Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II 0816678073, 9780816678075

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Clothing, Dress, Fashion: An Arcade
Introduction: WALKING THE WALK: CIRCULATION AND EXCHANGE
1 Accessory Questions
2 Krizia and Accessories
3 The Dress of Thought: CLOTHING AND NUDITY IN HOMER, VIRGIL, DANTE, AND ARIOSTO
4 Orbits of Power: RINGS IN JAMES MERRILL'S POETRY
5 Sheer Luxury: KATE CHOPIN'S "A PAIR OF SILK STOCKINGS"
6 Traveling Light: NELLIE BLY'S ALL-INCLUSIVE BAG
7 Like Their First Pair of High-Heeled Shoes: CONTINENTAL ACCESSORIES AND AUDREY HEPBURN' S CINEMATIC COMING OF AGE
8 Word-Processed for You by a Professional Seamstress
9 Slips of the Tongue: LESBIAN PULP FICTION AS HOW-TO-DRESS MANUALS
10 A Safety Pin for Elizabeth: HARD-EDGE ACCESSORIZING FROM PUNK SUBCULTURE TO HIGH FASHION
11 A Knot to Untie: SOCIAL POWER, FETISHISM, AND COMMUNICATION IN THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE TIE
12 Ornaments and Feminine Clothing Tradition in Algeria; or, The Identity Quest
13 It Is a Garage Sale at Savers Every Day: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE SAVERS THRIFT DEPARTMENT STORE IN MINNEA POLIS
Coda: SPEAKING OUT AND SPEAKING UP: THE CIRCULATING POWER OF FASHION
Contributors

Citation preview

E XC HAN G I N G C LOTH E S

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Habits of Being a c c e s s o r i z i n g t h e b o d y: h a b i t s o f b e i n g 1 exchanging clothes: habits of being 2

Exchanging CRISTINA GIORCELLI AND PAULA RABINOWITZ

editors

habits of being 2

CLOTHES U N I V E R S ITY O F M I N N ES OTA PR ESS

MINNEAPOLIS

.

LONDON

Copyright 2012 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data mmExchanging clothes : habits of being 2 / Cristina Giorcelli and Paula Rabinowitz, editors mmm(Habits of Being) mmisbn 978-0-8166-7806-8 (hardback) — isbn 978-0-8166-7807-5 (pb) mm1. Clothing and dress—Social aspects. 2. Fashion—Social aspects. 3. Gender identity. m4. Group identity. I. Giorcelli, Cristina. II. Rabinowitz, Paula. mgt525.e93 2012 m391—dc23 2012002772 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

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Clothing, Dress, Fashion: An Arcade

..........................................

xvii

Introduction walking the walk: circulation and exchange Paula Rabinowitz 1

....................................................................

15

Krizia and Accessories

MARIUCCIA MANDELLI (KRIZIA) 3

1

Accessory Questions

L A U R A M O N TA N I 2

..........................................................

....................................................

33

The Dress of Thought c l o t h i n g a n d n u d i t y i n h o m e r, virgil, dante, and ariosto

ANNE HOLLANDER 4

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39

Orbits of Power r i n g s i n j a m e s m e r r i l l’ s p o e t r y

ANDREA MARIANI

...................................................................

58

5

Sheer Luxury k a t e c h o p i n’ s “ a p a i r o f s i l k s t o c k i n g s”

CRISTINA GIORCELLI 6

...............................................................

78

Traveling Light n e l l i e b l y’ s a l l - i n c l u s i v e b a g

C R I S T I N A S C ATA M A C C H I A 7

..........................................................

97

Like Their First Pair of High-Heeled Shoes c o n t i n e n t a l a c c e s s o r i e s a n d a u d r e y h e p b u r n’ s cinematic coming of age

ALISIA GRACE CHASE 8

120

Word-Processed for You by a Professional Seamstress

KAREN REIMER 9

..............................................................

....................................................................

145

Slips of the Tongue lesbian pulp fiction as how-to-dress manuals

PAU L A R AB I N OW ITZ 10

...............................................................

149

A Safety Pin for Elizabeth hard-edge accessorizing from punk subculture to high fashion

V I T T O R I A C . C A R AT O Z Z O L O

........................................................

176

11

A Knot to Untie s o c i a l p o w e r, f e t i s h i s m , a n d c o m m u n i c a t i o n in the social history of the tie

N E LLO BAR I LE 12

.....................................................................

Ornaments and Feminine Clothing Tradition in Algeria; or, The Identity Quest

CHAFIKA DIB-MAROUF 13

193

.............................................................

212

It Is a Garage Sale at Savers Every Day an ethnography of the savers thrift department store in minneapolis

K ATA L I N M E D V E D E V

...............................................................

230

Coda speaking out and speaking up : the circulating power of fashion Cristina Giorcelli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 Contributors

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263

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Preface and Acknowledgments The four-volume English-language series Habits of Being extracts more than forty of the best essays included in the ongoing editions Abito e Identità: Ricerche di storia letteraria e culturale, edited by Cristina Giorcelli and published since 1995 by Edizioni Associate (volumes 1–3) and Ila Palma Press (volumes 4–11) of Rome and Palermo, Italy, augmenting them with a few newly commissioned ones and with examples of work by contemporary artists exploring the interface between text and textile. The result of seventeen years of research by international teams of scholars from Algeria, France, Hungary, Italy, and the United States, the series focuses on the multiple forms and meanings attached to various articles of clothing in literature, film, performance, art, and other cultural arenas as well as on the social, economic, and semiotic connotations of clothing. Bringing together the work of literary and film critics, art and fashion historians, semioticians, sociologists, historians, and ethnographers, as well as psychoanalysts, artists, and fashion designers, these books oƒer an English-speaking audience a rare glimpse of the important work being published in Italy, that most modish of nations. Moving among thematic, chronological, and aesthetic concerns, this series tracks clothing (especially accessories) around four cardinal points—top, bottom, inside, outside—to allude to the complex implications of power, meaning, and sensibility associated with, for example, the head (of state as much as of body) or the foot, interiority and exposure. Each volume addresses a complex of ideas encased within a set of terms that

at times appears contradictory. For instance, the first volume, Accessorizing the Body, reconsiders the cliché that clothes represent a “second skin” by showing how the body became an accessory within various political and artistic movements of the twentieth century. The second volume, Exchanging Clothes, looks at transnational circulation and exchange across time and space to consider how depictions of clothing in classic texts (for instance, Homer’s epics) might migrate into understandings of how items of clothing actually mutate within the secondary economy of used-clothing stores. The third volume is more traditional, organized by period (the nineteenth century) and place (Europe and the United States) to explore a crucial era within the consolidation and spread of Western culture, when dress signified class and other distinctions through excess and detail, even as mass production turned clothing into a commodity. The fourth and final volume interrogates connections between ornamentation and the quotidian, looking into how aspects of apparel decorate everyday lives as men and women daily don sunglasses and other mundane objects. Each book in the series addresses at once social and economic processes involving dress as well as psychic and ontological aspects of identity: for instance, “circulation” references global exchange of commodities or a pair of shoes walking the streets; “movement” stresses the fluidity of meaning—political, sexual, historical—attached to articles of clothing when worn in various contexts; “detail” focuses on accessorizing the body and the role of clothing in the construction of social formations; “intimacies” exposes how what appears outside is a complex of social meanings extending deep inside to the interior of the body and its psychic formations; and “value” addresses economic disparities coded within dress as well as examining how replication and individuation diƒerentiate aƒect. Obviously these fluid categories leak one into another because any attention to clothing and its representation necessitates awareness of what is seen and what is remembered for and by whom for what purpose activating which desires. As a continuous research project, the subjects in the series range from boardingschool attire to Futurist vestments, from lesbian pulp to Henry James, from used-clothing stores to analysts’ couches, from Spanish Fascist promotion of appropriate dress to

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / XII

Hungarian Jewish tailors embroidering the yellow star. The mix of essays provides a compelling argument for the inherent interdisciplinarity of fashion studies. Looking at how dress is represented in a work of fiction necessarily opens into a discussion of class, of social procedures, of psychic dimensions, of the texture of language itself; after all, text and textile share the same Latin root texere, to weave. Considering materials (literally, the stuƒ out of which stuƒ is made) requires a discourse that brushes economics up against aesthetics. That so many scholars (experts in the history of Italian education, in the history of East European socialism, in the ethnography of Algerian wedding practices, to name a few) can come together through attention to items of clothing speaks to the transhistorical and cross-cultural ubiquity of clothing. It is a basic human need. Yet the vast diƒerences and arcane meanings attached to any particular fashion trend or item of dress vary and change across classes, genders, time, and space. These embellishments appear utterly unnecessary. Such is the contradiction we all face daily. Fashion studies extends from the ethnographic approach of Joanne Eicher to the art historical readings of Anne Hollander, from literary critic Marjorie Garber’s inventive readings of transvestism to Germano Celant’s exhibition of Giorgio Armani’s couture at the Guggenheim Museum in 2000. This openness has attracted many distinguished scholars to our project. Most considered clothing here for the first time in their careers. Yet, once analyzed, the subject captivated them so deeply that they willingly extended their research to discover many original meditations on the materials covering bodies both real and imagined. By no means exhaustive, the essays in Habits of Being oƒer a range of styles, from rigorously archival to deeply textual, on objects and the reactions they induce in their wearers and in those who observe them, desire them, and perhaps also shop for them. As literary critics, much of our focus is on how literature relies on and participates in the construction of bodily presence through narrative or lyrical obsession with dress and habit. Because dress is at once tactile and visual—and often aural, like the crinkly sound of a crinoline or the swish of satin—the art of creating literary eƒects of touch and sight (and sound), especially when they are so intimately associated with character, oƒers tour

XIII / PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

de force examples of a writer’s skill in conveying aƒect through description. More obviously, film, photography, and visual culture present opportunities to foreground clothing, tracking its changing sensations over time. Film, especially from Hollywood’s Golden Era, worked hand in glove with the fashion industry, displaying the latest styles or costuming actresses in period clothing again and again to convey a world of opulence and ease seemingly accessible to all. Dress codes, whether school uniforms or corporate and government protocols, enforce, by contrast, a sense of clothing as a restrictive binding controlling one’s ability to express individuality. Clothing both opens up and clamps down the body and its myriad identities. Even the same article of clothing can be at once freeing and restrictive—an empty sign full of meaning. The essays in this series are concerned with how subjectivity and identity, intimately tied to processes of incorporation, projection, and desire, are evoked by an item of dress. Before opening the arena to scholars, each volume begins with an essay by a woman psychoanalyst. Given the complexity of the problematic of clothes, it seemed essential to open each book with a reflection that ponders its meaning in relation to identity from the point of view of the psychoanalyst’s particular school—Freudian, Lacanian, Jungian. In every case, her evocative, even innovative, elaboration on the sparse shreds that the various masters incidentally jotted down calls for new ways of thinking about the habits of being. For instance, Sigmund Freud noted Dora’s schmuckasten but could never fathom what she meant when she asserted her right to own, and show oƒ, such a fashionable item—sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but a purse is never just a purse. In every volume we also include a discussion by a noted fashion designer and a work by a woman artist who appropriates traditional Western assumptions that weaving and sewing are aspects of women’s work to create stunning visual links between text and textile. Like careful shoppers, we are selective in our choices, and so we include the views of masters of fashion design whose hands-on expertise and attention to detail augments the psychoanalytic and philosophical considerations of the analysts and the aesthetic renderings of the artists. They remind us that all clothing is at once conceptual (someone designed each piece) and material (someone made it). Made for use yet extravagant; quotidian yet unique. What else is culture?

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / XIV

Attention to the mechanisms by which clothing and its representation aƒect psychic and social structures underlies most of the essays, no matter how diverse their approaches. Representations of clothing, like the items themselves, can take on a fetishistic quality. Identity is perhaps little more than a matter of habit, of what is put on every day, to construct one’s being. A habit of being, clothed in the world and in the imagination. This book is the result of deep commitments of our contributors to this ongoing research project; we are grateful for their collaboration, enthusiasm, and insight. We thank our indefatigable research assistant, Sara Cohen, for taking care of the finishing touches on this volume. Support for the project came from the Dipartimento di Studi Euro-Americani of the Università degli Studi di Roma Tre and from the Department of English, the Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities of the College of Liberal Arts, and the Imagine Fund of the University of Minnesota. Our editor at the University of Minnesota Press, Douglas Armato (devoted to this eƒort from the beginning), and his assistant, Danielle Kasprzak, as well as Nancy Sauro, helped guide us and trusted us to follow them through the process of turning an Italian series into an American one. Our reviewers Caroline Evans and Cynthia Kuhn, as well as an anonymous reader, gave cogent and encouraging suggestions that made this a stronger work. Chafika Dib-Marouf’s “Ornaments and Feminine Clothing Tradition in Algeria; or, The Identity Quest” was first published in French in volume 3 of Abito e Identità (1999); April Ane Knutson translated it. Laura Montani’s “Accessory Questions” and “Krizia and Accessories,” by Mariuccia Mandelli (Krizia), were originally published in Italian in volume 4 of Abito e Identità (2001). Vittoria C. Caratozzolo’s “A Safety Pin for Elizabeth: Hard-Edge Accessorizing from Punk Subculture to High Fashion” and Alisia Grace Chase’s “Like Their First Pair of High-Heeled Shoes: Continental Accessories and Audrey Hepburn’s Cinematic Coming of Age” were first published (the former in Italian) in volume 5 of Abito e Identità (2004). Cristina Giorcelli’s “Sheer Luxury: Kate Chopin’s ‘A Pair of Silk Stockings’” and Andrea Mariani’s “Orbits of Power: Rings in James Merrill’s Poetry” (the latter originally written in Italian) were first published in volume 6 of

XV / PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Abito e Identità (2006). Nello Barile’s “A Knot to Untie: Social Power, Fetishism, and Communication in the Social History of the Tie” was originally published in Italian with Paula Rabinowitz’s “Slips of the Tongue: Lesbian Pulp Fiction as How-to-Dress Manuals” in volume 7 of Abito e Identità (2007). Anne Hollander’s “The Dress of Thought: Clothing and Nudity in Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Ariosto” was first published in volume 8 of Abito e Identità (2008).

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / XVI

Clothing, Dress, Fashion: An Arcade The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abominable unto the LORD thy God. DEUTERONOMY 22:5

You must needs have dresses embroidered with gold; you like to do your perfumed hair in countless diƒerent ways; you must have sparkling rings upon your fingers. You adorn your necks with pearls brought from the East, pearls so big that your ears can scarcely bear the weight of them. OVI D

, The Art of Beauty

A complete description of people’s costumes is apt to be tedious, but as in stories the first thing that is said about the characters is invariably what they wore, I shall once in a way attempt such a description. LADY M U R ASAK I

, The Tale of Genji

Man was an animal compounded of two dresses, the natural and the celestial suit, which were the body and the soul; that the soul was the outward, and the body the inward clothing. . . . By all which it is manifest that the outward dress must needs be the soul. J O N AT H A N S W I F T

, “A Tale of a Tub”

The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is Decoration. T H O M A S C A R LY L E

, Sartor Resartus

It was dressed entirely in black, and of the very finest cloth; it had patent leather boots, and a hat that could be folded together, so that it was bare crown and brim; not to speak of what we already know it had—seals, gold neck-chain, and diamond rings; yes, the shadow was well-dressed, and it was just that which made it quite a man. HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

, “The Shadow”

What shall we call our “self”? where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I’ve a great respect for things! . . . these things are all expressive. H E N RY JAM ES

, Portrait of a Lady

Fashion includes a peculiar attraction of limitation, the attraction of a simultaneous beginning and end, the charm of novelty coupled to that of transitoriness. GEORG SIMMEL

, “The Philosophy of Fashion”

The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are part of it. EDITH WHARTON

, The House of Mirth

CLOTHING, DRESS, FASHION / XVIII

The human animal shows in its clothing as conspicuously as in many other ways, the peculiar power of extraphysical expression. C HAR LOT TE PE R K I N S G I L MAN

, The Dress of Women

A blue coat is guided away, guided and guided away, that is the particular color that is used for that length and not any width not even more than a shadow. GERTRUDE STEIN

, “A Blue Coat”

Let there be fashion, down with art. MAX ERNST

, Let There Be Fashion, Down with Art

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them. VIRGINIA WOOLF

, Orlando

The eternal is in any case far more the ru‰e on a dress than some idea. W A LT E R B E N J A M I N

, The Arcades Project

Fashion is art’s permanent confession that it is not what it claims to be. THEODOR ADORNO

, Aesthetic Theory

“Nuncle, you’re looking wonderful this evening. Black suits you perfectly. But what are you looking at? Are you courting death?” GI USE PPE TOMASI DI LAM PE DUSA

, The Leopard

If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to wear the proper clothing. G R A C E K E L LY

to

JIMMY STEWART

XIX / CLOTHING, DRESS, FASHION

in Rear Window

The male subject, like the female subject, has no visual status apart from dress and/or adornment. K A J A S I LV E R M A N

, “Fragments of a Discourse on Fashion”

Dress is a sculpture in movement. VIVIAN E AU BRY

, Costumes II

As a playful and gratuitous representation and a factitious sign, fashionable dress has broken all ties with the past; it draws the essence of its prestige from the ephemeral, scintillating, fascinating present. GI LLES LI POVETSKY

, The Empire of Fashion

A contemporary metropolis is that social site where individuals present and represent themselves first of all through the form and style of appearances. ROBERTO GRANDI

, “Fashion and the Ambiguous Representation of the Other”

The real opposition is not between soul and body, but between life and garment. MARIO PERNIOLA

, The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic

I enter the garment. It is as if I were going into the water. I enter the dress as I enter the water, which envelops me and, without eƒacing me, hides me transparently. HÉLÈN E CIXOUS

, “Sonia Rykiel in Translation”

Clothes like lovers, or, better, instead of lovers. SEAN BLAZER

, Merchants of Fashion

CLOTHING, DRESS, FASHION / XX

To write on clothing implies trying to consider garments no longer . . . as secondary elements, as accessories, but as primary, founding elements that determine individual behaviors as well as social structures. FRÉDÉRIC MONNEYRON

, The Essential Frivolity: On Clothing and Fashion

Fashion is the foundation of dress. Style is imparted to it by the wearer, and the accessories are its expression. CARRIE A. HALL

, From Hoopskirts to Nudity

Marie Antoinette sold her soul, and eventually the crown of her husband’s realm, to her milliner, Rose Bertin. COLIN MCDOWELL

, Hats, Status, and Glamour

For clothing, its style is its essence. ANNE HOLLANDER

, Seeing through Clothes

Among primates, only humans regularly use adornment. VA L E R I E S T E E L E

, “Appearance and Identity”

Adornment is the woman, she exists veiled; only thus can she represent lack, be what is wanted. S T E P H E N H E AT H

, “Joan Riviere and the Masquerade”

Dress is the way in which individuals learn to live in their bodies and feel at home in them. JOANNE ENTWISTLE

, The Fashioned Body

XXI / CLOTHING, DRESS, FASHION

Perfume . . . is our own shadow. It is a luxurious mirage, our transparency, a majestic choreography, a kind of inner palace, an architecture of exquisite crystal. SERGE LUTENS

, “My Perfumes”

Clothes are inevitable. They are nothing less than the furniture of the mind made visible. J A M E S L AV E R

, Style in Costume

I think my clothes allow someone to be truly an individual. VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

, in “A Conversation

with Vivienne Westwood,” by Tara Sutton

CLOTHING, DRESS, FASHION / XXII

INTRODUCTION

W A LKI N G TH E W A LK CIRCULATION AND EXCHANGE

Paula Rabinowitz Between May 10 and 14, 2010, Kate Gilmore’s Public Art Fund–sponsored installation Walk the Walk was on exhibit in a corner of New York’s Bryant Park. Set behind the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street, home of Fashion Week and Midtown urban refuge for the hundreds of thousands of o~ce workers in the surrounding buildings, the “hardcore endurance” installation featured seven young women dressed in identical canary-yellow shifts, pink cardigan sweaters (when the weather was cool), and ivory pumps continuously walking in five-hour shifts between 8:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Ms. Gilmore had bought their identical rayon-and-spandex cowl-neck dresses in bulk online from the “career dresses” section of Chadwick’s, a budget clothier.1 The women (some accounts mention nine, some fourteen, performers) were paid $15 per hour for their eƒorts, and Gilmore insisted that they not be dancers or actors, preferring to use a variety of women whose size, body type, and ethnicity reflected the diversity of the city. The eight-foot high and ten-foot square pedestal on which they performed this promenade was at once a soapbox, a catwalk runway, a crowded intersection, and an o~ce cubicle where the seven women walked sometimes determinedly, sometimes hesitantly across, beside, and around one another’s paths. Choosing outfits from online catalogs, the sorts

of low-budget businesswear any secretary might acquire, Gilmore purposely sought unnervingly bright yellow, a color that “matched the taxis, Spring flowers and umbrellas” within view of the park that, like her video performances, would contrast with the drab gray of the concrete sidewalks and the men’s suits rushing by.2 This paean to antifashion, located in the site of fashion’s most public New York display, served as “a kind of ephemeral monument to city workers and urban energy.”3 Gilmore’s performers transform the workday into a visual spectacle and dissonant symphony. Public Art Fund Director and Chief Curator Nicholas Baume observes: “In Walk the Walk, the o~ce cubicle has morphed into a room-sized open structure. No longer confined by it, Gilmore’s o~ce troupe has literally raised the roof, making it center stage for their visually and acoustically startling performance.” Bright yellow walls beckon passersby inside, providing a multi-sensory experience . . . enveloped by the reverberations of the stomping feet overhead.4

Gilmore’s eƒort to encapsulate the frenetic movement and accompanying boredom, the conformity and resistance that are the actual experiences of the second sex in the city, subverting the site of high fashion by forcing passersby to gaze and listen to the random cacophony of monotony, oƒers a fitting allegory for the themes of this volume—circulation and exchange. The women perform an endless series of nonverbal exchanges, navigating the anonymity of the city as they circle the confined space of their exposed o~ce. Replicants who nevertheless stand out because of the garish colors they wear, each slightly diƒerently, they also vivify the social nature of the commodity and labor. They are the spectacles of commodity exchange, their bodies moving in endless circles, anonymous yet social. Gilmore’s installation emphatically showcases how the spaces of urban life are charged with a dynamism that forces visual and auditory interactions with practically every step. As an allegory it works to reveal how clothing is identity while at the same time can never wholly contain or express it. Like the invasions and evasions of space it produces and satirizes, the piece comments on the patterns of transit and transfer that

PAULA RABINOWITZ / 2

FIGURE I.1

Kate Gilmore, Walk the Walk, 2010. Photographer Adi Shniderman. Courtesy of the

artist.

accumulate around daily life. Walter Benjamin might have been describing the eƒect instead of German Romantic drama, Trauerspiel, when he observed, “That awkward heavyhandedness, which has been attributed either to lack of talent on the part of the artist or lack of insight on the part of the patron, is essential to allegory.” In this, Gilmore’s installation enacts—as allegory must—a variety of meanings, “a veritable eruption of images, which gives rise to a chaotic mass of metaphors.”5 One might see it as a tale about fashion itself as it restlessly moves across space and time in search of innovative ideas and patterns. As Alison Gill notes of “deconstruction fashion”: There are certainly well-documented signs that old hierarchies dividing designer clothes from “everyday” clothes, the runway from the street as mutually exclusive spheres, are being eroded. Today, in the terms of a highly publicized fashion industry, the temporal and spatial measures that mark the diƒerence between “true” innovation and its disseminated popular forms, middle ground of being in fashion, are constantly

3 / INTRODUCTION

being eroded by rapid media circulation, the widespread practices of reinventing historical styles, mass production and international distribution (manufacturers of massproduced clothes constantly watch the runway, reproducing styles with small changes and cheaper fabrics for mass market audiences).6

Gill’s astute reading of the demotic eƒects of mass circulation hedges a bit, “certainly” it is not, as the designers she surveys—Martin Margiela, especially—are not making street clothes, even if Patti Smith wears Ann Demeulemeester. Still, as Miranda (Meryl Streep) lectures her naive new assistant Andy (Anne Hathaway) in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), her “lumpy blue sweater” fished from “some tragic Casual Corner clearance bin” is precisely that shade of blue—“cerulean, not turquoise or lapis”—because it’s been “selected for you,” as it filters down in a process dating back to 2002 when Oscar de la Renta showed his collection of cerulean gowns and later Yves Saint Laurent created his cerulean military jackets. Fashion exempts no one within its trickle-down economy. But, as Vittoria C. Caratozzolo brilliantly demonstrates, the filtering process is reversible, it goes two ways—safety pins also moved from the cheeks of London punks to the seams of Gianni Versace’s gown. Circulation is the life of fashion. Any item of clothing participates in a system that exchanges one thing, one sensation, one memory, one desire, for another. Or as Karl Marx would have it: In so far as exchange is a process, by which commodities are transferred from hands in which they are non-use-values, to hands in which they become use-values, it is a social circulation of matter. The product of one form of useful labour replaces that of another. When once a commodity has found a resting-place, where it can serve as a usevalue, it falls out of the sphere of exchange into that of consumption.7

In Marx’s account of commodities, a complex transfer—not too diƒerent from the fashion industry moving from Oscar de la Renta to Casual Corner—of products is exchanged. The exchange between hands shifts matter from one use to another and it is this shifting, restless quality that Gilmore’s walking women publicly restage, as the

PAULA RABINOWITZ / 4

women themselves, representing lowly workers, become commodities. Marx dramatizes this circuit as well, expanding the stage from the confines of Gilmore’s pedestal to an ever-expanding arena that ultimately seeks to encircle the globe. The total of all the diƒerent circuits constitutes the circulation of commodities. . . . Only consider the course of events. The weaver has, as a matter of fact, exchanged his linen for a Bible, his own commodity for that of some one else. But this is true only so far as he himself is concerned. The seller of the Bible, who prefers something to warm his inside, no more thought of exchanging his Bible for linen than our weaver knew that wheat had been exchanged for his linen. . . . The exchange of commodities breaks through all local and personal bounds inseparable from direct barter, and develops circulation of the products of social labour . . . it develops a whole network of social relations spontaneous in their growth and entirely beyond the control of the actors. (112; emphasis in original)

In his discussion of the circulation of commodities and the series of exchanges entailed in the flows and circuits of money and circulation of goods, Marx describes a weblike “network” that moves across space and over time as each object replaces and stands in for another and as the currency of money ultimately stands in for them all. His classic scenario—weaver’s linen (which was bought by a farmer selling wheat) for merchant’s Bible for distiller’s brandy—all facilitated by currency: this is the “starting-point of capital” (142). “Circulation sweats money from every pore,” as he graphically puts it (113). While not all the essays in this volume are concerned with the circulation of commodities—in fact, some are expressly about precapitalist aesthetics—the twofold process of circulating and exchanging clothes—involving iconography, objects, stories, and colors—is recounted, collected, discarded, and reused in the various essays. In his discussion of commodities, Marx is careful to distinguish between linen and boots (one exchanged for another through currency, the medium of money), between wood and table (one transformed as the other, yet remaining itself by labor) (71).Yet he also is astutely aware of the entire process of circulation and exchange as social, as a complex system of

5 / INTRODUCTION

needs, desires, opportunities, abilities, and so forth. Narratives, images, and habits—for we are discussing clothing and identity in this case—are no diƒerent. Ideas and discourses circulate and are exchanged, in the process becoming transformed at the hands of new practitioners, new users. Marx’s formulation is hardly the rigid, unidimensional structure often attributed to his model of materialist thought; instead his vision is of the ever-expanding and anonymous exchange process in which a series of autonomous transactions proliferates in multiple directions, each facilitated by divergent tracks of currency, on the one hand, and the circulation of commodities, on the other. This circulation, then, is not a “contained entity,” a confining totalizing circle, but as Alison Gill notes of the hermeneutic process in general, “rather the circular structure delineates a pathway of interpretation, encounter, and a relation of mutual understanding and eƒect.”8 Sweating money from every pore, circulation enacts the return of the repressed as that which seems to be discarded reappears anew in a creatively transfigured guise. This model of circulation and exchange as a dynamic, shifting, and dependent mode can be applied not only to materialized commodities, but allegorically to images, ideas, traces, and of most relevance to this volume, fashion and all its aspects—the nude body, the accessorized outfit, the sense of style, the ritualized dress, the icons of adornment. How clothing as a vestige and artifact and transmitter of identity moves from one literary source to another visual one, from one use to another, from one fantasy to another fad, forms the underlying substrate beneath this collection of essays. In one way or another, the conjunction of clothing and identity is always an exchange, a substitution of the visible outer layer for a supposed inner one, impenetrable to the gaze but in endless circulation within multiple locations and temporalities. Habits are really all we have of being: addictions, appearances, bearings, among Webster’s many definitions, they surround the body and emanate from within it, defining at once a locus and its makeup. As Anne Hollander’s elegant readings of the epic poems of Western culture—from Homer through Virgil to Dante and Ariosto—sketch, the habits of the hero,

PAULA RABINOWITZ / 6

always male, must oscillate between armor and nudity. Heroes cannot be seen to wear clothing—draped fabric is the stuƒ made by and for women. So the imagination, even Dante’s, fails to adorn the legion of poet-heroes past who come into view as shades, disarming like their own heroic protagonists—fully revealed yet strangely unadorned. “The Dress of Thought,” as she calls it, from classical Greece and Rome, is inaccessible except through the remnants of language. This incompleteness, this failure to imagine in works so rich with imagery that they have spawned centuries of art and poetry, is precisely what is so fundamental about the nexus of clothing and identity, of habits of being, as psychoanalyst Laura Montani notes in her provocative “Accessory Questions.” She asks us to consider the partiality and incompleteness of identity as if it were an attachment that completes the ensemble. Clothing, and its accessories, is thus not metaphorical but rather ontological—a basis of identity formation that always generates new and additionally unfinished desires in the restless subject who longs for fulfillment and connection. Accessorizing is not simply a matter of addition—putting something on to accompany the main attire—it is a mode of being itself; it’s all there is . . . to us. We are the accessories of our own desire, forever adding another piece to an ensemble made up of recycled objects, never quite finding the right item to finally complete it. In the restless and futile search for desire’s fulfillment, capitalism comes to the rescue—proliferating desires as it manufactures new things along with new needs. A man clearly doesn’t need another tie to add to his collection, but in America, Father’s Day gifts celebrate the myriad choices always available; no man can possess every pattern, every color of Italian silk. These excesses, as Nello Barile demonstrates, signify an odd contradiction; patriarchal power, within the military or business, reduces men’s ability to stand out so that the tie encircling a neck and knotted tightly as a noose becomes the paradoxical vehicle to display diƒerences in taste, rank, or status, even as it acts to control and restrict each wearer. Yet these slivers of silk possess enormous symbolic value; news reports endlessly dissected the signal President Bill Clinton might have sent when he gave a speech during the impeachment and special prosecutor investigations, on August 6,

7 / INTRODUCTION

1998, wearing the gold-and-blue print cravat by Italian designer Ermenegildo Zegna given him by Monica Lewinsky as a fiftieth birthday present. But even this most popular design, known as the “Clinton tie,” will eventually go out of style. Fat or thin, short or long, bowtie or necktie—these minute distinctions, like all fashion trends, occur with rhythmic frequency, spawning the enormous business of used-clothing shops designed to empty the closets of overproduction and shopaholics, even as they facilitate the endless exchange and recycling of clothing from retail store to consumer to secondhand store to yet another customer now attracted by price and perhaps by the expressly unfashionable quality of last season’s piece only to reclaim it as a retro item destined for streetwear, which is then apt to influence a new set of designs. Katalin Medvedev, an admitted clotheshorse herself, conducts an ethnography of Savers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a branch of a global used-clothing (and other materials) chain that is part of the circulation of goods from Western capitalism, which now relies on sweatshop labor located in Asia and Central and South America, to the markets of African nations. This global circulation is mirrored in microcosm in the daily acts of workers and shoppers in this giant used-clothing emporium. As many of her informants mention, however, price is only one motivator; the “thrill of the hunt” for a great buy, for a perfect accessory, for an ironic statement—one that eschews acquiring something new—serves as well to goad shoppers to purchase bundles of others’ discarded clothing. It is precisely the move from back of the closet to the street, a rejection of bourgeois norms of getting and spending, that fired the punk scene that grew out of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s SEX shop in mid-1970s Thatcherite Britain. Vittoria C. Caratozzolo demonstrates how high fashion is attuned to the workings of social, economic, and political reverberations: in this case, channeling punk alienation into couture. But this is not entirely an example of designers ripping oƒ “punk’s subterranean and anarchic style.” “The punk subculture, then, signified chaos at every level, but this was only possible because the style itself was so thoroughly ordered,” notes Dick Hebdige.9 This order was tailored, so to speak, for reappropriation by bad-boy designers, ultimately finding its way

PAULA RABINOWITZ / 8

onto movie stars’ red-carpet appearances. This circular motion rotates, but it also migrates across classes, eras, and cultures as value diminishes and then accrues and is resituated elsewhere. Subcultures, because they are subterranean, operate outside of dominant culture; but they are, as the term suggests, deeply embedded within it, located below the surface but lived and felt by those forming them, sometimes noticed by those remaining aboveground. In the 1950s, American lesbians had few venues to meet and interact, so it fell to another form of subculture—paperbacks—to help carve a space for locating identity. This circulation from mass publishing industry into girls’ bedrooms demonstrates how materials shift meanings and uses as they are taken up and used by those on the margins of society. The covers and descriptions of lesbian pulp fiction not only oƒered signals to unvoiced desires within their narratives, but as I argue in “Slips of the Tongue,” they served more mundane functions: they taught a woman how to dress like a lesbian, to express an identity recognizable to others. Reading matter became a device to facilitate uncovering one’s sexuality and to find women to love beyond the urban gay zones charted by George Chauncey, who notes that the “social and spatial organization of gay male and lesbian life inevitably took diƒerent forms” due to men’s greater access to income and mobility.1 0 Buying a paperback book, even one with a racy cover, however, was part of a private experience in keeping with a proper role for women, and the zones in which these books were set were themselves places where one might meet other women as well—places at once within the sphere of propriety (department stores) and oƒ the beaten path (art schools). These were sites of exchange, where women changed their clothes and their money for some form of self-expression. Locating elsewhere—the sense that fashion and its articles travel across spaces that normally appear to divide social actors—also animates the ethnographic study of wedding gifts, dowries, and outfits worn by brides and their entourages in the small Western Algerian city of Tlemcen undertaken by Chafika Dib-Marouf. As she notes, “matrimonial exchanges” include much more than jewelry (often fashioned from antiquated

9 / INTRODUCTION

gold coins dating from the Middle Ages to those circulating during Emperor Louis Bonaparte’s rule, but also made from postindependence materials) as dowry, gift, or inheritance; the circulation of wealth and status is tied to the ways in which bridal jewelry and other items of finery stabilize social position as they also serve to hedge against future calamities and seek to incorporate modern attitudes as well. Thus the bride’s entire repertoire, including the apparel worn by her mother, sisters, cousins, in-laws, and so forth, circulates ideas about tradition and modernity with each gold or silver bangle, tiara, necklace, pair of earrings. Even in postcolonial Algeria, remnants of imperial France are exchanged and circulated in a complex cycle that helps constitute modern Algerian women’s “identity quest.” Circulation is as key to establishing women’s access to modernity as it was to establishing classic ideals about the heroic male warrior and poet. Anne Hollander shows how impossible it was to clothe the heroic male figure in anything other than his armor and nudity, while women flowed across the ages draped in the fabrics they worked as weavers. Textile artist Karen Reimer recycles the association of women’s work in cloth—this time sewing and embroidery—by reproducing an original printed text as a handcrafted sampler, thus forging a connection between her hand and the “professional seamstress” being trained by the instructional manual. In the process of hand-embroidering a printed text about sewing, thus creating a hand-made reproduction, she questions the notion of originality itself. The idea that armor fits the soldier for battle—not only as protection but to signify status—might be applied to the stripped-down wardrobe journalist Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane) had designed for her 1890 round-the-world tour. This outfit, featuring her signature checkered-patterned coat and miniature handbag, pared down the excessive weight of bourgeois women’s travel gear so typical of the grand tour and showed that a woman on her own could move around the planet, maintain a professional and dignified appearance, and do her work. Her image, according to Cristina Scatamacchia, as a single professional woman who could manage her own aƒairs—down to washing her draw-

PAULA RABINOWITZ / 10

ers—served as an iconic representation for the adventurous and resourceful female governess Mary Poppins and countless young middle-class American women eager for more worldly experiences in the new century, carrying their chic little Hermès bag or the disguised overnight Marc Cross satchel Grace Kelly brings with her to spend the night in Jimmy Stewart’s apartment in Rear Window. By midcentury, the European tour, as Alisia Chase shows in her tracings of Audrey Hepburn’s cross-Atlantic moves in Billy Wilder’s 1954 film Sabrina, at once looked back to Henry James’s naive heroine Daisy Miller and set the stage for American girls’ and women’s sexual revolution. Like the Pill, going to Europe, especially Paris (but also, as is clear in Ruth Orkin’s 1950 photograph, Italy, too), meant sexual awakening and freedom, signified by new wardrobes and accessories as much as by new attitudes. The formula was so powerful that the following year director David Lean sent another Hepburn, Katharine, across the ocean to find her erotic self in Venice with Rossano Brazzi in Summertime. From poodles to poodle skirts, American women and girls followed Audrey Hepburn’s smooth slide from gawky teenaged chauƒeur’s daughter to mature Givenchyoutfitted boss’s wife. Cooking classes never looked so good—and eventually Julia Child would make it possible to “master the art of French cooking” without the expense of travel! Navigating the world of luxury items—reading in detail, as Naomi Schor called it— is the lesson Mariuccia Mandelli, better known as Krizia, imparts to us in her lyrical tribute to the accessory as revelatory of subjectivity. She notes how seemingly marginal dress elements—she mentions watches and sunglasses and perfume—are perfectly located around the body and on its surface to exaggerate their significance. Each has become more than what it was originally: watches surely tell time and mark its passing, but they also point to wealth and prestige; sunglasses shield the sun’s damaging rays, but are now marked by designer logos; and perfumes, once used to mask odors when bathing was an ordeal, carry the names of the celebrities who develop and wear the fragrances bottled in stunning petite objects meant to decorate a bureau.

11 / INTRODUCTION

Andrea Mariani’s attention to detail extends to the complex meanings tied to two of James Merrill’s poems that circle around one of the most symbolic luxury items: rings. Linking Merrill’s meditation on his sexuality and his enchantment with the world of opera, a world at once associated with his mother and his homosexuality, Mariani shows how rings serve as modes of exchange between generations and lovers in both Merrill’s autobiographical works and his poems, as an emerald ring belonging to the poet’s mother is transferred to the poet—“for— // For when you marry. For your bride. It’s yours”—in a halting gesture in which an unspoken recognition of her son’s homosexuality is encoded in the blank spaces connecting and separating “for” and “For” and in the varying repetition of you/your/yours as his mother discards marriage and a bride, ultimately giving “The Emerald” to Merrill. Tapping into the mythological connotations of “orbits of power,” the ring at once is a cycle, a circle, that is epic (Wagner) and quotidian, a piece of bone on a finger. Luxury is what Kate Chopin’s “little” woman is also enchanted by when she takes her small sum of money meant to buy useful articles of clothing for her children and instead spends it on a pair of silk stockings. In her elegant reading of this precursor to The Awakening, Cristina Giorcelli finds in Chopin’s brief story of a poor woman’s captivation by luxury a tale of women’s deep connection to commodity culture. Silk stockings hug the skin, appealing to the sensuous charge of surfaces as material remakes skin, in fact remakes the entire identity of the shopper, when from purchasing her stockings she then proceeds to buy new boots and to dine on a delicious meal and finally to attend a theatrical performance, giving in to desires made possible by the simple exchange of coins for stuƒ and spectacle, until she herself becomes another’s spectacle. Silk stockings, the stuƒ of fantasy like gossamer wings, are really just vehicles for the transmission of stuƒ—the rude transfers of wheat and linen and Bibles and brandy that Marx used to define the social mechanism of capitalism. Kate Chopin’s “little” shopper becomes a double spectacle: first to herself as she puts on her silk stockings and her new boots and lifts her skirt to cross the street in pursuit of her meal and theater seat, a location where the spectacle performed on the stage is

PAULA RABINOWITZ / 12

matched by that of the matinee crowd displaying its finery; she later claims visual attention as she rides home on the streetcar apparently showing herself to be another profligate female spender. More than a century later, in another cosmopolitan city, Kate Gilmore’s walking women stomped across their constricted platform as bold spectacles of women’s circulation within the economy of exchange—women walk, women work, women wear. It should be clear from the essays in this volume that ideas about and materials of dress are in a continual process of recycling across time and space, undermining any attempt to fix them on the body. Beginning with Laura Montani’s meditation on the incompleteness of subjectivity, and thus its likeness to the accessorized outfit, and continuing with Krizia’s contemplation of fashion and time, the volume moves from Anne Hollander’s discussion of epic clothing and heroic bodies to Andrea Mariani’s references to Wagner’s Ring cycle in his discussion of James Merrill. Then desire becomes more quotidian as Cristina Giorcelli considers shopping as a highly personal quest; the search for new identity for turn-oftwentieth-century women sent journalist Nellie Bly around the world with her e~cient little satchel. She was followed by legions of young women modeling themselves on perky Audrey Hepburn, whose cross-class sexual adventures became the commodified fantasy of cheap paperbacks. But consumers put their purchases to all sorts of uses, and sensational tales of lesbian love helped define a new form of women’s sexuality. This process of cultural realignment works both ways—punks inspired couture even as they sought to annihilate the class structure it served, a story repeated in still another reversal by Nello Barile’s consideration of the tie. Its knot untied through semiotics helps make sense of the transfers of wealth and prestige tied up with the knot of marriage ethnographer Chafika Dib-Marouf located in the strands of coins and jewels encircling bridal parties. The method of participant observation crucial to the ethnographer sends Katalin Medvedev out shopping again, this time amid the remnants of American commerce, a second-hand shop where shoppers reclaim the old and discarded as new. Like Karen Reimer, they repossess the notion of originality through their recycled styles. “Origin,” remarked Walter Benjamin, “is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its

13 / INTRODUCTION

current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis . . . a process of restoration and reestablishment . . . and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete.”11 Exchanging clothes shapes identity—a habit of being otherwise, something imperfect and incomplete.

