and its opposite, appearing and disappearing with climates of erotic expression and repression. Also — speaking purely artistically, purely of the stage and film — heels have a tremendous sonic value. The actress appearing and disappearing — announced and then the sound slowly decaying — must recall every child’s memory of the passage of women on the pavement, one of the deep resonances of infancy, and embedded in the sexual imagination.

BROWN: Some actresses seem to grasp this from your work, almost instinctively. I discovered this recently, whilst working on … [a] reading of your (Uncle) Vanya. The young actress Nicola Daley — although she was, in fact, playing Chekhov — talked about her sense that she required high heels. Even playing a male role, she sensed from the play the need for her, as a woman on the stage, to have that elevation and authority. It wasn’t being required of her; she herself suggested it.

BARKER: … There was a generation of feminists who regarded high heels as the purest manifestation of enslavement to a sexual stereotype. These ideas seem less influential now. A new generation of women just sees them as part of the great cultural tradition of being a woman, which, first and foremost, elevates your arse.

The metaphysical and ideological implications of arse-elevation aside, Barker’s comments can be interpreted to encompass more of couture than footwear, of course. I will be writing more about tragedy, eros, clothing and the McQueen exhibition for Contemporary Theatre Review later this year. In the meantime, there is a fine online preview of the Met’s exhibition here.

Upcoming: Birth of the Modern

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Gustav Klimt, "Two Girls with an Oleander" (c. 1890-92). Oil on canvas, 55 x 128.5 cm (21 5/8 x 50 5/8 in.). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Photograph © Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York

Opening next Thursday, 24 February, Birth of the Modern: Style and Identity in Vienna 1900 at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue in New York, is an examination of the redefinition of individual identity during the early days of modernism. Curated by Christian Witt-Dörring and Jill Lloyd, the show pays special attention to the means by which fashion, design, art and music exhibited the tensions that undermined the Victorian bourgeois culture of the 19th century and led to the ideas of modernity demonstrated by the work of Sigmund Freud, Robert Musil, Karl Kraus and dozens of other artists who considered Vienna their home at the turn of the century.

Featuring displays of work by fashion designers and decorative artists of the period, the show also features major paintings by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and Arnold Schönberg, though this is by no means all, according to the Web page for the exhibition:

The exhibition will fill both the second and third floors of the Neue Galerie, with each room taking a different approach to the theme of identity. One is devoted to changing representations of women, with paintings that range from the searing psychological portraits of Oskar Kokoschka to the decorative, highly nuanced canvases of Gustav Klimt. Another gallery explores the crossover among art, medicine, and psychology. Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl were two of the artists working in this milieu, driven by a common desire to pierce through the outer façade of appearance to reveal essential truths about the body and the mind. The final gallery on the second floor contains drawings by Klimt, Schiele, and others.

The third floor will begin with a room dedicated to architect Otto Wagner, father of the modern movement in Vienna. The second room will be dedicated to the artists of the Vienna Secession, and examples of the art they championed, ranging from French Impressionist paintings to Japanese prints. The final large gallery on this floor will be dedicated to Viennese decorative artists’ two divergent paths to Modernism: one exemplified by the members of the Wiener Werkstätte (Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, and Dagobert Peche) and their desire to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, and the other by the strict formalism of Adolf Loos. In a small fourth room, the music of composers such as Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg, with their wish to abandon established norms, will be explored.

Running through 27 June, the exhibition will be accompanied by several special events, including a 7 April lecture by Frederic Morton, who will discuss his classic history, A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889.

Reader of Superfluities Redux are aware of the close associations of fashion, art and culture that I take for granted, and I constantly find inspiration in the excellent exhibitions of the Neue Galerie. And not only myself; the exteriors, interiors and art of the museum have proven inspiration to several other as well, not least to contemporary fashion designers and photographers. I’m looking forward to the reception for and opening of this unique show, which should prove a highlight of the spring season.