NOTES

1. Randy Kennedy, “Pounding the Pavement on Bryant Park Pedestal,” New York Times, May 8, 2010, C1. 2. Public Art Fund, “Walk the Walk” interview with Kate Gilmore, http://vimeo.com/11563453. 3. Roberta Smith, “Artist Struts Her Stuƒ in Other’s Shoes,” New York Times, May 13, 2010, C1, 5. 4. “Kate Gilmore’s Walk the Walk presented in Midtown Oasis,” ArtDaily.org, http://www.art daily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=37973. 5. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 187, 173. 6. Alison Gill, “Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Reassembled Clothes,” in Fashion Theory: A Reader, ed. Malcolm Barnard (London: Routledge, 2007), 493. 7. Karl Marx, Capital, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 1:104. Further citations in the text. 8. Gill, “Deconstruction Fashion,” 507. 9. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), 112, 113. 10. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 27. 11. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 45.

PAULA RABINOWITZ / 14

1

A C C E S S O RY Q U E STI O N S Laura Montani Zeus . . . said: “. . . I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers. . . .” He . . . cut men in two . . . and . . . bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn . . . that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility. p l a t o , Symposium (trans. Benjamin Jowett)

AC C E S S O R I E S : A S I G N I F Y I N G P R ACT I C E

The most ancient definition of the word “accessory,” together with the meaning it commonly has in current usage, suggests a unique spatial configuration where center and periphery are confused and intertwined. Anything that is marginal is, indeed, also a pathway required or necessary to get to a given point, a destination, taken to be a hypothetical center. In Italian, accessorio, as defined by the Garzanti dictionary, is similar to the English “accessory” but with a few interesting legal twists. “Accessory: that which accompanies or is added to that which is principal; secondary, complementary, marginal. From

Medieval Latin accessorium, from accedere, ‘to approach.’” The legal meaning of the word associates it closely with the acquisition of a main asset, to which that which is accessory is associated. This sense is central to my analysis: “an asset associated with another asset called principal, of which it completes the function; accessory right, that which is transmitted or acquired along with a main right.” If we go on browsing through the various meanings, we find that in real estate the term indicates “any of the delimited places [of a house] that cannot be called rooms, such as the kitchen, bathroom, closets, etc.” It is obvious that a house with rooms, but without accessories, would be uninhabitable. This again shows how the singular relation between what is considered central and what is considered accessory emerges clearly in the practical use of language. Finally, the last meaning of the term “accessory,” which is the most important one because it describes the crucial role of the signifying practice of the body, relates to clothing (“what completes a dress, etc.”). It tells us something about the close relationship between human beings and what they inhabit1 or entertain with their basic and structural incompleteness, their helplessness (Hilflosigkeit); and indeed, what is the criterion for establishing whether a dress is “complete” if not an exquisitely subjective one, always uncertain and suspended until approval is received through the gaze of the other? This incompleteness constantly needs to be “filled,” in forms and ways that have had many manifestations, yet whose deep meaning remains the same.

T H E A C C E S S O R Y : A P S Y C H O A N A LY T I C V I E W

On the contemporary epistemic stage, psychoanalysis inaugurates a research method where the accessory (i.e., the lapsus or Freudian slip, the parapraxes or “diverted actions,” the oversight) functions as a central tenet of its theoretical construction, and also as one of its main therapeutic instruments for discovering what is hidden behind those lapsi, diverted actions, oversights: the secret suƒering of patients. In the psychoanalytic field, the accessory is just as important as the symptom; and like the symptom, it has to do

LAU RA M O NTAN I / 16

with the unquestionably sulfurous structure of human sexuality (“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo,” says Freud in the frontispiece of The Interpretation of Dreams)2 that is subjected to that peculiar twist of desire Georges Bataille was to call eroticism, where what is central is not the actual enjoyment and real satisfaction as much as their imaginary satiation. A great example of this is the accessory-object that in English is called by the wonderful word pacifier (while the corresponding term in Italian is ciuccio, from ciucciare a colloquial term for “sucking,” a perfect example of an onomatopoeic word). The pacifier, which when placed in the baby’s mouth miraculously calms it, is neither the breast nor the mother; yet in a way it is both, an excellent example of the borderline space occupied by the accessory. On the border between reality and imagination, between essence and “instinctual representatives,” the accessory is tantamount to the “let’s pretend” that Freud relates to beliefs—to what cannot be known or recognized but which, in any case, leads to the production of “narrative constructions”— and Donald Winnicott correlates to illusions as preconditions for creativity.3 The semantic area configured by the term accessory presents several points of contact with the area called “part-object theory” in psychoanalytic theory. According to this theory, already present in nuce in Freud’s complex notion of “anaclisis”4 and later taken up and radicalized by Melanie Klein and her movement, recognition is impossible (if by recognition we mean the capacity to perceive another human being as a subject and not as an object) in the child’s representational universe, governed as it is by the laws of primary process. This fundamentally narcissistic device continues to operate in the adult (on the basis of the postulate that the unconscious is timeless) through the so-called secondary processes, in the form of traces, signs. In other words, it is a springboard for the construction of the symbolic apparatus. According to part-object theory, the primary process has its roots in drives and tends toward the other as object, an object of satisfaction and enjoyment, and therefore lacks the complex semantic meaning found in Freud or in Jacques Lacan’s vision. I would add, incidentally, that the part-object theory, which dominates the Kleinian universe, is also the theory that has driven therapy to be excessively “superegoic,” or in other words, moralistic. According to this specific methodology,

17 / ACCESSORY QUESTIONS

through “the cure,” patients are led to recognize their illusions as such. Once these are removed, patients can confront their inability to recognize the other as a person or, to use a Kleinian expression, as a “total object.” There is no doubt that Freud was the first to adopt a theory of desire where the other, as part-object (Lacan would say “objet petit a”), is an accessory of the subject experiencing the desire; but he also inaugurated a “relational theory” where the other not only becomes a very peculiar, very precious and dangerous accessory, inseparable from the desire for total enjoyment and total satisfaction (which will never be achieved because of the infinite and transcendent nature of human desire), but also becomes the sole element that can soothe the condition of Hilflosigkeit in which the human being is originally cast precisely because of the infinite and transcendent nature of desire. The accessory and nevertheless foundational function of the object vis-à-vis the subject (an estranging function insofar as it is reversible), the doomed nature of our relation with it, is indeed the core of our suƒering; but it is also the element that distinguishes biological sexuality from eroticism and makes the latter, according to Bataille, the uncanny and mysterious element that redeems us from the baseness of gender and from the chaos of the flesh. This is fundamentally the great insight into sexuality psychoanalysis oƒered us when it first appeared; this is Freud’s most important legacy, surpassing the aporias and contradictions found in his work. We owe to Lacan a reelaboration of Freud’s part-object theory that is less regulatory than the Kleinian one, aesthetically more elegant, and ultimately closer to the painful truth that ineluctably binds human desire to illusion and forces it to base itself on the ambiguous status of its object, indeterminably positioned on the border between the “always partial-always central.” His arresting analysis of the dialectics of love in Seminar VIII, Transference, is wholly centered on a Greek term, agalma, that can be adequately translated into English as the word “accessory.” In Greek, the meaning of agalma ranges from “ornament,” “frieze,” “jewel” to “statue” and even “image”; along with these meanings, says Lacan, agalma as an analytical notion indicates the twist of our inner experience that occurs at the border between subject and object, which eminently character-

LAU RA M O NTAN I / 18

izes the experience of love. In this experience—and herein lies the twist—the original truth of the specular mandate, whereby we are forced to perceive ourselves as subjects who are exclusively on the other’s border, is, so to speak, wiped out. In love relationships, the object of our desire, the part-object, takes on a special radiance that structures the emotional-cognitive situation of “dazzling”: the other becomes a total object or, if you wish, a subject and draws on an illusory totality that, while canceling its own and our original Spaltung (severance), nevertheless profoundly recasts us into this very Spaltung insofar as this radiance is an illusion and a deception. In this regard Lacan says: The root of agalma is unwieldy. The authors refer it to aganos (splendid, superb) and derive it from agamai (“I admire,” but also “I envy,” “I am jealous of”) which in turn slips into agazo (“I patiently put up with,” “I suƒeringly put up with something”), which slips towards agaiomai, which means “to be indignant.” Authors who are root zealots and according to whom roots have meanings—something that is absolutely blasphemous for linguists—derive from it gal (“milk,”—“precious thing”) and gel (“that makes you laugh,” the gel of gelao, “I laugh for joy,” “I laugh out of scorn”), gal which has the same root as glene, “pupil,” and which we find again in galenen (“smooth sea”), which the other day I mentioned, in passing, the sea that glistens because it is perfectly smooth. In short, an idea of splendor is hidden in the root. Agalos (splendid), aglaia, that which shines, are there as familiar echoes. This is not in contrast with what we must say about it. I am only saying it in parentheses to show the ambiguity of the idea according to which etymology takes us in a direction that is not that of a signifier but towards a central signification. Indeed one could focus not so much on gal but on the first part of the phonematic articulation, namely aga, which is precisely the part of agalma that is of interest to us in its relation to agathos.5

The root and the components and signifiers related to agalma, the “accessory” par excellence, simultaneously aƒect the passionate movements and desire produced by the appearance of the love object to which we entrust the illusion that it can “complete” our

19 / ACCESSORY QUESTIONS

uncertain inhabitation of the world. Radiant, splendid, the eromenon is at one and the same time what we bear with pain and that something whose wholeness, even if false, and precisely because it is false, constitutes the utmost good and binds us to the charm of illusion and of deceit. Here Lacan provides us with a key to look into the mirror, that smooth, shining surface in which we originally meet oneself as another, to echo Paul Ricoeur.6 We are ourselves accessory to ourselves. Winnicott softens and smoothes the sharp edges of this dramatic vision of the relationship with the object of desire and, albeit placing it in the field of “appearing,” of “seeming,” makes it a key to Being in that it marks a border area where it is possible for us to learn the diƒerence between “me” and “non-me.” The discovery for which we are indebted to Winnicott, that is, the notion of transitionality7 —a key function in the structuring of an identity that can be seen as divided and separate from the other while integrating and supporting its dependence—has still not been fully understood in all its implications: today it appears to have been simplified by a “sociological psychoanalysis” that reduces the richness of this notion to the function of the mother as an envelop. The consequences of this simplification are not insignificant in terms of analytic treatment when it comes to the suƒering of women who, being identified with a single function—motherhood—do not find a truly sympathetic ear within this commonly used theoretical approach.

B E YO N D T H E M I R R O R : A S P E C I AL AC C E S S O RY

S., my patient, had “panic attacks.” With the analysis they seemed to have stopped. He comes to our sessions with his face adorned by small jewels inserted into the holes that pierce his face, jewels that he often changes, and with his body marked and embellished by various tattoos, which have increased over time and which he would often show me and tell me about.

LAU RA M O NTAN I / 20

In listening to him, Alberto Burri’s paintings of holes, irons, and burns insistently come to my mind, and I wonder why, as, after all, I am not an expert in the rhetoric of painting. Maurizio Calvesi says: Burri’s brush strokes leave only marks, they do not draw, and the image does not arise from the metamorphic virtuality of the inorganic, but from the metaphorical virtuality (autometaphorical and omnimetaphorical, one might say) of the existent: namely from an assumption of what exists as a particular phenomenon extending in space and time, at an unchangeable and fixed moment or condition, i.e., a symbol of existence and of the very consciousness of our existence.8

Around Burri’s holes and burns, whose strokes mime the condition of existing versus Being, we find, however, the greatest variety of fabrics and materials, laid out with a compassionate and merciful grace, as if to soothe the wound that the fire or knife have inflicted on the body of the work. All this takes me back to S.: it makes me suspect an inner state of the utmost psychic exposure, translatable into the image of “being pierced,” which his body literally visualizes, beyond anguish, in the “here” of the pain. Just as female suƒering is in some respects impregnable in the current state of theory—which has set aside the question that Freud was unable to answer, “What does a woman want?”—likewise in the present-day experience of the psychoanalytic cure, individual suƒering, expressed in ways that confront the analyst with a constant and unceasing moaning on the body and of the body, is for diƒerent reasons just as ungraspable (this obscure and mysterious parallelism still needs to be explored, but in any case it is not all that diƒerent). In this moaning, being/having a body appears as a tragic destiny and the analyst, in his/her listening, is confined to the borders of a space-body that does not have a single center but multiple ones, and where the relationship between center and periphery is constantly reversed. (This is not without significance if it is true, as Michel Foucault says, that “we are in an era of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, of the near and of the far, of the side-by-side and of the scattered.”)9 The contemporary stage violently brings the body into the limelight, as if the body

21 / ACCESSORY QUESTIONS

itself were an accessory (consider transplants, for example) in close contact with a loss that cannot be elaborated, the “ek-sist” that cancels, or precludes, entering into a relationship with the other, because the other is simply and actually grafted on and incorporated into the subject, through a spectacular transition toward “acting out.” As a symptom precluding the articulation of diƒerence that denies finiteness and time in relation to the body and to its inhabiting, the accessory—in its typical double connotation described so far—takes on extreme and bewildering forms of signification, because the entire body, whose parts are interchangeable, becomes an accessory of itself. Just as the symptom reveals itself, showing what it seems to deny, likewise piercing, together with the more recent enigmatic practices of scarification, body markings, and the various forms of body art, literally embody a laceration and an original oƒense, a constituent separation of existing from Being that may be represented only as a hole, a slit. This practice, which is performed on a boundary area of the body—the skin—is closely related to the non-“matter-of-fact” of human sexuality, the obscure commerce it carries out with the negative and with death, taken as forms of an incoercible (or “pulsional”) desire. The original and unfathomable depth of pain, the absolute paradigm we find behind all bodies with holes and tattoos, also drives the analyst into a theoretical no man’s land, exposing her/him to a blank or, if you will, to a hole in his/her thought that he/she can try to fill only with the visionary strength of transference. Didier Anzieu,1 0 Joyce McDougall,11 and J. B. Pontalis,1 2 who dealt very closely with this condition, point out that there are few psychoanalytical works on the experience of pain. Moreover, the absence in Freud of a theory of pain, whose place is taken by a theory of anxiety, occurs just as, during the Dora case, he opted for Oedipus, giving up on the study of the enigma oƒered by his patient’s desire. The practice of piercing that, as I was saying, literally enacts the suƒering of an existing body that cannot perceive itself as such unless it cuts itself, drilling holes into the living flesh, confronts the analyst with an extreme experience that is exceedingly di~cult to analyze. An experience in which, as Pontalis says:

LAU RA M O NTAN I / 22

the object ceases to function as a possible surety; he is, at best, a substitute, and behind this substitute, there is always another one. Infinite “transference.” Irremediably lost but eternally maintained, the object cannot be recovered through representation, which renders present another: the same yet diƒerent. Where there is pain, it is the absent, lost object that is present; it is the actual, present object that is absent. Consequently the pain of separation appears to be secondary to a naked, absolute pain. The psychic sense is populated only by shadows, the psychic reality is elsewhere, not so much repressed as encysted.1 3

Albeit with caution, analysts—especially younger analysts—have started working on the enigmatic nonrepresentative, presymbolic area located beyond the subject-object representation. Friedrich Eickhoƒ points out that even though we do not have a convincing nosological concept of borderline, and even though this has become a sort of magic word in psychiatry, this is the area in which we need to inquire in order to understand certain forms of suƒering.1 4 What lies between neurosis and psychosis, or what borders on them, is still very obscure to us, and “borderline disorder” remains an extremely vague category, created initially, it seems, to support the classificatory bias that psychoanalysis imported from the “positive sciences” in order to attribute a class to all the forms of human suƒering that could not be classified within the two main categories: neuroses and psychoses; an accessory instrument, therefore, in respect to the two central axes, a refugium peccatorum for analysts always and insistently in search of a diagnosis, whatever it may be. Precisely on account of its vagueness, of its accessory status, the notion of borderline disorder opens up an evocative space that mocks the vis classificandi by bluntly referring to a subject area that is yet to be investigated. This psychic space, the borderline space, requires careful exploration in order to be grasped in all its suggestive complexity and paradoxical structure. What manifests itself and makes itself visible, as in the case of piercing practices, as an infinite repetition of

23 / ACCESSORY QUESTIONS

the original trauma of the separation of existing from Being, cannot be captured by a type of listening that is still profoundly imbued with the normative knowledge of psychiatry, obscuring the specific field of psychoanalysis by reducing the discovery of the “borderline place” to a notion that replicates the rigid fence that in psychoanalysis still separates what is normal/genital from what is pathologic/pregenital. Or, in other words, what is adult from what is infantile, what is erotic from what is sexual, what is accessory from what is central. The practice of piercing, however, certainly does not correspond to the Lacanian agalma even though it has some of its traits (it is placed beyond the looking glass, in the mise en abyme, as in Alice’s case). Through this practice of attending to the semantics of the term accessory, including its acceptance in Italian, that widens out to include the area where, once all complementariness between center and margin, between subject and object has fallen, the psychoanalytic edifice is challenged to confront its own “accessories,” those that make a house fit for living, on the one hand, while asserting their right to being considered as “fundamental assets,” on the other.

T H E R E L AT I O N W I T H T H E U N K N O W N A N D T H E F E T I S H I S T S T R AT E G Y

The thoughts expressed so far on the etymon of the term “accessory,” and on its web of meanings, have prompted in me various fantasies on what was and still is the most controversial point in psychoanalytic theory: female desire.1 5 Three hypotheses have emerged from these fantasies:1 6 1. In Freud’s writings, what is treated as an accessory, that is, female desire, has, in fact, a central, albeit absolutely, anodyne value. 2. Freud entertained a very close and special relationship with female desire, which

LAU RA M O NTAN I / 24

from here on I will call the “relation with the unknown” (in the sense Freud used in his 1927 essay “Fetishism”).1 7 3. The drama of the impossibility of representing diƒerence and its fetishistic outcome have aƒected both Freud’s work and the subsequent representational structure of psychoanalytic thinking.

I shall try to flesh out these hypotheses by putting together a series of clues that in my view support them. The first and basic bricks of the psychoanalytic edifice built by Freud are the hysteriarelated issues he studied.1 8 In truth, these studies are structured according to heterogeneous and often conflicting styles characterized by a ferocious “drive to knowledge” and by a just as ferocious denial. Through these issues, which he then dropped and came back to only occasionally and en passant, Freud came very close to using a working and thinking method that, had he postponed the hasty conclusions on the existence of a single and exclusively masculine libido (to which he was driven by the urge to conclude his polemic with Jung), would have enabled him to do precisely what he reproached Josef Breuer for never doing: “entering the territory of Mothers.”1 9 While the fact that psychoanalysis derives from Freud’s self-analysis (a self-analysis that would never have been possible without his relationship with Wilhelm Fliess, which actually inaugurates the model of the analytic relationship in psychoanalysis) is generally taken for granted, what has not been fully acknowledged, or at least thoroughly investigated and taken into account, is that, as with any analysis, Freud’s self-analysis had its blind spots. Pointed out, albeit in diƒerent ways, by Didier Anzieu2 0 and Jacques Derrida,2 1 the deep probing he performed through this very special “analysis,” which has marked the “knowledge” of a whole century, contains the traces of Freud’s subjectivity, where subjectivity means the unique and special relationship that each individual is compelled to have with his own “unknown” or, if you will, his unconscious. In my opinion, any theoretical work is the result of the scholar’s compromise between a passion for

25 / ACCESSORY QUESTIONS

knowledge and his or her own specific and personal relationship with the unknown (what he/she cannot aƒord to know), an unknown that has the semantic characteristics of what in German goes under the title of Unerkannt; this outcome leaves behind a “residue” that can be researched, a leftover of thought waiting to become thinkable. In German, Unerkannt is a polysemic term: it is used to designate both the unknown and the unrecognized. What remains unrecognized is that which was known in origin, the strange-familiar, the uncanny, that Freud talks about in Das Unheimlich: unthinkable, inaccessible, it exists only as a potential. The eƒects of Freud’s unsounded relationship with the female body—which pervades his writings and reaches its climax with the angst-ridden question “What does a woman want?” a question that continues to this very day to go unanswered—are and will go on being the blank spot not only in Freud’s selfanalysis but also in psychoanalytic theory as such, handed down as a cross-generational enigma from the “father” to the analytic community that came after him. To date, the tools available to us to investigate this obscure place—female desire—are few. At most, we think of it as the “desire for a child.” Female analysts who have tried to forge their own autonomous instruments, like Karen Horney and Luce Irigaray, have been expelled from their respective societies. The invitation launched by Freud to women analysts (and to women in general)—in truth quite provocative and ironical—to solve the enigma themselves has mostly fallen on barren ground, or at best it has produced sectarian work on the “desire for a child,” as evidenced by a large proportion of the theoretical work done by early feminists. I will try to demonstrate how the “desire for a child” is not an exhaustive answer to the question “What does a woman want?” To do this I will use a symptomatic reading of what Freud describes in his essay “Fetishism.” The short essay written in 1927, begins: In the last few years I have had an opportunity of studying analytically a number of men whose object-choice was dominated by a fetish. There is no need to expect that these people came to analysis on account of their fetish. For though no doubt a fetish is recognized by its adherents as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by them as the symp-

LAU RA M O NTAN I / 26

tom of an ailment accompanied by suƒering. Usually they are quite satisfied with it, or even praise the way in which it eases their erotic life. As a rule, therefore, the fetish made its appearance in an analysis as a subsidiary finding.2 2

And further on in the same essay: In every instance, the meaning and the purpose of the fetish turned out, in analysis, to be the same. It revealed itself so naturally and seemed to me so compelling that I am prepared to expect the same solution in all cases of fetishism. When now I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment; so I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis. . . . To put it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up.2 3

But what are these reasons? By probing more deeply into the whole of Freud’s work, the first thing we run into is the “disquieting extraneousness” of the female body, the “unknown” (or unrecognized) whose genital organs, synonymous with the invisible, are also the place of the nonrepresentable associated with the body itself.2 4 The phallic organization, allowed by the visibility of the penis (and the logic that it produces: male or castrated), responds to this “disquieting extraneousness” with its reassuring order that contrasts a specific and extremely dangerous condensation of the primary process, the order of the little detachable one. “The feces, the child, and the penis constitute a unity, an unconscious concept—sit venia verbo—the concept of a ‘smallness’ that may be detached from one’s body” says Freud in “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.”2 5 Smallness, or if you will, being small, is therefore linked to a special fear, that of detachment, of abandonment, the fundamental fear of the infans. I would like to reconsider the theoretical result of anticathexis of this fear in Freud in the light of the Lacanian notions of symbolic and imaginary. In relation to Lacan’s notions, anticathexis has

27 / ACCESSORY QUESTIONS

two outcomes: the first (symbolic) is the identification and enunciation of the fetishist strategy per se, an extremely important analytic instrument for listening to a human being, beyond the question of gender; the second construction (imaginary) is that of the phallic mother, which is in fact a condensation more than a construction, a fantasy of desire pertaining to only one gender, the male one, more than being a heuristic instrument capable of explaining the suƒering of both genders. In the case of the imaginary construction, the phallic mother fantasy guarantees that she, always identical to the male child with his very precious penis (which is also a very precious child), will never drop him, and like a kangaroo with her little one in her marsupium, she will always carry him with her, have him in front of her, and look at him. In other words, according to fetishist strategy as developed by Freud, it is inconceivable to represent the female body other than as the body of the mother united with her child, which is her phallus. But the formulation of the sequence penis-child-feces tells us a lot about Freud’s fears as a child: it reveals his fear of being an accessory for his young and fascinating mother, a waste material that she can readily dispose of, a piece of shit. In spite of this, even though psychoanalysis after Freud did have the instruments, provided by Freud himself, to unmask the “partial truth” of the penis-child symbolic equation, what happened in fact was that this equation was taken literally and so insu~ciently investigated. Ultimately, in its pure literal meaning, it has authorized post-Freudian psychoanalysis to enact a theoretical operation that has reduced female desire to maternal desire. This brand of psychoanalysis has forgotten or decided to ignore the fact that, for the unconscious, the child is the signifier of something else, and that equating the child symbolically with the penis, the phallus, and feces is only one of many possible equivalences. This omission has had a negative impact on clinical practice. To overcome it is not at all easy because, as pointed out by Cornut,2 6 a female desire that is not equivalent to maternal desire, a female erotic that is defined exclusively in relation to the diƒerence of the sexes, is, given the current impoverishment of a theory that has reinstated a linear and pre-Freudian notion of subjectivity, impossible.

LAU RA M O NTAN I / 28

CONCLUSION

A fact remains however: the essay on fetishism (to accept Derrida’s invitation to be fair to Freud) is above all a short, enlightening text on the strategy of denial. It accounts for the epistemic construct that underlies beliefs and superstitions and can be expressed in the phrase, “yes, I know it is not true, but I believe it all the same,” of which this text is both a testimony and a metapsychology. But the imaginary fetishist strategy—according to which the penis-child cannot nor should not ever be detached from the mother’s body and is therefore attached directly to it, thus becoming a phallus (it is indeed at a first and more archaic level of representation, “the little detachable one,” perceived as an eternally endangered and threatened accessory)—is not solely a defense of the male individual against the phantom of castration. It also and above all is related to the Freudian construction based on a mechanism of sexuality that takes into account only one gender (which therefore, it follows logically, is the only one that can be cured). What is overshadowed and confined to silence as a result of this very strategy is female desire. And so, the “general” sexuality mechanism imagined by Freud, as pointed out by Irigaray, Sarah Kofman, and Jacques Cosnier, fully responds to the logic of male castration, which is none other than the primary logic of the child who “desperately” clings to his mother: a logic built on denial. The escamotage (sleight-of-hand, which in truth is tragically ridiculous) of providing an “accessory” to another’s body with what in one’s own body is already a precarious accessory not only supports Derrida’s claim about the infinite deferral of the thinkability of diƒerence (diƒérance), but it invites analysts to radically question the epistemological strategies they adopt in their practice. The relationship with the unknown, which is what Freud and psychoanalysis have had with the feminine and with female desire, is therefore the outcome—in Freud’s text and also elsewhere—of a defensive strategy that as early as the Three Essays results in a strong theoretical construction that compels psychoanalysis to conceive the female body in general as the negative of the male body. What emerges from the constant tension between presumed knowledge (theory in its systematic aspect) and the relationship with

29 / ACCESSORY QUESTIONS

the unknown that lacerates it is a fundamental passionate truth, the truth that the word “sex” establishes in and of itself. Through the eulogy of eros that Plato puts into Aristophanes’s mouth, sex has to do with secare (“cut,” “separate”) and hence directly refers us to diƒerence, to the inconceivable, the unthinkable. Therefore the theory of psychic bisexuality, a “passionate truth” (whose defensive value can be grasped only thanks to the technique of suspicion that we have learned from Freud’s teachings), replicates within Freud’s very text what happens in the child’s mind. It develops for the purpose of making more acceptable, and less scandalous and violent, the truth about sex, the truth about diƒerence, from which the body derives and is produced. At this point perhaps one cannot fail to agree with the symptomatic value that the stated ignorance about female desire unmistakably has in Freud’s writings: a statement that, by juxtaposing the representation of mother and phallus, suggests an obvious di~culty in recognizing the other, beyond one’s desire. This “psychotic nucleus”2 7 is present and speaks to us precisely in the passage where Freud states that the discovery of the importance of the fetish in the male imaginary is “accessory,” thus adopting himself, unawares, a strategy of denial. As has been often pointed out,2 8 and with special emphasis by Marjorie Garber,2 9 a large part of Freud’s construction can be assumed to be based on the fetish, and the fetishistic trait should, perhaps, be considered to be an inherent and specific modality of Freud’s mind at work, an essential accessory.

NOTES

1. The verb “to inhabit” and the noun “habit,” in the sense of “dress” or “garment,” have the same root. Inhabit here is used in Heidegger’s philosophical sense. 2. “If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell,” from Virgil’s Aeneid, 7.312. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [1900], in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 4:ix. 3. D. W. Winnicott, “Creativity and Its Origins,” in Playing and Reality (Abington: Routledge,

LAU RA M O NTAN I / 30

2005), 87–114. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 6. 4. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 14:87. 5. Jacques Lacan, “Seminario VIII” in Scritti (Turin: Einaudi, 1972), 1:170 (my translation). 6. Paul Ricouer, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 7. D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Playing and Reality, 81–89. 8. Maurizio Calvesi, Le due avanguardie (Rome: Laterza, 1971), 221 (my translation). 9. Michel Foucault, “Diƒerent Spaces” [1967], in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley (New York: New Press, 1999), 2:175. 10. Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). 11. Joyce McDougall, Theaters of the Body: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Psychosomatic Illness (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). 12. J. B. Pontalis, Between the Dream and Psychic Pain, trans. Catherine Cullen and Philip Cullen (London: Hogarth, 1980). 13. Ibid., 200. 14. Friedrich Wilhelm Eickhoƒ, “A Short Annotation to Sigmund Freud’s Observations on Transference Love,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 14 (1987): 103–9. 15. Fantasieren is the term used by Freud himself to define an aspect of his theoretical act. For more thorough information on the role of the imagination in theoretical processing, see Patrick Lacoste, La strega e il transfert (Rome: Borla, 1988). 16. Rosy Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1991); Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 17. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 21:152–57. 18. Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 7:7–122.

31 / ACCESSORY QUESTIONS

19. Sigmund Freud, November 5, 1899, Lettere a W. Fliess (1887–1904) (Turin: Boringhieri, 1986), 419 (my translation). 20. Didier Anzieu, Freud’s Self-Analysis (London: Hogarth, 1986). 21. Jacques Derrida, “Michel Foucault (1926–1984): ‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Braunt and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 77–90. 22. Freud, “Fetishism,” 152. 23. Ibid., 152–53. 24. Laura Montani, “Per una rilettura del perturbante freudiano,” Argonauti 18, no. 5 (1983): 229–36. 25. Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 17:85. 26. Marcel Cornut, “Sur le corps de l’autre,” Bulletin de la Société Psychoanalitique de Paris 7 (March 1985). 27. Maurizio Balsamo, ed. Soggetti al delirio: Elaborazione del dolore e percorsi della cura (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2000). 28. For a decisive analysis of this trait in Freudian works, see Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985). 29. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992).

LAU RA M O NTAN I / 32

2

KR I Z I A A N D A C C E S S O R I E S Mariuccia Mandelli (Krizia) In my opinion, accessories are small, portable talismans of our well-being. They make up that framework of meaning that we construct about ourselves; they are invaluable indicators of taste, character, style, and behavior. I can understand a lot more about people by looking at their shoes or their watch than the clothes they wear or the things they say. Walter Albini, one of my first assistants who went on to become an almost legendary name in fashion, used to say that accessories are ten times more important than clothes. I agreed then—and I agree now. This is also true because not all women feel free (for reasons of body size, for example) to wear the clothes that they would like to—perhaps bolder or more colorful and imaginative ones—without running certain risks, whereas they do feel free to unleash their desires with accessories. Apart from jewelry, the accessory that fascinates me the most—from the point of view of style and, above all, conceptually—is the watch. The meaning of time is personal and fluid (when young it never seems to pass quickly enough but then with age it starts to rush by), so I feel a certain relief that we wear this precise, impartial, reliable instrument. Unfortunately, it is inevitable that time passes, but at least we can make sure that it does so in an orderly fashion. In this sense, the watch is an excellent way to keep time in check.

The watch is always there to tell us the truth. A survey conducted by a telephone company into the relationship that Italians have with time revealed that 40 percent of the population complains about not having enough time, 30 percent feels they have enough time, and 20 percent thinks that they have too much. Watches are there, however, to prove that time is always the same; we just need to know how to organize it. A line from a song by Jovanotti, one of the most popular Italian singers, goes, “Time, time, however things go, he passes by and doesn’t give a damn if anyone’s late.” I hate tardiness, and this is also one of the reasons why I love watches. I like to think of their minute, invisible mechanisms, hidden inside their casings, perfect wheels and cogs, constantly moving to and fro. I have been told that the most valuable watches are worth so much not because they contain a certain number of rubies or because they have gold or platinum cases, but because they have perfect mechanisms that are made up of between sixty and around fifteen hundred tiny pieces. In some cases, as with the balance pivot, the tolerance is less than a millionth of a millimeter. With infinite patience, each tiny piece is meticulously finished by hand; this too fills me with admiration. But I do not like people who flaunt watches with famous brand names as if they were status symbols. Usually these people are simply parvenu. The woman who, with casual elegance, wears the gold wristwatch she received as a gift on her first communion is far more distinguished than someone who wears the latest watch of some famous brand that any soccer player might buy with his signing fee. Other people I cannot stand are the superorganized types who want watches with a compass, a pedometer, or an alarm incorporated, perhaps with something to count heartbeats per minute, an altimeter, and, in the future, even a videophone. Then there are those who wear watches over their shirt cuƒs just because they have heard that Fiat owner Gianni Agnelli did the same. I like people who eschew battery-powered watches and choose those that you must wind up by hand. The problem with automatic watches, those that wind themselves when the wearer moves, is that you can never take them oƒ for long or they will stop. A mechanically minded friend of mine has, nevertheless, discovered a special case that keeps automatic watches running even when they are not being worn.

MARIUCCIA MANDELLI (KRIZIA) / 34

For physicists, time is just an invention; while for economists, time is money. Meanwhile, the watch carries on, measuring the passage of time. It is the fact that time passes that makes life so interesting, so unpredictable, and so precious. Think how boring it would be if time were immobile and the hands of the watch always pointed to the same time! Above all, I hate anyone who makes me waste time, like those who always arrive late and show little respect for others. They should look at their watches more often. John F. Kennedy was of the same opinion when he apparently said, “We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.” I have always thought that was a magnificent thing to say. What can be said of all other accessories, especially those that Krizia produces under license? They are so numerous—and so varied—that there are almost too many to mention. They range from shoes, umbrellas, foulards, bags, and leather objects to costume jewelry, ties, perfumes, and eyeglasses. Nowadays, the makers of spectacles pay increasingly more attention to the fashion element of their designs. This makes these particular items especially attractive to the public and encourages people to change their glasses more often. This is something that I wholeheartedly do not approve. When I get to like a certain pair of glasses, I wear them all the time. It is a shame that I often lose or sometimes break them. I once had a pair of sunglasses that I eventually wore out; it oƒered extremely good protection from sunlight, including from the sides as it was a special wraparound model. Whether prescription spectacles or sunglasses, whether for day or for evening wear, glasses should be an accessory that highlights the style of the wearer in a unique way. Glasses can exalt one’s looks and add character to a face, thanks to the additional merit of the design and the technological and fashion input. They are showcases for the eyes, created from precious materials and interesting colors; they have clean, ergonomic, innovative lines that can be severely geometrical or curved. On Krizia glasses, there is always a small “K” in rubber or in metal that has both a distinguishing and a decorative function. I like them to be glasses that, once you have made the right choice, you can really grow fond of, as if they were small, gentle guardians of our eyesight. They should be worn with pleasure for a long time because they also a~rm your personality.

35 / KRIZIA AND ACCESSORIES

The function of fashion is to make an accessory—in fact any item of clothing—an expression of its time. This is actually the only thing that should dictate change, not some futile, consumer-driven desire to produce an object today that in a headlong race toward the ephemeral will have no meaning tomorrow. For this reason, I like all my creations, including accessories, to be able to stand the test of time—thanks to their clean lines, their quality, and their wearability—even while perfectly belonging to a specific moment. Creating is an infinite pleasure when you have the ability to interpret contemporary rhythms, responding to visual and conceptual stimuli that can then be transformed into collections where invention, freedom of choice, and a play on contrasts are always present. This is the very spirit of Krizia: a determination that every item bearing its name benefits a woman. It can animate her daily routine and make every moment more alive and more intense. Take perfume, for example. There is no more interesting accomplice in the game of seduction. Krizia perfumes—for men and for women—are fragrances packaged in ultramodern bottles and boxed accordingly. There are no useless embellishments, and they have a clean, simple design, which is what also makes them excellent gifts. And my idea of perfume? It must suit the person wearing it to perfection because it acts as a calling card; it announces our arrival and it lingers, leaving a memory of us, even after we have gone. We should not forget that perfume has an irresistible evocative power. After all, it was a fragrance that inspired a writer like Marcel Proust to write In Search of Lost Time. The famous, sweet smell of the madeleine had the power to make him relive entire periods of his life. As attested by Marilyn Monroe, who famously declared that when she went to bed she only wore three drops of Chanel No. 5, perfume would undoubtedly be in first place in any scorecard of the accoutrements for seduction. No high heels, lipstick, seamed stockings, lace negligee, see-through blouse, slit skirt, or plunging neckline can compete with it. Perfume has a much more subtle attraction, and at the same time it is allusive, discreet, and knowing. Finally, I would like to talk about a men’s accessory with which I have a particular lovehate relationship: the tie. Many men have an almost fetishistic passion for ties. For a

MARIUCCIA MANDELLI (KRIZIA) / 36

FIGURE 2.1

Collezione Krizia, Autumn/

Winter 2005–6. Photographer Giovanni Gastel. Courtesy of Krizia S.p.A.

start, it seems that the most serious, least imaginative of men willingly entrust to these few inches of cloth around the neck the total responsibility for self-expression, their one chance to assert their creative choices and play with pattern and color. As for the rest of their clothes, suits of nothing but gray—except for the occasional dark blue. This is what has always annoyed me and this is why I have problems with ties. Otherwise I cannot say that they have ever done me any harm! Years ago, however, my debut in men’s fashion was marked by a battle to liberate men from the tie. It seemed an unbearable symbol of middle-class decorum, that bourgeois tendency to dress always in the same, boring, suƒocating way according to regulations that were simply meant to be broken. Then, as always happens when you satisfy a desire to break rules, there is the subsequent game of reviving them; they are no longer rules, but one of many options available. Nowadays I think, “A beautiful tie—why not?” Men usually prefer to choose their ties themselves and so I avoid giving them as presents, or if I do give them, I am not oƒended if they are not worn. In general, however, I would rather give a nice sweater or a bottle of one of my colognes. One of my dearest friends once introduced me to a young architect who loved ties and

37 / KRIZIA AND ACCESSORIES

told me that he also had some original ideas on the subject. I told him to put them down on paper and show them to me. They turned out to be unsuitable for men, but I thought that I could add some to my women’s collection as a playful touch. I asked him how much he wanted to be paid, and he came up with a high fee that almost made me give up the idea. Then I gave it to him without further thought because I liked him. Of course, not even one of those ties ever sold, and the only one that I saw being worn was the tie that he wore himself. On the positive side, we are still great friends, and now he is a successful businessman who still wears original ties. I myself have occasionally worn ties; indeed, ties for women—in that ever-intriguing play on androgyny—have appeared in many of my collections, including recent ones. But the woman’s tie that I prefer—other than those that are worn around the bare neck—is the famous trompe l’oeil tie with blue sequins and large white pearls, embroidered on a cool, white short-sleeved silk blouse. This has become a classic item in the Krizia collections from the 1980s. People sometimes ask me what are the new developments in the field of accessories. I reply that clearly they are those expressed in my most recent creations and they will see future trends in the next collection. A successful creator of fashion is certainly gifted with particularly sensitive antennae to pick up on new trends. But even if she knew how to read a crystal ball, don’t you think that she would keep what she sees to herself ?

FIGURE 2.2

Collezione Krizia, Spring/Summer 2010. Photographer Giovanni Gastel. Courtesy of Krizia S.p.A.

3

TH E D R E S S O F TH O U G H T CLOTHING AND NUDITY IN HOMER, VIRGIL, DANTE, AND ARIOSTO

Anne Hollander I want to look at clothes in the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Ariosto, four great poets who represent a cumulative literary tradition, with a huge influence on centuries of later writing. Each of these writers was essential to the next, and a great deal of later Western literature shows constant evidence of having internalized them all. I’ll be dealing with a few of these poets’ common themes that treat of dress, undress, and armor, with their diƒerences in attitude about clothes, and with real clothes in their time. I will also note how one powerful literary treatment of clothing and nakedness is silence about both.

HOMER

Homeric clothing itself and Homer’s references to it are the most remote from modern assumptions. In The Iliad, male characters in armor are omnipresent. Clothed women appear rarely, but Homer uses them to intensify their visual contrast to armed men and dramatize the moment, as when Helen appears on the ramparts, wrapped in her snowy veil (Iliad 3:142–43), to survey and name the warriors. In The Odyssey, almost no characters are military, but civil dress is shown to have a transformative power, often through

divine agency. The flying nymph Ino only has to throw down her veil to drowning Odysseus so that he gets safely to shore, and after he’s dressed, Athena invisibly adds an improving tweak to his cloak and a becoming curl to his hair. We see Homer inaugurating the literary idea that there is something unearthly about the power of clothing. Actual garments in Homer’s time were simple rectangles of fabric, woven in many diƒerent proportions, sizes, and textures and worn as they came oƒ the loom, variously hung, draped, or wrapped around the body, and pinned, sashed, or belted. The stuƒ was never cut. Oƒ the body, garments were like so many shawls and sashes of diƒerent dimensions and thickness, and looms were of many sizes. Everybody wore two garments: a chiton, or tunic/shirt/gown/robe/dress; and a himation, or cloak/cape/wrap/mantle. Homer mainly uses the two Greek words, and translators have supplied the modern variations. Men’s tunics were short; women’s were long. Homer specifies the “long” character of women’s dresses again and again in his descriptive epithets, along with the whiteness of women’s arms, from which we infer that the long dresses revealed arms, and the dresses were all “well-sashed” or “finely-girdled.” Other frequent epithets are about hair—all women are seen to have “lovely braids” or “fine ringlets,” depending on the translator—and we infer that female hair was carefully arranged, never loose or untended. Allure lay in careful adornment and covering—no flowing hair, no bareness other than arms. Female nakedness is never mentioned. All Homeric clothing was spun and woven at home by women, who also spun and wove all household blankets and bedspreads, towels and tablecloths, palls and shrouds, protective coverings and decorative draperies, along with tents, awnings, and sails for ships. Whatever else they did, women’s lives were filled with this work, and female honor was bound up in it. Homer says that the excellence of women’s weaving in certain cities was famous; any palace treasury would contain magnificent garments accompanied by jeweled brooches, received as gifts or made as future gifts and perhaps never worn. The palace storehouse, by contrast, would contain huge chests of household cloaks and tunics ready, like casks of oil and wine, for constant guest and family use. We know from The Odyssey that these garments might only be washed once a year, or less often, and they were all quite similar. But in The Iliad, Hecuba, looking in Troy’s treasury for a suitable

ANNE HOLLANDER / 40

oƒering to Athena, finds that the most beautiful robe there was woven in the palace by Sidonian women, famous for their weaving, whom Paris had cleverly scooped up as slaves on his way back to Troy with kidnapped Helen. While the war is raging, Helen is twice shown weaving in Troy, as if her earth-shaking beauty had no real importance unless she wove. Early in The Odyssey, we find her back home in Sparta preparing to spin as she sits enthroned beside King Menelaus to welcome Telemachus. In The Iliad during the war, the goddess Hera, who supports the Greeks, decides to seduce her husband Zeus, who sides with the Trojans. She knows that sex will unfailingly distract him from the battle he’s watching, in which he would certainly intervene to turn the tide in Troy’s favor. But instead of approaching him suggestively and baring her heavenly charms, she enters her boudoir. Then Homer gives us eight lines of bathing, oiling and perfuming, combing, braiding and coiling, followed by fourteen lines of arranging and fastening with gold brooches a remarkable robe, woven and embroidered by Athena, a hundred-tasseled belt, and a veil, “fair and bright, all glistening,” the ensemble finished oƒ with jeweled drop earrings and a pair of sandals (Iliad 14:166–87). But just in case Hera’s stunning array fails to entrance her husband (she knows he likes artless girls), she asks to borrow Aphrodite’s girdle. Homer then devotes another fourteen lines to this mythic object, with which Aphrodite can command the mad lust of anyone for anyone else. Hera hides it in her bosom—and it works, as if Homer meant to show it as the hidden unearthly secret of any seductive feminine toilette. This long passage has had endless literary echoes in the later history of fiction, whenever the action stops dead while the author describes the compelling dress of the desirable woman. Samuel Richardson did it in Clarissa; John Updike and Philip Roth are still doing it. Hera’s trappings, like Helen’s snowy wrap, are oƒered in extreme contrast to the harsh male panoply of war—for none of which, unlike all the woven stuƒs, is any human maker ever mentioned. The shield of Achilles, and armor to match, is made to his mother’s order by the god Hephaestus, and with these immortal arms, Homer inscribes a superhuman quality into any epic armor—no man makes it, only the poet. Homer lets the divine glamor of Achilles’s arms add an extra charge of holy dread to all armor’s grim destiny in war. Any gleaming bronze helmet, greaves and breastplate, weapons and war

41 / THE DRESS OF THOUGHT

chariot become fused with the fighter’s life, and he and they together are lifted into the tragic dimension, all bearing the acute value of anything precious put at absolute risk. To fulfill its destiny, all war gear is wielded with pitiless violence. Ferocious javelin throws pierce the many layers of the toughest breastplates; heavy helmets and multilayered shields are irretrievably split, pierced, or crushed. Swords are thrust through skulls by way of an exposed temple, or shoved up under the cuirass to slit the liver; often they strike through the neck, just where the helmet and breastplate fail to meet and leave a gap. Spears routinely rip throats and plunge into guts. Homer shows how a warrior’s battle dress exists to be brutally destroyed along with him, or else ripped oƒ his dead enemy and worn by him in further bloody triumph. All this opposes the integral woven stuƒ that is never cut, and of which any damage or raggedness is a humiliating and transforming disgrace. Odysseus becomes unrecognizable when he wears rags in his own house, and the goddess Athena pointedly takes oƒ her own dress, woven by her own divine hands, before donning her armor to join the fight. Throughout The Iliad, Homer repeatedly mentions Hector’s flashing, crested helmet, so we see he carries the whole war—and also that he will be brought low, which we learn again when he removes it, so as not to frighten his little boy. He then tells Andromache to stay indoors and keep all the women weaving throughout the bloody war, while the armed Greeks and Trojans slash away at each other. Women must spin and weave while men arm and fight, as if their endless warp and woof would hold the world together so it can survive, even if the armed fighters do not. But epic male armor indeed proves to be immortal, as no other human apparel is. We learn this when Odysseus tells the Phaeacian royal family about his visit to the Underworld. There he identifies the individual dead who floated toward him in a mist, saying he tried vainly to embrace his mother; but Homer gives him no word to say on whether these lifelike wraiths are naked or clothed. Then Odysseus sees dead warriors, and he says they all wear their bloody armor. A procession of famous men and women out of history comes toward him—again, no bodies, no garments, no trappings, how does he know them? But when the human ghost of the half-god Heracles appears, Odysseus describes the magnificently ornamented sword belt he wears. In Erebus, civilian clothes

ANNE HOLLANDER / 42

and bodies merge into a featureless blur, but armor persists after death, in glorious or gory detail, itself conveying the immortality of heroes. Homer emphasizes the nakedness only of Odysseus himself, washed ashore on the island of Phaeacia, shielding his bare body behind a shrub while he addresses Princess Nausicaa with compliments. Odysseus is uncomfortable conversing with a lady while he is naked and filthy all over, but it was perfectly natural that she turn his bare body over to the maids to wash and dress. Her status, not her sex, made his nakedness indecent— short, draped male tunics slid oƒ too easily for male nudity to be much of an issue. There is also evidence that some ancient warriors fought naked, armed only with helmet, sword, and shield, as if heroic nudity were the Other Armor, equally superior and immortal. We see them represented (if not recorded) on the classical-period Parthenon. When Odysseus arrives alone at the Phaeacian palace wearing the garments Nausicaa has given him and asks for help as a shipwrecked stranger, King Alcinous says, of course, be my guest. But Queen Arete asks, where did you get those clothes? Were you wearing them when you were wrecked? The artist has recognized her own handiwork, and she doubts the allegedly lost stranger’s word. Then Odysseus explains about the nudity and the laundry and praises Nausicaa’s discretion and generosity. Later, back in Ithaca wearing the shameful rags that disguise him, Odysseus tells Penelope how he met the great Odysseus, and she asks, what was he wearing? He describes the textiles of garments she had woven for him—one of them delicate as an onion’s skin—and the brooch she gave him to fasten them, and then she believes him. In these epics, the work of female artists of the loom is always personally attributed. The unattributed warriors’ armor all seems supernaturally created, only named if the god Hephaestos has made it for half-divine Achilles.

VIRGIL

Seven centuries after Homer, Virgil wrote The Aeneid as a Roman national epic, celebrating the establishment in Italy of Emperor Augustus’s family by Aeneas, the only son of

43 / THE DRESS OF THOUGHT

King Priam to survive Troy’s fall. In writing his sequel to The Iliad, Virgil undertook to be Homeric, even though poetry had hugely changed since Homer first turned improvised sung verse into written literature. Homer’s Greek verse had been direct, repetitive, and archaic, mesmerizing in the manner of a singing bard. For his modern Roman epic, learned Virgil could modulate and enrich Homer’s antique tone with layers of suave, fluid literary Latin. Virgil plunges right into the destruction of Troy through the agency of the Trojan horse and proceeds with Aeneas’s adventures as suggested by those of Homer’s heroes. Like Odysseus, Aeneas meets some natural and supernatural women and visits the Underworld; like Achilles, he fights ferociously, stages funeral games, and gets an immortal prophetic shield, this one ordered from Vulcan by Aeneas’s mother Venus. Then with the help of various allies, some of them divine, he is ultimately victorious after a very long war in Italy against many exotic local forces. He marries the local princess Lavinia, his dead enemy’s promised bride, and founds Rome. Changes in the world, not just in poetry, appear in the way Virgil makes clothing, armor, and nudity do their expressive work. The armor of Aeneas and his followers, for instance, is immediately recognized in Italy as Trojan and their dress as unfamiliar. Homer had made no point about the opposing looks of armed troops or about diƒering local forms in clothing or arms. Throughout Virgil’s poem, elements of armor and dress are given regional adjectives, suggesting that readers knew what they meant: Evander “winds Tyrrhenian sandals on, takes up a Tegean sword”; someone has a “Lycian” bow, “Gortynian” arrows, or “oriental” leggings; a soldier’s cloak is “bright with steel-blue Spanish dye.” Whether or not Virgil’s readers in the burgeoning Roman Empire could rightly visualize such distinctions, they were certainly accustomed to cultural diƒerences, and such qualifiers sounded right to Roman ears. Thus the bloody battles that fill the second half of The Aeneid—Homerically peppered with pierced guts, splashed brains, and bursting eyeballs—may be visualized in modern cinematic style, with opposing troops in strongly diƒerentiated gear. Virgil gives examples of the various quasi-barbarian fighters’ apparel, in the initial muster of Aeneas’s enemies. One group wears tawny caps of wolf skin instead of helmets, with one foot bare

ANNE HOLLANDER / 44

and the other wearing a rawhide boot. Other troops have headgear made of bark stripped from cork trees, and they hurl darts; still others have clogs instead of boots. Virgil is similarly discursive about celebrity armor, going well beyond Homer’s unchanging epithets for individual warriors. Turnus, the supreme commander of the enemy forces, wears several diƒerent terrifying helmets and cuirasses, each glittering with a diƒerent arrangement of gold and plumes, and as the war subsides and starts over, Virgil describes each gaudy new appearance. Cuirasses are now either sculpturally Roman, imitating an ideal torso, or made of overlapping scales (Homer oƒered no description, calling them all “bronze shirts”), and some Virgilian helmets have knobs and horns along with crests and plumes. But Virgil needed to use the incomparable Iliad for the language of armor’s destruction. We hear again and again of how a hurled spear pierces through numbered layers of leather, bronze, and fiber to strike artery, sinew, and internal organ, and how a helmet and head are both split with one blow of a heavy sword. The more modern poet also wants to convey atmosphere and to suggest how garb feels to its wearer. He makes things gleam even by moonlight, including the gear of lesser characters and columns of nameless troops; he adds the sound of arrows rattling in their quiver on a marching fighter’s back; and he lets us know how the heavy trappings chafe their wearers, mentioning a spear piercing the ribs “where the stitched belt rubs against the belly, and the buckle gnaws against rib-ends.” He shows an armed soldier wearing a bright scarf, embroidered by a loving wife at home—and he mentions the fact just before describing the wearer’s grim death. Embroidered, not woven—by Virgil’s time, weaving had become commercial and was losing its role as women’s sovereign domestic task. This poet dwells less on the weave of any specific stuƒ, more on how it was used, its color, and its impact. Virgil also expresses new ambivalent views of dress for the sexes. Each of The Aeneid’s three active heroines—Aeneas’s mother, Venus; his lover, Dido; and his enemy Camilla, a barbaric virgin warrior—is at least once described as armed with quiver and bow, in a short-skirted tunic. The maiden goddess Diana dressed like this, but she hunted beasts and never fought in wars. In wartime, a short tunic worn with weapons but no body armor or helmet carried the flavor of the dreaded Scythians and Parthians, the mounted

45 / THE DRESS OF THOUGHT

plains warriors whose deadly speed and free range had often threatened the heavily armed ranks of marching Greeks and Romans. As battle dress, it connoted unexpected danger from men, not women—unless a poet wished to evoke the legendary Amazons. Venus appears to Aeneas just after he’s been shipwrecked on the beach near Carthage, startlingly disguised as a Phoenician girl wearing what she says is normal local fashion, including not only a quiver and bow, but high red boots, a skirt tucked high up above the knees, and hair blowing free. Venus wants to excite her sober son and set him in motion toward Dido, whom she has already inflamed with passion for the renowned hero. It is only when she leaves him that Aeneas recognizes his mother, as Venus’s clothes transform into her usual Homeric floor-length draperies and bound-up, perfume-drenched coiƒure. Very soon, Dido duly welcomes Aeneas to Carthage wearing the native costume, with bow, quiver, and leg-baring tunic (no boots—Venus made those up), and Virgil compares her to the goddess Diana, perhaps to suggest she is hunting a man. Bellicose Camilla repeatedly leads the Volscian troops against Aeneas during the long Italian wars, carrying a range of lethal weapons and wearing gold ornaments; but her short tunic also bares one breast. With this detail, Virgil instantly links her to the Amazon Queen Penthesilea, who (an ancient poem relates) fought on the Trojan side after Hector’s death and was slain by Achilles, who promptly fell in love with her corpse. Virgil even lets Aeneas see a picture of armed Penthesilea inside a temple Dido is building: to prefigure fierce Camilla in peaceable Carthage and to associate violent death with her mode of dress. Virgil later tells Camilla’s history, saying she refused to learn spinning and weaving but excelled in hunting and fighting, refused to bind up her hair or wear long dresses, and wore a tiger skin down her back with its head crowning hers. Virgil also shows, besides describing these threatening female outfits, how exotic male dress could suggest doubtful masculinity. He has Turnus’s blustering brother-in-law jeering at Aeneas’s Trojan fighters for their long-sleeved tunics, their saƒron-embroidered purple garments, “their turbans tied with ribbons”—meaning the puƒy Phrygian bonnet, later famous as the liberty cap, with side lappets tied under the chin. He calls them women and tells them to quit fighting and leave arms to real men.

ANNE HOLLANDER / 46

The quasi-male outfits Virgil puts on the principal female characters are not armor and have no helmets, despite the deadly weapons and bare legs. Virgil keeps to Homer’s rule that no woman wears armor, just as no man weaves. He suggests that civilized women should still weave, even though The Aeneid never shows a woman doing so, and we might even suspect that Virgil never saw any being done. He describes Aeneas as wearing garments Dido has woven—her native city was Sidon, home of those great weavers Paris had captured in The Iliad—but we see that all her time is spent in administrative, diplomatic, and ceremonial tasks. Virgil says Dido is a weaver so that she can share in the talent and intelligence of Penelope, Arete, and Andromache. Virgil’s two heroines in quasi-Amazonian costume meet a dramatic death, like their original. Abandoned, Dido stabs herself, and Camilla’s body is finally pierced through by a stalker’s ferocious javelin throw, just below the bare breast. This fighting heroine even goes mad before she’s killed, as if Virgil wished to punish her with the loss of selfpossession as well as life. Meanwhile, Aeneas’s eventual bride is a passive creature, never seen to do anything except lament, blush, and tend the altar—certainly no weaving, the sure sign of self-possession. Nor does she wear anything specific except jewels and a crown, to indicate her royalty and material value. All the other females in The Aeneid are a distracted lot, usually shown with disorderly hair and unfastened garments: the witch-like Sibyl in the cave, Lavinia’s hysterical mother, and Turnus’s mad sister in Italy, even stricken Dido before her suicide. The theme of ethnic conflict and perpetual chaos now forbids the appearance of standard female elegance, the long dress and well-arranged hair so often repeated in Homer, which Virgil only describes twice—on departing Venus, and when Camilla refuses it. But the poet does not contrast the wild Amazonian style to feminine hair arrangement and fine garments; he pointedly combines them, and on Venus herself. The mythological urAmazon Hippolyta, whom Heracles killed to get her gold belt for Hera, had been a brutal self-mutilating fighter, neither huntress nor enchantress; but all these flavors are blended in Virgil’s ambiguously costumed characters. Aeneas must complete his epic education before founding Rome, and he visits the Underworld after leaving Carthage. Following Homer, Virgil puts garments on the

47 / THE DRESS OF THOUGHT

permanent staƒ there, who need identifying signs: a bloody mantle on Tisiphone, the gateguarding Fury in Tartarus; a few disgusting rags on Charon the Boatman; a white robe on lyre-playing Orpheus; white bands on his dancers’ heads in the Blessed Isles. Discord has snaky locks; Cybele wears her towered crown. Otherwise there is Homeric silence about what the spirits wear or don’t wear in this vast world of the dead and the unborn. Except armor, again the star. The mythical Romulus wears only a double-crested Mars helmet, but all the future Roman heroes (recent in Virgil’s time)—Marcellus, Pompey, and Julius Caesar—wear complete shining armor, which already creates their immortal heroism-to-be. In the living world, armor makes a superhuman body for fighters, and in the other world, it utterly trumps the qualities of civil dress and those of living bodies. The combined looks of those are what Homer and Virgil so often eloquently omit, giving epic permission to future writers to observe silence, as needed, about dress and nudity.

DANTE

More than thirteen centuries after Virgil wrote The Aeneid, Dante wrote his three-part Commedia using Virgil as a main character, the guide for his journey out of the dark wood and toward the light. Dante clearly wishes to honor poetry itself as a salvific force, distinct from Christian faith. Virgil the great poet was even a hypothetical Christian, since his Aeneid was read as a prelude to the founding of the Roman church, and his fourth eclogue was thought to prophesy Christ’s birth. He was qualified to lead Dante toward the Christian Heaven, even though he could never go there himself. The whole poem begins in despair and takes place entirely in the next world. Everyone in it is dead. The only living character is Dante himself. For visual appearance in Hell, Dante takes Underworld eƒects from both Homer and Virgil, even though Dante only knew Homer through later Latin poets. For clothing in Christian Heaven, Dante’s main source is the Revelation of St. John the Divine. He makes up all visual aspects of Purgatory, since no ancient writer had the concept; but in

ANNE HOLLANDER / 48

all three parts we see a Christian sense of dress and bodies. Dante automatically thinks of the clad and nude states as opposing moral conditions, as Virgil and Homer never did. Armor, however, keeps its eternal honor. As Virgil and Dante cross the broad plains of Limbo in Hell’s first circle, past the throngs of Virtuous Heathen, they see Homer himself coming toward them, leading Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, and welcoming Virgil— Dante happily says they invite him to join them. Nobody’s looks or clothes are described, but to show his immortal status as Great Leader and War Poet, Homer’s ghost carries a sword. In this circle, Dante meets many other ancient world celebrities, but he says nothing about their looks, although he carefully describes the look of their surroundings, as he always does. Homer, Virgil, and Dante all seemed to believe that great ancient personages don’t need looks, even the famous beauties; the references are purely literary, invoking the power of naming, not appearance. That power is very great, and reading the names of these apparitions with no appearance, we don’t feel we are missing something. Dante sees Socrates and Plato, Thales and Zeno, Cicero and Seneca, among many others, plus Cleopatra, Semiramis, and Dido, and even warlike Penthesilea and Camilla. They all have no clothes, no accessories, no looks at all. But sure enough, when Caesar’s ghost appears, it is fully armed. The idea that heroic armor remains part of the surviving soul is later invoked by the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who is armed from head to foot, but with “his beaver up” so his face shows and he can be identified and speak. When Virgil and Dante are about to cross the Homeric river Acheron, they see a rushing, howling mob of the demoralized Neutrals, who can’t go to Hell or Heaven but must eternally bemoan their worthless condition. They are being stung by wasps and hornets as they run, and Dante specifically says they are naked. Naked, too, are the hundreds of freshly damned souls he sees jostling to board Charon’s boat. This is adult Christian nakedness, which Dante clearly associates with absolute moral and spiritual failure—it’s the basically sinful state of man, after Adam’s fall destroyed the pristine harmlessness of bare flesh. Clothing is an acute moral necessity, sometimes wickedly used as a snare or a crutch to promote evil, and only worthy if it symbolizes virtue. And since Hell exists for punishing willfully unrepentant sinners, Dante must give them sinful nakedness, so

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they can feel their torments. They must be able to bleed and blister; they must have bodies that can be charred by fire or frozen in ice, skin that can be pustulant and moldy, limbs that can be gangrenous, trunks that can be slit from neck to crotch so entrails hang out. Dante only calls them naked when he sees them crowding at a distance. Up close, he describes what only naked bodies could be seen to undergo. But there are other punishments, such as that of Francesca, who tells Dante how she and her lover were led into adultery by reading the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere. Dante, the writer and lover, clearly sympathizes with so responsive a reader. Francesca’s fruitless whirling embrace with Paolo demands only a nonbody in its nonclothes, and her soul is a wraith, like the ghost of Odysseus’s mother. The only damned souls wearing specific costume in Hell are the Hypocrites, found among the worst sinners near the bottom of the Eighth Circle. These venal friars must walk eternally in hooded robes made of heavy gold, lined with thick lead plates—the poet says they glitter in dark Hell. Dante here delivers a judgment against fine dress itself, crushing the souls of fake-virtuous, money-hungry monks under too-rich, impossible-to-manage garments. Weaving by this time has the most literary value as a reference to the striking myth of Arachne, whose spidery punishment Dante mentions in Purgatorio. Cloth making was now a big business in the hands of men, no longer at all associated with individual female value. Spinning, something queens did in Homer, was now done by working

FIGURE

3.1

Eugène Delacroix, Dante and Virgil in Hell, 1822. Oil on canvas, 189 ∞ 246 cm.

Louvre, Paris. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.

women paid by merchant middlemen, who sold the spun yarn to dyers and weavers. Thirteenth-century European clothing for both sexes covered the body’s entire surface except for face and hands, blurring its precise shape and hiding women’s hair and necks. But near the end of Dante’s life in the early fourteenth century, upper-class European clothing began to be more closely fitted, and tailoring became a more exacting craft. Men’s doublets became shockingly short and shapely (to resemble the new plate armor), women’s necklines became alarmingly low and their torsos outlined, and fancy headgear even began to show oƒ their hair. Dante must have noticed. He has his dead friend Forese Donati in Purgatory express outrage at the exposed breasts of Florentine ladies, predicting that the clergy would soon forbid this and that God would punish it. Living Dante emphasizes his own clothed state among the naked damned. He has one of them pluck at his gown, another recognize his Florentine style, and he says how hard it is to climb a big rock in his long gown. This gown is belted with a cord—which symbolizes self-discipline, because back in the first canto Dante says he thought he could use it to capture the Leopard of Lust. Before climbing Mount Purgatory, Dante gets a new belt made of a reed, now symbolizing his share in the repentant humility of those working oƒ their sins. Meanwhile, not one word on Virgil’s costume—he is always a bodiless, nonsymbolically dressed Homeric shade. But Dante never forgets real life, and he puts real clothes into his epic similes. He compares Virgil, quickly rescuing Dante from some immediate harm, to a frantic mother rushing outdoors in her shift to save her child from fire, her seminudity as bad as nakedness in Dante’s day. This little vignette is moral, too, with common decency overwhelmed by maternal self-forgetfulness. On Mount Purgatory, sackcloth is worn, but only by the Envious. For all other struggling penitents, Dante specifies no clothing and no nakedness, and perhaps true repentance requires never acknowledging the body, even under stress. But on Purgatory comes welcome relief from so many dread or blank presences: Dante’s richly costumed angels, bright creatures borrowed from the Bible, who monitor the rising stages of the mountain. First he makes a beautiful image of four hovering angels guarding the valley

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outside the gates, their green draperies fluttering behind them, fanned and beaten by their green wings. On the way up, more angels wear luminescent draperies in many colors, with multicolored or swan-like wings, and all have golden hair and faces like stars. These descriptions match the appearance of angels in Florentine art—a familiar, earthly visualization, suitable for what is still an earthly journey. Finally we reach the top of Mount Purgatory and the Earthly Paradise, full of sparkling water, flowers, and green grass, still rightly served by the pictorial style of describing, and here Virgil leaves Dante to the guidance of Beatrice, who arrives riding on a float out of a church pageant, followed by a symbolically costumed procession. Dante says this is better described by Ezekiel, but the enamored poet dresses Beatrice himself, in a gauzy white veil wreathed with olive leaves, over a green cape and a flame-colored dress, her figure surrounded by a cloud of flowers, her hair chastely unmentioned. Her colors, symbolic of Florence, also symbolize the sacred virtues Faith, Hope, and Love, while four attendant angels wearing imperial purple stand for secular Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, and Justice. This last canto of Purgatorio marks the end of earth and of all earthly beauties such as delicious scenery and lovely clothing, even for angels. Beatrice and Dante go up through the spheres of Heaven, encountering many individuals with no physical looks. No visual dimension at all exists in the encompassing Primum Mobile, where the angelic orders administer the universe. Dante is addressed by important angels and great personages—Thomas Aquinas, St. Peter, and the Emperor Trajan, among many others—but these have no shape or surface his eye can seize, only voices and degrees of light. Great visual detail appears only in the complex astronomical display surrounding everything, which Beatrice continuously expounds, its stark vastness a great change from the lush settings and costumed performances in the Earthly Paradise. Then we climb a ladder up to the Empyrean, the thousand-tiered golden rose where the face and form of each redeemed soul is again recognizable, and here everybody wears the white raiment prescribed in Revelation 19:8: “fine linen, clean and white,” writes St. John, “for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints.” And we see why Dante makes

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dress important in highest Heaven. Inside the earth in Hell, the damned are stuck in their shameful naked bodies. On Earth, and all the way up Purgatory, clothing’s only true task is to hide sinful flesh, never to look fine or flatter the vile body; but the job of heavenly garments is to replace the body entirely, to clothe each soul only in what might be called the Armor of Righteousness. Left bare are the face—where the mouth utters praise, eyes see the light, ears hear the message—and the hands, which may bless and beckon, point and pray, hold an attribute and (of course) write. The rest of the body obligingly vanishes. No feet, no shoes, pilgrimage is over. No skin shows through the celestial stuƒ; it makes no bodily shapes discernible—this white linen in no way resembles classical drapery, as the angels’ floating robes in Purgatory seemed to do. Once in the Empyrean, Beatrice goes up to her high seat near the Virgin, telling St. Bernard to continue explaining things to Dante; but Bernard sees that the living mind of his entranced charge will soon weaken under so much supernal pressure. He says, “Time is running out and we must stop here, as the good tailor cuts his coat according to the length of his cloth”—and the poet admits that the huge three-part vision is beginning to dissolve in his mind. Dante has to concentrate on how to cut his own coat from what he can remember and tailor the complex shape of everything he has seen.

ARIOSTO

By the time Ariosto was writing Orlando Furioso two hundred years later in the early sixteenth century, the arts of tailoring and verse were still more complex. The narrative art of weaving now produced expensive tapestries in professional workshops. Elegant tailored garments were multipartite, ornamented, and stiƒ, and so was armor. Armor was now being worn for sport as well as war, and Ariosto describes battle as resembling sport, or perhaps dance—even bloody sieges, with a Homeric level of slaughter. Conceptions of sin and virtue had been refined by an ideal of chivalric honor embodied in individual knights, and nudity was an aesthetic and not a moral condition. Ariosto further shows

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that a self-consciously theatrical spirit might now lighten the tone of serious poetic narrative. Orlando Furioso is a romance about the knights of King Charlemagne saving Christian Europe from the concerted attacks of infidel and pagan warriors. But Ariosto also oƒers it as an Aeneid-like epic to celebrate the founding of the Este family of Ferrara— as if implying that Aeneas was the first Christian knight. Besides Virgil and Homer, Ariosto borrows freely from Ovid, Scripture, and earlier Italian romances, which had already co-opted and translated Orlando from the original Chanson de Roland of medieval France. The poem’s double heroic trajectory is further embellished with countless tales of giants, monsters, and sorcerers, of globe-circling trips on a flying horse, of jealousy and devoted love, of thievery and deception, of sex, magic, nakedness, and madness, all these involving dozens of characters from many literary traditions, including God and the Archangel Michael. There’s a trip to the epic Underworld and a visit to Dante’s Earthly Paradise, where we are startled to find a jeweled palace with the Fates spinning inside it, owned by the aged and benign John the Evangelist, who organizes a trip to the Moon to fetch back mad Orlando’s lost wits. The most exhilarating figure in this fantasy is Bradamante, a lady knight-at-arms and Christian warrior, the sister of Orlando’s cousin Rinaldo, all three of them noble members of King Charlemagne’s family. She is the destined bride of the pagan knight Ruggiero, who will convert to Christianity to marry her and link his heroic Trojan ancestor Hector to their joint descendants in the Este family. Bradamante herself is no Amazon like Camilla, nor virgin goddess like Athena. She passionately loves Ruggiero and is miserably jealous when she hears of the closeness between him and Marfisa, the invincible female knight-at-arms on the pagan side, until she learns that they are brother and sister. Bradamante is tender-hearted and chivalrous—she often unhorses her opponents and doesn’t slaughter them; but pagan Marfisa is inexhaustibly ferocious, able to take on and kill a dozen in a row, a true Amazon. It helps that her armor is enchanted, like that of several other warriors in this poem; we are still being reminded of epic armor’s immortality.

ANNE HOLLANDER / 54

This point is further made by two suits of heirloom armor physically deriving from remote antiquity: Hector’s armor, which is magic and comes to Ruggiero all the way from the Trojan War; and a pagan warrior’s dragon-skin armor, which once belonged to his ancestor Nimrod, the Bible’s mighty hunter (Genesis 10:9), but is not magic. Genesis is mere history; The Iliad is creative poetry. By now great heroes’ swords all have names, like living souls, and famous arms and armor constantly change hands and sides, often by conquest, sometimes by theft or plain carelessness. Armor thus generates its own drama, which independently rolls up the legendary and literary past into the present written story. Ariosto suggests that whenever the arms of a great hero are worn or used by someone else, the original owner is virtually present in whatever battle the new owner fights. The poet oƒers the familiar piercing, slicing, and crushing of breastplates, helmets, shields, and body parts underneath, many of these blows dealt by the relentless Marfisa. Despite all this, both she and Bradamante are very beautiful and sometimes wear becoming feminine clothing. But other than naming their color and saying whether jewels adorn them, Ariosto doesn’t dwell on ladies’ dresses. He instead suggests their similarity, evoking Homer’s repetitive long skirts and fine sashes. Diƒerences in armor are what really interested Ariosto, as they did Virgil, and the fact that both Bradamante and Marfisa are always taken for men while wearing full armor and a closed helmet. Knightly costume had become a literary device, used for creating any perfect disguise required by a writer’s plot. Ariosto finally stages what readers breathlessly wait for—a fight between the two armed women, during Bradamante’s jealous period. But then there’s one between the brother and sister, and another fight between the two armed lovers, both of these while Ruggiero is completely disguised in someone else’s armor, helmet, and surcoat. Surcoats were sleeveless tunics worn over armor to show the wearer’s crest or device. We find virtuous ladies cutting, sewing, and embroidering them for the knights instead of weaving, using diƒerent symbolic devices according to present need, which might often be to deceive or mislead. To balance the ancient male armor in the poem, Ariosto introduces a large piece of ancient female needlework near the end. An enormous tent is magically borrowed from the Byzantine emperor by the good witch Melissa, to serve the lovers as a marriage pavilion.

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Ariosto says this fabulous object was made in Troy for Hector by his sister Cassandra the prophetess, and Ariosto devotes several verses to the lineage of the Este family that she, foreseeing the future, embroidered on the fabric. He thus neatly conflates Homeric weaving and modern embroidery, adding in the prophetic shields of Achilles and Aeneas. Ariosto gives female nudity all the erotic and aesthetic importance it has in Renaissance art, and like a painter, he renders it as a beautiful costume. The universally adored Angelica, the elusive Chinese princess who later drives Orlando mad with love, wears it when she’s chained naked to a rock, waiting to be devoured by a sea monster. Ruggiero, in love with Bradamante, must rescue Angelica out of chivalry, but not before Ariosto so paints her nakedness that we can feel its eƒects on the virtuous knight. Once he frees her, Ruggiero tries to make love to her, but he can’t get his armor oƒ fast enough. Angelica escapes, as she always does, and we see that his honorable armor itself has kept this susceptible hero from betraying his betrothed. Later, Orlando rescues the forsaken Olimpia, an even more ravishingly described naked lady in chains, but Orlando’s passion for Angelica prevails, and this lady’s nudity captivates only the king of Ireland, whom she marries. Ariosto’s descriptions of nude charms resemble Homer’s description of Hera’s seduction clothes—the action stops, and we revel in lush details. Earlier in the story, the evil witch Alcina makes Ruggiero forget Bradamante entirely. When they meet, the poet praises Alcina’s hair, bosom, face, arms, hands, and feet—not her clothes, only what they reveal. Visiting Ruggiero that night, she shows her bodily beauties through a transparent shift, “which concealed her rounded limbs as little as the stems of lilies in a crystal vase.” In this literary epoch, either selectively bared or transparently veiled nudity are an unearthly enchantress’s means of seduction—no longer a long robe, tasseled girdle, shimmering veil, and jeweled earrings. No untidy hair and short-skirted hunting costumes either, and no saintly draperies. Ariosto suggests that full armor or classical nudity is what women wear at their most appealing. That’s because equivocal fashion has now irreversibly arrived, with its shifting imaginative scope, enabled by the humanist spirit. Ariosto shows its eƒects on Alcina’s dissolute prisoners, Ruggiero now among them. Melissa the good witch reports them

ANNE HOLLANDER / 56

changing their clothes several times a day for various pastimes and pleasures, and she’s appalled to find stalwart Ruggiero wearing curled and perfumed tresses, a gold necklace and bracelets, pearl drop earrings, and exquisite silk and gold attire woven by Alcina herself—the Circe of this poem, and its only weaver. We learn that finery suggesting Attis or Adonis is not the proper oƒ-duty wear for a knight—although for a lady knight, finery suggesting Venus might be correct, and Bradamante’s mother orders her a rich trousseau. But for a heroic man, nudity is superhonorable, and great Orlando’s stout, furry nakedness inhabits the second half of the poem after madness has made him shed every piece of his clothing and armor. Orlando rages destructively in his nude Titan costume until his wits are restored, he’s cured of love, his clothes and arms are returned, and he can lead the victorious fighting in the last cantos. Ariosto keeps demonstrating the new literary possibilities of clothing. Poetry can show the power of selective exposure in fashion and suggest how masculine and feminine eƒects—or exotic and familiar eƒects, or ancient and modern, or sacred and profane—may be mixed, juxtaposed, exchanged, or rearranged and written about with zeal or scorn, irony or aƒection, or pure hilarity. An old woman is jeered at for wearing a young woman’s outfit, and Marfisa punishes the jeerer; a maid is seen receiving a lover in her mistress’s clothes—minutely described—and causes great harm to the lady’s reputation; there’s transvestism, both comic and romantic; and comic embarrassment arises when a misogynistic tyrant has cut oƒ the skirts of three ladies up to the navel, and three knights must hastily lend them their surcoats. Such things damaged this poem’s credit during periods when Dante’s moralizing use of dress seemed the most appropriate for respectable verse. Homer, Virgil, and Dante had observed great decorum for the poetic role of clothing, because epic treatment of dress had its rules, and all three sometimes left it out deliberately. Ariosto uses the same themes, but in him we find a modern, skeptical sense of literary dress, influenced by the subversive way fashion works, where anything serious may quickly be made ridiculous, and vice versa, depending on who’s writing about it, and how.