Related material:

Transgressions and transformations in the erotic tragedy

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In Jan Fabre’s Prometheus — Landscape II, which closes this Sunday at Peak Performances, Io is played by a woman, naked most of the time but taking upon her body various fetishistic costume items (straps, a saddle, pumps) to emphasize her status as simultaneously beast and woman, animal and human, object and subject, expressed and expressive. According to Jan Kott, a staging of Prometheus Bound at Yale also featured an actress who, though not naked, also embodied the animal in the human not through costume but through gesture: “Irene Worth did not wear a mask with cow’s horns. Sometimes she would make a gesture of driving away the invisible gadfly with her left hand, as if wagging a tail. She would shift her weight impatiently from foot to foot; a couple of times she kicked her foot against the floor. Her costume was not stylized, she wore only a long dress. … Io is all body; chased and bleeding from the sting of the invisible gadfly, she cannot stand still for a moment.”[1]

The various versions of the Io myth differ as to whether it was Zeus or Hera who turned Io into a beast. But what is clear is that the human subject consciousness renders the body a willful object of desire and desirousness, especially once the Attic mask is removed and the naked human face, and the body, reflects this dual nature: the consciousness of other genders is a subjective knowledge, but the subject is bound in an unchanging body. In the erotic tragedy, several dual natures of Eros are expressed: male and female signifiers, the phallus and the womb, the transgressive erogenous zones of mouth and anus, can on the stage be traded and this exchange expressed through language and the body. Consciousness and imagination are trapped in the object world as the self is trapped in the body, but yearning for an experience impossible to it: to exchange male and female in the moment of jouissance. Costume then becomes mask, a symbolic expression of union: bound and unbound in the accoutrements of bondage and restraint, of the delicacy of silk and the bestial origin of leathers. The erotic tragedy encourages the spectator to then explore these dualities within their own experiences and relationships: to discover an erotic knowledge beyond that of the biological body, to trade male for female and vice versa, in so doing to open the path to creative transgressions and imaginative possibilities.

This is true in Tristan und Isolde, and in Shakespeare it can be found in the sexing, desexing and resexing of the title characters in Antony and Cleopatra. Kott finds it primarily in Shakespeare’s mid-period comedies:

The central theme of the love stories in Twelfth Night and As You Like It is the disguise of a girl as a boy. But again the full and complex significance of this disguise has its realization only on the stage. Viola on the stage becomes Cesario and Rosalind changes to Ganymede. Viola-Cesario is a girlish boy for Orsino, and a boyish girl for Olivia. Viola-Cesario is the “master mistress” of the Shakespearean sonnets. … I would like only to point out that in both plays we can find the eternal triangle of sex ambiguity that is exposed in the sonnets. This triangle is composed of a man, a boy, and a woman.

But Viola is Cesario; they have the same body. What is more, in a deep sense of Shakespearean parable, Sebastian also has the same body as Viola. The theatre is an imitation of an action by another action, of a body by another body. On the level of physical action — on the level of bodies — Viola-Cesario is either boy or girl, and the sense of ambiguity depends upon who takes this part — a boy, as on the Elizabethan stage, or a girl, as in modern times. If we choose a boy for the part of Viola or Rosalind the happy ending is illusory, the triangle of the Shakespearean sonnets remains unsolved, and the real meaning of As You Like It and Twelfth Night is a delusion. If we cast a boy for these parts, we have both acting and miming. Or, more precisely, we have a boy who mimes a girl who plays a boy. I am fairly sure this is the only way to render the full Shakespearean ambiguity.[2]

The gender transformations from girl-to-boy are exclusively rendered only in Shakespearean comedy, not in tragedy. Perhaps the alternate imaginative transformation was far too subversive for the society and culture of early seventeenth-century England, and thus was subverted in the tragedies into a more metaphorical, lyrical expression. Contemporary erotic tragedy can however garner these recognitions, and it can only do so meaningfully through a tragic consciousness that denies reconciliation. This is not to say that these imaginative experiments are necessarily drawn in pain and suffering, but rather produce the ecstasy that transcends both pain and pleasure (and indeed it is a transcendence within the subjective consciousness, not a comic reconciliation in the phenomenal world). Union is not reconciliation, but a being joined in the highest explorations of the sensual experience possible to the self expressed in the body. This is not possible in the theatre except through metaphor. But the theatre can encourage and demonstrate the union, the jouissance of the blinding exchange of male and female into a single being, in the bedroom of the spectator, after the performance, in the private world of the self — an exploration which, once undertaken, has unbounded possibilities in the public world as well.