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4

O R B ITS O F P O W E R R I N G S I N J A M E S M E R R I L L’ S P O E T R Y

Andrea Mariani James Merrill agrees with Charles Baudelaire in considering dressing a deeply spiritual act that, through artifice (which opposes the banality of daily reality), demonstrates the soul’s immaterial dimension.1 His texts abound in elegant skirts, fur coats, sandals, and sunglasses; the poetic “I” describes with morbid satisfaction scarves, pochettes, jewels (tissues, colors, textures) as signals of deeper truths (good or bad taste, tensions and intentions) that contribute to the overall message of the text. This is true even of tights (according to Umberto Eco, the only garment that “the thought abhors”), which can allow for an appreciation of the abstract, purely formal harmony of the body, as if it were naked, but without the erotic implications of nakedness.2 What appears at first as a marginal observation can soon prove a pivotal element that vastly resounds in the acoustic chamber of the reader’s mind and will not cease to work before it reaches the highest levels of allegory and symbolism. Likewise, in the course of his long profession as a poet, Merrill wore various clothes, masks, armors that helped him to pursue his textual projects, giving substance to the strategies he employed to express or to hide his true personality, either suggesting a desire to involve his reader in a dense dialogue based on a series of intermittent “confes-

sions” or, in contrast, distancing himself and his reader from the autobiographical sources of a process of writing that can, to some extent, be labeled as postmodern. In this context, his discourse on clothes, guises, and costumes regularly indicates the progress not so much toward the Bildung of a stable identity, as toward the discovery that identity is never acquired, but constantly renegotiated.3 The poet, as a rule, oƒers his notations on clothes and dressing with an apparent nonchalance, in the form of rapid brushstrokes, as if they were no more than the final touches in the “portrait” of a person. Upon a closer scrutiny, however, such notations prove to be precisely the primum movens, the original nucleus around which the various components of the text coalesce and find an order. The color of a shirt, a bracelet, a hat is often the first thing that catches the subject’s attention, piercing his mind or sensibility. It remains as the basic coordinate of the network the poet weaves along both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. Even in The Changing Light at Sandover, the monumental trilogy based on the messages coming from numberless “voices from the other world” (where the crucial discourse is metaphysical),4 the physical traits of reality are also important, including the way these “voices” are dressed and masked, once they become “presences” that can be seen, thanks to a mirror hanging on the wall of the room where the spiritualist séances take place. The poem is a gigantic pageant that stages a procession of human, hybrid, mythological figures: some remain aerial, suave, or harsh speakers; some are introduced as fascinating or extravagant bodies and described in detail in their attire. Characters from ancient history and the personal lives of JM and DJ (the protagonists of the poem) are regularly scrutinized in their garments and judged according to their looks, which condition the reliability of what they say. Here and there, unexpected touches pertaining to garments force us to revise our expectations, as, for instance, when Plato dismisses the serious tone he has “worn” up to a certain moment, and reveals his inclination toward transvestism, as well as the joy he feels when he goes around “in drag”: “the Mediterranean / Makes such a heavy prose of being male.”5 Plato’s androgyny in Symposium foreshadows the controversial praise of

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doubleness—which, as the old philosopher discovered after death, must not be reduced to an undue concordia discors—and finally stands as an ironic refutation of C. G. Jung’s theory of bisexuality. The interest of this passage, as of several others, lies in the frequent presence of an erotic subtext, often based on dress and costume: “Ephraim is kneeling. A soupçon of garment / Shows oƒ the body of a lover’s dream.”6 “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia” (a poem that belongs to the final phase of Merrill’s production)7 may serve as a convenient transition from Merrill’s poetry to his autobiographical prose A Diƒerent Person, in which the discourse on dressing, jewels, and rings reaches an acme. The complex poem is a tribute to the memory of Elizabeth Bishop, a friend and master. The poet visits the cottage in Canada where she spent several happy moments of her life; the objects that are kept in that “sanctuary” are surveyed with a perfect balance between realistic description and ironic restraint. Most interesting for our purposes are the following lines: “A whole wall hung / With women’s black straw hats, some rather smart /—All circa 1915.” In 1915, Elizabeth was four years old, but the hats were certainly used for several years after World War I. It is, most likely, that these are the very hats that Elizabeth’s aunts and uncles exchange in the strange picnic described in her poem “Exchanging Hats”—an exquisite text that Merrill analyzes in his memoir.8 As we have seen, the poet chooses to charge with a strong symbolic value, above all, objects we wear, which identify us and connote our actions, standing out as markers of the hidden traits of personalities, moods, and mental habitus; so much the better if they can be used by women and, in a revelatory playful whim, by men as well. The discussion of Bishop’s “Exchanging Hats” in A Diƒerent Person occurs by a practice that Merrill confesses with exquisite self-irony: the frequent exchange of shirts, pullovers, jackets, between him and his partner Robert, at the peak of their relationship, back in 1952: A poem by Elizabeth Bishop appeared in a little magazine and pointed to new strategies, while summoning up with a pang those joyous months when Robert wore my jacket and I his shirts. . . . “Exchanging Hats” smiled down at its reflection in depths so refreshing that I read it a second, a third, a tenth time.9

ANDREA MARIANI / 60

The text is interpreted in perceptive syntony: The poem begins by evoking the behavior of grown-ups—clownish uncles and spinster aunts—at a beach picnic, but . . . these figures grow ghostly, other- or underworldly, wise as that Ovidian Tiresias who, at a more genital level than Miss Bishop’s, also explored (in her phrase) “the headgear of the other sex.” (140)

The notation that sees the figures of the poem as avatars of Tiresias seems particularly interesting; Bishop’s text, in fact, is constellated with allusions to the “forbidden topic of transsexual impulses” (141) (Bishop: “transvestite twist,” “golden anchors drag,” “perversities may aggravate / the natural madness of the hatter”). Experiments of this sort, no matter how successfully the poet finds a way to “exorcise” them, inventing “a familiar, ‘harmless’ situation to dramatize them,” are risky: the apparently perfect, pre-Edenic partnership between James and Robert (who looked so much like each other as to be seen as twins) was a dismaying double impersonation of androgyny, verging on narcissism and incest. Bishop’s fortunate little masterpiece, though, was able to create a tone that left the fellow poet “enthralled.” The theme of transgender experimentation is resumed by Merrill when he reports a coincidence (but coincidences do not exist, as the wisest “voices” in the Trilogy explain) that occurred several years later, when he visited Bishop in Brazil: [As] she and I were being driven through sunny red-and-green hillsides sparkling from a recent downpour . . . ahead squatted a small intense rainbow we seemed about to collide with. . . . Something Elizabeth said in Portuguese set the fat black driver shaking with laughter. “In one of the Northern provinces,” she explained, “they have this superstition: if you pass under a rainbow you change your sex.” (142)

Merrill’s memoir reveals a sensitivity to dresses and costumes that would not cut a poor figure if compared to that of Marcel Proust (in particular in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs);1 0 a “curiosity,” a “metaphoric imagination” through which, according to Claudia Ingram, both Proust and Merrill invite their readers to find in the text the story of “his/her plural selves and worlds [as] more vividly imaginable and hence more real,

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countering, to some extent, the blinkering eƒects of repression and denial.”11 The volume is enriched by a splendid photographic apparatus, showing Merrill, his parents, relatives, friends, on various occasions in the early 1950s. James wears, in general, those “fine white shirts” we often find in his poetry, but in a casual, loose way, and without a tie; his father, the stodgy Wall Street magnate, by contrast, wears a starched collar. His mother, a typical Southern Belle, cannot be caught en robe de chambre and never parts from her aristocratic pearl earrings. Jewels (bracelets, rings, necklaces) are a constant outfit in every lady’s attire, but appear sober, in harmony with the taste of the circle of expatriates who make the best of their stay in Europe, where, immediately after World War II, everything is less expensive than in the States. The photographs are more portraits of people, styles, and fashions than snapshots. They remain in our mind as vividly as those described in Merrill’s lines, chosen as they are with monomaniac attention, in fact, intention, because they not only illustrate the text (commenting on it, visually documenting it) but dialogue with its pages in the construction of an intersemiotic discourse. The territories that Merrill explores in the pages of A Diƒerent Person deserve a much closer scrutiny; Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests helps us to understand his strategies and textual projects.1 2 Here I limit myself to just one more quotation, which is most useful in order to link the discourse of the memoir to that on the ring in “The Emerald” and “The Ring Cycle.” One of the joyful evenings of those years is introduced by the usual, obsessive attention to what all “actors” wear: I know even today what an attractive foursome we made—the girls in their smart dresses, Claude and I in the light-weight cotton suits that were the inexpensive fashion that summer. (. . . Robert Isaacson had found one of electric blue closely threaded with crimson). (99–100)

The atmosphere seems perfect, until “did an awkward moment arise.” One of the girls notices that both young men wear a ring and insists on inspecting them. As James pretends that he cannot slip his ring oƒ his finger, the girl adds: “Rings have to have a story, I always think.” The other girl, who gets hold of Claude’s ring, attempts to read the let-

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ters inscribed inside it. James knows that they are the initials of his mother’s name, and of his own. When he gave the ring to his friend, he promised a special, lasting aƒection, as well as the overcoming of the previous, equally special relationship with his mother; he also implied the trust of his past, of the history of his life, into the hands of his new companion. When Grace crushes him with a glare, whispering “I saw,” the sensation the text conveys to the reader is that of the unveiling of a truth that embarrasses the subject at various levels: homosexuality, (virtual) incest, betrayal, ménage à trois. Rings thus “have to have a story”: they are semantically dense, charged with implications that ramify from the past into the future. As Claude Mazlum demonstrates, it is not only the way we wear them that is meaningful, but why and how we choose, buy, and oƒer them.1 3 Marcel Mauss attaches great importance to them in his General Theory of Magic.1 4 For him, rings signify the transmission of a heritage, the reification of a promise (through precious matter), a connection that goes well beyond the boundaries of fleeting daily experience. Myths, stories, and fairy tales of all cultures have exploited this density. Su~ce it to mention, in the Western imagination, the rings of King Solomon, Prometheus, Polycrates, Gyges.1 5 In the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition, such a prismatic density of meaning reached several peaks: in the Victorian era (Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book), in the mid-twentieth century (J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings), and in the 1970s (Carlos Castaneda’s The Second Ring of Power). The success of the film adaptation of Tolkien’s trilogy proves that also at the dawn of the new millennium globalized audiences are ready to be captured by the call of such a powerful symbol.1 6 If, as we shall soon see, the ring mounts an emerald, its ambiguous power is of chthonian origin. The ring can be priceless, not so much because of its stone setting, but because it belongs to a dynasty and represents the stratification of a family history; because it absorbs numberless layers of emotions, distils a crucial episode, reminds us of a person or a story. If it can be extremely di~cult to oƒer a ring (in particular, if one did not buy it, but has always possessed it); it can likewise be embarrassing to accept it, to wear it not

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FIGURE 4.1

Parmigianino,

Portrait of Gian Galeazzo Sanvitale, 1529. Museo di Capodimonte, Napoli.

occasionally, as a piece of one’s outfit that must match the rest of the attire, but constantly, as a token of a new self that accepts the terms of the person who gave the ring (e.g., a wedding ring). The semantic tension of the ring is often used by Merrill with diƒerent intentions and results. I shall concentrate on two texts in which the function of the ring is central, as the titles indicate: “The Emerald” (part two of a diptych, “Up and Down,” published in Braving the Elements), and “The Ring Cycle,” from A Scattering of Salts.1 7 In “The Emerald” the balance between the narrative element (derived, at least in part, from an actual episode of his life) and the archetypal/psychological implications the reader is invited to consider is an example of Merrill’s poetry at its best. Recent criticism stresses the fact that, because Merrill adopts what Piotr Gwiazda calls “a rhetoric of in-

ANDREA MARIANI / 64

authenticity,” we should not ask “whether what occurs in the poem corresponds to an actual experience or not.”1 8 It is true, of course, that what really matters is that the text shows a perfect honesty of intentions, a concentration on the message, the conquest of an inner vision, an intelligent management of variants: the subject does not descend underground in order to obtain from Tiresias’s shadow directions as to his nóstos, like Homer’s Odysseus, nor to meet his mother; he goes there with his mother, not to hear from her, but to tell her (invited, almost provoked by her) an important, so far unexpressed, truth. The entry of the two characters into a bank’s “inmost vault” is underlined by not an “opening” but a “closing” of solemn doors, “palatial bronze gates” that shut “like jaws” behind their shoulders, leaving them alone (with what they have to tell each other and would not dare to communicate outside), in front of an unimpressive metal box, whose appearance is in sharp contrast to the value of its content: “a tin box painted mud-brown.” We should remember, though, that it is with mud that God modeled Adam, that mud and a spelt cake were the sop to throw Cerberus in order to obtain admission into Hades, and that with mud Christ restored sight to the blind man in the Gospel. After a quick, but attentive and self-satisfied, search among “Security. Will. Deed” (the full stops suggest the instants of attention devoted to each document), the mother reaches the deepest level: that of the most precious jewels. All of a sudden, her face brightens and grows “queerly . . . fair, young”; though similar to “the faces of our dear ones who have died.” The elderly woman is, indeed, in a liminal position between life, death, and an “Other/ Under World” that restores to the souls the appearance and apparel of their young or early mature age. The mother cannot resist the temptation to wear a diamond bracelet, a gift from her first husband (James’s father, the only great love of her life, who deceived and betrayed her by divorcing and marrying again): the precious stones sparkle like stars in the penumbra of the “cave,” hurting the lady, penetrating into her inmost self, piercing her heart; they contain and conjure up a concentration of joys, pains, passions (“teardrop to fire”), and, above all, of memories; finally, they are defined as “my father’s kisses”

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(unfortunately “lipless”). The jewel has activated, as in all myths and fairy tales, the amplest possibilities of communication. James can hardly withstand the flow of emotions, his only defense strategy being that of remaining in the dimension of fairy tales, assimilating his rejuvenated mother to the “girl-bride” of an Indian prince, buried alive, with all her jewels, beside her husband. He is ready to bring her back to life as an incestuous middle-aged Orpheus, whose gray hair surrounds a forehead that beats with exceptional intensity: “Gray are these temple-drummers who once more / Would rouse her.” Then, almost abruptly, the tone of the diction, which previously risked shifting toward a pathetic mood, veers in the opposite direction. The mother shows the son a ring in which is set the purest of emeralds, a “den of greenest light,” that “grows, shrinks, glows” (the play of alliteration reproduces the pulsatory rhythm of the gem, a real firstgrade “star”), soon defined as “Hermetic stanza embedded in the prose / Of the last semiprecious years.” More weighty than ever, the adjective “hermetic” opens the line reminding us that we are witnessing a special “ceremony,” a “mystery,” in which the stature and the role of the mother are almost as crucial as those of a Demeter priestess in the course of the Eleusinian rites. Compared to the sublime beauty of the emerald, and to what it suddenly comes to stand for, as the mother oƒers it to the son, the rest, including the long series of years James spent oscillating between moderate joys and tolerable pains, cannot but appear “semiprecious.” The lines “here, take it for— // For when you marry. For your bride. It’s yours” demand a careful close reading. The gift is not casual, naive, or disinterested; it is part of a project the mother almost forces on the son. At the same time a token of love and a challenge, a provocation, it is meant to superimpose a design and/or to excite a reaction, a final “confession.” Should the son refuse such an oƒer, he would have to justify himself. In fact, the sophisticated technique of the poet inserts a double, imperceptible hesitation: the dash after the first “for,” and its iteration in the second line (“For when . . . For your bride”). The result is a splendid achievement: the woman sounds as if she were in search of the right words, still perhaps uncertain as to the timeliness of the crucial showdown.

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The response/reply of the son explicitly addresses not the mother, but rather the reader and is presented as a “confession” whose meaning and significance the mother will understand only indirectly, obliquely (Emily Dickinson’s “tell all the truth, but tell it slant”), thanks to the final gesture, which concludes the ceremony, the episode, and the text that staged it all. Every answer—in particular the revelation of a truth—“would sound theatrical”; would, in fact, ruin the perfect balance of movements, glances, reflections (revolving around—even produced by—the fascinating green light of the emerald) that alone can allow the mutual understanding—the result the impeccable ceremonial aimed for. The ring (the set stone that dominates the place, the environment, the space, and its color, so much in syntony with the context and the story of the life that is “set” in it) stimulates the poetic self to accept his own nature and to invite (at last) the maternal figure to accept it.1 9 The conclusion of the poem is firm and honest. Mother and son have to cope with the fact that there will be no rooms (no double rooms, in particular), but only stanzas; no children (“little feet that patter”), instead the feet of the poet’s lines. And as it is necessary that the mother should perform a concrete act of acceptance, the son slips the ring “onto her worn knuckle” (she does not withdraw). We seem to be before the scene of a mystic wedding, which compensates the mother for the son’s betrayal, twenty years before, when he had given her ring to a friend who had been nothing more than the companion of a few months (A Diƒerent Person). However, Frank B. Farrell does not stop here: he believes that “the ring . . . remains in the oscillating dyad between mother and son,” because “the emerald, in the way its green light seems to pervade the poem, is a symbol of the symbolic. . . . We do not give up the symbolic; if we did so, we would lose the hermetic presence and lighting . . . that give a richer depth from beneath to the lines of prose of a life.”2 0 I believe, instead, that it is necessary that the ring should be given back to the mother. In fact, in perfect symmetry with the mother’s hesitation as she oƒered the ring to her son (“take it for— // For when you marry. For your bride”), a slight embarrassment seizes the son as he oƒers the ring back to his mother: “Wear it for me . . . / Until—until the time comes.” The harmony of

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intentions that is thus established between the two is underlined by the meeting of their glances (“Our eyes meet”). Only then does the shady underground space (partially lit, as we have seen, by the ambiguous light of the green gem) give way to a radiant, more diƒused, less ambiguous light of a truth that finishes the text with an impression of great relief: “The world beneath the world is brightening.” The discourse on the ring in “The Emerald,” though central, occupies a limited segment of the text (fourteen lines out of fifty-six). In “The Ring Cycle” the situation is similar: it occupies fifteen lines out of ninety (just one stanza that is not even its final): I’ve worn my rings—all three of them At once for the first time—to the Ring. ... One ring is gold; one silver, set With two small diamonds; the third, bone —Conch shell, rather. Ocean cradled it As earth did the gems and metals. All unknown, ... Orbits of power, Love’s over me, . . .

As in “The Emerald,” the title sheds light on the double importance of the “ring,” if we consider that ring and cycle are synonyms: the ring is a ky´ klos, a small but dramatically important “circle”; it sums up, suggests—and alludes to—all other major and minor circular objects (and concepts): the immense circle of the horizon, the solar and lunar disks, the cycle of the seasons, the paradigm of birth, life, death, rebirth, as well as the dysphoric, “closed circle” of a power that cannot be avoided. The title of the present essay (which uses a hemistich from the poem) also implies the intrinsic double power of the ring: active and passive, positive and negative; the power we acquire when we wear a special, magic ring is also the power we are subject to and dependent on; di~cult to get rid of, it may continue to inhabit us, even if we decide to give up the ring.

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One should not forget that Richard Wagner’s tetralogy is, in fact, a trilogy, consisting of three “days” preceded by a prologue.2 1 We are, therefore, in front of a fascinating interlacing between a circular and a triadic system of signs. The structure of the text is as complex as it can be without becoming obscure. On the temporal plane, we have in the background the episode of the ring from “The Emerald,” as well as the many rings appearing here and there in The Changing Light at Sandover and in A Diƒerent Person. Evidently, the poem deals with the question of memory, of the superimposition of layers of experience in the subject’s life and of the possibility of dialogue between past and present. The first production of the entire Wagnerian “cycle” the poet had heard, “absorbed” in his mother’s company, dates back to 1939 (four decades before the present of the text) when he was twelve; now he is fifty-two (it is no accident that the numbers twelve, twenty, and their multiples keep recurring in Merrill’s poetry).2 2 The poetic “I” traces his real birth to that occasion, his discovery (for the moment, largely unaware) of the sense of things. His mother’s love of opera had already introduced him to Verdi, but Verdi, apparently so catchy, had oƒered him riddles he “could whistle but not solve.” Wagner, on the contrary, “had been significance itself, / Great golden lengths of it, stitched with motifs.” The adjective “golden” eƒectively describes the synesthetic dimension of Wagner’s music, which is the result of the theory of Gesamtkunstwerk, based on the interaction of all senses and epitomized in the title of the cycle’s Prologue (Das Rheingold). At the same time, it suggests the precious quality of the poetic discourse that will, in fact, use three rings as instruments, “orbits of (priceless) power,” in order to pursue its goal. “E-flat denotes the Rhine, / Where everything began”: the mythical, archetypal river is the crucial place, but also, somehow, the time of an immemorial “beginning.” Likewise, the 1939 production of Wagner’s tetralogy is the chronotope of the subject’s coming to life, and the present production coincides with a “second coming,” a revelatory, epiphanic experience that oƒers a final understanding. In between the two “fissures,” all that has happened can be defined as banal, “semiprecious” (“The Emerald”). This is what distinguishes the basic, essential moments of our lives from the less important ones: they can be read as watersheds.

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What happens in the present tense of the text is, once again, a double happening: a melodramatic performance takes place on stage, and another, mirrorlike (but more intimate) performance is staged at the audience level. Almost all of the spectators are old friends; they recognize each other and, moved by resemblances and strange metamorphoses, perceive the uncanny, disquieting traces of the passing of time in many, once familiar, faces. Meeting the same people who were present at the Metropolitan Opera for the 1939 production is like meeting “survivors.” Evening after evening, all follow the Ring cycle with a feeling of close participation, of concern, almost of anxiety. When the curtain falls on the final scene of Die Götterdämmerung, they will wonder how little time is left before the final scene of their lives. No matter how strange the dresses, the costumes of these (at intervals) pathetic Wagnerian gods look convincing: they, in a word, not only are “the powers” but have power. Siegfried and Brünnhilde, for instance, wear heavy makeup (they are heavy, overweight, themselves); their gestures are clumsy, but (such is the magic of opera, and of the unique situation) they “now hate / So plausibly that one old stagehand cries.”2 3 The poet, adds Frank B. Farrell, “(like the old stagehand) today sees very well the stage machinery of language and knows how its mechanisms produce certain stage eƒects. . . . Yet from that disenchanted stance [he] is still able . . . to be moved by words put together in certain arrangements.”2 4 The rings that will soon appear in the next (fifth) stanza are no less clumsy, insofar as they are heterogeneous, consisting of diƒerent material, and certainly do not match each other. Their power, however, intensified by the emotions the drama gives rise to, is as strong as it can be; it reverberates with a mysterious sparkling, even in absence of light (like the green gem of “The Emerald,” in the darkness of the bank vault), and spreads in circles, following the centrifugal waves of Wagner’s music. I have come now to the “stanza of the rings.” The rhyme scheme (like that of the previous and subsequent stanzas) presents us with a loose but very sophisticated melopoeia, consisting of rhymes, assonances, and consonances: them, Ring, gleam, sound, underground, listening, set, bone, it, unknown, Nibelheim, jewelry, me, scales, Time. The subject here is, more than ever, a transparent projection/persona of the poet, whose voice is not

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ashamed of intruding, providing details that only Merrill can know. First of all, one should observe that the text does not say “I’ve worn three of my rings,” but “I’ve worn my rings—all three of them,” as if the subject only had three rings. What he wants to convey is the idea that only three (of his rings) really count. They are diƒerent (and heterogeneous, as I said), but all equally dear to him, apart from their commercial value. Before describing them one by one, he wants us to approach them (or them to approach us) to understand how important they are for him, and therefore tells us that “Like pearls in seawater they gleam.” One of them, though, does more than gleam: it “sparkles through waves of sound.” The three rings, considered together, are an elegant but not a strong source of light: their luminescence is compared to that of pearls seen through a screen of water. One of them, instead, “sparkles,” thanks to the facets of two diamonds set in it. All three rings were not bought but given to the subject by persons who love (or loved) him and are (or were) loved by him; apparently, there is no need to mention their names. The fact that he wears the three rings at the same time signals his desire to pay a tribute to his three “dear ones,” excluding every possible competition or jealousy: aƒections do not compete but are added to each other. The first ring is a gift from “one [who] is underground” (one thinks, again, of the underground dimension of “The Emerald”). The second, by a person who is far away; but love and friendship, according to Merrill, overcome all distances of space and time. The third, by a friend who sits beside him, listening to Wagner’s music. The origins of the three rings are thus explained before they have been described: so much to confirm that, without their givers, without their histories, they would have little meaning (and, hence, little power); and to insist that people, anyhow, have precedence over things, no matter how dense and rich in significance these things may be. When we finally see them, we know them: these overcharged objects par excellence. One is simply a gold ring (a wedding ring?). The second is silver (a less noble metal but, probably, less vulgar, more elegant) with two diamonds set in it (so, this is the one that “sparkles”). The third (most likely the least precious, but sentimentally the most important) is bone—or, as the subject immediately corrects himself, “conch shell”: a sort of

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mother-of-pearl; had it been “bone,” the subject could not have added “ocean cradled it” (doubling what he had said, a couple of lines before, about the pale luminescence of the three objects, gleaming “like pearls in seawater”). In addition, it is important that, out of three rings, two should come from the bowels of the earth, one from the sea. The depths that are at the origin of gold, silver, and diamonds are defined as older than the mythical mines and the underground forges of the Nibelungen that reduced nature to a precious artifact; but the expression used is “That worry Nature into jewelry,” and implies a real suƒering on Nature’s part, because the process has unnatural, foreboding ill-omened consequences. The stanza concludes with yet another acknowledgment of the power of rings, of love, of music, on the poetic “I,” while, in a unique moment of absolute joy and triumph (Siegfried), the dragon is “beset” not only by the hero, but by “his own chromatic scales” (a pun, but also another sophisticated use of synesthesia that helps us imagine, at the same time, the sound of Wagner’s scales and the colors of the dragon’s scales).2 5 The overall message of Wagner’s tetralogy and of the three rings worn by Merrill seems to be an overturn of the traditional Christian hierarchy of the “triumphs,” as it was conceived, for instance, by Petrarch. Far from being overcome and defeated by Death and Time, Love (which, in Merrill, always is, at the same time, a “sacred and profane” love) remains as the utmost good and supreme power: a force that (especially in some passages of The Changing Light at Sandover) reminds us of Empedocles’s philía. In this sense, it is obvious that Merrill belongs to a parallel tradition of Western culture, the one that runs from the motto embroidered on the bodice of Chaucer’s healthily sensual Wife of Bath through Caravaggio’s blatantly immodest Cupid (in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin): Amor vincit omnia. Love defeats everything: old age, the passing of time, the vanishing of memories, all distinctions and boundaries, including those between dresses, costumes, customs, habits and identities, outer look and inner essence; between sleeping and waking, consciousness and the unconscious, dreams and reality. The sixth and last stanza oƒers the reader the description of a dream that takes place in what probably is the very last “ses-

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sion” of the whole production, as James sits not, as the night before, on a pit stall with the plate that has the name of Walter Fogelsong inscribed (another meaningful coincidence: Fogelsong, “bird song,” alludes to the tune of the bird that leads Siegfried into the corner of the forest where he meets Brünnhilde), but on a seat with his own name; he sees the letters gleaming (as in the bank vault of “The Emerald”) with a phosphorescent, slightly eerie light: has he finally reached his place, in the womb of his grave? Overwhelmed by too many death omens, literally sinking into his seat with an unusual heaviness, he seems ready to give up/give way to a sort of “premature (self ) burial”; until, giving a side-glance behind his shoulders, he sees a young man (“daybreak in his eyes”), looking incredibly like him, who gets up, as if he had received from him the baton in the relay of life. His interest in an attractive young man is immediately dislocated and becomes a virtual love for a “son till now undreamed of,” a love that can overcome (the premonition of ) death and, transcribed on the page, sublimated as text, defeat time.

FIGURE 4.2

Bruyn, Barthel

the Elder, Portrait of a Man of the Patrician Family of Weinsberg, Cologne, ca. 1538–39. Oil on panel, 35 ∞ 25.5 cm. Copyright Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

No less than “The Emerald,” “The Ring Cycle” stages a sort of ceremony of acceptance of one’s own destiny, as well as the oƒer of a moral will and the rehearsal of a preparatory rite in view of one’s own death. The discourse on rings confirms the necessary responsibility in their use, as their power not only continues to work, but is probably intensified when we find ourselves at the extreme limits of our lives. It can, for instance, conjure up an heir, whom we decide to charge with the weight of our deposits of emotions, stratified—layer after layer—through time, in the hope that he might boldly resist without succumbing, and even transmit them: in primis, the supreme lesson of the totalizing eƒect of love. It insists on the theme of duplicity (or, should a similar word exist, of “triplicity”) and on the mysterious intertwining of bonds, ties, connections that do not exclude but, on the contrary, deposit on top of each other, supported by the good o~ces of memory, which cannot refuse any past experience. It is clear, here perhaps more than anywhere else, that the poet “reconceives identity as a distorting concept” and that his text “opens up questions about the nature of love, desire, and identity. Each is reconfigured because each is shifting, unstable and ambivalent.” Yet love remained for over forty years “so frankly the highest good.”2 6 “The Ring Cycle” will not specify on which fingers (of what hand?) the three rings are worn by the subject; therefore they end up—in spite of their diƒerences—being perceived by the reader as a single triadic structure, which returns us to the dialectics between circular and triangular forms. The overall image that remains engraved in our minds is that of a strange mandala: a circle inscribed in a triangle or, vice versa, a triangle embedded in a circle. According to C. G. Jung, mandala is the figure not only of cosmic, but of psychic harmony as well.2 7 Merrill’s interpretation of this figure, though (and not only in this particular text), is very personal: the stable square is substituted by the unstable, pointed trilateral, whose corners and vertices (even in an equilateral triangle) are seen as dangerous sharp edges. Merrill’s archetypal man, unlike that of Leonardo, does not occupy the center of a perfect (stable but static) golden section; he finds his (momentary) balance, his role and identity, in the context of a dynamic structure that does not cancel the sharpness of contradictions, the uneasiness of ambiguities,

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the di~culties we encounter in overcoming obstacles and conflicts. The passage between the smallest and the largest “circle” (the minimal space of our daily experience and the horizon, the eye and the universe, the humble conch ring and the immense masterpiece of Wagner’s Ring cycle) expresses, above all, the hard overcoming of endless tensions in diƒerent directions: a miracle that can come true only thanks to a love that is, at the same time, a priceless instrument and a goal per se.

NOTES

1. Laura Aga Rossi, “L’abito non fa il monaco,” Bérénice 8 (November 2000): 27–33. 2. Umberto Eco, “Il pensiero lombare,” in Sette anni di desiderio, 2nd ed. (Milan: Bompiani, 2000), 263. 3. Eric Murphy Selinger, “James Merrill’s Masks of Eros, Masks of Love,” in Critical Essays on James Merrill, ed. Guy Rotella (New York: Hall, 1996), 145–74. 4. James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover (New York: Atheneum, 1982). Robert Polito edited the extremely useful A Reader’s Guide to “The Changing Light at Sandover” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). See also David Johnson, “Resistance to the Message: James Merrill’s Occult Epic,” Contemporary Literature 41, no. 1 (Spring 2000), 87–116; and Timothy Materer, James Merrill’s Apocalypse (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000). 5. Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover, 468. 6. Ibid., 487. See also Peter Nickowitz, Rhetoric and Sexuality: The Poetry of H. Crane, E. Bishop, and J. Merrill (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006). 7. James Merrill, “Overdue Pilgrimage to Nova Scotia,” in Collected Poems, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (New York: Knopf, 2001), 666–67. 8. Elizabeth Bishop, “Exchanging Hats,” in The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 200–1. See Luke Carson, “J. Merrill’s Manners and E. Bishop’s Dismay,” Twentieth-Century Literature 50, no. 2 (June 2004): 167–91, and Timothy Materer, “Mirrored Lives: E. Bishop and J. Merrill,” Twentieth-Century Literature 51, no. 2 (June 2005): 179–209. 9. James Merrill, A Diƒerent Person: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1993), 140. Further references in the text. For the relationship between life and autobiography in Merrill, see Charles Berger, “The

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Necessary Angel and A Diƒerent Person: Defending the Liberty of Poetry,” Wallace Stevens Journal 25, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 64–73, and Matthew S. McClelland and Rachel Slaughter, “James Merrill,” Paris Review 182 (Fall 2007): 71–81. 10. Paola Placella Sommella, La moda nell’opera di Marcel Proust (Rome: Bulzoni, 1986). 11. Claudia Ingram, “Fission and Fusion Both Liberate Energy: J. Merrill, J. Graham, and the Metaphoric Imagination,” Twentieth-Century Literature 51, no. 2 (June 2005): 146. 12. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992). 13. Claude Mazlum, Choisir, acheter, oƒrir et porter les bijoux et les pierres précieuses (Rome: Gremese International, 1991). 14. Marcel Mauss, General Theory of Magic and Other Essays (London: Routledge, 1972; orig. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950). See also Cristina Giorcelli, “‘Charlie’: Travestimento e potere,” in Abito e Identità: Ricerche di storia letteraria e culturale, ed. Cristina Giorcelli (Rome: Edizioni Associate, 1997), 2:25–77. 15. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. John Bruckman-Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), s.v. “ring.” 16. Jane Chance, The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); see also Stratford Caldecott, The Power of the Ring (New York: Crossroad, 2005). 17. James Merrill, Braving the Elements (1972) and A Scattering of Salts (1995), in Collected Poems, 341–42 and 611–13. 18. Piotr K. Gwiazda, James Merrill and W. H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), 53. 19. In the history of psychoanalysis, Emilio Servadio seems to have been the first scholar to touch on the possible connection between the color green and male homosexuality. It is no coincidence that, among many gems of diƒerent colors, Merrill should have chosen an emerald ring for the complex staging of his epiphanic drama. Emilio Servadio, La psicologia dell’attualità (Milan: Longanesi, 1961), and La psicoanalisi e la moderna psicologia dinamica (Florence: Sansoni, 1961). See also Marcel Eck, Sodome: Essai sur l’homosexualité (Paris: Fayard, 1966). As far as the American literary tradition is concerned, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), as well as Michael Denneny, Charles Ortleb, and Thomas Steele, eds., The View from Christopher Street (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984); Robert K. Martin, The

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Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, 2nd expanded ed. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998); and Toby Johnson, Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness (Los Angeles: Alison, 2000). 20. Frank B. Farrell, “James Merrill and the Making of Literature,” in Why Does Literature Matter? (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 168–69. 21. Michele D’Angola, I significati del “Ring” di Wagner (Naples: Palmieri, 1991); Rudolph Sabor, Richard Wagner, “Der Ring des Nibelungen”: A Companion Volume (London: Phaidon, 1997); Jean Shinoda Bolen, Ring of Power: Symbols and Themes, Love vs. Power in Wagner’s Ring Cycle and in Us; A Jungian-Feminist Perspective (New York Beach, Me.: Nicholas-Hayes, 1999). 22. J. D. McClatchy perceptively analyzes Merrill’s passion for opera, and its textual consequences, in “Braving the Elements,” in Rotella, Critical Essays on James Merrill, 232–33. 23. For the fruitful interaction, in Merrill’s poetry, between banal, commonplace daily experience and the sublime tension of epic or lyric poetry, see Nick Halpern, Everyday and Prophetic: The Poetry of Lowell, Ammons, Merrill, and Rich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) and Daniel Mendelsohn, “A Poet of Love and Loss,” New York Times Book Review, March 4, 2001, 16–17. 24. Farrell, “James Merrill and the Making of Literature,” 158. 25. Timothy Materer, “James Merrill’s Polyphonic Muse,” Contemporary Literature 47, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 207–25. 26. James Merrill, “Variations: The Air Is Sweetest That a Thistle Guards,” in Collected Poems, 19–22. 27. Carl Gustav Jung, Mandala Symbolism, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972).

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5

S H E E R LUXU RY KATE C H O PI N’S ‘‘A PAI R O F S I LK STO C KI N G S’’

Cristina Giorcelli Clothing . . . maps out the shape of the ego k a j a s i l v e r m a n , “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse”

That talented, innovative composer and author who was Serge Gainsbourg wrote a beautiful, delicate song titled “Les dessous chics” (“Chic underwear”) in which he twice, in a song dedicated to elegant undergarments, evokes stockings (and once even garters): C’est ne rien dévoiler du tout se dire que lorsqu’on est à bout c’est tabou les dessous chics c’est une jarretelle qui claque dans la tête comme une paire de claques les dessous chics ce sont des contrats résiliés

qui comme des bas résilles ont filé ... les dessous chics c’est se garder au fond de soi fragile comme un bas de soie. It unveils nothing at all it says that when one is at the end it is taboo chic underwear it’s a garter that snaps in the head like a pair of slaps chic underwear are canceled contracts that like fishnet stockings have run their course ... chic underwear it is like secreting something deep inside oneself fragile as a silk stocking. (my translation)

In her 2002 recording, Arabesque, Jane Birkin included this song to which her Arab musicians have added an oriental-sounding arrangement played on a violin, lute, piano, and percussion. Such a touch of exoticism, Edward Said would have agreed,1 has, possibly, the purpose of underlining the atmosphere of luxury and licentiousness that “les dessous chics” cannot but evoke in the minds of Westerners. The charm of undergarments is precisely that of apparently hiding but, at the same time, of strategically exhibiting the body so that they end up adorning rather than

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simply protecting it (which was the function originally attributed to them and for which they were originally devised). One of the sexiest representations of woman is not, as we know, the naked but the half dressed. “Catching a glimpse of a woman’s underwear greatly aƒects he who sees it, as if what is invisible is more important than what is visible.”2 Because what is hidden may be suggested with more force and eƒectiveness than what is displayed, on the one hand, the erotic appeal of undergarments “is due first of all to this visual relation and to its link with imagination and fantasy,”3 and, on the other, “underwear . . . is the last step towards divesting a woman of her clothes before achieving total nudity.”4 In eƒect, “mysterious garments because destined to be worn in the mystery of their concealment,”5 “lingerie owes its erotic charge to what, visible only in intimate contact, promises sex.”6 In particular, stockings (and garters) are endowed with an extraordinary erotic fascination in the imaginary—to the point of becoming objects of fetishism as Alfred Binet, Richard von Kraƒt-Ebing, and Sigmund Freud have demonstrated. Stockings are among fetishists’ preferred objects because they are “resonant of forbidden women.” Moreover, “the stocking’s combination of silky invisibility with delicate restraint quickens the slavish heart with its tantalizing irony.”7 That stockings are transparent turns them into interesting items because “transparency plays a great role in the strategy of hiding and displaying the body, as it can cover physical imperfections and reveal without the shock of complete nudity.”8 Recent fashion presents the voyeuristic—even sadomasochistic—in undergarments designed by Vivienne Westwood, Stella McCartney, and Alexander McQueen when he designed for Givenchy. Specifically, stockings made of silk—which perfectly clings to the skin—best represent the legs’ “second skin” as they give the flesh a uniform, firm, and tense look.9 Moreover, silk stockings, with their soft, smooth texture, evoke the characteristics of feminine skin to the point of making a woman feel that her femininity has been doubled by them: “contact with these fabrics enhances her femininity . . . The skin’s contact with these fabrics makes the senses tingle.”1 0 Like shoes and gloves, penetrated by feet and hands, stockings are female symbols be-

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cause legs penetrate them. In addition, as legs suggest to the gazer a movement upward, toward the genitals—which would be framed by the garter, once that most titillating of accessories was invented11 —so too do stockings, especially seamed ones, “arrows pointing to the promised land.” Furthermore, because “the tops of stockings trace a line across the thighs, just as a gunslinger draws a line in the sand to indicate ‘Go no further!’” stockings stop a few inches below the genitals, thus becoming even more erotic.1 2 The fact that stockings could be fabricated with silk linked their covering and warming function to the voluptuousness of sensuous, if not lecherous, touch. Alluring both to the gaze and to the touch, silk stockings could not fail to charm. If accessories have thus become, for some, “a means to seduce, personalize and declare one’s identity, even a fetish, a memory, a nostalgia,” in the case of undergarments in general and of stockings in particular this is even more so, for both the wearer and the gazer.1 3 In the late nineteenth century, for most women, wool and cotton were the fabrics of which their stockings were made, while silk, with its brilliance and smoothness, bespoke of luxury—an extravagance in which only women of means could indulge.1 4 Furthermore, with women’s clothes at ankle length, buying silk stockings—which would not/ should not have been seen—only meant that those who did give in to such a whim did so either out of narcissistic pleasure or out of the wish to oƒer ticklish boudoir vices to their (legitimate or illegitimate) lovers.1 5 At that time, in the United States—and, more precisely, in Louisiana where she set her narratives—Kate Chopin (1850–1904),1 6 attentive to the needs and aspirations of women, dedicated a beautiful short story to, precisely, “A Pair of Silk Stockings.”1 7 Daring in her subjects and treatments, Chopin chose for the ostensible subject of this story an article of clothing that, at the time, was taboo. Let us not forget that, in Victorian England, even the legs of pianos and tables were at times covered, lest they suggested by association sinful thoughts,1 8 and that the word “leg” was rarely pronounced in polite society because it was considered indelicate and immodest.1 9 If in Catholic Louisiana customs were more relaxed than in Protestant England, Chopin was still regarded superciliously for her defiance of the accepted laws of demureness.2 0 Written in 1896, “A Pair

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of Silk Stockings” was published the following year.2 1 Not by chance, as the years from 1890 to 1910 were “the grand time for underwear.”2 2 Chopin’s five-page story, narrated in the third person, has for its protagonist a “little” woman, Mrs. Sommers, who “one day” unexpectedly “found herself” in possession of fifteen dollars (500).2 3 Interestingly, the story opens with the very adjective “little.” If “little” may appropriately also apply to such a short—formally unpretentious—narrative, this adjective may specifically indicate that Mrs. Sommers was petite (physically and/or emotionally). It may also announce, however, that she was a bit pathetic since the “unexpected” money “gave her a feeling of importance such as she had not enjoyed for years.” The vague temporal marker “one day,” by distancing the narrative to an indeterminate time, gives it a fairy-tale innuendo to which the use of the past tense greatly contributes. Moreover, the fact that Mrs. Sommers “found herself” the possessor of such money beautifully expresses her passive condition—so becoming to her gender at the time. Readers will never know what event made this possession possible; they only know that Mrs. Sommers kept this money in “her worn old porte-monnaie.” In the fourth paragraph we are informed that she had known “better days” before she married. We are thus confronted with another of those Chopin circumstances in which marriage has devastating eƒects on women. But, historically, especially in the South, social conditions had dramatically changed for men as well as for women after the Civil War, and at the time of the story’s publication, the United States was recovering from the economic depression of the mid-1890s. The hinted-at situation is thus more than plausible. Notwithstanding her harsh financial condition, however, Mrs. Sommers never indulged in “morbid retrospection” because “she had no time—no second of time to devote to the past.” And if, occasionally, “a vision of the future . . . appalled her” (501), with the use of free indirect speech or of authorial interference, readers are informed that “luckily tomorrow never comes.” Therefore, if she was, perhaps, a bit shallow or, simply, too optimistic, “little Mrs. Sommers” was also capable of taking her di~cult life easily. Consequently, the fact that her surname evokes the warmest and most relaxed time of the year has a meaningful purpose. With just a few touches and with an incipit in me-

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dias res (Chopin’s stylistic technique was influenced by Guy de Maupassant), this brief, even laconic, presentation succeeds in implying that Mrs. Sommers was as destitute and superficial as she was good-natured. Concerned with and excited by this “unexpected” money, for “a day or two” she “walked around apparently in a dreamy state” (500) trying to decide on the best way to spend it. But it was especially “during the still hours of the night” that she lay awake “revolving plans in her mind” toward “a proper and judicious” use of it. The eƒect of such money is thus to unsettle her completely: she is reduced to a somnambulistic state during the day, and she is kept awake at night. It is not she who possessed the money, but rather the money that possessed her. Readers are made to understand that the question of how to spend it is very important for Mrs. Sommers because such a possibility is unlikely to come again either soon or often. It happened “one day,” that is, “once upon a time”—exactly as in fairy tales. The mother of numerous children (two girls are mentioned, plus some boys), she finally decided to spend the money on practical items: shoes, percale, stockings, sailor hats, and caps for them—as, according to the duties of a good mother, she would have been expected to do. The money was not an enormous sum, but Mrs. Sommers, constrained by her meager financial situation, knew how to bargain and, at sales, she ordinarily “could stand for hours making her way inch by inch toward the desired object that was selling below cost” and even “clutch a piece of goods and hold it and stick to it with persistence and determination till her turn came to be served, no matter when it came” (501). While an element of satire may be detected in the description of such exaggerated behavior,2 4 it is true that at department stores of the late 1890s, as today, giant clearance sales punctuated the end of each selling season.2 5 The day she arrived at the department store to put her plans into action, however, she felt tired.2 6 All her musings, devoted to thinking only of others, had evidently exhausted her. Rather than fighting for the best item at the best price, she sat on “a revolving stool” and waited to be served. The revolving stool perfectly objectifies her state of “revolving plans in her mind.” On such a chair, moreover, swiveling around almost to the point of

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dizziness, like an impatient or playful girl, she could not but have a panoramic view over everything that was on display. No longer target-oriented, as she used to be when she would purchase goods at low prices, this day she seemed to enjoy the large variety and the atmosphere of comfort, recreation, enjoyment, and sociability that department stores were meant to exude.2 7 By the 1890s, department stores tailored their appeal especially to women of the middle and upper classes, while working-class people could aƒord only occasional department store purchases at sale prices, because their budgets excluded luxury goods and items such as clothing that could be more economically made at home.2 8 In particular, department stores’ intent was “to make women . . . feel special, to give them the opportunity for play-acting, and to lift them into a world of luxury or pseudo-luxury, beyond work, drudgery, bills, and the humdrum everyday.” Consequently, their eƒect “was often to stir up restlessness and anxiety,” again, emotional states that busy working-class women could not indulge in.2 9 The not-well-oƒ Mrs. Sommers wore “no gloves”—another important feminine accessory that designated the lady who, leaving her house, did not normally expose her flesh to indiscreet glances, exciting touches, burning sun beams, and dangerous dirt— and so “she grew aware that her hand had encountered something very soothing, very pleasant to touch.” The fact that this “something” is “very soothing” placates the fatigue by which she had been overcome. Mrs. Sommers looked down and saw a pile of silk stockings being sold at reduced price (from two and a half dollars to one dollar and ninety-eight cents—to be sure, still an expensive item). She looked at them as if she were inspecting “a tiara of diamonds” and touched “the soft, sheeny, luxurious things . . . holding them up to see them glisten, and to feel them glide serpent-like through her fingers.” Not being the Virgin Mary who crushed the serpent under her foot, this married woman held the slippery, serpent-like stockings in her hand. And, like Eve, she was unable to resist the temptation. She, in fact, asked the salesgirl whether the stockings came in her size. They did. She was then dazzled by the large choice of colors: they came in light-blue, lavender, black, tan, and gray. (These mostly pastel hues had the same attraction for her that more than twenty years later Jay Gatsby’s colored shirts will have for Daisy Buchanan.)3 0

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FIGURE 5.1

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Rousse, La Toilette, 1896. 26 ∞ 21 inches. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Mrs. Sommers selected for herself the sexiest silk stockings: the black ones. We know that “the black stocking symbolizes the branded, sinful woman.”3 1 Not only are black stockings as black as the vicious night and as sin, but black is also the color of death, of rebellion, of perversion. Black, a powerful color, is “abstract, pure, and mysterious.”3 2 It is also the color that absorbs light and cancels all the others. Being “the zero degree of colors,” it may be seen as a sort of “black hole” that first swallows all colors and then throws them all up, thus adding to the terrifying dimension of its symbolical meaning.3 3 Moreover, black stockings, marking a sharp contrast with the white skin they envelop, are quintessentially erotic. We have only to think of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s and Pierre Bonnard’s paintings with models in black stockings or Egon Schiele’s sketches, not to mention Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (1965), Liza Minnelli in Cabaret (1972), or Hanna Schygulla in The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978).3 4

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Nothing is said either about her motivations or about a Mr. Sommers, who might be allured by her at home, so we cannot state for sure whether Mrs. Sommers’s choice was dictated by the impelling wish to please herself or by an unconscious desire to be seductive,3 5 as “tantalizing underwear . . . is a compliment to one’s husband.”3 6 To underscore her sudden nonchalance in the territory of what was usually prohibited to her, Mrs. Sommers paid for her stockings with a five-dollar bill. In her circumstances, it was a large sum (one-third of her treasure): she needed much less ($1.98), but she flaunted the bill to show that she had money to spare. When she had the stockings wrapped up in a parcel, however, she could not but realize “what a very small parcel it was! It seemed lost in the depths of her shabby old shopping-bag!” (502). Incidentally, this tatty bag is the appropriate companion to her “worn old porte-monnaie.” Obviously, all her accessories were shabby (no clothes are mentioned, but readers may infer that they were too)—except, now, this extraordinary pair of stockings. She could not wait to wear them: “in a retired corner” of a dressing room, she immediately changed from her old cotton stockings into her new silk ones. By so doing, Mrs. Sommers enjoyed a moment of absolute physical pleasure: “How good was the touch of the raw silk to her flesh!” For a while, she reveled “in the luxury of it.” Thanks to the combination of softness and rawness these stockings evidently gave her an erotic shock comparable to that of an expert lover’s caress. She thus experienced an awakening of her sensibilities and of herself. (Chopin’s most famous novel, The Awakening, would come out two years later.)3 7 Under the pressure of a compulsion (to which her twirling on the counter stool might have added yet another giddying dimension), she now stepped beyond all reason. In fact, “she was not thinking at all.” Indeed, “she seemed for the time to be taking a rest from that laborious and fatiguing function and to have abandoned herself to some mechanical impulse that directed her actions and freed her of responsibility.” In the department store displaying all sorts of goods, passive in everything except in her spending—the only woman’s activity that was well accepted by her society—she became the typically driven consumer, the impulse buyer. In succession, she bought a number of clothing items: contrary to her best intentions, all for herself. First, she bought a pair of pointed-

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tipped boots and then a pair of kid gloves.3 8 The purchase of those black silk stockings thus had the eƒect of breaking all her self-imposed—and society-imposed—restraints: not only is she incapable of stopping her acquisitive bout, but she uncovered her inner (past?) “fastidious” nature and demands very specific quality items. On the one hand, Mrs. Sommers is exposed to “the unfamiliar experience of being served, rather than serving” and, on the other, the fact that she buys only accessories proves how important they are to spur, uphold, and enhance one’s self-esteem and confidence, notwithstanding their ostensible ancillary status.3 9 This former princess, turned Cinderella by her marriage, is thus also attracted by shoes. Put simply, “the foot-and-shoe form a particularly striking unit,”4 0 because while

FIGURE 5.2

Egon Schiele, Seated Woman with Left Leg Drawn Up, 1917. Black chalk, gouache, 46 ∞ 30.5 cm. Národní Gallery, Prague.

the foot is “testimonial to our degraded animality,” the shoe “is the closest thing to the body and yet it is not the body.”4 1 When high heeled (as these implicitly are), shoes have an erotic appeal because they induce a graceful movement of the body when walking: the back is more arched, the bosom is thrust forward, and hips’ and buttocks’ undulatory motions are emphasized.4 2 High heels are associated with sexually sophisticated women; Mrs. Sommers is evidently trying on a new image of herself (seemingly, mostly for herself ). At the time, because high-heeled shoes might hinder exertion and physical mobility, they fictitiously proclaimed a status of idleness to which, at least momentarily, she seemed to have aspired. Readers are not informed of the color of either the boots or the gloves; they only know that with her new boots on, “her foot and ankle looked very pretty,” and with her new gloves on, she lost herself in “admiring contemplation of the little symmetrical gloved hand.” If Mrs. Sommers’s hands, arms, legs were naturally shapely (something readers did not know before; in shabby clothes beauty is hard to detect!), the newly bought accessories enhanced their attractiveness. Because the gloves were made of kid, they were soft and smooth to the touch (like the stockings), but they also brought out Mrs. Sommers’s juvenile characteristics (“kid”). Specifically, covering the organs of touch, “gloves . . . emphasize[d] sexual insinuations by simultaneously reining in and stimulating desire.”4 3 In the Middle Ages, gloves were exchanged between lovers, much as engagement rings are today.4 4 Removing gloves is a sexy act, as strippers know and as Rita Hayworth displayed in the famous scene in Gilda (1946). Furthermore, like a booted foot, a gloved hand is a symbol of power.4 5 We must notice how Mrs. Sommers’s first three purchases are all symbolically female accessories. Even without necessarily knowing psychologists’, anthropologists’, and cultural sociologists’ remarks on them, Chopin perceptively identified those items that point to her protagonist’s need to a~rm her (long-denied? neglected? unsatisfied?) femininity and sexuality (beyond merely reproductive purposes). Yielding to the temptation of fine and attractive materials and objects, Mrs. Sommers avowed the common belief that, in department stores, women’s susceptibility to fineries enticed them into the ranks

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of fallen women.4 6 But Chopin—a woman who had been married and had had six children—knew better: she was a masterful connoisseur of such needs and of the workings of a woman’s mind. As these purchases “worked marvels in her bearing” by giving her “a feeling of assurance” (503), one of the most important eƒects of buying so-called unnecessary things— accessories—was accomplished. But we may wonder whether another eƒect was not achieved by them. One of the social meanings of accessories is that they “entail new ways of equipping the body . . . to the point of addressing the whole body system.”4 7 In Chopin’s story, Mrs. Sommers’s purchases provide a new way of exhibiting herself in public. It is not insignificant that, upon leaving the store, she is described as someone who “as well as she could she lifted her skirts at the crossings.” A masterful understatement lies behind that “as well as she could” to mean, possibly, “as high as conventions allowed her.” Like a girl, “little” Mrs. Sommers wanted to show her new, beautiful stockings and shoes to all passers-by. In a few more years, skirts would be shortened, and feet, ankles, and the lower part of legs would be shamelessly exposed.4 8 Our protagonist thus turned into an unconscious, early precursor of such a sartorial change. Subsequently, after having gratified her body, Mrs. Sommers did the same with her mind: she bought two “high-priced magazines” that she used to read during her “better days.” Her irrational money splurging is, therefore, devoted not only to clothes, to her appearance, to her looks, but also to putting herself in touch again with the economically higher—but at the same time larger, beyond her household—world, something for which she (possibly for too long?) had had no time, since “the needs of the present absorbed her every faculty” (500–501). Having developed an appetite, she even entered a restaurant, remarkable for its “spotless damask and shining crystal,” and treated herself to “a nice and tasty bite” (503). She did not order a “profusion” of food; she just wanted to eat something good served in an elegant ambience, that is, she wanted to keep relishing things (food and interior-design paraphernalia) that were in synchrony with her new accessories and renewed taste for diverting her attention toward the upper-class world of her time, that is, for thinking

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about something other than her family. There is no doubt: she utterly savored and enjoyed her gastronomic and clothing purchases, “she sipped the amber wine and wiggled her toes in the silk stockings.” And as “your ethnic, class, and gender subjectivity may be articulated through where you are seen to eat,”4 9 Mrs. Sommers may have implicitly felt that she had temporarily gone back to the social world from which she came and may have cherished the possibility of being recognized by someone who still belonged to it. Finally, totally oblivious to all but her gratification, totally irresponsible (as her society would have pronounced her), she was attracted by an advertisement and went to a matinee at the theater. With this last choice also, her mind and heart were gratified. She sat among “brilliantly dressed women who had gone there to kill time and eat candy and display their gaudy attire” (503–4), as Thorstein Veblen would be observing two years later when commenting upon women as consumers.5 0 When the performance ended— Chopin writes when the “dream ended” (504)—Mrs. Sommers went out of the theater and waited for the cable car (she evidently had no more money left to hire a more comfortable means of transportation) that would take her home. Although all she had bought was, for lucky women, quite ordinary, to underline such an extraordinary event in the life of a poor woman, the writer brings in the notion of “dream,” as it is money that makes some dreams come true. Readers know mostly indirectly and vaguely, through the omniscient author, Mrs. Sommers’s mind, but in the end, it is given to a man “with keen eyes,” who sat in front of her in the cable car, to try and decipher what she was thinking. Interested in her, but impersonally, he did not understand anything at all. We are told that he was not “wizard enough to detect a poignant wish, a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever.” In a story that presents or alludes to no male figure of any importance (it mentions only in passing a clerk who serves her in the shoe department and a waiter at the restaurant), this perfunctory man, who appears at the very end, has nothing to oƒer either to the protagonist or to the reader: he is a blank screen for her individuality.5 1 Yet, with what else than horror would he have acknowledged her thoughts—a married woman and a mother? How could he have recognized

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and respected such a longing on the part of “the angel in the house” and, what is more, how could he have anticipated with sympathy her probable dismay in entering her impoverished household? Mrs. Sommers’s Cinderella day being over, rather than living with Prince Charming and their elegant and well-fed heirs “everafter,” once at home she was in all probability confronted with both the ashes of her hearth and the noise and demands of her “little brood” (500). This denouement is left unsaid, but it is neither unimaginable nor unimplied. We may be tempted to jump to the conclusion that all of this is the unhappy result of the protagonist’s yielding to the seduction of silk stockings. As in Gainsbourg’s song, “Chic underwear / will be like a pointed heel / that will pierce a young woman’s heart,” costly and attractive undergarments end up punishing those women who succumb to their fascination.5 2 Consequently, black silk stockings, like many accessories, seemingly a weapon of vanity and seduction, may turn into a source of grief, if the women who buy them forget that they are but a brief interlude in their lives: a moment of exciting gratification destined to be followed by sadness and discontent once access to new expensive items is denied. But is Chopin really giving such a moralistic lesson in restraint? Knowing her work, we may seriously doubt it, although Mrs. Sommers’s interiority is never clearly revealed. Chopin, who often carefully balanced “respect for self-sacrifice and endorsement of self-freedom,” may have aimed at recording some brief but important hours of sheer delight in Mrs. Sommers’s busy and dreary life: a short but sweet moment of respite.5 3 No hint of censure for her selfishness colors the picture of this young mother5 4 who, nurturing her sense of aesthetics, develops a feeling of independence— at least temporarily.5 5 If Mrs. Sommers is not filled only with regret, it may be due to the fact that, if before she had been capable of enduring her impecunious life lightly, then after her self-indulgent experience she will go on braving her situation with courage.5 6 As the story is narrated in the past tense, the bracketed nature of such a momentous event is emphasized. In the twentieth century, stockings would be made of rayon (in the 1920s), nylon (in the late 1930s), lycra (at the end of the 1950s), and latex (in more recent years): fabrics

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and textures that the majority of women can aƒord without endangering their family budget.5 7 From being a glamorous and seductive accessory, stockings have come to acquire the status of an ordinary item of clothing. Yet, thanks to new colors, new patterns, new embroideries, they have not entirely lost—especially when they are black—their allure.5 8

NOTES

1. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 2. Muriel Barbier and Shazia Boucher, The Story of Lingerie (New York: Parkstone, 2004), 143. The French reads: “Apercevoir les dessous d’une femme entraîne chez lui qui les voit une vive émotion, comme si l’invisible était plus important que le visible.” Les Dessous Féminins (New York: Parkstone, 2004), 143. 3. Ibid., 148. The French reads: “réside avant tout dans ce rapport visuel et dans son lien avec l’imaginaire, et donc le fantasme” (148). 4. Ibid., 259. The French reads: “les dessous . . . constituent la dernière étape de l’eƒeuillage, celle qui précède la nudité intégrale du corps.” 5. Maguelonne Touisant-Samat, Histoire technique et morale du vêtement (Paris: Bordas, 1990), 385: “Vêtements mystérieux puisque destinés à être portés dans le mystère de leur dissimulation” (my translation). 6. Frédéric Monneyron, La frivolité essentielle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), 102: “la lingerie tient sa charge érotique de ce que, seulement visible dans un contact intime, elle est promesse de l’acte sexuel” (my translation). 7. Valerie Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 132. 8. Barbier and Boucher, Story of Lingerie, 148. The French reads: “Dans la stratégie entre montré et caché, le transparent a toute sa place car il permet de masquer d’éventuelles imperfections physiques et de dévoiler sans provoquer le choc de la nudité intégrale” (148). 9. Ibid., 192. The French reads: “le bas aƒermit, uniformise et tend la chair d’une jambe” (192). 10. Ibid., 155. The French reads: “la femme sent sa fémininité décuplée. . . . Le contact des tissus avec la peau participe d’un éveil des sens.”

CRISTINA GIORCELLI / 92

11. Garters were invented in 1910, but in 1878, in France, Féréol Dedieu created a similar object. 12. Steele, Fetish, 132. 13. Eleonora Fiorani, Abitare il corpo: La moda (Milan: Lupetti, 2004), 210 (my translation). 14. In 1900, 88 percent of stockings were made of cotton, 11 percent of wool, and only 1 percent of silk. Patrizia Calefato, The Clothed Body, trans. Lisa Adams (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 146. In the 1880s, Dr. Jaeger, advocating underwear made of pure wool, declared “war against such cherished finery as silk dresses, white petticoats . . ., linen stays, cotton or silk stockings.” Elizabeth Ewing, Fashion in Underwear (London: Batsford, 1971), 70. 15. Queen Elizabeth I was so pleased with the gift of a pair of black silk stockings by Lady Montague, according to the new Spanish style, that she never again wore woolen stockings. The fashion spread to the court circles and to the women of the wealthy middle class. Elizabeth B. Hurlock, The Psychology of Dress (Salem: Ayer, 1984), 107–8. 16. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Kate O’Flaherty moved to Louisiana when she married Oscar Chopin. Although she started writing after the death of her husband and her return to St. Louis in 1882, she took her inspiration from the places and people she had seen and met in Louisiana. In this short story, there is no indication of place, but the use of porte-monnaie, as we shall see, may indicate that the protagonist lives in French-speaking Louisiana. 17. Kate Chopin, “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” in The Complete Works, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 1:500–4. References in text. 18. But women found exceptions to such strict rules. “Although normal evening dress was characterized by very long skirts with trains, the clothing worn for costume balls often featured skirts that rose as high as mid-calf.” Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 114). Also clothing for gymnastics and hunting was shorter than regular dresses. 19. John C. Flugel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth, 1930), 66. 20. The writer dealt with another intriguing item of clothing (bloomers) in a very interesting story, “Charlie.” See Cristina Giorcelli, “‘Charlie’: Travestimento e potere,” Abito e Identità: Ricerche di storia letteraria e culturale, ed. Cristina Giorcelli (Rome: Edizioni Associate, 1997), 2:25–77. 21. It came out in Vogue on September 16, 1897. 22. Anne Buck, “Foundations of the Active Woman,” in La Belle Epoch: Costume, 1890–1914, ed. Ann Saunders (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1968), 43.

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23. In another short story, “Polly” (1902), Chopin’s protagonist unexpectedly receives a sum of money (one hundred dollars), but she spends it on her parents and sisters. 24. Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), notes that “even the most prosperous [women] among the working class lacked the time to browse with their middle-class sisters among department-stores wares” (77). 25. Ibid., 16. Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward (1886) puts the department store at the epicenter of American society. 26. For the role of department stores at the end of the nineteenth century, see also Cristina Giorcelli, “Tra costume e letteratura: I cappelli femminili negli Stati Uniti (1878–1914),” in Abito e Identità: Ricerche di storia letteraria e culturale, ed. Cristina Giorcelli (Palermo: Ila Palma, 2004), 5:105–64. 27. Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: “physically and socially, these firms were bulwarks of urban gentility and the culture of consumption” (5); “Department stores were . . . both seductive and didactic, both followers and shapers of taste, dynamic museums of a constantly changing way of life attuned to style and propriety” (22). 28. Ibid., 76–77. 29. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 91. As Emile Zola wrote in “Ladies’ Delight,” in department stores “the customers, despoiled and violated, were going away dishevelled, their sensual desires satisfied and with the secret shame of having yielded to temptation in some shady hotel.” Cited in Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Richard Bienvenu (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 64. 30. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 72–73. 31. Wilhelm Stekel, Sexual Aberrations: The Phenomena of Fetishism in Relation to Sex, 2 vols., trans. Samuel Parker (New York: Liveright, 1971), 1:86–87. 32. Steele, Fetish, 190. 33. Calefato, Clothed Body, 712. 34. “Au XIX siècle, ‘les bas de soie noire, aux eƒets de velour’ et aux accents de grivoiserie, loués par Armand Silvestre, règnent sur les lithographies de Toulouse-Lautrec, mais n’en parent pas moins les garde-robes élégantes.” Marie Simon, Les Dessous (Paris: Chêne, 1998), 76. (“In the

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nineteenth century, ‘black silk stockings with velvet eƒects’ and saucy nuances, borrowing from Armand Silvestre, prevail in Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithographs, but they are no less prominent in elegant wardrobes”; my translation.) 35. Some critics have assumed that she is a widow, but there is no such indication in the text. 36. Barbier and Boucher, Story of Lingerie, 155. The French reads: “sous-vêtements attrayants sont . . . des compliments pour les maris” (155). 37. See Cristina Giorcelli, “Edna’s Wisdom: A Transitional and Numinous Merging,” in New Essays on “The Awakening,” ed. Wendy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 109–48. 38. Kidskins are taken from baby goats. “Kid gloves have been the aristocratic delineation of fine gloves for generations. . . . They have always been considered the pre-requisite for formal occasions.” C. Cody Collins, Love of a Glove (New York: Fairchild, 1947), 87. 39. Kristin B. Valentine and Janet Larsen Palmer, “The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Feminism in Kate Chopin’s ‘A Pair of Silk Stockings,’” Weber Studies 4, no. 2 (1987): 64. 40. Steele, Fetish, 106. 41. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), 237. 42. Steele, Fetish, 111. See also Paula Rabinowitz, “Barbara Stanwyck’s Anklet: The Other Shoe,” in Accesorizing the Body: Habits of Being 1, ed. Cristina Giorcelli and Paula Rabinowitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 185–208. 43. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, 106. 44. Collins, Love of a Glove, 3–15. In the late nineteenth century “the great importance of a glove was its tight fit. . . . The main intent seemed to be to disguise the fact that a gloved hand could be useful” (ibid., 73). Earlier, ladies were very jealous of gloves: at the Spanish court they often had their portraits painted upon them to guard them against loss (ibid., 22). 45. Edward Podolsky and Carlson Wade, Erotic Symbolism: A Study of Fetishism in Relation to Sex (New York: Epic, 1960), 117; quoted in Steele, Fetish, 133. 46. Gail Reekie, Temptations: Sex, Selling, and the Department Store (St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1993), 15. 47. Fiorani, Abitare il corpo, 210 (my translation). 48. Skirts started shortening by 1912 and almost reached the knees in 1916, but then returned to the ankle until the 1920s. See Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York: Knopf, 1994), 127. 49. Lorraine Gamman, “Visual Seduction and Perverse Compliance,” in Fashion Cultures:

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Theories, Explorations, and Analysis, ed. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (London: Routledge, 200), 65 (my emphasis). 50. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class [1899] (Boston: Houghton Mi‰in, 1973). 51. The behavior of salesmen in department stores at the end of the nineteenth century was carefully choreographed: “Male assistants were instructed . . . to treat women customers as if they were courting them. . . . In the tailoring, glove or shoe departments, male employees discretely, and within the bounds of propriety, verbally referred to and made contact with women’s bodies. We do not know how women responded to the physical intimacy demanded by this kind of shopping: like other forms of heterosexual relations, it could equally have been the source of pleasure or discomfort.” Reekie, Temptations, 10. Moreover, “Mrs. Sommers is considerate of others, even while shopping for herself, as evidenced by . . . her conscientious tipping of the waiter.” Valentine and Larsen Palmer, “Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Feminism,” 64. 52. “Les dessous chics / ce serait comme un talon aiguille / qui transpercerait le coeur des filles.” 53. Valentine and Larsen Palmer, “Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Feminism,” 66. 54. Peggy Skaggs, Kate Chopin (Boston: Twayne, 1985), 60. 55. Lynda S. Boren and Sara de Saussure Davis, eds., Kate Chopin Reconsidered (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1992), 148. 56. But Barbara C. Ewell thinks she is filled with remorse (Kate Chopin [New York: Ungar, 1986], 120). 57. Nylon was created in 1935 by the American Wallace H. Carothers. Lawrence Langner wrote that nylon was “the invention of the devil himself. For who but the devil would think of transforming the coal with which he feeds the everlasting fires of hell into the filament used in the nylon stockings which lure so many sinners into his clutches.” Quoted in Caroline Cox, Lingerie: A Lexicon of Style (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 97. 58. In the 1970s, punk women wore torn fishnet stockings that were “paraded as a mark of feminine defiance” (ibid.).

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6

TR AV E LI N G LI G H T N E L L I E B LY ’ S A L L- I N C L U S I V E B A G

Cristina Scatamacchia The American journalist Nellie Bly, whose real name was Elizabeth Cochrane, was fully aware of the importance of clothes. As a reporter, she was the first woman to do undercover investigations, creating a new kind of female sensational journalism. In the course of her reporting for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, she realized that clothes played a crucial role: they became masks allowing her to hide her true identity and assume a new one that would enable her to expose social abuses and political corruption. Bly was an exception among women journalists of that time, and her work marked a turning point for careers open to females in the publishing world. From the mid-1880s, newspapers and magazines were oƒering women fresh opportunities to work, although generally confining them to writing for the women’s pages. Thus, Nellie Bly’s articles, thanks to their enormous popularity, opened women’s access to the profession of reporter, until then an exclusively male territory.1 The most famous of Bly’s investigative reportage took place in 1886, when she pretended to be a mentally deranged Cuban girl and was interned in the asylum for the insane at Blackwell’s Island, New York. Several years before, another woman journalist,

Margaret Fuller, had visited this madhouse and published a highly critical report of the ghastly conditions in which the women patients were forced to live: it was 1845 and the asylum was still under construction. Fuller had called on the authorities to reform this institution, but over the next forty years nothing had changed.2 Undertaking a similar subject, Bly decided to carry matters to extremes. She remained ten days in the asylum until she was set free by some journalists from the World and then published a report in which she denounced the ill treatment of patients.3 The article raised such a public outcry that it forced authorities to intervene. They finally improved the sanitary conditions of the whole asylum. At the same time, it marked a great success for Bly who instantly became famous: she was ready to embark on other undercover investigations requiring new masks and further changes of identity. In 1889, Bly toured the world sponsored by Pulitzer’s newspaper, inventing a new kind of travel journalism: as a woman she would try to break the record established by Phileas Fogg, the protagonist of Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne.4 The World intended to create a sensational event—a stunt—that would attract America’s attention and, presumably, increase the circulation of the newspaper. During her travels, the reporter was to send her articles to New York via telegraph; she hoped that the public would embrace her exploit and buy more copies of the daily paper. To make her enterprise more striking, Nellie Bly introduced two innovations: she traveled alone, without a chaperone, in contrast to Fogg who in Verne’s novel had been accompanied by his valet Passepartout; and she traveled without luggage, carrying only a small bag. She wanted to overcome two prejudices quite common in those years. The first was rooted in the belief that traveling alone was dangerous for a woman; thus she risked both her safety and her reputation. The reporter aimed to disprove the notion that women were not able to take care of themselves and needed constant protection, especially when they traveled far from their home, that is, from the private sphere. Therefore, her tour of the world was not only a race against time but also a race against the idea that women were weak, lacking autonomy and independence. The second prejudice held that women were unable to travel without a large number of trunks and bulky bags. On the

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contrary, Bly was going to take with her only one bag and one so small she was obliged to always wear the same traveling gown. On November 14, 1889, the reporter left New York, sailing from Hoboken Pier in New Jersey, toward Europe and then Asia; she returned on January 25, 1890, completing her journey in seventy-two days, six hours, and eleven minutes.5 The tour of the world was a spectacular success not only because it established a new record, but also—and mainly—because it drew the attention of millions of Americans, attracted by the absolute novelty of a young woman racing around alone carrying no luggage. On her way back, Bly traveled across the United States on a special train; excited crowds appeared to celebrate her at every station, assembling along the tracks to cheer her passage. Upon her arrival in New York, she was welcomed with a triumph that anticipated the tribute given to Charles Lindbergh after his 1927 transatlantic flight. Bly became a celebrity, and her exploit was praised in several songs and theatrical plays. Her image appeared so frequently in the national press that she soon became a prominent figure in American popular culture. In this process of transformation, the outfit Bly wore during her journey played a crucial role, and she was fully aware of its importance. When the editorial staƒ of the World asked the reporter to embark on a tour of the world, it allowed her only two days for preparations before leaving. It was essential that Bly acquire an appropriate traveling gown quickly. The choice of a gown was very important for any woman traveler because it disclosed immediately her identity, revealing her social status and bearing witness to the fact that she was a real lady.6 Checkered patterns were fashionable for gowns that were to be worn on board trains and steamboats. These clothes had to be comfortable as well as chic, providing both protection and elegance: the ensemble had to be sturdy yet stylish. The one that Bly bought had all these distinct features, being strong and robust, and at the same time fashionable and expensive. The journalist went to Ghormley, Robes et Manteaux, a famous couture house that had two prestigious ateliers: the first in New York at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Nineteenth Street, and the second in Paris on the rue Richelieu. High fashion had already developed in France thanks to couturiers like Charles Frederick Worth, with Paris as its center, so

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much so that the American dressmaker William Ghormley opened a center in the French capital.7 Ghormley was a particularly renowned dressmaker because earlier that year he had created an evening gown for the wife of President Benjamin Harrison, First Lady Caroline, who had worn it at the inauguration ball for her husband’s second term. In order to comply with the patriotic slogan “America First” that was to mark the economic policies of the president, the First Lady had chosen an all-American creation: the gown was custom-made in New York City, while its material, an original silk brocade, was manufactured by the Logan Silk Company in Auburn, New York. In light of these events, Nellie Bly thought that the patriotic element could be beneficial to her own public image. The morning after her assignment, she arrived at the couture house and ordered her gown for that very evening. In a calm and professional tone, Ghormley answered, “Very well,” as if it were an everyday thing for him to make clothes to measure so fast. Bly went on explaining, “I want a dress that will stand constant wear for three months,” and let the decision about the material and the model rest with the tailor. Ghormley “did not become nervous or hurried” and started to bring out various materials and to throw them “in artistic folds” over a table, studying their eƒect in front of a mirror until he selected “a plain blue broadcloth and a quiet plaid camel’s hair as the most durable and suitable combination for a traveling gown.” By midafternoon the gown was finished, and Bly, when she later recounted the episode, observed, “I considered the promptness and speed a good omen and quite in keeping with the project.”8 The traveling gown included a double-breasted redingote coat in a wool cloth that had a bold check pattern, and two large pockets, and was not too wide at the hem. This coat was to be worn over a two-piece blue ensemble, composed of a high-necked jacket and a long skirt that hung a few inches below the coat. Ghormley’s fashionable model required the use of a corset to tighten Bly’s slender waist and of a crinoline to support the skirt around her hips. However, the crinoline—that is, the stiƒ underskirt—was not very bulky, in accordance with the simple and linear style of the traveling gown. This style reflected a wider process of feminine emancipation that was taking place in America and

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FIGURE 6.1

Nellie Bly, ca. 1890.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

was influencing the world of fashion. The role of middle-class women in society was changing: the possibility for paid employment and the increasing popularity of sport, travel, open-air promenades, and bicycle tours required more comfortable clothes. The new simplified style of women’s dresses was a symptom of these changes and, more specifically, an expression of a trend toward the gradual liberation of women’s bodies from clothes that constrained their movements. The accessories that accompanied Bly’s traveling gown included an English cap, a pair of laced boots, a watch, gloves, and a few simple pieces of jewelry: a pair of golden earrings, a silver chain bracelet, and two rings, one of them being a talisman. The journalist, who was quite superstitious, had first worn that ring the day she had been employed by the World and had not removed it from her finger since (9–10). The most important accessory, however, was the traveling bag, about which the reporter wrote, “I bought one hand-bag with the determination to confine my baggage to its limit.” It was quite a small one—sixteen inches wide and seven inches high—and

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apart from it Bly carried no other piece of luggage, just as Phileas Fogg had done in the novel Around the World in Eighty Days.9 “But the trunks?” Passepartout had gasped before their departure, and the gentleman had answered, “We’ll have no trunks; only a carpetbag, with two woolen shirts and three pairs of stockings for me, and the same for you.” However, unlike Fogg, who kept all his money inside his carpetbag, the journalist made use of a small chamois-skin bag tied around her neck as a precautionary measure against thieves. Nellie Bly’s only piece of hand luggage—which she playfully called “my solitary handbag”—was so small that initially it created serious problems: “Packing that bag was the most di~cult undertaking of my life; there was so much to go into such little space” (8). Yet she managed to fit everything necessary into it, and at the end of the tour, when she wrote an account of her adventures, she drew up a detailed list of its contents: I was able to pack two traveling caps, three veils, a pair of slippers, a complete outfit of toilet articles, inkstand, pens, pencils, and copy-paper, pins, needles and thread, a dressing gown, a tennis blazer, a small flask and a drinking cup, several complete changes of underwear, a liberal supply of handkerchiefs and fresh ruchings and most bulky and uncompromising of all, a jar of cold cream to keep my face from chapping in the varied climates I should encounter. (12)

In short, the bag contained—apart from some vital toilet items, a few pieces of underwear, and a couple of extra clothes—only the stationery Bly needed for writing her articles. But besides the things that the reporter put into her bag before her departure, it is interesting to point out what she decided not to carry, including a lighter dress that her own dressmaker had hurriedly sewn. This dress turned out to be too cumbersome to fit into the bag and was substituted by a much smaller silk blouse Bly could wear with her blue skirt. The journalist did not put into her bag any cosmetic products except a jar of cold cream destined to be a constant nuisance: “That jar of cold cream was the bane of my existence. It seemed to take up more room than everything else in the bag and was always

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getting into just the place that would keep me from closing the satchel” (12). According to Bly, however, this cream was not for makeup, but solely a protection against sunburn. In fact, she was trying to project to the readers an image of herself as a very young and natural woman, who did not even think of making up her face. To this end, she did not hesitate to lie about her age: she was twenty-five years old but claimed to be only twentytwo. The absence of an umbrella represented another nonconformist choice, because it was an indispensable accessory for any woman appearing in public. Initially it had been replaced by a light raincoat that Bly intended to carry over her arm, but soon she discarded this as well. Moreover, the reporter refused to carry a weapon, although many people had suggested that she get a revolver. She explained her decision by stating that she would not be in any danger if her attitude were open and respectful toward strangers: “I had such a strong belief in the world’s greeting me as I greeted it” (10–11). Finally, she did not take any medicine, despite suƒering from headaches almost daily during the previous year. Before leaving, she had even visited several doctors, because she feared that her health was deteriorating due to her unremitting work at the newspaper: in the previous three years, she had never had a day oƒ. Nevertheless Bly believed that she would not need any medicine during her round-the-world trip. This tour would be tiring and intense, yet it represented a less stressful activity than the work she had undertaken until then; thus it was a sort of vacation: “It is not surprising then that I looked at this trip as a most delightful and much needed rest” (10–11). As for hygiene, Bly later confessed that before her departure she had been worried about laundering her clothes and underwear. It was impossible to have them washed during transatlantic crossings or while traveling by train, but in Asia steamboats oƒered a laundry service and in every harbor cleaners were e~cient, fast, and inexpensive. In any case, one could always buy any type of clothes in these harbors. As a result, Bly reached a paradoxical conclusion, stating, “After-experience showed me that I had taken too much rather than too little baggage.” And she continued: “So much for my preparations. It will be seen that if one is traveling simply for the sake of traveling and not for

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the purpose of impressing one’s fellow passengers, the problem of baggage becomes a very simple one” (12–14). Eventually she admitted that her only regret was not to have had within reach a Kodak camera, but when she had left New York, it had not seemed worthwhile carrying one, as photographs could not be printed in newspapers. (This technology was developed in 1897.) Therefore any photograph taken during her travels could not appear in the pages of the World to replace the drawings that usually accompanied her reports (256). The tour of the world galvanized public opinion in America, capturing its attention for two and a half months, and giving Nellie Bly widespread celebrity. An element that contributed to this fame and was soon to become a decisive factor in the creation of her public image was her traveling gown with its main accessory, the small bag. Bly herself created this image and was able to preserve it unaltered. For millions of Americans, her identity was never detached from her traveling gown: drawings, sketches, and photographs repeatedly showed the reporter wearing her check coat and holding her little bag. In this way Bly became a regular character in popular culture, like Little Red Riding Hood and the characters of the comics (the first comic, Yellow Kid, appeared in the same period as her tour of the world) and later Mary Poppins. Like all these fictional characters, the journalist projected an image that was unchangeable. After her return to New York, she published a report of her travels in her book Around the World in Seventy-Two Days. This became a best seller, and to promote it she went on a lecture tour, on every occasion wearing her gown and carrying her bag. Making the most of this wave of success, advertisers grabbed her image and reproduced it in innumerable copies, in which Bly would appear invariably with the same traveling gown and the same bag—although in a few of them her accessories also included a second bag and an umbrella! Her small, single bag played a prominent role in her travels. Furthermore, there was a synergy between the bag and the traveling gown. This relationship mimics the basic ambiguity of the word “accessory” examined by the psychoanalyst Laura Montani.1 0 A modern Italian dictionary defines “accessory” as “something complementary or subordinate, especially on the functional level; of secondary importance.”11 The American

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FIGURE 6.2

Nellie Bly, ca. 1890.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Heritage Dictionary of the English Language similarly describes the noun as “something supplementary; an adjunct” and the adjective as “having a secondary, supplementary or subordinate function.”1 2 A more intriguing definition appears in Collins Essential English Dictionary, where an accessory is referred to as “something nonessential but desirable that contributes to an eƒect or result.”1 3 According to Montani, the oldest sense of this term, when confronted with its present-day meaning, is “a unique spatial configuration where center and periphery are confused and intertwined.” Therefore the psychoanalyst concludes that a unique relationship exists between what is essential and what is marginal, because the secondary element opens access to the primary one, that is, it permits a direct approach to the center itself. Consequently, the function of an accessory is neither secondary nor subordinate.

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Regarding clothes, the term “accessory” indicates “what completes a garment” transforming a “dress into an ensemble.” Coco Chanel a~rmed, in fact, that it is the accessory that makes the dress.1 4 In this context, Nellie Bly’s bag was an accessory that completed her traveling gown and, at the same time, made it unique: because it was very small, the journalist could hold its handle at all times during the trip. The traveling gown was always the same, just as the image of the reporter was always the same: the dress characterized her public identity making it immediately recognizable. The bag, therefore, represented a way to access the center, which in this case was the traveling gown. Before her departure, Nellie Bly had justified the absence of other pieces of luggage in the name of convenience and comfort, stating that it allowed her not to have to think about trunks and bulky baggage at every transfer from steamers and trains. It was an eccentric choice for a woman, but it would not have been so original if she had been a man, as several generations of Western travelers had already limited their luggage to just one carpetbag. Originally in the sixteenth century, this type of bag had been made from remnants of Oriental rugs and carpets, but later canvas or woven fabric was used. In 1826, it underwent a basic transformation in Paris, when a leather or cardboard base was added to it, and Pierre Godillot, the owner of the famous Bazar du Voyage, introduced a steel clasp with a padlock of his own invention. In 1836, he further modified it by connecting to the carpetbag a small independent leather bottom with copper studs. Thanks to these additions, the carpetbag acquired an enticing and sophisticated appearance; it was represented in fashionable catalogs of travel articles as a practical, modern, and elegant piece of luggage. Its widespread use was confirmed by its frequent appearance as a picturesque feature in paintings evoking travel scenes.1 5 According to Ménéhould du Chatelle, the carpetbag was an ideal companion for artists, who preferred to travel carrying with them only what was essential. Arriving in London, Gérard de Nerval experienced the intense pleasure of being “master of the town” thanks to his decision to limit himself to just one piece of hand luggage.1 6 Similarly, Stendhal considered his carpetbag heaven-sent when his steamer docked in the port of Nantes in 1837, and he was one of the first passengers to get to the pier while the others were burdened with their many packages.1 7

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With the development of railroads, the carpetbag acquired the name railroad bag; at the same time, the first handbags for women were produced. According to Anna Johnson, the first leather handbag with handles appeared in the 1860s as a travel accessory.1 8 Establishing a relationship between the invention of handbags and the growth of women’s independence, Johnson notes that “how a woman carried her chattel relates closely to how she carried herself.”1 9 Women travelers considered the new handbag a useful accessory but would not dream of making it their only piece of luggage, as Nellie Bly did. In contrast to men who often limited themselves to one carpetbag, women carried a variety of bags and trunks, which in the second part of the nineteenth century were produced specifically for them. For example, Louis Vuitton created luggage for the wife of Napoleon III, the Empress Eugénie, and later made luxury steamer trunks for many European customers.2 0 Like the carpetbag, Nellie Bly’s bag evoked the idea of comfort and convenience, but it could not meet every need because its dimensions were reduced to the minimum. From a practical point of view, the bag would have been much more useful had it been twice or even three times as large: it would not have created any additional problems in transferring from one place to another, it would have been just as easy to carry, and it would have allowed the journalist to avail herself of a few more clothes which might have been helpful during such a long journey. However, as Anne Hollander has pointed out, comfort in clothing is a mental condition rather than a physical one. What is most desirable is the image of comfort, because visual and symbolic elements prevail over practical aspects: “The desire for a satisfying-looking style is stronger than any need for useful arrangements, whose utility has often been quickly sacrificed to stylistic considerations.”2 1 In the case of the reporter’s bag, these aesthetic and symbolic elements were embodied in its extreme smallness, which immediately emphasized the idea of “traveling fast” or “traveling light” and became a metaphor for blithely traveling through life. It was a symbol well suited to a way of life that appeared free and easy, devoid of any obstacle or encumbrance that might hinder a speedy advancement toward the future. If clothes are so closely connected to self-assertion and personal identity that, as Laura Cocciolo and Davide Sala have pointed out, “dressing up is always a way of creating a

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personal image and determining a social mask,” then what did the “symbolic bag” of the reporter express?2 2 According to Roland Barthes, clothes not only “tell” who we are but also who we would like to be; similarly Hollander has written that “the dress communicates” and clearly its accessories are also invested with symbolic meanings.2 3 Nellie Bly’s bag was so small that it looked like a doctor’s or a midwife’s briefcase rather than a traveling bag.2 4 Describing this type of professional bag, two historians of fashion have noticed that “what is expected is not beauty but solidity, appropriateness, and e~ciency.”2 5 Thus Bly presented herself as a journalist who was both competent and respectable: her bag communicated her professional as well as her sexual identity. In fact, according to Alison Lurie, bags express a variety of symbolic meanings: Sex is not all that is communicated by the handbag of course. Its contents, for instance, may represent the contents of the mind, or serve as a portable identity kit and a repair kit. At the same time, however, the bag conveys erotic information, if only in the eyes of the beholder. . . . A tightly snapped, zipped and buckled purse suggests a woman who guards her physical and emotional privacy closely, one whom it will be di~cult to get to know in either the common or the Biblical sense. . . . The handbag may also resemble a man’s brief case.2 6

Lurie suggests that a woman’s clasped handbag symbolizes that its owner is unapproachable sexually, an idea directly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s symbolic interpretation of fetishism, in which the handbag substitutes for the vagina.2 7 Relating the case of Dora, his “hysteric” patient, Freud interprets her playing with her “reticule” as masturbation. Moreover, referring to one of Dora’s dreams about a small jewelry case as well as a small ivory box owned by another woman patient, he defined these objects as symbolic substitutes for the shell of Venus, that is, female genitals. We can see, therefore, that the tightly closed bag of Nellie Bly communicated that she was sexually inaccessible: although her daring tour of the world contrasted with well-established gender rules, she was a respectable young woman who complied with the nineteenth-century bourgeois moral code.