Footnotes
  1. Jan Kott, The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy. New York: Random House, 1973, pp. 30-31. [↩]
  2. Jan Kott, Theatre Notebook: 1947-1967. Translated by Boleslaw Taborski. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968, p. 267. [↩]

The fashion photograph as erotic event

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The best fashion photographs present the body itself as a catastrophic erotic event rather than a narrative (which can be drawn from it, but only through the imposition of the spectator’s consciousness). The event is a rupture: the diametrical opposite of the theatre, it is caught in time, stopped for the splitsecond of the photographer’s shutter. As it is torn from time, it bears a presentation of the body which, far from being an object for the spectator’s gaze, is in the best photography a provocation by the photograph’s subject: a provocation the product of which is the subject’s evocation of his or her own seductive power. The photographer’s use of light, film and technology might be compared to the dramatist’s use of the word, time and space for the erotic consciousness, which similarly prepares for the spectator an event for contemplation (not unlike the work of Howard Barker and Richard Foreman). Specifically as the product of the fashion designer and the photographer as well, the fashion photograph partakes of that nexus between costume and body, which elicits the instinctual response of the spectator to the given image, which I wrote about last week. Catastrophic because torn from time, erotic because a product of the sensual body and the skin’s response to the clothes that it wears.

A word to recommend quite highly Purple Fashion, a Paris fashion magazine which I recently came across, edited by Olivier Zahm and Caroline Gaimari. Two  photographs from the current Spring/Summer 2010 issue have appeared in recent posts (here and here). The magazine is an artfully evocative publication that explores just the arena where eroticism, the body and philosophy co-exist. Issue 13 also includes an interview with writer and editor Philippe Sollers, the husband of psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva and founder of the Structuralist journal Tel Quel, which provides my quote for the day:

OLIVIER ZAHM — Is there any way to escape the society of the spectacle?
PHILIPPE SOLLERS — Yes, if you realize the simple fact that God has become Society. Therefore atheism today means escaping the spectacle, escaping that perpetual false present of social cinema that unfolds within individuals. Everyone thinks they’re acting in a global movie. You just have to look around you, on any mode of public transportation, or in the street — anywhere. Listen to conversations — nothing is said; each person is trying to have his own little advertising moment. It’s not even Warhol’s 15-minutes of fame. It’s not even 20 seconds, or even ten seconds. But there are a certain number of people who are aware of this general decrepitude. …

ZAHM — So what is love according to you?
SOLLERS — There is nothing more antisocial than love! They’re constantly selling you the opposite. Love is supposed to be social, but it’s not true. Love is a-social; it isolates. Society hates love and jouissance. It’ll do anything to stop it. And it does.

ZAHM — Does society celebrate love in order to control it and limit it to the family sphere?
SOLLERS — Yes, in the family, or in advertising, or in cinema — in the cinema which, once again, is the vision of society today. Love has to be a part of the scenario of the society. If you keep quiet — if you’re secretive, discrete [sic] — you’re already suspect. Yet you haven’t done anything except keep quiet. If something has happened to lovers, it’s in their interest that they commit to silence, except between themselves.

ZAHM – Does love have a political meaning for you?
SOLLERS — Lovers are criminals. Love is the non-manipulable. Love is free. As soon as it’s assigned a value, whether monetary, sentimental, or narcissistic, as soon as it takes shape as a value, that’s proof that it doesn’t exist. That is, it ceases to be free.

Purple Fashion is available at better magazine shops in New York; there is also a Web site for the magazine, as well as this blog.