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Nellie Bly favored women’s rights, including the right to vote; yet she adhered to traditional ideas about the relationship between men and women. Because her journey was unconventional, she carefully maintained decorous behavior and etiquette and controlled her actions, her public statements, and her clothes. As a result, the journalist was able to project a reassuring image, one that enabled the American public to accept more readily her solitary tour of the world. Her decision to travel light and alone lost its threatening potential as it seemed rooted in and arisen from society’s established moral code. Bly became a living symbol of the New Woman, but an unthreatening one: she was just an ordinary girl who was undertaking an uncommon exploit. Her venture acquired patriotic overtones when every time she referred to herself, she stressed with pride the fact of being an American, exactly like all the clothes she wore during the trip, each garment custom-made in the United States. This unique interplay of tradition and innovation was at the base of Bly’s extraordinary popularity. Her role as a public figure, according to historian Alison Piepmeier, who has pointed out that women’s historians often tend to view the experience of nineteenthcentury women reductively as “interlocking sets of binary lenses: the public and private spheres, and agency and victimization,” was, like other women’s public roles, “multiple, transitional, strategic, playful.” The careers of a series of women journalists who were Bly’s contemporaries, Piepmeier suggests, managed to elude any confinement to the domestic sphere by negotiating a public identity, which, while defying the limits imposed by the so-called binary lenses, avoided censure for challenging the norms regulating gender roles. Each of these journalists developed a “public enactment of the female body” that represented an original and distinctive model.2 8 Piepmeier’s interpretation fits Nellie Bly perfectly and contributes to explaining her fame. In fact, as Charles Ponce De Leon has observed, the cult of celebrity emerged in America during the second half of the nineteenth century, but it experienced a tremendous growth especially in the 1880s and 1890s because of mass journalism.2 9 At that time, celebrities were mostly men, and even though a number of women soon achieved growing visibility, they remained isolated and singular public figures. Only in the early

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1900s would women join the ranks of celebrities and their journalistic profiles become vehicles for promoting a new understanding of femininity. To attract women as readers, publications (including conservative women’s magazines) began coverage of adventurous and enterprising female celebrities: Inspired by . . . a belief that much of the public was interested in the “new woman,” journalists writing about such figures began to endow them with traits—independence, creativity, and business sense—not previously attributed to women, but more likely to make female celebrities interesting to women readers.3 0

At the time of Bly’s world tour this trend had just started, but her metamorphosis into a celebrity had already occurred. The journalist was a particularly attractive public figure as a self-made woman whose life was a rags-to-riches success story: born into a poor family, she became quite wealthy, earning in 1890 alone $25,000, a staggering amount of money.3 1 When newspapers and magazines continued to publish the image of Bly invariably wearing her travel gown, women readers began to imitate it. In fact, the gown set a fashion trend that was copied for years all over the country by numerous dressmakers, whose task was made easier by the widespread technological development of sewing machines: in 1889, the Singer Company created the first commercial electric sewing machine and two years later launched a similar model for domestic use.3 2 Sears, Roebuck & Co. sold, through postal delivery, a ready-to-wear traveling gown that looked like the one owned by Bly, and kept it on the market for many years; it still appeared in their 1897 catalog.3 3 According to Hollander, people copy the clothes of others whom they admire. Moreover “copying them is an aesthetic act” because what is most important in fashion is the image evoked by clothes (and by the individuals who wear them) rather than the clothes themselves.3 4 Sociologist Georg Simmel, who coined the concept of “competitive emulation,” argued that this was not a negative behavior because it gratified the need for diversity and the inclination for further variety and change. In fact, fashion requires the renewal not only of styles, shapes, and objects but also of subjects.3 5 Nellie Bly’s travel-

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ing gown was copied by thousands of women because the journalist projected a public image that was instantly modern, dynamic, and reassuring. It expressed an appeal that could be summed up as a new readiness for action. The reporter became a living symbol of adventure and female mobility that allowed American women to catch a glimpse of an unexpected freedom. Thus every time they wore their traveling gowns, they embarked on some extraordinary venture even though—in reality—their journey was completely commonplace. The slender figure of Nellie Bly and her simple clothes already embodied women’s new potentialities for action and movement, anticipating a tendency that was to dominate fashion after World War I and to become a basic feature of modern elegance. Very soon, according to Hollander, “the look of possible movement” would constitute “a necessary element in fashionable female beauty and all women’s clothing.” Simultaneously the feminine ideal of slimness and slenderness would impose itself as a means to conform to this new “restless spirit.”3 6 Given the basic role that bags play in women’s lives, an investigation of any additional symbolic meaning related to these accessories contributes to illuminating the peculiar relationship between Bly and her bag. Anna Johnson’s interpretation of bags invokes the theories of British psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott about the universe of children. According to Johnson, Winnicott’s notion of “potential space”—an imaginary territory between the inner and the outer world coinciding with children’s sense of play—can find its perfect location in the bag: this accessory completes the human body to the point of becoming its “intimate extension.”3 7 Similarly Hélène David-Weill has written that the bag “is the most diverse and prolific of accessories,” but actually it is far more than that, according to Daphne Merkin in an article appropriately titled “Sometimes a Bag Is Not Just a Bag,” in which she argues that it constitutes “the portable manifestation of a woman’s sense of self, a detailed and remarkably revealing map” of her inner life.3 8 A bag is a sanctuary of privacy because it contains and protects the essential items of daily life; as a result, it can be seen as “a trusty companion” and “an essential and reassuring companion.”3 9 According to novelist Carol Shields, a woman’s bag is a part of

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herself, an extension of both her style and her soul, while its contents represent the only inviolable space she owns, apart from the labyrinth of her thoughts. Shields has elaborated these concepts in her essay “A Purse of One’s Own,” which directly recalls Virginia Woolf’s generative work A Room of One’s Own.4 0 In it she also stresses another symbolic element, which is quite relevant in relation to Bly’s personal experience: a new bag is a sign of lightness, order, and determination; therefore the purchase of a bag, especially a traveling bag, marks the beginning of a new stage in the life of a woman. Apropos of a new bag, Shields notes: It came packed hard with tissue paper. And in the midst of all the paper wadding there was always a little unframed rectangle of mirror. These were crude, roughly made mirrors. . . . They were like charms, good-luck charms. Or like compasses; you could look in them and take your bearings. Locate yourself in the world.4 1

This metaphor suggests that Bly’s purchase of her traveling bag marked the beginning of a new phase in her life, full of expectations and rich with adventures. This bag— just like the mirror that might have been inside it—was small and unpretentious, yet it acted as a compass and as a charm against bad luck: it was Bly’s true traveling companion. If apparently it did not contain anything superfluous, unnecessary, or sentimental, it actually held her secret dreams of glory, success, and happiness. This is the reason her bag was so important. According to Johnson, all bags play a similar role: “In being so sublimely iconographic, they tell us nothing less than where we live, who we are and where you might metaphorically someday find us, carrying our best selves in the bag of our secret dreams.” The same ideas have been voiced by Hélène David-Weill: “When you open it, layers of intimate life, past and present are to be found: . . . all the future dreams carried within the soothsayer’s bag.”4 2 Thus Nellie Bly’s small bag represented one of the most enduring legacies of her world tour. Bly’s bag resembled a medical briefcase; it was also quite similar to a nanny’s, and in particular to Mary Poppins’s carpetbag. The novel by P. L. Travers, an Australian writer living in England, was originally published in 1934, becoming an instant best seller.4 3

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Encouraged by her initial success, Travers published eight Mary Poppins books over the course of her life (two novels, four collections of stories, an alphabet book, and a cookbook), selling millions of copies all over the world. In 1964, she also served as a consultant on the Walt Disney film that transformed the story into a musical.4 4 In the Hollywood version, the character of Mary Poppins, played by Julie Andrews, presents a surprising resemblance to the image of Nellie Bly.4 5 The nanny, whose slim body recalled the journalist, owned a “special” carpetbag and always wore the same traveling gown, one extraordinarily similar to Bly’s. If Nellie Bly’s bag was all-inclusive, Mary Poppins’s carpetbag was even more: it was magical, containing the strangest and most wonderful objects. Besides being a sort of magician’s hat, it had a second important function; it was one of two accessories that allowed her to fly: a parrot-head umbrella helped her to take oƒ, while her carpetbag assisted her in landing. Thus the umbrella was a means of transport that had nothing to do with rain, and the carpetbag was the symbol of the unlimited possibilities to be found within the confines of everyday life. The adventures of Mary Poppins, in fact, make up an extraordinary tale about the magical powers of imagination.4 6

FIGURE 6.3

Mary Poppins, 1964.

Copyright Disney. Courtesy of The Walt Disney Company Italia S.p.A.

E P I LO G U E

In the early twentieth century, Nellie Bly was forgotten by the public, just as the carpetbag disappeared from the world of luggage until Emile Hermès revived it in the 1920s. In order to adapt it to the new age of rapid travel, he changed its name into sac-mallette, or travel bag, and restyled it by substituting canvas with leather and adding a zipper.4 7 As for the bag carried by Bly, which was much smaller than a carpetbag, fifty more years elapsed before its entry into the fashion world. Its use, in fact, was confined exclusively to doctors and other professionals until the 1970s, when Fendi turned it into a luxury briefcase for women. Today many women nurture a sort of obsession with bags, which they see as indispensable fashion accessories.4 8 Transformed into fetishes, top-quality leather bags made by fashion designers rank among women’s favorite extravagant and expensive purchases.4 9 According to Merkin, “the mania for bags—an irrational passion if ever there was one—defines our acquisition-mad cultural” period. Bags now lead the way as signs of high fashion; “the handbag in its various forms is the ultimate accessory.”5 0 Recently in fashionable collections two bags have come into vogue once again: the carpetbag, relaunched by Prada under the name of “stage-coach bag,” and a luxury version of Nellie Bly’s bag made of crocodile by John Galliano for Dior.

NOTES

1. In contrast to her immense popularity in the 1890s, Bly was forgotten in the early decades of the twentieth century until the first study to mention her life appeared in the 1930s: Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press: The Stories of Women in Journalism by an Insider (London: Harper and Brothers, 1936; repr. New York: Arno, 1974). Ross again narrated the events of Bly’s life thirty years later: Charmers and Cranks (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). The first biographies of the reporter appeared in the 1950s: The Story of Nellie Bly (New York: American Flange and Manufacturing, 1951),written by Jason Marks but published anonymously; Nina Brown Baker, Nellie Bly, illustrated

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by George Fulton (New York: Holt, 1956); Emily Hahn, Around the World with Nellie Bly, illustrated by B. Holmes (Boston: Houghton Mi‰in, 1959); Iris Noble, Nellie Bly: First Woman Reporter (New York: Messner, 1956); and Mignon Rittenhouse, The Amazing Nellie Bly (New York: Dutton, 1956). In the 1970s, the reporter was rediscovered by feminists and became an icon of American journalism. See Elizabeth Ehrlich, Nellie Bly (New York: Chelsea House, 1989); and Brooke Kroeger, Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (New York: Times Books, 1994), which is the best and most detailed biography. For a recent analysis of her work, see Jean Marie Lutes, Front Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006). Fiction writer Carole Nelson Douglas has introduced the character of Nellie Bly in her Irene Adler “novels of suspense”: Chapel Noir (New York: Forge, 2001); Castle Rouge (New York: Forge, 2002); Femme Fatale (New York: Forge, 2003); and Spider Dance (New York: Forge, 2004). In Italy, Nellie Bly is known through my writing, especially Nellie Bly: Un’avventurosa giornalista e viaggiatrice dell’Ottocento (Perugia: Morlacchi, 2002). 2. Margaret Fuller, “Our City Charities,” New York Tribune, March 1, 1845, 1; repr. in Bell Gale Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings, rev. ed. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), 337–40. 3. Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-house; or, Nellie Bly’s Experience on Blackwell’s Island (New York: Munro, 1887). 4. Jules Verne’s novel appeared serially in the Paris newspaper Le Temps from November 6 to December 22, 1872; it was then published as Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Paris: Hetzel, 1873), and in the same year it was translated into English and published in New York by Morrow and Co., and in Boston by J. R. Osgood. Given its enormous success, the novel was reprinted in the following years by many diƒerent American publishers, so that in 1889–90 everybody knew it. Moreover, in 1874, Verne and the playwright Adolphe Philippe D’Ennery wrote a theatrical adaptation of the novel, which was still performed in New York at the time of Bly’s world tour. 5. For a detailed account of Bly’s tour, see Jason Marks, Around the World in 72 Days: The Race between Pulitzer’s Nellie Bly and Cosmopolitan’s Elizabeth Bisland (New York: Gemittarius, 1993); and the electronic resource Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, compiled in 1997 by the National Digital Library Program of the Library of Congress under the title Today in History: January 25, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/jan25.html. 6. Laura Cocciolo and Davide Sala, Atlante illustrato della moda: Dalla pelle d’orso alle top model;

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Forme del fascino e dello stile (Colognola ai Colli: Demetra, 2001), 175 and 189–91; Ornella Morelli, “Funzione e retorica dell’abito da viaggio,” in Viaggio e scrittura: Le straniere nell’Italia dell’Ottocento, ed. Liana Borghi, Nicoletta Livi Bacci, and Uta Treder (Florence: Libreria delle donne, 1988), 180– 213; Mary Suzanne Schriber, Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830–1920 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987), 28; and Mary Russell, The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt: Women Travellers and Their World (London: Flamingo, 1986), 215. 7. For the role of Worth in the development of haute couture, see Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (1978; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 353–54. For the influence of this dressmaker on the French, see Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Richard Bienvenu (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). Perrot’s work is a history of French society through its fashions and clothes. 8. Nellie Bly, Nellie Bly’s Book: Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (New York: Pictorial Weeklies, 1890), 7–8. A few decades ago, Ira Peck edited a reprint of this book (Brookfield, Conn.: Twenty-First Century Books, 1998); and some excerpts of it were also published in Mary Suzanne Schriber, ed., Telling Travels: Selected Writings by Nineteenth-Century Women Abroad (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995), 221–39. Today Bly’s text can also be read on the Web at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/world/world.html. Further citations in the text are to the original 1890 edition. 9. Ibid., 8. For the dimensions of the bag, see Kroeger, Nellie Bly, 141. 10. Laura Montani, “L’accessorio: Una pratica significante,” in Abito e identità: Ricerche di storia letteraria e culturale, ed. Cristina Giorcelli (Rome: Ila Palma, 2001), 4:13–32. The English translation appears as chapter 1 of this volume. 11. Giacomo Devoto and Gian Carlo Oli, Vocabolario Illustrato della Lingua Italiana (Milan: Le Monnier and Selezione del Reader’s Digest, 1977), 1:18. 12. William Morris, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (New York: American Heritage; Boston: Houghton Mi‰in, 1969; repr., 1973), 8. 13. Collins Essential English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 2006). 14. Antonio Mancinelli, “La borsa è la vita,” in Moda! Qualche regola e molte eccezioni per creare il proprio stile (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2006), 100. 15. Ménéhould du Chatelle, “The Carpetbag: Packing the Essential,” in Carried Away: All about

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Bags, ed. Farid Chenoune (New York: Vendôme Press in association with Hermès, 2005), 126–35. This book appeared in connection with the exhibition Le Cas du Sac organized in Paris by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs; in France it was published by the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs (UCAD), Le Passage, in association with Hermès, 2004. 16. Gérard de Nerval, “Un tour dans le Nord: II. Une nuit à Londres,” in Oeuvres, vol. 2, Notes de Voyage (Paris: NRF-Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1961), 859. 17. Stendhal, “Nantes, le 25 juin 1837,” in Mémoires d’un touriste (Paris: A. Dupont, 1838), 2:1. 18. For a history of bags, see Anna Johnson and Eri Morita, Handbags: The Power of the Purse (New York: Workman, 2002). Johnson is a journalist and Morita is a photographer. Their book is a celebration of an accessory that they see as indispensable. For another history of bags, see Claire Wilcox, Bags (London: V&A Publications, 1999). 19. Johnson and Morita, Handbags, 3. 20. Ibid. It is interesting to notice that in 1896—that is, just a few years after Bly’s tour around the world—Vuitton started to hand paint his logo on his travel items in order to distinguish them from counterfeit ones. 21. Hollander, Seeing through Clothes, 152, 312, 319, and 348–49. 22. Cocciolo and Sala, Atlante illustrato della moda, 183. 23. Roland Barthes, Système de la mode (Paris: Seuil, 1967), English translation in The Fashion System, ed. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). See also Barthes’s other essays on the same subject published in the collection The Language of Fashion, ed. Andy Staƒord and Michael Carter (Oxford: Berg; New York: Power Publications, 2006); and Hollander, Seeing through Clothes, 193, 195, and 388. 24. Currently a leather factory in Tuscany, ToscoWEB 2004, sells through the Internet a doctor’s bag called the Michelangelo model whose dimensions are almost the same as those of Bly’s bag: 14.17 by 9.45 inches. Instead, the smallest model among traveling bags looks much wider. See http: //www.Tuscanyleather.it. 25. Ménéhould du Chatelle and Marc Stoltz, “Bags for Professionals,” in Chenoune, Carried Away, 184. 26. Alison Lurie, “Fashion and Sex,” in The Language of Clothes (New York: Random House, 1981), 243.

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27. Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1959), 7:7–122. 28. Alison Piepmeier, Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 1–2 and 17. 29. Charles Ponce De Leon, Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 44, 51, and 66. 30. Ibid., 67. 31. Ehrlich, Nellie Bly, 95. 32. Singer: At Home Worldwide 2004, http://www.singer.it/Azienda.asp. 33. Fred L. Israel, ed., 1897 Sears, Roebuck Catalogue (1968; repr., Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1993), 281. 34. Hollander, Seeing through Clothes, 315 and 349. Yuniya Kawamura has restated some of these concepts, holding that fashion is not really a matter of clothes, but rather a question of meanings. See Yuniya Kawamura, La moda (Bologna: Il Mulino, Universale, 2006). 35. Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 316–17. 36. Hollander, Seeing through Clothes, 152–55. 37. Johnson and Morita, Handbags, 1–2. For the concept of potential space, see D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971). For a collection of essays by this psychoanalyst, as well as a critical analysis of his theories, see Dodi Goldman, ed., In One’s Bones: The Clinical Genius of Winnicott (Northvale, N.J.: Aronson, 1993). 38. Hélène David-Weill, “Preface: Conversation about Bags,” in Chenoune, Carried Away, 10; and Daphne Merkin, “Sometimes a Bag Is Not Just a Bag,” Women’s Fashion Magazine supplement of the New York Times Magazine, February 26, 2006, 154. 39. Ophelia Georgiev Roop, “The Handbag: A Handful of Power,” San Bernardino Sun, “Book of the Week,” November 24, 2002, 14. 40. Carol Shields, “A Purse of One’s Own,” Allure, 1995; reprinted in A Second Skin: Women Write about Clothes, ed. Kirsty Dunseath (London: Women’s Press, 1998), 11–16.

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41. Ibid. See also Carol Shields’s short story “Mirrors,” originally published in Prairie Fire Magazine 16 (Spring 1995); reprinted in Collected Stories (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2004), 8, and posted on the Web at http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0997/shields/sstory.html. 42. Johnson and Morita, Handbags, 3; and David-Weill, “Preface,” 10. 43. For biographical information about this writer, see Patricia Demers, P. L. Travers (Boston: Twayne, 1991). 44. All eight Mary Poppins books by P. L. Travers are still in print; they are published in New York by Harcourt Brace in the series Young Classics, in association with Odyssey Classics. 45. The Disney film Mary Poppins—directed by Robert Stevenson, starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, and supervised by Walt Disney himself—was released thirty years after the first edition of Travers’s novel, winning five Academy awards. On November 30, 2004, a gala occurred at El Capital Theater in Hollywood to celebrate its fortieth anniversary; soon afterward a newly restored version of this movie appeared on DVD. 46. Axelle Ropert, “12 Movies, 12 Bags,” in Chenoune, Carried Away, 85. 47. Chatelle, “The Carpetbag,” 132. 48. Guia Soncini, “L’orologio di Bertelli,” Io Donna, supplement of Il Corriere della Sera, April 15, 2006, 34; and Mancinelli, “La borsa è la vita,” 100–6. 49. The results of an online poll carried out by Time magazine about the shopping preferences of Americans have confirmed that women have a real passion for bags, which are women’s favorite luxury purchase and appear to be more desired than shoes and jewelry. See “How Much Is That Little Handbag in the Window?” Style & Design, supplement of Time, Spring 2006, 45. 50. Merkin, “Sometimes a Bag Is Not Just a Bag,” 154.

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7

LI KE TH E I R FI R ST PA I R O F HIGH-HEELED SHOES C O NTI N E NTAL AC C ESS O R I ES AN D AU D R EY H E PB U R N’S CINEMATIC COMING OF AGE

Alisia Grace Chase If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you. e r n e s t h e m i n g w a y, A Moveable Feast It’s not every girl that’s lucky enough to go to Paris. Sabrina

For nearly two centuries, the idea that the atmosphere of Europe would turn a puritanical American into a passionate American was fairly commonplace. It was also a given, however, that the American taking a trip to the Continent in order to seek sensual and cultural pleasures (often referred to as “the grand tour”) was male.1 There were definitely flesh-and-blood counterparts to Henry James’s wealthy heiresses and Ernest Hemingway’s bohemian heroines, but these tended to be the exception not the rule, and it

wasn’t until the early 1950s that the dream of fulfilling one’s desires while traveling or living abroad finally became a commonplace for American females.2 These frequently provincial, typically middle-class young women sought the very same sort of liberation as their glamorous literary and real-life predecessors, and the Lost Generation’s pleasures soon were recycled for both a new generation and a new gender.3 As a result, the notion that traveling to Europe, and more specifically, the city of Paris, would transform a naive duckling into a sophisticated swan eventually became part of the American mythos, a Cinderella story that was far more chic than the archaic Grimm Brothers’ version. And like all cultural myths, the elements of this coming-of-age fairy tale became formulaic. A young American girl would go abroad. There, on the Continent, she would study the arts, dressmaking, or gourmet cooking. She would leave home as a sartorial disaster but would learn how to dress, returning as the most stylish woman in her suburb. And without fail, for this was the most integral element of the fairy tale, as well as the part most rife with innuendo, she would “learn how to live.” “To live” meant to experience the sensual world, not only to become familiar with petit fours or be able to discern a Cezanne from a Picasso, but to seek physical pleasure on one’s own terms without fear of reprisal.4 Given the period’s overt stress on virginity, experiences gained by these women were not to be divulged upon one’s return, and I would argue that this socially inculcated silence regarding a young woman’s sexual coming of age is why the material evidence of one’s trip becomes so culturally significant. A savoir faire in dress, firsthand knowledge of continental cuisine, and a command of art history were part of what one might learn on the Continent, but they were merely the external components of the more significant transformation that occurred within.5 Thus, when Jane Doe came back to her small town, USA, wearing an exotic Parisian chapeau with a bejeweled French poodle by her side, the tacit implication was that she had discovered not only style but also sex. Hollywood filmmakers quickly capitalized on this modern fairy tale, producing at least two dozen quest romances in the 1950s and 1960s with this visual transformation as a major or minor plotline.6 The heroines of these films were, as film critic Pauline

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Kael aptly summed it up, “new Daisy Miller[s],” but this cinematic version was far more ambitious: a young woman who desired to learn the secrets of couture and of the boudoir, as both were believed to be the province of a sophisticated woman. The fairy tale’s setting on the European continent was in itself enough to suggest that the activities that took place there would naturally be more sensual. But the fact that Italian and French women were reputed to be more stylish as well as more sexually permissive than their American counterparts also worked in a film director’s favor, for one could use clothes and accessories to make one’s point about sexual transformation less explicitly but just as powerfully. This was particularly convenient in an era when the Motion Picture Production Code had strict rules about sexual innuendo and young women.7 Satisfying the censors, as well as an audience full of young women who desired the vicarious thrill of continental pleasures, required creative use of mise-en-scène that said and did what the dialogue and actors could not. Fittingly, it is in the films of the actress whom Molly Haskell has called “the perfect Production Code heroine,” Audrey Hepburn, that costume most frequently symbolizes a sexual coming of age. Hepburn’s very physical form, simultaneously as lithe as a fashion model and as flat-chested as a teenage tomboy, was the perfect embodiment of a girl on the cusp of becoming a woman, and it is thus not surprising that she was the ideal actress to portray such heroines.8 In this chapter, I illustrate how her coming-of-age transformations are most often insinuated through fashion and accessories, taking into account Kathryn Schwarz’s theorization that, in regard to virginity, the body is always “a privileged site of information, evaluating women through the material signs of what they have and have not done.”9 Given the Production Code limitations of what was permissible to be shown on screen, and the impossibility of representing absence, it is logical to deduce that costume becomes a revelatory visual substitute, the outward material sign, for the virginal body or its sexually experienced other. The cinematic apotheosis of Paris teaching a girl “how to live” and a director using fashion and accessories to illustrate this metamorphosis is Sabrina, the 1954 Paramount Pictures romantic comedy in which Hepburn stars as a young woman who leaves the

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States as a lovesick, ponytailed teenager and comes back as the epitome of European chic and feminine knowing. The screenplay was loosely based on the popular Broadway play Sabrina Fair: Woman of the World, which was far more socially realistic and politically radical in its portrayal of how Paris changed American girls, but Billy Wilder and Ernest Lehman omitted much of the original material.1 0 The romance remained, however, and that upon her return Sabrina seduces both the childhood crush who once spurned her as well as his older brother only served to prove what a young woman could learn on the Continent. Director Billy Wilder, a European who was repeatedly frustrated by the strictures of the Code, cleverly represented Sabrina’s loss of innocence with a spectacular change of hairstyle and a wardrobe created by French designer Hubert de Givenchy.11 Although a number of scholars have written about Hepburn’s head-turning appearance in Givenchy’s sublime organdy evening gown, it is equally her Parisian accoutrements that mark Sabrina’s transformation into a woman of the world, literally and figuratively.1 2 Sabrina ostensibly goes to the City of Light to learn how to be a gourmet cook, but it is the amorous atmosphere of Paris that is her real finishing school, one where she learns far more than culinary secrets. It is where she is “tutored” by a French baron twice her age; it is where she trades her girlish ponytail for a sleek cap of curls; and it is also where, as she writes to her father on the eve of her return to America, “[One learns] so many things . . . not just how to make vichyssoise or calf’s head with sauce vinaigrette, but a much more important recipe. I have learned how to live. How to be in the world and of the world. And not just to stand aside and watch. I will never, never again run away from life, or from love either.” That “learning how to live” was a 1950s euphemism for experiencing sensual pleasures was further a~rmed in other popular texts besides the cinema. In the serial article titled “American Girl in Paris,” which ran in the travel magazine Holiday during October and November 1954, the heroine told her interviewer, “Visitors [from the States] come over, bring regards from my family . . . and invariably they ask, ‘Why are you staying here?’ Usually I tell them: I don’t know, I just like it here, and then change the subject. How can I tell them that I’ve learned to live, that I’ve discovered

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myself as a woman?”1 3 The rest of the article extrapolated on her love aƒairs with various European men, insinuating that it was the liberal atmosphere of the Continent that allowed her to be free of social conventions as they existed back in the States. Similarly, in a then contemporary short story written by Irwin Shaw, “A Year to Learn the Language,” the nineteen-year-old female protagonist believes France will provide her with a sexual freedom she can’t risk in the United States. For Roberta’s father, a year abroad means learning the French language; for Roberta, it means learning the language of love. Shaw writes, “As all virgins who come to Paris she was secretly convinced or resigned or delighted by the idea that she would leave the city in a diƒerent condition from that in which she had arrived in it.”1 4 That how one dressed delineated one as sophisticated or not was a~rmed by the protagonist’s comment that although she wasn’t sure when or where she was going to lose her virginity, she was certain that she “wasn’t going to enter the first love aƒair of her life in blue jeans.”1 5 Given that movies were thought to be more culturally influential than printed media, Sabrina cannot be shown to be as open about her continental aƒairs as the subject of “American Girl in Paris” nor as predetermined as Shaw’s character to lose her virginity, but Wilder’s visual subtext and witty double entendres strongly suggest that becoming sexually experienced is a fundamental part of her continental education. The film shows little of Sabrina’s actual transformation, physical or otherwise. This visual ellipsis is dramatically eƒective, for when Sabrina leaves the United States she is shown wearing a plain black jumper and pinafore, with a long high ponytail hanging down her back; she continues to wear a variation on this girlish costume in the cooking school scenes. Rather, we understand from the letters she has written to her father that the Baron St. Fontanelle and Paris are turning her from a shy, rather coltish girl into a self-confident woman who attends the races and the opera. Her escalating cultural maturity is materially alluded to when she writes that she now wears dresses that have “yards of skirt and [are] way oƒ the shoulders.” When the viewer next sees Sabrina, two years have passed, and she is shown sitting at her writing desk, giving her father instructions about her arrival in the States. That she has undergone a transformation is illus-

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F I G U R E 7. 1

Film still from Sabrina (Paramount Pictures, 1954).

trated by her new hairstyle, as well as her advice: “If you should have any di~culty recognizing your daughter, I shall be the most sophisticated woman at the Glen Cove station.” On this note, Wilder cuts immediately to the sight of a miniature French poodle wearing a rhinestone collar, and the camera moves dramatically up the dog’s leash to find an equally magnificent Sabrina at the end of its lead. This clever editing and Wilder’s mise-en-scène confirm that Sabrina meant what she said. Clad in a sharply tailored suit, Sabrina’s newly cultivated, clearly Parisian poise is apparent in her smart curls, the couture turban, and the manicured, bejeweled beast by her side. Wilder pauses, and slowly allows the viewer to savor this vision; his intentional lack of extraneous dialogue and characters further underscores Sabrina’s remarkable change.1 6 Spectator-consumers who were familiar with the cultural meanings behind her Parisian accoutrements and remembered the film’s tagline—“the chauƒeur’s daughter who’s learned her stuƒ in Paris”—immediately understood just what it was she had learned, and it was a lot more than how to make vichyssoise. Sabrina’s hairstyle, known as the “Bettina,” her French poodle, and her Paris hat were all symbolic markers of sophistication during the 1950s and early 1960s, signifiers of a woman’s worldliness.

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As Sarah Berry has pointed out, clothing and accessories can act as catalysts for “new kinds of social behavior.”1 7 That the film Sabrina and the actress Audrey Hepburn provided a cinematic model of this new kind of social behavior is supported by such comments as the one that British fashion designer Barbara Hulanicki made about the influence of this film on young English women. “Sabrina Fair,” she said, “made a huge impact on us all . . . everyone walked around in black sloppy sweaters, suede low-cut flatties and gold hoop earrings.”1 8 For Hulanicki and her art college peers, Sabrina’s costuming represented a spirit of feminine rebellion that would become standard in the following decade, but for the 1950s was semirevolutionary. That Hepburn made continental style the height of chic in the States is supported by such editorials as the one in Harper’s Bazaar magazine in their “Decade’s End” issue of 1959. Hepburn, they wrote, “brought the Portofino look to America—black leotards, turtleneck sweater, straight hair.”1 9 Apart from the bohemian clothing Hepburn wears in the film, her hoop earrings also symbolized a certain piquant sexuality that wasn’t normally associated with a wellbehaved heroine. Most young women in America would have accessorized that suit with matching pearl earrings and necklace. Hoop earrings were stereotypically believed to be worn by Mediterranean peasant women and were visually associated with a liberal sensuality. As Jackie Stacey has pointed out, Hollywood fashions were often seen as “transgressing restrictive . . . femininity and [were] thus employed as strategies of resistance.”2 0 Sabrina’s new hairstyle is one of the primary signifiers that she has come of age in Paris, for when she initially meets the baron, he informs her that he can tell that she is “unhappily in love.” To a sophisticated Parisian, Sabrina’s ponytail symbolizes her innocence, and he reprimands her for such long and childish locks. “To begin with,” he tells her, “you must stop looking like a horse,” the obvious subtext being that no French woman who desired a lover’s attentions would wear such a juvenile hairstyle. When Sabrina is next shown, happily ensconced in her little atelier in the shadow of the Sacre Coeur, her hair is short and chic. This shot, coupled with her voice-over stating that she will never run away from life or love again, intimates that losing her ponytail is, quite ob-

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viously, a visual innuendo for losing her virginity. This new style—a close-cut cap full of curls—was known as the “Bettina,” named after the popular French model Bettina Graziani, who was the embodiment of postwar French beauty. Jacques Fath is historically credited with sending the coveted young mannequin to the French stylist Georgel to have her hair cut within an inch of her scalp, but Graziani quickly became the defining muse for Hubert de Givenchy, the designer who would go on to be Hepburn’s personal couturier. Paris Match immediately covered the new style, which also became known as the “Marine Cut” in honor of the American GIs who occupied postwar France.2 1 The hairstyle came to stand for the generation of young women who saw the haircut as a symbolic shearing away of wartime horrors. But another French woman, actress/dancer Leslie Caron, originally brought the Bettina style to Hollywood, and thus to the United States. When the young French dancer came to America in 1951 to star in An American in Paris, studio executives at MGM were aghast when she arrived on set without the long locks that she had worn when they saw her dancing in Paris. Caron presciently realized that this hairstyle was the most authentically French accessory she could wear for the time period. As she later recalled, “Bettina was like Twiggy or Jean Shrimpton (but in Paris), and she started this new hairdo, what Mia Farrow eventually copied. I thought this would be great and modern, and [that] it would be great for the film.”2 2 An American in Paris was hugely popular, and as the film suggests that it is Parisian women who are the ultimate model of femininity, it follows that Caron’s look represented, to female audiences, the epitome of gamine exoticism. The cap-like form of the hairstyle also resembled that of a beret, which further reified its status as an icon of French femininity. A variation on the Bettina within the United States was known as the “Poodle Cut.” It consisted of tight curls that resembled those of the French poodle dog, and throughout the decade such well-known American women as First Lady Mamie Eisenhower and comedienne Lucille Ball wore it. In Sabrina, the shearing away is a symbolic loss of her innocence and her adolescent inability to attract the man she loves, but it is also a symbolic gain of her continental sensuality. In the film that inaugurated Hepburn’s career in Hollywood, Roman Holiday, her

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character also undergoes a transformative haircut that symbolizes a young woman’s coming of age. Although this 1953 Paramount Pictures production, directed by William Wyler and written by the uncredited, blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, was a fairy tale in reverse—the story of a European princess who only wants to live like a normal girl—the film can be read as another of the period’s examples of the cultural myth that Europe turned a girl into a woman. In this version, Hepburn plays the sweet but dissatisfied Princess Anne. Anne is fed up with her life as an obedient monarch, trapped in a world in which she is denied the adventures and pleasures a young girl might normally experience. It is not di~cult to see how female viewers in the United States might substitute their own lives for that of the princess, for the things she desires are typical symbols of sophisticated continental living: a glass of champagne, her first cigarette, a cone of gelato, a ride on a motor scooter, and late-night dancing on a barge on the Tevere. But her dramatic change in hairstyle is the first visual indication that she is determined to be free. As “Her Highness,” Hepburn wears her lank, thick hair held back by two girlish barrettes. Once outside of the palace, and away from the commands and expectations of her caretakers, this is the primary vestige of her royal self she wants obliterated. The barber she enlists to do it is initially timid. But as he cuts, the modern young woman is revealed and myriad identities are made possible. He says to her, “[Perhaps now you look like a] musician, maybe? You [look like an] artist? [A] Painter? [No!] I know . . . you [are a] model!” This short, insouciant hairdo symbolized, like the Bettina, not only a generational change from the severe, rolled hairstyles of the war, but a maturity free of the endless strokes of the brush as monitored by one’s mother. Haskell has also noted that in this scene, “[Hepburn’s] haircut is a rite of passage.”2 3 Similar to the transformation in Sabrina, this makeover is meant to have its sexual implications and is a way to make visible that which social and filmic strictures forbid. Given that it is a glass slipper that embodies Cinderella’s shining moment at the ball, it is perhaps not surprising that shoes symbolize a young woman’s romantic liberty in Roman Holiday. In order for her fairy tale to come true, Princess Anne also desires and requires a change in footwear. In this case, however, as she herself states, when her time

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away from the palace is over she’ll put her glass slippers back on. In the film’s opening scene, Princess Anne is shown greeting one dignitary after another in an insuƒerably long receiving line. The camera privileges the sight of the princess’s sore feet underneath her skirt and shows her removing one of the oƒending high heels. What she needs in order to be a normal girl is something more pedestrian. When she is shown moving freely through a market in the middle of Rome, she stops and exchanges her royal slippers for sexy Capri sandals that suggestively lace up her legs. It is immediately apparent that this new choice of shoe stands for the freedom she has gained. Flat soled, as a dancer’s shoes would be, they enable her to ride around the city on a scooter, liberated from the formal, uncomfortable heels that her position as princess dictates she wear. That a young girl’s shoes and other fashionable accoutrements were symbolic of her sexual experience was expressed in yet another film that starred Hepburn as a virginal young woman, Allied Artists’ Love in the Afternoon, released in 1957. In this story, in which Hepburn plays Ariane Chavasse, a Parisian jeune fille who is determined to lose her innocence to a caddish but wealthy American playboy, again director Billy Wilder uses shoes as a tender symbol of his heroine’s desire to become a woman. When the much older lothario, Frank Flanagan, proƒers, “I suppose most girls are sentimental about their first love,” Ariane answers, “I suppose so . . . like their first pair of high-heeled shoes,” carefully omitting the fact that this is her first love aƒair. In another sequence, Wilder shows the playboy hiding Ariane’s shoe in his bathrobe pocket after one of their afternoon dalliances, hoping to prolong her stay. The clear visual implication is that Ariane is now an experienced woman. Not only is she wearing her first pair of high heels, but her lover is shown to have possession of one of them, and thus, by implication, of her virginity.

F I G U R E 7. 2

Film still from Love in the Afternoon (Paramount Pictures, 1957).

Ariane further plays the part of a worldly woman by wearing a chain around her ankle. Her detective father, who specializes in illicit love aƒairs, has assured her that wearing an anklet means a woman has had sexual relations with whomever she received it from. As he explains, “[If it weren’t a gift from a lover, it would be] an umbrella or an eggbeater. There is something very provocative about an anklet.” Her father is correct, for as soon as Flanagan sees the chain dangling from her ankle he demands to know who gave it to her and the status of that relationship. Ariane also piques his interest by “borrowing” a white ermine coat from one of her father’s clients. Even though she is meeting Flanagan inside the hotel in the middle of the summer, Ariane cloaks herself in this elaborate fur to show that she is a woman whom men covet. Once again, her lover falls for the ruse and demands to know who gave her such a lavish gift. Wilder also makes devious, if only playfully so, use of another continental accessory to arouse the attentions of the man Hepburn loves in Sabrina. When David Larrabee picks her up at the station, he is initially unable to recognize the mysterious beauty who claims to be his neighbor. When he oƒers her the front seat, Sabrina calls to her perfectly groomed gray poodle, “Come on, David!” Larrabee exclaims, “David? Is his name David? . . . That’s funny, my name’s David, too.” Sabrina chuckles to herself and says, “That is funny, isn’t it?” knowing full well that she named the dog after Larrabee. While her American teenybopper peers compensated with wide circle skirts that had a felt appliqué of the breed, and often even a chain leash attached so that the wearer could “walk the dog,” Sabrina has the authentic Parisian appurtenance, and the authentically flirtatious air of a French woman. The connection in the popular American imagination between a provocative female expatriate and a well-groomed French poodle was established at least as early as 1875 in the novel Roderick Hudson by Henry James, which was first published serially in the Atlantic Monthly. The title character, a young American sculptor studying in Rome, one day sees a young girl apparently of about twenty. She was tall and slender and dressed with extreme elegance; she led by a cord a large poodle of the most fantastic aspect. He was

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combed and decked like a ram for sacrifice; his trunk and haunches were of the most transparent pink, his fleecy head and shoulders as white as jeweler’s cotton, his tail and ears ornamented with long blue ribbons. He stepped along sti‰y and solemnly beside his mistress, with an air of conscious elegance. . . . “Immortal powers!” cried Roderick, “What a vision! In the name of transcendent perfection who is she? . . . I wonder if she would sit to me?”2 4

Roderick’s companion agrees that she is a beautiful vision, but Roderick goes further: “Beautiful? She’s beauty itself—she’s a revelation. I don’t believe she’s living, she’s a phantasm, a vapor, an illusion!” “The poodle,” answers the companion drolly, “is certainly alive.” There is no doubt that Roderick is struck as much by the spectacle of the poodle Stenterello as by the gorgeous Christina Light, and it is clear that James means for the pet to function as a sign of the pretentiously decadent airs worn by such Americans, equating the flamboyance of the poodle’s coiƒure with the frivolity of women seduced by the charms of the Continent. The dog’s white puƒy crown “looked like one of those little pads, in swan’s-down, for applying powder to the face.”2 5 Christina Light can think of nothing other than her poodle—she fawns over him constantly and is teaching him to talk, “to say the proper little things in society.” As she ridiculously explicates, “It will save me a great deal of trouble. Stenterello, love, give a pretty smile and say tanti complimenti.”2 6 When Roderick wants to sculpt a portrait of Christina, she asks if he might do a bust of the dog instead, indicating that she sees her status reflected in her pet’s ostentatious appearance. Furthermore, Christina ends up seducing Roderick and wooing him away from his faithful, if dowdy, fiancée. James’s foreshadowing that she might be Mephistopheles is no mere hyperbole. For even then, as the fashionable accessory for an American woman abroad, the poodle was identified with the desire to be looked at, and this desire was an indication of female depravity. The breed once again became a worldly woman’s most stylish complement after World War II, an era like La Belle Époque that revolved around conspicuous consumption and ornate dress. It isn’t just a colloquialism when Sabrina writes that she is

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wearing dresses that “have yards of skirt”—this referenced the most chic style of the period. After the severe rationing of fabric under Nazi occupation, French designers, most notably Christian Dior, reveled in re-creating the voluminous skirts and narrow waists of the turn-of-the-century demimonde. Like the silhouette of Dior’s New Look, which was superexaggerated and hyperfeminine, the French poodle’s coiƒed coat mimicked the hourglass shape of the latest haute couture, with a dramatically large shoulder, skinny middle, and padded hip. While the rationalizations oƒered for these canine topiaries were comic (one excuse was that the ankle pom-poms helped to keep the dog’s joints warm when it was swimming), it was obvious that these were simply pretexts for selfindulgent women who wanted their pet’s appearance to replicate the voluptuousness of their own dress.2 7 In countless American films, advertisements, and fashion editorials of the 1950s, French poodles surround the actresses and models, visual shorthand for the style and sophistication associated with the City of Light.2 8 Poodles were used to sell everything from cars and luggage to children’s coats—and even, in a truly absurd take, feminine hygiene products. By 1960, it was easily the most popular breed in America, with the majority of the pets being named Jacques or Suzette; one of the most famous American girls who’d been to Paris in the 1950s—Jacqueline Kennedy—called her poodle Gaullie, after Charles de Gaulle. The period’s most fashionable mannequin, the Barbie doll, had an ensemble called “Poodle Parade,” which came with a “dog-show trophy awarded to Barbie’s winning poodle.”2 9 When Barbie was launched by Mattel in 1959, her novelty was that she wore what stylish adult women were wearing, often miniature copies of the latest couture creations, which included the period’s must-have accessories. In addition to the trophy, the 1965 “Poodle Parade” outfit also came with a small handbag that had a fluƒy white French poodle embroidered on it, and one of those real chains that spanned from the dog’s collar to the bag’s handle. Barbie’s creators must have realized how significantly Audrey Hepburn films influenced young women, for aside from her pet poodle, one of the teenage fashion model’s outfits called “Gay Parisienne” was created by none other

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than Hubert de Givenchy, who designed the post-Paris clothes for Sabrina, while yet another was named “Roman Holiday” after the film of the same name.3 0 It wasn’t just the French canine that was representative of continental style. The Paris hat, as it was known, was another accessory that signified the glamour associated with having been abroad, and in Sabrina Wilder makes good use of it. Paris hats represent the extraordinary, so Sabrina reveals that the hats she brings back for both the cook and her chauƒeur father are for special occasions only. “Margaret, I got you a hat! A real Paris hat for you to wear to church on Sundays!” Sabrina exclaims to the cook. “This is for you to wear on your day oƒ,” she says as she hands a black beret to her father. The only character who can carry oƒ the Paris hat as part of her everyday appearance is the elegant Sabrina, the woman who has truly traveled. The snug-fitting, soignée turban that Sabrina wears as she waits at the Glen Cove station not only highlights her Bettina hairstyle, it stands in stark contrast to the type of outrageous Parisian creations that were frequently parodied in the popular American press. Sabrina’s other piece of millinery is also evocative of a woman who has experienced Paris as more than just a visitor; the triangular tiara graphically covered with shiny rhinestones that she wears to the 21 Club is both fantastical and flattering. The black chapeau looks like a headdress from Swan Lake and is the ultimate haute couture accessory for her ballerina-skirted Givenchy dress. In contrast to the frothy, and often quite unflattering, confections tourists returned with, Hepburn’s hat is the height of French fashion. A “real Paris hat,” as Sabrina says to the cook, was one of the most coveted accessories an American woman could have in the 1950s, even if few carried it oƒ with the same aplomb as Audrey Hepburn. A 1948 article in Life, titled “Americans Abroad: The Rush to Europe Rivals Pre-war Days,” had the tagline, “Tourists Find Everything from Old Ruins to New Hats.” One accompanying photo with the caption, “Mrs. Claude Crawford of Memphis, Tennessee at the Paris salon of Gilbert Orcel,” shows a very matronly American woman looking at the French milliner as if he had just suggested something obscene.3 1 One has the strong suspicion, however, that Mrs. Claude Crawford is

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F I G U R E 7. 3

Film still from Sabrina.

F I G U R E 7. 4

[ facing ] Cover of Saturday Evening Post, April 13, 1957.

determined to come home with a Paris hat no matter how foolish she may look in it. A Saturday Evening Post cover from April 1957 also ridiculed the typical woman’s passion for a hat from the City of Light. The illustration shows a husband and wife in their bedroom. The wife, wearing a huge hat on her head, is sitting up and admiring her possession and her appearance in a hand mirror while her heavy-eyed husband looks up warily. The hat is enormous, close to absurd in size, and covered with pink and yellow roses with a plume of pink feathers protruding from the rear. This creation, made by one Madame Rosalie de Paris, is clearly the stuƒ of dreams. As film critic Maria Di Battista has pointed out, the Paris-made hat “epitomizes the mutable, ephemeral and nonsensical spirit of fashion.”3 2 It is exactly these qualities that made an accessory such as the Paris hat so pleasurable to purchase and to own, even aside from one’s pride in wearing it. Often outlandishly large, decorated with feathers and flowers and sparkly, diamanté doodads that did nothing other than look spectacular, its

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very visual appearance was symptomatic of what was missing from the repressive, conformist atmosphere of 1950s suburban living in America. Looking at the delighted expression on the wife’s face as she proudly admires her couture creation, compared to the exhausted and quizzical appearance of her husband, reveals that this was a pleasure that heterosexual men weren’t meant to understand. That a Paris hat was a pleasure unique to women was also evidenced by the accompanying caption: We see by the cover that Mlle. Rosalie de Paris has unloaded on madam a chapeau avec beaucoup de flower garden topside. It is darling, madam is fully convinced. And if you think it is a malformed nightmare whose logical repository is the ashcan, you must be just a puritanical old fogy. . . . As for the character in the other bed, for once in his life he is noticing that his wife has a new hat. When he gets the bill, he will notice it again.3 3

The message in Sabrina is the same as that of the Post cover: heterosexual American men have no interest in fashionable millinery. Linus Larrabee, the staid, business-obsessed brother whom Sabrina ends up falling for, wears a black fedora day in and day out. The post-Paris Sabrina tells him that in the City of Light he’d be mistaken for an undertaker and repeatedly tries to flip up the brim of his hat so that he has a modicum of élan. Until the moment he boards the Liberté, the cruise ship that will take them both to Paris, however, he repeatedly resists her advice, fearing he’ll appear too fey. Hats in cinema, particularly Parisian hats, emphasize women deliberately disregarding what men (at least their spouses or lovers) think of them.3 4 They are pleasures, instead, to please themselves, cinematic symbols of defiance. As Jeanine Basinger has written, “In the women’s world on film, there is so little freedom possible that a woman’s putting something on her [head] becomes one of her most dramatic actions.”3 5 There is further evidence to suggest that these accessories were representative of female independence. Travel statistics from the period indicate that the most frequently listed occupation on passports during this period was housewife, and many women came to the Continent with the express intention of coming home with a souvenir to prove that they had seen the sights, another euphemism for worldly experience.3 6 The

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chapeau de Paris, like the Bettina hairstyle and the poodle, may have seemed frivolous to husbands, but the fantasies associated with them were empowering to wives. Emblematic of independence and possibility, these trinkets, large or small, represented the “what might have happened” while one was abroad and imparted an air of mystery to the woman who wore them (or walked them, in the case of the canine). Certainly one could read the female figure in the illustration from the Saturday Evening Post as a housewife whose Paris hat has the ability to remind her of secrets unknown to her sleepy husband.3 7 To take Di Battista’s description of the Paris hat as the epitome of the mutable and the ephemeral, one could argue equally that men feared that a woman’s slavish devotion to the whims of fashion represented her fickleness and, by extension, her ability to be unfaithful in matters of the heart. Billy Wilder uses the Paris hat to suggest this very same infidelity and a woman’s clandestine aƒairs in Love in the Afternoon. When Ariane overhears one of her father’s clients state that he is going to shoot his wife’s lover, she rushes to the Hotel Ritz to try and stop him. After entering the suite where the couple’s nightly rendezvous occur, Ariane informs them of the jealous husband’s plot and takes the place of the wife. As the women are dressed similarly—in black, full-skirted gowns—Ariane simply dons the hat of the wife, a black crown with a discreet veil that has allowed the adulteress to enter her lover’s hotel unrecognized. When the husband enters the room and lifts what is supposedly his wife’s veil, he sees only the face of Hepburn. The hat obviously foils the would-be assassin but more important allows the virginal young woman to play the part of the knowing older woman. Disguised as such, she gets to dance in the lothario’s arms, drink a glass of champagne, and even receive a kiss. Although she plays it cool, it is clear she is smitten, for she leaves wearing the hat and humming the song they danced to. When her boyfriend Michele, who has driven her to the hotel yet remains ignorant of what went on inside, sees her, he says in frustration, “Will you please stop humming that idiotic tune . . . and how did you get that stupid hat?” Ariane’s dreamy response, “What hat?” and her leisurely repositioning of the veil indicate that she quite liked her romantic masquerade. Toward the end of his life, in an interview by director Cameron Crowe, Billy Wilder

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commented that one only had to watch the remake of Sabrina, filmed in 1995, to see how clothing and accessories had lost their ability to symbolize a character’s development and transformation.3 8 As I noted earlier, many have written about the critical scene in the original film when Sabrina enters the Larrabee ball through the backyard, her Givenchy gown ethereally floating behind her. The eƒect is visually stunning, and it is not di~cult to see why this filmic moment is so historically significant, nor to see how a remake could never hope to equal it. When David Larrabee, one of the many young men who surround Sabrina as she enters, shows her oƒ to his older and wiser mother, he excitedly exclaims, “It’s Sabrina. She’s been to Paris, you know.” The older woman’s sardonic tone as she answers, “Yes, I know . . .” indicates that she sees something her besotted son cannot. In the world of women, clothing and accessories allowed one to say what decorum prohibited speaking aloud. While Hepburn’s oƒ-the-shoulder neckline is quite similar to those of the other young women, her skirt varies dramatically. Instead of the full bell shape that suggests a fortress of impenetrable undergarments below, Sabrina’s skirt is tight and fitted, and the cutaway overskirt only further emphasizes her shapely hips and the part of her body that Paris has helped her discover. Sabrina is no longer the little virgin emerging from the apple tree, but a woman of the world entering her sexual destiny. The cultural myth could indeed go without saying in this instance; Maude Larrabee knows exactly what Sabrina’s metamorphosis has entailed. In the version directed by Sydney Pollack, Sabrina does return from France with a new haircut, a dramatically broad-brimmed hat, and a shiny silver ball gown. But in a period when it is assumed by most audiences that no woman of Sabrina’s age could possibly be a virgin, the story, and thus the haircut and hat, as well as the gown, lose much of their frisson. They represent nothing other than Sabrina having developed a sense of fashion. The film implies as much; when Linus questions Sabrina about the origin of her name she tells him that it is from a poem about a water sprite who rescues a virgin from a fate worse than death. When he remarks that Sabrina must be the virgin, she looks away and says, “No, Sabrina is the savior.” The other accessories become just as meaningless. In the Pollack film, when Sabrina hands her father the black beret, she

ALISIA GRACE CHASE / 138

doesn’t even suggest that he should wear it. “For laughs,” she says, as she places it on top of his head. Likewise, the Paris hat for the cook is turned into an Hermès scarf, which Sabrina promises to teach her to tie. It is fairly safe to assume that the modern-day Sabrina would look positively foolish were she to return to the States with a diamanté-collared poodle by her side, but the point remains the same. In an era when a young American woman spends two years living in the branches of a California Redwood tree, two years in Paris hardly represents a remarkable form of independence.3 9 In a similar vein, when images of Britney Spears’s obviously experienced belly fly across the globe in a matter of milliseconds, it is di~cult to imagine what sorts of fashion could supposedly represent sexual liberation or the loss of one’s virginity. Near the denouement of the original film, before Linus breaks the news that she’ll be going back to Paris alone, Hepburn’s Sabrina tearfully steels herself against the pain of romantic rejection and says, “I went away to grow up, and I thought I had. . . . I guess I haven’t, really. Just got myself a new hairdo, that’s all.” Her words are a powerful reminder of just how important a young woman’s coming of age once was, and just how important it was to wear the accessories that symbolized this tender change.

NOTES

1. See Stephen Longstreet, We All Went to Paris: Americans in the City of Light, 1776–1971 (New York: Macmillan, 1972); Humphrey Carter, Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920’s (Boston: Houghton Mi‰in, 1987); Ernst Dunbar, ed., The Black Expatriates: A Study of American Negroes in Exile (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968); Stanley Karnow, Paris in the Fifties (New York: Times Books, 1997); Donald Pizer, American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, The Continual Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris, 1944–1960 (New York: Grove, 1992); and Georges Wickes, Americans in Paris (New York: Doubleday, 1969), among others for material on Americans in Paris during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.

139 / LIKE THEIR FIRST PAIR OF HIGH-HEELED SHOES

2. This postwar explosion in overseas travel was due to the confluence of a number of political, social, and economic factors. Three of the major factors, in my opinion, were the seemingly limitless a‰uence of many middle-class Americans, the opportunities for travel and work abroad that such postwar economic and educational programs like the Marshall Plan and the Fulbright scholarship provided, and the relative ease and low expense of airline travel. 3. For contemporary examinations of this phenomenon, see both Paul E. Deutschman, “American Girl in Paris,” Holiday, October and November, 1954, and William Brinkley, “They All Say: ‘Look at the American Signora!’” Life, December 23, 1957, 66–74. 4. Much of my understanding of 1950s sexual mores comes from Elaine Tyler May and her ideas about domestic containment in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 5. Since this essay’s original publication, parts were revised and printed as sections of my essay “What Paris Reveals: The Sartorial and Sensual Transformation of American Girls,” in The Great American Makeover: Television, History, Nation, ed. Dana Heller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 65–84. 6. For a more extensive discussion, see my PhD dissertation, “An American Heroine in Paris: Hollywood and Women in the City of Light in the 1950s” (University of Minnesota, 2002). 7. Hollywood studios’ virtual paralysis about single young women and sexuality was evidenced in the scandal over Otto Preminger’s 1953 film, The Moon Is Blue. It was refused the Production Code seal of approval because it used the term “professional virgin” to describe a young woman who did everything but have sexual intercourse in order to gain a husband. 8. Molly Haskell, “Our Fair Lady,” Film Comment, January/February 1991, 17. Billy Wilder, who directed two of the films discussed here, also recalled that “Hepburn [was] so virginal” that her presence erased any hint of vulgarity from otherwise risqué stories. See Cameron Crowe, Conversations with Wilder (New York: Knopf, 1989), 146–48. 9. Kathryn Schwarz, “The Wrong Question: Thinking through Virginity,” diƒerences 13, no. 2 (2002): 13. 10. Chase, “An American Heroine in Paris,” 70–72. 11. The director was well aware of the importance of clothing and accessories. Crowe, Conversations with Wilder, 218–20. 12. For more information on the Givenchy gown and its filmic and fashion significance, see

ALISIA GRACE CHASE / 140

Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (London: Routledge, 1997); Gaylyn Studlar’s “Chi-Chi Cinderella: Audrey Hepburn as Couture Countermodel,” in Hollywood Goes Shopping, ed. David Dresser and Garth S. Jowett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 179–204; and Rachel Moseley, Growing Up with Audrey Hepburn: Text, Audience, Resonance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 13. Deutschman, “American Girl in Paris” (November), 59. 14. Irwin Shaw, “A Year to Learn the Language,” in Short Stories: Five Decades (New York: Delacorte, 1978), 338. 15. Ibid. 16. In regard to Wilder’s pause, Rachel Moseley has noted that it is geared toward “a feminine audience, one which is competent in reading sartorial codes.” See “Dress, Class, and Audrey Hepburn: The Significance of the Cinderella Story,” in Fashioning Film Stars: Dress, Culture, and Identity, ed. Rachel Moseley (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 113. 17. Sarah Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 144. 18. Elizabeth Wilson, “Deviant Dress,”Feminist Review 35 (Summer 1990): 58. 19. Harper’s Bazaar, July 1959, 12. 20. Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: The Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994), 198. Although Stacey is referring to British spectators and restrictions, I believe the same case could be made for American spectators and cultural beliefs about normative femininity. 21. See Guy Schoeller’s Bettina (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 11. 22. Donald Knox, The Magic Factory: How MGM Made “An American in Paris” (New York: Praegar, 1973), 96. 23. Haskell, “Our Fair Lady,” 12. 24. Henry James, Roderick Hudson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 76. 25. Ibid., 110. 26. Ibid., 109. 27. The manicured form of the dog can also be viewed as suggestive of the world of the turnof-the century courtesan as its alternately shaved and puƒy appearance mimicked the curves of the female nude. 28. Hollywood directors utilized the wooly beasts as convenient props to maintain the illusion

141 / LIKE THEIR FIRST PAIR OF HIGH-HEELED SHOES

that their films took place on the Continent and, in addition, as an accessory that signified both feminine sophistication and European pretension. In An American in Paris, elegant women walk their well-groomed poodles along the city streets, the diamanté collars and curly coats of the pooches chosen to echo the jewelry and hues of the dresses of their female owners. In April in Paris (1952), a nightclub act shows dancers walking poodles whose coats have been dyed to match the colors of their feathery costumes—a shocking pink and a vivid violet, among others. In the musical remake of Ninotchka, Silk Stockings (1956), a gray French poodle with a red ribbon and bejeweled collar is the decade’s equivalent of the absurd hat in the original film. A serious-minded Russian spy proclaims the dog to be a “ridiculous and useless” emblem of Western capitalism and Gallic female frivolity. 29. See Barbie Millicent Rogers: An Original, Photographs by David Levin (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 23. 30. It isn’t just coincidence that during this period Barbie owns a French poodle. During the late 1960s, when fashion takes a turn toward the rich hippie side, her dog is an Afghan hound. 31. “Americans Abroad: The Rush to Europe Rivals Pre-war Days,” Life, August 16, 1948, 31. 32. Maria Di Battista, Fast-Talking Dames (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 256. 33. Saturday Evening Post, April 13, 1957, 3. 34. That men thought women were foolish for wanting to wear such seemingly ridiculous creations was also parodied in the 1947 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty when Danny Kay’s title character pretends he is the famous designer Anatole of Paris. After showing a hat shaped like a Venetian gondola (replete with oars), he proclaims, “Why do I sew each chapeau with a style they look positively grim in? Strictly between us . . . entré nous . . . I Hate Women!” Although this is an obvious send-up, it suggests a particularly misogynistic reading of a woman’s desire to cloak oneself in the guise of fantasy. 35. Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960 (New York: Knopf, 1993), 117–18. 36. In Americans Abroad: Two Centuries of European Travel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), 174–76, Foster Rhea Dulles writes that Paris was by far the most popular post–World War II destination for American women. 37. The negative representation of this feminine independence was seen in The Last Time I Saw Paris, the 1954 film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story. Here, the Paris hat is symbolic of

ALISIA GRACE CHASE / 142

what decadent and empty lives the main characters lead. When Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson are on the verge of breaking up, he asks what she’s going to do about their situation. She answers sadly and cruelly, as she leaves him in the Bois de Bologne, “I’m going to do something really important. Buy a new hat.” 38. Crowe, Conversations with Wilder, 218. Wilder later says the costuming is “the last piece of the puzzle” (ibid., 220). 39. I am referring here to Julia Butterfly Hill, the young woman who lived barefoot in a thousand-year-old California Redwood tree from 1997 to 1999 in order to prevent loggers from chopping it down.

143 / LIKE THEIR FIRST PAIR OF HIGH-HEELED SHOES

8

W O R D-PR O C E S S E D F O R YO U BY A PR O FE S S I O N A L S E A M STR E S S Karen Reimer My embroidered works exploit the tensions between copy and original, object and process, and fine art and domestic craft to examine the relations between beauty, value and meaning. I’m particularly interested in how the amount of manual work invested in an object aƒects our judgment of which category it fits into and to what degree it possesses those related qualities. These embroidered replicas of fragments and texts range from great books to candy wrappers. Generally speaking, copies are of less value than originals, but when I copy by embroidering, the value of the copy is increased because of the elements of handicraft and singularity—traditional criteria of artistic value. The copy is now also an original. From another point of view, the value of the duplicate is decreased by the technique of embroidery. Not only is it extravagantly ine~cient in terms of time and labor, it also produces a bad copy; it makes the original partially or completely illegible. The embroidered texts teeter on the edge of legibility; reading them relies heavily on pattern recognition, projection and guesswork. Some words, however, are legible. At the very least, the titles of the pieces, which are taken from the embroidered words, are printed in the

FIGURE 8.1

Karen Reimer, Made for You by a Professional

Seamstress, 1999. Embroidery, 8 7/8 ∞ 5 7/8 inches. Photograph by Tom Van Eynde. Copyright Karen Reimer.

labels or captions, and then prompt the viewer’s ability to “read” those words in the piece. In most cases, these readable words can be understood to somehow refer to the object itself, or its making, or its relationship to the viewer. Embroidering these words moves them away from their meanings in the printed originals (advertising slogans, pieces of fiction, documentation, etc.), so that they, like the less legible words, become open to a wider play of possible meanings. This particular embroidery, titled from the first line, Made for You by a Professional Seamstress, is a copy of a page from a 1956 home economics textbook for high school girls about how to dress, sew, look after their clothes, and generally make themselves attractive. The text lists questions such as the following: “8. Have you ever used the sewing machine? 9. Do you make any of your own clothes? What garments have you made? 10. Are you responsible for: (a) Pressing; (b) Washing and ironing; (c) Removing spots and stains?” It goes on to ask in question 11, “In the following list of personal problems, with which ones do you need help?” The problems include arranging hair, applying makeup, developing good taste, selecting the right clothing for any occasion, and so on. It is not surprising to find young women, particularly in the 1950s, being educated about personal problems related to their appearance—being given a large set to choose from, as it were, in case there were any problems that hadn’t occurred to them yet. What I did find striking was that exactly twenty-six potential personal problems were listed, one for each letter of the alphabet. This couldn’t have been a coincidence, right? So, why? Because of this A to Z list, embroidering this page let me conflate it with an earlier tradition of pedagogical sewing—the sampler. Samplers usually featured the alphabet and also frequently included biblical verses or other uplifting quotations; the activity of making them, and of doing fine handwork in general, was considered a kind of moral hygiene for women by keeping them busy, since idle hands were the devil’s workshop. These samplers served to demonstrate the maker’s knowledge and character as much as her sewing skills. Made for You by a Professional Seamstress, taken as a sampler, could be seen as a lesson

KAREN REIMER / 146

in or demonstration of a type of knowledge and literacy, of the ability to read and write female appearance. And, while we don’t all sew, mend, or iron anymore since the advent of cheap manufactured clothing, dealing with appearance and wardrobe certainly still keeps women busy, to understate it. As the artist of the piece, I am the “professional seamstress” referred to in the title. Embroidering and sewing are no longer commonly practiced. Sewing clothing now is more expensive than buying it, and choosing to do so assumes a creative impulse rather than a practical motive, as does choosing to embroider or, for that matter, to write by hand. Use value has traditionally been one of the criteria for judging something to be craft or design rather than art. The impracticality and ine~ciency and inutility of all handwork make it at home in the conceptual economics of the art studio.

NOTE

The full text reads: *Made for you by a professional seamstress 8. Have you ever used the sewing machine? 9. Do you make any of your own clothes? What garments have you made? 10. Are you responsible for: a. Pressing b. Washing and ironing c. Removing spots and stains d. Mending and patching e. Polishing shoes 11. In the following list of personal problems, with which ones do you need help? a. Correcting posture faults b. Caring for hands and nails c. Arranging hair becomingly

147 / WORD-PROCESSED FOR YOU BY A PROFESSIONAL SEAMSTRESS

d. Applying make-up e. Maintaining a neat appearance f. Planning your wardrobe g. Choosing becoming colors h. Developing good taste i. Selecting the right clothing to wear on every occasion j. Managing your clothing allowance k. Judging the quality of fabrics l. Buying durability m. Judging whether or not a fabric is washable n. Judging the fit of clothes o. Choosing clothing becoming to your figure p. Shopping for attractive and suitable accessories q. Making a dress r. Buying a suitable pattern s. Using a sewing machine t. Altering clothing to fit you u. Storing clothing between seasons v. Keeping clothes neat and clean w. Removing spots and stains x. Pressing a shirt y. Washing a sweater z. Deciding whether it is more profitable to make or buy your clothes

KAREN REIMER / 148

9

S LI P S O F TH E TO N G U E L E S B I A N P U L P F I C T I O N A S H O W -T O - D R E S S M A N U A L S

Paula Rabinowitz A woman should some day write the complete philosophy of clothes. t h e o d o r e d r e i s e r, Sister Carrie Pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic. s i g m u n d f r e u d , “Fetishism”

The department store, site of middle-class female consumer culture since the nineteenth century, demarks a zone in which women not only shop but, in the process of trying on apparel, communally disrobe, sometimes literally together within a huge open space, occasionally under the supervising eye of the saleswoman who monitors the cut and fit of the garments, more often alone before a full-length three-way mirror, producing a solitary portrait. In another part of the modern cityscape, bohemia, female models shed their clothes and pose nude or draped in fabric for life drawing and painting classes in artists’ studios. Each scene—commercial and aesthetic—depends on the

discerning eye—of the shopper, of the artist—to note the details of curve, fold, cut, and color. These two modern gendered spaces—like the school dormitory or the locker room —oƒer institutionalized structures for public female nudity. Not surprisingly, they serve as the settings for depictions of female voyeurism and other same-sex forms of desire. American pulp fiction, one of the rare mass avenues open to depicting lesbian relationships during the immediate postwar period, situated many plots within these domains. The older woman, a professional working at the upscale department store, dressed with refinement and care, takes her younger protégé under her wing, training her and ultimately protecting and loving her (Valerie Taylor [pseudonym of Velma Young], The Girls in 3-B [1958]); the sophisticated bourgeois shopper signals her interest to the working-class shop girl by commenting on her looks rather than her goods (Claire Morgan [pseudonym of Patricia Highsmith], The Price of Salt [1952]); the older bohemian artist instructs a young girl in sketching by disrobing and posing in her Greenwich Village apartment (March Hastings [pseudonym of Sally Singer], Three Women [1958]); in a slight variation in an earlier novel, We Too Are Drifting (1936), Gale Wilhelm has the lesbian artist modeling for her male mentor’s woodcarving “Hermaphroditus.” These scenes from classic lesbian pulp fiction borrow from set pieces strewn among twentieth-century American fiction that suggest a complicated interaction among narratives, female desire for material objects, and displays of the female body more or less sanctioned as cross-class encounters in public spaces. They range from detailed scenes of shopping in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy or Anzia Yesierska’s Salome of the Tenements at the beginning of the century through midcentury pulp (all later made into movies) as in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (here the art school is replaced by the antiquarian bookshop, both invariably fronts for pornography rings) or James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce (where the department store is replaced by the restaurant as scene of a cross-class female workforce), to Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, which became the Max Ophuls film The Reckless Moment (art school), and Vera Caspary’s Laura (modeling agency) in the 1940s. Even with the 1950s emergence of lesbian pulp, the location of female encounters is quite circumscribed.

PAULA RABINOWITZ / 150

How to find other women, undress them, and describe them and still retain an air of plausibility and discretion? Boarding school dormitories? Too European and upper class, though many classic lesbian novels do take place in the school or college dorm: Christa Winsloe’s novel The Child Manuela, which she turned into the screenplay for Leontine Sagan’s 1931 film Maedchen in Uniform; Violette Leduc’s 1960s novels La Bâtarde and Thérèse et Isabelle, the latter of which became a film in 1968; and the book that began the American flurry of lesbian paperbacks, Spring Fire by Vin Packer (the pseudonym of Marijane Meaker). The army? Possibly (Nancy Morgan, City of Women, Tereska Torres, Women’s Barracks, and Margaret Long, Louisville Saturday, all suggest that the armed services oƒer rich opportunities for same-sex romance), but by custom and censorship, stories of sex and violence in the armed forces were curtailed during and immediately after World War II.1 The bar? Too seedy (though that’s where Beebo Brinker, in the novels of Ann Bannon [pseudonym of Ann Weldy], could be found on the prowl). All these erotic zones stray from middle-class, middle-American propriety; instead, two acts—shopping and art making—provide possibilities for almost any respectable young woman to meet other women. The department store, where women worked and shopped and supped and stripped together and could congregate alone within the limits of legitimate middleclass behavior; and life class, where they could break out of these constraints at the bohemian edges of society by modeling or sketching in arty districts with studios, art schools, second-hand book and print shops: these became the sites for the more “positive” representations of lesbian love. In a classic of the genre, for instance, Ann Bannon’s I Am a Woman (in Love with a Woman—Must Society Reject Me?), the prim lesbian finds herself drawn to her heterosexual roommate. Then, on a double date with her roommate and her boyfriend and his pal, descending the steps into a Greenwich Village gay bar, she finds a world of young short-haired girls dressed in open-collared white shirts and black trousers. At first repelled, she thrills to find a self-confident butch eying her in the bathroom. Try as she might to repress her desire, it springs forth uncontrollably until she can admit and act on it. It has become a cliché to find lesbian pulp fiction described, in Joan Nestle’s phrase,

151 / SLIPS OF THE TONGUE

FIGURE 9.1

Book cover of City of Women, by Nancy Morgan.

as “survival literature,” a means through which 1950s middle-class heterosexual culture could be escaped briefly, and where a corresponding world of women’s homoeroticism was expressed and explored.2 Editor Katherine Forrest recalls how “a lesbian pulp fiction paperback first appeared before my disbelieving eyes in Detroit, Michigan, in 1957. I did not need to look at the title for clues; the cover leaped out at me from the drugstore rack: a young woman with sensuous intent on her face seated on a bed, leaning over a prone woman, her hands on the other woman’s shoulders.”3 Others responded to this newly

PAULA RABINOWITZ / 152

visible expressive culture with more ambivalence. Her “middle-class background” kept Gail Ellen Dunlap “frightened” of the “popular dyke literature” and “gay bars in New York.” However, she recalls, as a student at Vassar, “the books I found! There was Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, Jeannette Foster, Radclyƒe Hall, Simone de Beauvoir, and Gertrude Stein.”4 Still, these high literary works barely contained the “desire so big” found in the cheesy paperbacks, as the working-class lesbian daughter of a “mother who liked to fuck,” Joan Nestle, called it, bursting their cheap pages.5 Noting that lesbians in 1950s America had no “subculture” outlined through a history or a geography in the ways gay men had, except a few bars or softball teams, Lillian Faderman argues that what might be understood as in Benedict Anderson’s phrase the “imagined community” created by this literature served to produce a space for lesbian desire.6 Ann Bannon described the “Golden Age” of lesbian writing during the 1950s when a group of writers “suddenly reached out and connected with women who were very isolated and sequestered, almost, in little towns across the country. . . . They [the paperback originals with lesbian themes] were widely distributed and they said this is how it is, this is who some of your sisters are.”7 Remarking on the reviews of lesbian pulp by Barbara Grier (writing as Gene Damon) in The Ladder as well as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s compilation of lists and bibliographies for readers, Susan Stryker notes “the careful attention many mid-twentieth-century lesbian readers paid to lesbian-themed mass-market paperbacks, their hunger for a~rming representations, their ability to tease out subtextual sympathies in books that were often overtly homophobic and misogynistic, and their loyal appreciation for authors who expressed carefully coded support for the kind of lives they led.”8 In addition to the entertainment and community value of these illicit novels—the legitimating expression of female erotic desire for another woman—noted by these historians, critics, and authors, the novels also served the other notorious function of the roman á thèse outlined by Susan Rubin Suleiman, of “instruction.” Indeed all domestic novels, according to Nancy Armstrong, are a form of the conduct book. In Authoritarian Fictions, Suleiman’s provocative study of French ideological novels written by both

153 / SLIPS OF THE TONGUE

right- and left-wing authors during the interwar years, she identifies these two poles— entertainment and instruction—as keys to understanding what are essentially generic conventions of “the structure of apprenticeship” designed to nurture and encourage appropriate political behavior in the reader, by a process of replication and homology as the reader undergoes a development parallel to that of the protagonist.9 Of course, a novel must entertain—keep its reader reading until the end; this is especially important when the nature of the narrative presupposes some moral or political or religious message derived from the tale when instruction in proper ideas and behaviors of the reader was its primary purpose. While it might be counterintuitive to read a lesbian pulp novel as an example of an “ideological novel,” one that has instructional value, I want to argue that the details accruing in these tales—details, for instance, about the artifacts of clothing, down to bras and slips—laid out a fashion manual for young lesbians, especially those living far from gay centers like New York’s Greenwich Village. Reading these novels (and studying their covers) nourished more than hidden pleasures; these books taught women how to shop, how to dress—right down to one’s drawers—how to check out other women. In sum, they are how-to manuals, conduct books. In their groundbreaking work of lesbian ethnography, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (note the significance of footwear), Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeleine Davis explore how working-class Buƒalo lesbians shopped and dressed for both bar and straight culture during the 1940s and 1950s. Lesbians knew which shops and tailors fashioned and sold men’s clothing and shoes in sizes for women. However, “since 1940s lesbians did not actively introduce people to gay life, they did not instruct people in how to dress or carry themselves. Newcomers picked up what they wanted.”1 0 For example, they quote various white working-class butches’ memories about the significance of wearing white T-shirts (in raunchy and daring tribute to James Dean and Marlon Brando) backward: “because we didn’t wear a bra . . . you’d put them on backwards, so it would be higher up.” “It covered you more . . . in the front.” And so “camouflaged their bosoms,” explained Sandy and Toni and Gerry. Those with larger breasts “would often modify the cups of their bras so their breasts wouldn’t look so pointy.”11 But, according to Jackie,

PAULA RABINOWITZ / 154

who lived in New Orleans in the 1950s, police “could arrest you for impersonating a man, so you had to be sure you were wearing three pieces of women’s clothes.” This meant, for butches, women’s undergarments.1 2 Donna Penn quotes a young woman’s memories of learning how to identify (as) a lesbian: I had been a closet gay before I got married, about 1948, which means I had a relationship with a woman, and I’d been in love with her but I thought I was the only person in the world. There was no others in the world. I had never read a gay book. I didn’t even know the word “gay.” . . . I didn’t know the word “lesbian.” . . . And I really believe that women used to dress mannish simply to get you to know who they were. . . . In those days it was very important.1 3

Clothing signified and paperbacks circulated. In fact, as historian Regina Kunzel notes in her study of unmarried mothers’ “true confessions,” popular narratives “helped women find words to make such a confession, as well as the narrative templates with which to plot their stories.”1 4 Complaining of the lurid covers that helped sell her Beebo Brinker series, Ann Bannon commented sardonically on the targeted heterosexual male audiences at which PBO (paperback original) covers were aimed: And speaking of clothes, where did all those pink tap pants come from? Those fluƒy negligees? Those peach silk slips? In those days, real girls wore 100 percent cotton “lollipop” briefs, plain white. They provided coverage even our grandmothers could approve, from above the navel to below the buns. No need to wax the bikini line. None of those lacy pushup things, either. Bras were of sturdy cotton, circle-stitched so as to give our breasts no-nonsense conical points. Indeed, they appeared to be aimed fatally at anyone who got closer than three feet. As for outerwear, many of the covers exhibit young women in torn blouses, unbuttoned blouses, sheer blouses, and the occasional peignoir—standard issue, of course, for all self-respecting lesbians of the 1950s and 1960s.1 5

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The gap between cover and content, between the outside and the inside, reverses the placement of the slip as undergarment, bringing it onto the surface, in fact, returning it to its original position on the outside rather than underneath one’s clothing. Thus, it makes sense that it was the cover of Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks (1950) that sparked Ezekial Gathings (Georgia)—chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials—in 1952 to explore the problem of an exploding postwar American culture of salacious novels, films, and comics. There is little evidence that anyone in the House of Representatives had read this lively documentary account of life in the Free French Forces, however. In a tidy example of Michel Foucault’s hypothesis of the productivity of repression, it should be noted that in addition to spurring congressional hearings on pornography, the cover also suggested to one publisher (Fawcett Gold Medal) that lesbianism might sell; the result was Vin Packer’s Spring Fire (1952).1 6 Although it is all over the front cover, the slip is barely discernible within the body of the novel. Yet, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymology of the noun “slip”—deriving from both strip (a narrow piece of fabric, a shoot, an oƒspring, the skin shed by a snake) and from slime (the muck of mud potters use, the scum coating fishscales, fetid water)—followed this very course from exterior garment inside to become an “intermediate body.”1 7 First denoting the hole in a sacking cloth (like the giant neckholes in 1950s T-shirts), then a child’s dress or a woman’s cloak, in the eighteenth century the slip had migrated inside from covering the dress to becoming a hidden cover of the body, worn deliberately close to the skin as its second. In their ethnography, Kennedy and Davis track evidence of lived butch–fem lesbian culture in a minor American city during and immediately after the war years. The stories they recount detail how women learned to bind breasts or refashion underwear to eliminate the pointiness of 1950s bras, shop for men’s shoes, acquire short haircuts, tailor trousers with pockets, and so forth. But literature encroached on lives not yet actually lived, ones merely imagined; novels helped make lesbian lives possible, if only in fantasy, for those unable or unwilling to go to a bar, move to a big city, find a lover—or per-

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haps a tailor. Just as the British novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries served to indoctrinate and make legible the new bourgeois woman and her household, by stressing, like a conduct book, what kinds of clothing she should wear, which furniture and home accessories she should use to decorate her house, these pulp novels aided young, rebellious, and working-class women to find a way to dress the part and acquire lesbian or bohemian identities.1 8 In March Hastings’s novel Three Women (1958), Paula, a girl from a working-class family who occasionally paints, is drawn to her fiancé’s Aunt Byrne, a Greenwich Village artist; she finds herself returning to Byrne’s apartment alone, supposedly seeking instruction from the older artist in painting the female form. Paula begins “obediently” by sketching a coƒee percolator. But almost immediately, “Without embarrassment, as though it were the most everyday thing in the world, she [Byrne] unbuttoned her shirt and dropped it to the floor. Paula watched, speechless, as she unhooked her bra and tossed it aside. . . . ‘All right, draw.’”1 9 This scene of Byrne undressing for Paula as model is repeated across the narrative, until the pretense of the artist’s sitting eventually gets dropped. “All right, draw,” the declaration of the gunman in classic Westerns—those complicated scenes of repressed male homoeroticism—now redirected into a command between two urban women artists not quite yet willing for their “lips to speak together” of mutual desire.2 0 Still, each scene emphasizes in detail all the items of clothing Byrne wears—beige skirt, high heels, sweater, white garter belt, stockings, bra, panties, but not a slip (the slip on the cover slips out of the narrative)—which serve as guides for Paula’s new wardrobe, too.2 1 Preparing for her first visit to Byrne’s apartment, Paula dresses carefully in black trousers and white man-tailored shirt, as if she already knows the neutral attire of a discreet lesbian displayed on the book’s cover. Margaret Sargent, Mary McCarthy’s jaded “Bohemian Girl . . . a Vassar girl,” the antiheroine of The Company She Keeps (1942), picks up and has sex with “the man in the Brooks Brothers shirt” aboard the Empire Builder, going West through Reno, lurid site of female independence and decadence, as a gesture of kindness to the pathetic businessman and as an ironic embrace of the American heartland, of the West.2 2 Despite a

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night of tawdry sex and the loss of her garter belt amid the sheets, she manages to retain some shred of her self-worth by fastening her attention on the brass safety pin holding her crepe-de-chine panties (known, in French, as a slip) together. This sign of a woman who obviously does not plan her conquests leads her to be appalled when the man later sends her several gifts of “glamour-girl underwear.”2 3 What femme fatale, after all, would wear torn undergarments? Like Byrne, Margaret Sargent was an artistic woman with a Greenwich Village apartment and thus with access to various sexual underworlds, such as the homosexual drag shows she boldly describes to her Brooks Brothers man. McCarthy charted connections among the sexual underworld, sexualized underwear, and lower Manhattan that extend beyond lesbian pulp to many early paperbacks. It’s a sort of cute homological poem (Downtown: Underground: Underwear: Down there) metonymically reversing part for (w)hole, as the city becomes the female body and downtown her vagina. For instance, Gloria Wandrous, played by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1960 film of John O’Hara’s 1935 novel (pulped in 1955) BUtterfield 8, bursts into her Greenwich Village writer friend’s apartment revealing her disarray after absconding with her last-night-lover’s wife’s fur coat to conceal her disheveled slip. Waking in her onenight-stand’s empty apartment, she is furious to discover her ruined dress and the crisp bills (two hundreds and a fifty) he left her for services rendered and to buy another dress. She takes oƒ with his wife’s goods; after all, she needs something to cover her slip. After Taylor’s explosive performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), dressed for most of the film in her gleaming white slip, what choice did she have? Luce Irigaray has suggested that not only do women acquire commodities in the exchanges between men known as heterosexuality, they themselves are commodities whose value accrues through this exchange. When the goods get together, she argues, it is possible to imagine “these ‘commodities’ [who] refused to go to ‘market’” and thus undo the decorative vision of the female body: “Exchanges without identifiable terms, without accounts, without end. . . . Without additions and accumulations, one plus one, woman after woman. . . . Without sequence or number.”2 4 In the return to the icon of the two women together, these covers convey at once the “commodities” on the market—

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FIGURE 9.2

Book cover

of Three Women, by March Hastings. FIGURE 9.3

Book cover of

The Company She Keeps, by Mary McCarthy.

FIGURE

9.4. Book cover of

BUtterfield 8, by John O’Hara.

they scream out sex to customers, both male and female—and their refusal, “one plus one, woman after woman.” Slips—one lip surrounded by two sibilants, slip, lips—lace on top and below, then, are already embedded in an alternative economy, an economy that typically defers display but, in the case of these covers, uncovers the hidden value beneath the surface. Slips, in short, especially when oƒered on one of two or more women, are lesbian. “When our lips speak together”—“that contact of at least two (lips) which keeps woman in touch with herself, but without any possibility of distinguishing what is touching from what is touched . . . closed and open, neither ever excluding the other, they say they both love each other. Together”—they whisper desire.2 5 The slip on the cover, a cover full of women—even if it never appears in the contents—signals an-

PAULA RABINOWITZ / 160

other love, another eroticism, the two lips together both love each other. Women together, in slips baring shoulders, may be a come-on for men, but the come-on is complicated. The slip, like the lips, its inverse, is queer. Referencing John Singer Sargent’s scandalous 1884 Portrait of Madame X that he later retouched to eliminate the fallen strap and thus restore Madame Gautreau’s fallen honor (and claim his commission after her mother refused to pay), the image of the woman in the slip, strap falling oƒ her shoulder, is a staple on the covers of 1950s pulp paperback books. The “professional model” posing for the cover of Fletcher Flora’s cheesy novel Leave Her to Hell signals her innate sluttiness because her strap hangs all the way oƒ her shoulder. She seems to be directed at the masculine gaze, but the author’s name with its double Fs (echoing Tereska Torres’s double Ts) stamps this too as a lesbian fantasy even

FIGURE 9.5

John Singer Sargent,

Portrait of Madame X, 1884. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, N.Y.

if the author is a man, an Oklahoma schoolteacher, in fact. The hanging strap, sign of a slovenly woman provocatively in the middle of dressing or undressing or simply (though clearly not in Sargent’s diamond-studded case) wearing a slip with straps too big for her white shoulders, invites scrutiny, incites desire, but also points to the need of a better fit, provoking a maternal response, a saleswoman’s response to trim up the migrating strap with a tug and a pin. Slips, panties, bras clothe the private regions of the body—“intimate apparel” they are called in American department store directories—hidden from view. But they are ever present: slips hanging too far below a hem; bra straps sneaking out from a low-cut shirt. Not only might they sneak into view, slips, especially cheap ones, made noise; nylon and other wartime manmade fabrics were “stiƒ.” They could be heard crinkling and crunching under sweater and skirt or sheathe.2 6 Styles periodically brought the slip out of the closet, so to speak: the 1920s chemise dress mimicked lingerie. Novelist Katharine Brush (Red-Headed Woman, 1931) precisely described these 1929 vintages as “tight and thin . . . knee-length,” and it has reappeared throughout the decades.2 7 Until Madonna strutted around in her bodices and Jean-Paul Gaultier reconstructed corsets and foundations into couture, undergarments were not to be seen through the clothing of good girls, though they could be admired, as Sister Carrie does at the corset counter of the Fair department store, “paus[ing] in rich reverie as she noted the dainty concoctions of color and lace there displayed.”2 8 As Farid Chenoune notes, by the 1920s, movies, fashion magazines, department stores, and their catalogs brought undergarments to the surface. In 1924, the Bon Marché store in Paris was oƒering cami-petticoats in cotton crepon for 9.75 francs, in brushed white finette (a cotton serge) for 18.50, in pure-wool jersey for 31, in crepe de chine for 49 and, the finest of the finest, in “openwork and eyelet lace, piece-dyed blue, pink, and black” at 79 francs. People were entering, as LouisFerdinand Céline put it, “a new period of democratically available fine underwear.”2 9

This democratization of the slip, its availability in the dynamic space of the department store, allowed even working-class women access to the secret attributes of decadent fem-

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ininity. In the opening montage of Red-Headed Woman, the 1932 MGM film of Brush’s novel with a screenplay by Anita Loos that made Jean Harlow a star, we first see her at the beauty parlor, being transformed into a redhead; she then appears, tugging at her sheer bias-cut chemise, and asks her maid, “Can you see through this?” “I’m afraid so, miss.” “Good,” she replies. Finally, she slides a man’s picture into a locket on her garter: “The boss’s picture. It will do more good here than on his desk.” In this movement from towel to silky dress, sheer as a slip revealing nothing underneath, to lacy thigh-high garter supporting her stockings, Lil Andrews has inventoried her arsenal of seduction necessary to get what she wants from rich men. This pre–Hays Code evocation of the role of the petticoat (or its lack) and garter in male seduction fires stories of the vamp, gold digger, and harlot throughout the 1920s and 1930s. But the place of lingerie in lesbian pulp, while certainly designed to excite, also provided guidelines for how to achieve the “slim and tailored, and not so damn sexy” look of Miss Ilene Gordon. Sales manager in a major Chicago department store, Miss Gordon is first seen by new salesgirl Barby wearing “suits and simple blouses, with one good bit of costume jewelry . . . all of a piece.”3 0 Soon after a few lunches with her supervisor, Barby, who has recently moved to the city with her two small-town friends, leaves Apartment 3-B and moves into Ilene’s Northshore Chicago apartment. Barby is deliriously happy watching Ilene in “her favorite lounging pajamas, blue and gold,” and the older boss trains her and loves her and supports the young woman damaged by rape, incest, and the pettiness of pinched provincial life, also instructing her to “rumple your bed a little. This is the cleaning woman’s day.”3 1 Knowing how to dress also means Ilene knows how to handle buyers and customers as well as smoothly knowing how to live a closeted life: leave separately, hide your copies of lesbian pulp fiction, make her lover look like her roommate, charm her younger lover’s possessive father. Considered one of the earliest “prolesbian” pulps, The Girls in 3-B oƒered a picture of Beats and business, and of normalcy: lesbians who “acted human, who had problems and families, and allergies, and jobs, and so on.”3 2 In another early lesbian novel, a rare hardcover and one of the first to be reissued as

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pulp, Claire Morgan’s The Price of Salt, the department store also serves as primal scene for an initial erotic encounter between a young employee and an older, sophisticated woman. When nineteen-year-old Therese, a budding set designer who works in the toy department of a large New York department store, first meets Mrs. H. F. Aird shopping for a valise for doll clothes, she notes her eyes, “gray, colorless, yet dominant as light or fire,” but fixes on her voice, “like her [fur] coat, rich, supple and somehow full of secrets.”3 3 Therese’s boyfriend is an artist in Greenwich Village struggling with his life drawing class; she, having graduated from the convent school and the baleful blue eyes of Sister Alicia, works at Frankenberg’s during Christmas rush. Thus Highsmith triangulates Greenwich Village, artists’ studios, and shopping within the first few pages, and the connections between art making and shopping occur through clothing. (The French edition of the novel is titled Les Eaux dérobées.) Like Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Therese, a designer, is acutely aware of dress. It becomes a vehicle of characterization. Dreiser might be said to have invented a realism that eschews interiority, substituting careful descriptions of surface details of clothing and accessories for depth—that’s his philosophy of clothes. Carrie notes, at her first meal with Drouet, “As he cut the meat his rings almost spoke. His new suit creaked as he stretched to reach the plates, break the bread, and pour the coƒee.”3 4 We recognize, long before he enters the narrative, that Hurstwood will be significant because of the attention paid to his impeccable haberdashery. Therese reads apparel with Carrie’s sharp eye.3 5 In the awkward prelude to Therese’s first encounter with Carol, she visits the apartment of the hunchbacked Mrs. Robichek from “fifth floor—sweaters.” Mrs. Robichek, a former dressmaker, pushes Therese to try on one of her now outmoded creations (called the Caterina). After she briefly admires herself in a garnet red one, Therese finds herself swooning in her slip in the overheated room. Collapsing on a chair, she is covered with a blanket by Mrs. Robichek who then disrobes to her corset revealing her back brace before she slides into bed. Therese lets herself out, thinking she has escaped, yet “she was not really escaping at all.” This encounter, between the young woman fed and clothed by the older experienced woman, begins most lesbian fiction of the early period (1950–66).

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In this case, Mrs. Robichek, the grotesque hunchback, appears perverse, predatory; she literally is a crippled woman, whom Therese imagines as the wicked witch entrapping her. Yet she has actually oƒered Therese a sort of haven from which “she didn’t want to move.”3 6 When she visits Carol’s luxury suburban New Jersey house a few weeks later, Therese finds herself “reminded suddenly of Mrs. Robichek” as Carol tells her to “slip her shoes oƒ” and lie down and then covers her with a blanket and gives her a glass of warm milk.3 7 Within minutes, Therese is detailing the secrets of her life to Carol who is caressing her when the phone rings, shrilly interrupting their interlude together. Therese rises and puts her skirt and shoes on. Again, Therese has dozed on the bed of an older woman in her slip—neither the big lacy corset and prosthetic brace of Mrs. Robichek nor the green smoky silk she imagines clinging to Carol, but presumably her simple, work-a-day white nylon slip required of all proper 1950s young women.3 8 Accessories focus the women’s interaction: Therese buys a small black leather pocketbook for Carol that “looked like Carol,” beautiful and expensive; Carol, in turn, purchases an expensive leather suitcase for Therese, a prelude to their month-long crosscountry road trip West. Carol’s suburban New Jersey house, her car, the handbag holding the incriminating letter, replace Therese’s bohemian apartment and bar, the art school and little theater as the zone of gay life. Initially crossing paths at the heart of bourgeois commerce, the two women exchange tokens of desire purchased in small specialty shops. But it is the department store, where women of diƒering classes meet and interact, linking downtown to midtown and beyond, that enables this relationship. These cross-generational stories of lesbian desire are thus inevitably cross-class tales as well. As such they owe much to the literary practices of 1930s proletarian writers, who, primarily middle-class themselves, staged scenarios designed to foster interactions across class lines, and like them too, they open a downtown bohemian arty world to middleclass view. In Edmund Wilson’s satirical and scandalous novella about the 1930s, “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” the art historian narrator maintains two cross-class aƒairs:

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between himself and his skinny but sexy Fourteenth Street dancehall lover from Brooklyn, supporting her child and helping out her husband; and with the upper-class married ice queen from Hecate County whose body remains frozen even as she makes love to him until she masturbates to orgasm. Notorious for the New York State obscenity trial and subsequent Supreme Court case, Memoirs of Hecate County, consisting of interlocking stories, was banned in New York despite establishing new, more expansive federal definitions of pornography and obscenity. “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” the central tale, recounts the art historian’s amorous involvements with these two women, who span a geography of New York class and ethnicity. The narrator’s two-year pursuit of wealthy Imogen finally pays oƒ; watching her undress, he learns she wears an orthopedic brace beneath her expensive silk slip to correct a spinal problem caused by a childhood accident. Helping her fasten it after an evening of heavy kissing, he finds himself fantasizing about making love to her perfect body (her breasts round and firm compared to his emaciated proletarian lover’s figure) with her brace on. She insists that he tighten the brace across her shoulders and chest, producing deep indentations in her flesh. Later on, while researching a painting in the New York Public Library, perhaps Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum where the nameless narrator works, he comes across a book from the 1880s titled The Hysterical Element in Orthopaedic Surgery that describes Imogen’s symptoms, right down to the desire to wear the brace “so tight as to produce excoriations.”3 9 The conflation of illicit sex, art, and medical discourse that swirls around the princess is contrasted to the healthy eroticism of the ethnic girl getting by Downtown. Describing Georgia O’Keeƒe’s still-life paintings exhibited in 1925 at Alfred Stieglitz’s Andersen Gallery, Wilson, at the time art critic for the New Republic, made the extraordinary claim that female artists were incapable of objectification. Like form-fitting underwear, they were simply too close to their materials. Objects represented did not reveal subjectivity, but instead, like one’s most intimate apparel, women’s paintings became so enmeshed in the psychic structures of femininity that they conformed to, even entered into a woman’s figure, leaving traces, like Imogen’s brace, on the skin: “Women seem to

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FIGURE 9.6

Frida Kahlo,

The Broken Column, 1944. Copyright 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS).

charge the objects they represent with so immediate a personal emotion that they absorb the subject into themselves instead of incorporating themselves into the subject . . . women artists have a way of appearing to wear their most brilliant productions—however objective in form—like those other artistic expressions, their clothes.”4 0 Wilson’s comments as an art critic reveal sources for his 1946 novella. So, too, perhaps, was Frida Kahlo’s 1944 painting, The Broken Column.4 1 For much of her life Frida Kahlo wore a plaster-cast brace, or one made of metal and straps, that she decorated with her own miniature frescos and that appeared in some of her paintings. The site of her prosthesis became a work of art—she painted her corsets and painted herself in them as Wilson theorized a woman artist would. Unlike Imogen’s,

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Kahlo’s back injuries were not hysterical symptoms. Kahlo’s numerous operations on her injured and paralyzed spine, her many abortions and miscarriages, her addiction, her gangrene and leg amputation, her confinement to a back brace, wheelchair, and bed, her wounds and poorly healed scars, some of which may have been self-inflicted through unnecessary surgery, were the basis for her own endless self-inspection and self-revelation. In the early 1940s, she underwent a series of spinal operations that left her severely scarred and unable to sit except with support from steel, leather, and plaster corsets. The Broken Column, from 1944, presents her lovely torso ripped apart revealing an Ionic column pieced together in broken sections. A brace fastens her body together; it is littered with nails partially driven into her flesh. She does not bleed, but her eyes leak milk for tears. As Rafael Vazquez Bayad describes the painting: A kind of homage to all those who suƒer from spinal injuries . . . her torso split in two by a wide gap inside of which is a broken Ionic column. The architectural element is the artist’s way of glorifying her infirmity, conferring on her fractures a certain art and beauty. An orthopedic corset like the ones she often had to wear wraps around the fragmented torso; it has the leather straps and metal buckles common to such contraptions. The beauty of the breasts, which Frida painted with utmost perfection, contrasts with the rest of the composition.4 2

Undergarments here have become part of the construction of Kahlo’s persona as damaged woman and revelatory artist; artifacts of injury, art, and science, she called them “punishment.”4 3 Like Imogen’s rigid corset, Kahlo’s enters her body, leaving marks on it, constricting and constructing her identity, one which, like Imogen’s self-arousal, moves decidedly away from conventional heterosexuality. Meant to conceal and to be concealed, undergarments remain invisible, only to become overcharged, revealing something of the inner sexual truth when they can be seen. Foundations, they were once called, designed to contour and reshape the female figure. A slip is at once there and not there, swerving between the work-a-day and demure, and the erotic and decadent; all over the covers, barely legible inside the book. Like the cot-

PAULA RABINOWITZ / 168

ton underwear that Aline Weinman sells at Diamond’s Department Store in Leane Zugsmith’s 1936 proletarian novel about the Orbach’s strike, A Time to Remember,4 4 or the backward white men’s T-shirts sported by Buƒalo butches in the 1950s recounted by Kennedy and Davis, it might signify a connection to working-class identities and labor. Or as finery, excessive, like the sheer silk and lace items fingered by Sister Carrie at the Fair in Dreiser’s Chicago or the black silk stockings Mrs. Sommers purchases in Chopin’s story, it hints at a realm of pleasure and wealth far above its lowly place covering breasts and buttocks, legs and pubis. As a medical device, the undergarment allows the invalid to endure pain at work; its macabre quality as a form of entombment that straps one into oneself, however, excites a certain sexual fetishism as well. Straps haunt the covers of these pulpy books: bra straps, slip straps, gown straps. The movement from control to disarray: a motion from reined-in sexuality to its overt expression as the strap falls oƒ the shoulder. Tight straps constrict, confine, remold the figure; loose ones undo constraints, oƒer full décolletage from shoulder to shoulder. Their location conveys an entire narrative: “A beginning of the work of condensation,” Freud defines slips of the tongue.4 5 Slips fall oƒ the shoulder, fall oƒ the tongue, record sales; slippers dangle oƒ the foot; one slips one’s shoes oƒ. They are all-purpose fetish items running from head to toe, bridging private and public spaces, crossing class and sexual boundaries and borders of discretion. Slip, verb, transitive; intransitive; noun: escape, a narrow slit, a thin person, a slight thing, a lapse, and on and on. There are seven pages of definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary for slip, slipper, slippery, the adjective. From function to fetish to fashion, secrets of identity pass across social barriers through imitation, reading, and looking. Designed to sell, the covers of many pulp novels function to telescope desire; often forms of fashion and movie tie-ins, they are part of the explosion of popular culture across various media occurring in postwar America. They sold America itself, in its many emerging identities. The slips could never be too white, the fabric too sheer, the breasts too pointy, the hips too round, the stomach too flat, the cleavage too deep, the lace too intricate, the skin too smooth. Even before Jean Harlow was falling out of her kimono into Clark Gable’s arms

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in the jungles of Saigon in Red Dust, the slip haunted the erotic imagination. It speaks of private self-contained pleasure; the slip and the body it sheathes outline the sex which is not one. For all the male eyes it is supposed to entrance, the slip is meant for women. In the 1950s: There was Joanne Woodward finally stripping down to a slip to survive that long hot Mississippi summer. There was Marilyn casually chatting to her girlfriends Josephine and Daphne in the sleeper car because some do like it hot. There was diaphanous Blanche and gritty Stella inhabiting their desire so diƒerently before Stanley’s ripped T-shirt. And, most luminous of all, there was Liz sizzling like a cat on a hot tin roof surrounded by the no-neck monsters on Big Daddy’s plantation. In the 1960s: Elizabeth Taylor running out of her john’s apartment in her lace slip and his wife’s mink coat in BUtterfield 8; the zoom into Janet Leigh dressing herself after her tryst with her lover in Psycho, an echo of the keyhole view of Leigh undressing herself in her motel room in Touch of Evil. These iconic images rescript the form-fitting ru‰ed corsets of bar girls from Dallas to Vienna to Frenchy in countless Westerns, the slinky lingerie of Theda Bara and Mae West and all the gold diggers of 1930s musicals and melodramas and screwball comedies. Young female readers in midcentury America, like Sister Carrie before them, were quick studies; they observed and picked up traces of fashion advice—down to their socks and drawers—from the available sources. These included a newly popular genre, aimed primarily at straight men, but hidden in the sock and underwear drawers of some young women—lesbian and bohemian pulp fiction. There but not there, like a slinky slip, the clothing in the lesbian and bohemian pulp novels splashed all over the covers could barely be found within. Still this debased literature taught a generation of women how to dress down and undress together. In the slippage between cover and content, between visibility and disappearance, lie some hints of both Dreiser’s quest for a philosophy of clothes and Freud’s fantasies of the phallic woman. Like a new garment once consumed, the pulp lesbian and her bohemian sister may lose some allure. Neither philosopher nor fetish, however, she can perhaps do some real work—teach our lips to speak, together.

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NOTES

In memory of my mother-in-law, Rae Bernstein, née Rivka Masler, immigrant, Communist party and ILGWU labor organizer, who, during the winter of 1937–38, successfully led a strike of young Italian, Jewish, and Puerto Rican women brassiere makers in Bridgeport, Connecticut. 1. As Leisa D. Meyer notes, “The sexual stereotypes of servicewomen as ‘camp followers’ or ‘mannish women,’ prostitutes or lesbians, had a long history both in the construction of notions of femaleness in general and in the relationship of ‘woman’ and ‘soldier’ in particular.” “Creating G.I. Jane: The Regulation of Sexuality and Sexual Behavior in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II,” in Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 66. However, uniforms provided an easy way for lesbians to avoid the problem of how to dress. In her study What Is She Like: Lesbian Identities from the 1950s to the 1990s (London: Cassell, 1995), Rosa Ainley quotes one woman describing her career choice in terms of wardrobe: “I didn’t realize at the time, when I went into nursing, how much I would hide behind the uniform and how comfortable I felt in a traditional female role, where I could be totally hidden. . . . I was in a dress with a little cap perched on my head. It wasn’t really until I left the health service for another job that I realized I did not know how to dress, I did not know how I wanted to look. Or I did know how I wanted to look, but might well be accused of being lesbian” (137). The nurse is a staple of pulp novels—both pornographic and romantic—and the icon of the white cap and white dress served as the basis for the “Nurses” series by artist Richard Prince. 2. See Joan Nestle, “Desire So Big It Had to Be Brave,” Ms., January 1983, 2; Kate Millett, Flying (New York: Ballantine, 1975); and many others. Lillian Faderman sums up the sentiment: “The pulps, with their lurid covers featuring two women exchanging erotic gazes or locked in an embrace, could be picked up at newsstands and corner drugstores, even in small towns, and they helped spread the word about lesbian lifestyles to women who might have been too sheltered otherwise.” Well of Loneliness, especially, “provid[ed] an example of how to be a lesbian among the young who had no other guide.” Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in TwentiethCentury America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 147, 173. For a comprehensive analysis of the place of lesbian pulp fiction in developing a lesbian identity in postwar America, see Yvonne Keller, “‘Was It Right to Love Her Brother’s Wife so Passionately?’ Lesbian Pulp Novels and U. S. Lesbian Identity, 1950–1965,” American Quarterly 57 (June

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2005): 385–410. My point, in this essay, is to stress a small aspect of the “nourishment” that Lee Lynch argues was so crucial to reading about lesbians in pulp fiction—the pedagogy these books oƒered on how to accessorize one’s lesbian body (“Cruising the Libraries,” in Lesbian Texts and Contexts, ed. Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow [New York: New York University Press, 1989], 40–41). Pulp collector Linnea A. Stenson makes the point that “the pulp novels themselves make explicit references to their own importance in the formation of identity and community.” She cites one Toronto woman claiming to have traveled to Greenwich Village with her girlfriend “because they had learned from the pulps that that was where lesbians were.” Tretter Letter (Newsletter for the Friends of the Tretter Collection, University of Minnesota Library), June 2006, 5. 3. Katherine V. Forrest, “Introduction,” in Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels 1950–1965 (San Francisco: Cleis, 2005), ix. Forrest concludes, “The writers of these books laid bare an intimate, hidden part of themselves and they did it under siege, in the dark depths of a more than metaphorical wartime, because there was desperate urgency inside them to reach out, to put words on the page for women like themselves to read” (xix). 4. Quoted in Anne MacKay, ed., Wolf Girls at Vassar: Lesbian and Gay Experiences 1930–1990 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 52. 5. Joan Nestle, “My Mother Liked to Fuck,” in A Restricted Country (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand, 1987), 120–22. 6. Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 161. Anderson’s concept of the importance of print culture to the rise of nationalism oƒers a suggestive model for considering how the development of lesbian identity in part coalesced around these books. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 7. Quoted by Jaye Zimet, “Introduction,” in Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction, 1949–69 (New York: Viking Studio, 1999), 21. 8. Susan Stryker, Queer Pulp: Perverted Passion from the Golden Age of the Paperback (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2001), 8. 9. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 2. 10. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Penguin, 1994), 157. 11. Ibid., 160–61.

PAULA RABINOWITZ / 172

12. Quoted in Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 185. 13. Donna Penn, “The Meanings of Lesbianism in Post-War America,” Gender and History 3 (Summer 1991): 190. 14. Regina Kunzel, “Pulp Fictions and Problem Girls: Reading and Rewriting Single Pregnancy in the Postwar United States,” American Historical Review 100 (December 1995): 1470. 15. Ann Bannon [Ann Weldy], “Foreword,” in Zimet, Strange Sisters, 11–12. 16. In the apocryphal story, after reading a magazine account of the hearings, the editor asked his assistant Marijane Meaker if she knew of any lesbianism at her boarding school. Her notorious response, “Why, yes, and even more of it in college,” led to a career shift as she became Vin Packer and Ann Aldrich (among many other “authors”) not to mention their agent, too. Terry Gross, Fresh Air, National Public Radio, June 19, 2003. 17. Farid Chenoune, Beneath It All: A Century of French Lingerie (New York: Rizzoli, 1999), 13. 18. I am drawing on Nancy Armstrong’s provocative claim in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) for the priority of literature in the fashioning of bourgeois class consciousness to describe how lesbian fiction’s domain of the body—sketched visually on the cover of pulps and limned as narrative in the text—helped create a recognizable lesbian sensibility and thus forge a collective knowledge of how to be a lesbian, or at least how to dress as one. 19. March Hastings [Sally Singer], Three Women (New York: Beacon, 1958), 39. 20. Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 205. 21. Hastings, Three Women, 61, 63. 22. Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps (San Diego: Harcourt, 1942), 84, 88. 23. Ibid., 107, 117, 131. 24. Luce Irigaray, “Commodities among Themselves,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, 196–97. This essay originally appeared as “When the Goods Get Together.” 25. Ibid., 205, 206, 208. 26. Katalin Medvedev surveys oral histories and memoirs of 1950s dress in her comparative study “Pointy Bras and Loose Housedresses: Female Dress in Hungary and in the United States in the 1950s,” AHEA: E-journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association 3 (2010), http://ahea .net/e-journal/volume3(2010)/3.

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27. Katharine Brush, Red-Headed Woman (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931), 23. On the periodic return of the slip, see Ruth La Ferla, “What’s Sexy Now? The Slip,” New York Times, January 12, 2006, E 1–2. 28. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900; New York: Bantam Classic, 1958), 55. 29. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of Night [1932], trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: New Directions, 1983), 63. Quoted in Chenoune, Beneath It All, 49. 30. Valerie Taylor [Velma Young], The Girls in 3-B [1958] (New York: Feminist Press, 2003), 98. Emphasis in original. 31. Ibid., 163. 32. “Prolesbian” is Yvonne Keller’s term; Taylor is quoted in an interview with Kate Brandt. Both quoted in Lisa Walker, “Afterword,” in Taylor, Girls in 3-B, 194. 33. Claire Morgan [Patricia Highsmith], The Price of Salt [1952] (Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad Press, 2001), 331–32. 34. Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 47–48. 35. The Price of Salt (reprinted in 1990 under Highsmith’s own name as Carol) is an intensely autobiographical novel, its genesis being a chance encounter Highsmith had when she worked the Christmas rush at Bloomingdale’s toy counter (to make money to pay for her psychoanalysis that was to “cure” her homosexuality), which was followed by Highsmith’s stalking the blonde woman customer buying gifts for her daughter. Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 1–2 and passim. 36. Morgan, The Price of Salt, 16. 37. Ibid., 59, emphasis added. 38. Sardonically critical of psychoanalysis, and an anti-Semite as well, according to her biographer and lover, Marijane Meaker (Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s; A Memoir [San Francisco: Cleis, 2003]), Highsmith, who, according to Andrew Wilson, another biographer, was seen by a Jewish woman psychoanalyst in the 1940s, may very well be quoting from one of the most widely read of Freud’s texts in America. In the 1963 film Captain Newman, M.D., set during World War II in a stateside psych ward, Tony Curtis, playing a manic orderly overseen by Gregory Peck, finds Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life on his boss’s desk and declares it “ABC,” simply too obvious to be taken seriously. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud cites a number of instances where undergar-

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ments—chemise, drawers, and slips—figure in parapraxes. In “Slips of the Tongue,” Freud includes, verbatim, this citation from Dr. Alfred Robitsek of Vienna of examples of slips of the tongue recounted by an old French writer: “Brantôme (1527–1614), Vies des Dames galantes, Discours second: ‘Si ay-je cogneu une très-belle et honneste dame de par le monde, qui, devisant avec un honneste gentilhomme de la cour des aƒaries de la guerre durant ces civiles, elle luy dit: “J’ay ouy dire que le roy a faict romper tous les c . . . de ce pays là.” Elle vouloit dire les ponts. Pensez que, venant de coucher d’avec son mary, ou songeant à son amant, elle avoit encore ce nom frais en la bouche; et le gentilhomme s’en eschauƒa en amours d’elle pour ce mot.’” [Thus I knew a very beautiful and virtuous lady of the world who, discoursing with a virtuous gentleman of the court on the aƒairs of the war during those civil disturbances, said to him: “I have heard tell that the king had a breach made in all the c . . . of that region.” She meant to say the ponts. . . . One may suppose that, having just lain with her husband, or thinking of her lover, she had this word freshly on her tongue; and the gentleman was fired with love for her on account of this word.] Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1959), 6:79. 39. Edmund Wilson, Memoirs of Hecate County [1946] (New York: Signet, 1961), 199. 40. Edmund Wilson, “The Stieglitz Exhibit,” New Republic, March 18, 1925, 97. 41. Though I cannot find any direct mention that Wilson had seen The Broken Column, by this time Kahlo was widely recognized by modernist art critics, collectors, and curators, especially in New York following her shows at Julian Levy’s gallery and Peggy Guggenheim’s exhibitions. Her story of bodily pain, revolutionary politics, and bisexuality were widely known. 42. Quoted in Erika Billeter, ed., The Blue House: The World of Frida Kahlo (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 142. 43. Quoted in Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 345. 44. Leane Zugsmith, A Time to Remember (New York: Random House, 1936). I believe this novel, like Freud’s “slips of the tongue,” may be another source for The Price of Salt. It, too, features crossclass allegiances among women, including a scene where the young female clerk forgets to fill out the sales slip for a female customer and is chastised by her supervisor. 45. Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 59.

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10

A S A F E T Y PI N F O R E LI Z A B E T H HARD-EDGE ACCESSORIZING FROM PU N K S U B C U LTU R E TO H I G H FAS H I O N

Vittoria C. Caratozzolo There was an aroma of safety-pin violence in the air. m a r k k i n d e l , New Statesman, June 24, 1977 Oh we’re so pretty . . . we’re vacant. sex pistols

London, May 1994. A radiant Elizabeth Hurley caused an uproar at the premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral, the film starring her boyfriend, Hugh Grant, thanks to the daring black dress she wore, designed by Versace. Soon after, when Hurley’s outfit was splashed across the front pages of the English tabloids, Gianni Versace himself described it in rather blasé terms as a remake of the old, classic punk dress. The tone of his remark surely complies with British understatement but is nonetheless an astonishing reference to his safety-pin dress—a bold sartorial experiment in construction. Twenty years after the punk aesthetic had exploded on the London scene, Versace’s reference to that style as “classic” places punk tout court within the fashion canon. In November of that same year, punk style was formally recognized by the authoritative Vic-

toria and Albert Museum show on Streetstyle. The exhibition, an exclusive, multilayered collection of subculture clothing dating from the 1940s to the 1990s, acquired by Amy de la Haye and Cathie Dingwall for the V & A Textile and Dress Department, included a section dedicated to the influence of subcultural styles on mainstream fashion and on haute couture in the first half of the 1990s. Inscribed in the regime of revival, Versace’s safety-pin dress is emblematic of the strategies through which fashion genetically manipulates and distorts styles that have emerged and become recognizable over the course of time. A few years later, during the exhibition dedicated to Gianni Versace, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (December 11, 1997—March 22, 1998), following his tragic death, Richard Martin, fashion scholar and curator of the prestigious American Costume Institute until 1999, read or rather misread this dress as an antibourgeois version of Coco Chanel’s little black dress.1 In the mid-1920s, the innovative Chanel, in keeping with the modernist aesthetic “less is more,” proposed a simple black dress as the symbol of a new chic countertendency in fashion. She translated the emerging emancipation of women into sartorial terms. The New Woman wanted to move more freely in more comfortable garments designed with a simpler cut and a sober style. Cheaper materials were used, like jersey, a fabric previously used primarily for domestic uniforms and sportswear. Black became the basic color of female attire for women of all ages, for day and evening wear. Self-eƒacement and decorum, expressed by a maidlike little black dress, was quite heterodox, a newly outrageous note to strike in the roar of the 1920s. In America the Depression made elegant the “poor look,” of which the little black dress was the herald. Black, used as a serious, modest color in conservatively cut daytime dresses suggesting a shop assistant, could, by the 1930s, seem as revolutionary and new as the slapdash, pale, bright, and shapeless dresses of the 1920s had been.2

The real innovation instituted by Chanel was to liberate women’s bodies by accepting their shapes as they actually were, freeing them from the structural and constrictive impositions used to create a feminine silhouette: corsets and bustles that had distorted the

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body’s volume. Thus was created a standardized form for the female figure. For the male figure this had already been achieved with the invention of the power suit at the beginning of the nineteenth century, just as fashion entered the mass market. In 1926 the American edition of Vogue predicted that a certain dress, disconcerting in its simplicity, would become a sort of universally adopted uniform. It had neither collar nor cuƒ, it was made of black crêpe de chine, had long, very tight-fitting sleeves, and bloused above hips, which were closely hugged by the skirt. It was a Chanel dress, a simple sheath. Would large numbers of women consent to wear the same dress? The prediction seemed wildly improbable. So, to persuade its readers that this dress would owe its success to its convenience, and perhaps even to its impersonal simplicity, Vogue compared it to an automobile. Did one refuse to buy a car because it was identical to another car? On the contrary. The likeness was a guarantee of quality. And applying this principle to fashion in general and to Chanel’s black dress in particular, the magazine concluded: “Here is the Ford signed Chanel.”3

Epitomizing the new tendency of elegance and taste, the little black dress spread like wildfire, both in expensive original models intended for the elite consumers of haute couture as well as in cheaply made, easily reproduced, and more or less counterfeited copies, accessible to women at all social levels. The innovative value of the little black dress was immediately recognized; and through mass consumption, it quickly acquired its status as a classic, becoming one of the mainstays in any woman’s wardrobe. In 1994, when Versace created his evening dress for Elizabeth Hurley, the subversive character of the little black dress was reemphasized through a punk “rewriting.” The safety-pin dress, with its direct reference to the chief accessory of punk subculture style, which had exploded in London in the mid-1970s, provocatively challenged the now bland reception of Chanel’s black sheath. Whereas the little black dress sensually revealed the body by discreetly enhancing its lines without overt display, the safety-pin dress boldly exposed the body as a spectacle in itself. The breasts, barely supported by a bodice precariously held up by straps fastened with little safety-pin bijoux, nearly popped out of a

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plunging décolletage. Fastened on the right side with gold and silver safety pins, the black fabric reveals a flash of skin that is as much a part of the dress’s construction as its safety pins. The overall eƒect is one of tentative stability. The modeling tension of its design, compressed by the very reduced surface of the fabric, rushes toward a sudden gash on the side. This laceration of exposed skin is striking, though perhaps not as striking as the rips and tears of punk style, which may have been the last subculture aesthetic capable of shocking us before our present state of general anesthetization. The side opening of the safety-pin dress is a surgical cut, precise and cool, from which the body-dress exhibited by Elizabeth, media queen, attacked the body of fashion itself and challenged its historical forms now emptied of their original connotations and reused as pure sartorial signs in the logic of a revival of styles. One of the most striking things about retro phenomenon is the irrelevance of the actual historical past. It exists only to be cannibalized, or refashioned. . . . Clothing signs become meaningless, except in purely visual terms. Some remnant of intrinsic signification may be retained if, and only if, it can be utilized in the context of today’s fashion. . . . But even then the scrap of original meaning is transformed and mythologized, tailored to our preconceptions.4

F I G U R E 10 . 1

Gianni Versace,

evening gown, 1994. Courtesy of Gianni Versace.

The provocative statement of the safety pin was tempered by the gold and silver bijoux pins, and the original transgressive power historically connected to punk subculture was transmuted through the allusive power of the Versace logo: the Medusa head engraved on the safety pin. The petrifying gaze of the monstrous Gorgon, a shield on the body-dress of the diva-goddess Elizabeth, stared out from the deadly frontal position, forcing viewers into the reciprocity of seeing and being seen. In order to see it one enter[s] into the field of its fascination and risk[s] losing oneself in it. . . . This reciprocity implies both duality (man and god face each other) and inseparability, even identification. . . . In Gorgo’s face a kind of doubling process is at work. Through the eƒect of fascination, the onlooker is wrenched away from himself, robbed of his own gaze, invested as if invaded by that of the figure facing him, who seizes and possesses him through the terror its eye and its features inspire.5

Through the Medusa eyes of Versace’s couture, fashion scorns the “imaginary order: that of referential Reason,” of identity, and inaugurates “the pure speculative stage in the order of signs,” the free commuting and commingling of forms and styles in the service of our fantasy selves.6 In this sense, the safety-pin dress can be considered truly outrageous. It celebrates how fashion consumes every form of otherness, shedding light on the ephemeral nature of every representative form, of every defined identity that seeks to recognize itself in it. From this point of view, we may reconsider the impersonal quality of the little black dress that had made it so unusual. Like the Ford motorcar, Chanel’s dress was designed for technological reproduction targeted to a mass market. Moreover, it lay the foundation for what would decidedly become a process of abstraction, almost of dematerialization, in dressing: a process that changed the relationship of the mutual subordination between clothing and body by introducing clothing as a medium, a device for reinventing the entity of the body-garment, an entity to be reconstructed according to the logic of its wearer’s fantasy selves, detached from a core interiority that shifts toward the figurative.7

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The human figure enlisted in the mass ornament has begun the exodus from lush organic splendor and the constitution of individuality toward the realm of anonymity to which it relinquishes itself when it stands in truth and when the knowledge radiating from the basis of man dissolves the contours of visible natural form.8

The safety pin, materially interposed between the body and fabric, welcomed a path of knowledge relegated to the exterior, to the surface, to the contiguity of the skinfabric. Its cold metallic splendor swerved from an aestheticism of the organic to embrace the culture of the body-garment, “the sex appeal of the inorganic.”9 Finally, the beauty of bodies, their masculine and feminine gender, their age no longer have any importance. What counts is their disposition and attitude to covering and being covered, to dressing and being dressed, to wrapping and being wrapped by fleshy tissues that have nothing organic any more, that cannot be distinguished from the clothing, the materials that usually hide them.1 0

Elizabeth’s body-garment is pure image moving through the crowd, intended for visual consumption, and certainly not lacking an imaginative and fictional quality. As Colin Campbell has noted, consumers seek not so much satisfaction from products as pleasure for the self, illusory experiences they construct according to the meaning they attribute to those products. Because the basic activity of consumption is not the selection, acquisition, or use of products, but the search for an imaginative pleasure attached to the image of the product, the real consumption is largely the result of this mental hedonism.11 This imaginative pleasure cannot be detached from the nature and quality of the representation stylish products hold within our cultural system. In this regard, Versace’s sartorial art situates the fashionable and fashioned body in discourse and the mediascape. Central to Versace’s work is his acuity in understanding fashion as an art of the media. Not only did he thrust fashion into the gobbling jaws of the media of the contempo-

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rary spectacle in runway shows and alliances with rock music, dance, and performance, he also grasped and was empathetic to the charisma of media performers. While other fashion designers have also understood the media’s attraction for fashion, Versace was a virtuoso performer in this regard. His clothes address this role for they—at least, the most familiar garments—are seldom made for polite drawing-room discourse or even the private ballroom candlelight of most fashion design. Rather, they radiate under the lights of the camera, of the runway, and of video’s revealing eye. Versace designed for the visually voracious, media-saturated generations that have come of age only in the last quarter of the twentieth century. No other time could have convened a plastic fashion intended for spectacular eƒect, and grand dresses designed for an opulence not only in the details but also in the eƒect and charismatic afterlife of the image. . . . In social terms, plastic provides the excitements of sheer and muted transparency. . . . It is as if the designer had an instinctive media sense for the perception of fashion; the art that he practiced at hand in draping but that he also perceived from afar in synergy with media.1 2

It might appear that we have strayed far from punk subculture; but as Vivienne Westwood has noted, from the very first, punk was a fashion event inscribed within a fashion regime and bound to the media in a symbiotic relationship. Some people still think the punk thing was an eruption oƒ the street. Something about the dole-queue-rock, or working-class youngsters making a protest. But actually it was a fashion event right from the start. It was like creating one of those historical paintings of a revolution, with revolutionaries charging over a barricade. In every corner of the canvas you can see people in heroic postures, with everything in the picture meaning something revolutionary or shocking or thought-provoking.1 3

Fred Vermorel attributes these words to Vivienne Westwood in his biography dedicated to this designer, who, along with Malcolm McLaren, was at the core of the London punk rock scene. From the moment they opened their shop, Let It Rock (the name is

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taken from a song by Chuck Berry) at 430 King’s Road in November 1971, both Westwood and McLaren recognized the importance of fashion as a communicative and creative phenomenon able to galvanize and attract a world of diverse artistic expressions. “It really did seem that the fashion world was the place where art and music were fused,” explained McLaren when asked about his transformation from struggling art student to revolutionary entrepreneur. “Creating my own clothes was like jumping into the musical side of painting. The shop became a natural extension of my studio.”1 4 A few years later, the success of their shop as a new space of cultural crossbreeding had become so much a part of the London metropolitan fabric that McLaren and Westwood were invited by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) to speak about their clothes at a conference titled “Fashion Forum—New Designers.” The Sex Pistols—the transgressive punk rock band created and managed by McLaren—were in the audience. This ICA initiative analyzed the interplay of fashion, art, anthropology, and popular culture. The shop, viewed as a cultural space, represents the final degree of evolution in a change in attitudes toward fashion that had first arisen twenty years earlier with the opening of Bazaar on the King’s Road in 1956. Mary Quant’s mythic boutique was followed a decade later by Biba, Barbara Hulanicki’s dazzling deco shop on Kensington High Street. Bazaar and Biba are only two emblematic examples of the colorful London fashion scene. Not merely places for exhibiting new designs for clothes or for entrepreneurial experiments, these were truly performative spaces in which new lifestyles were tried out and tested. The production and consumption of fashion design were entwined with a physical activity performed in a specific spatial situation. It was site specific: the garment had become a double space to inhabit. The typology of these establishments was very far from the ateliers of the creators of haute couture with their exclusive models addressed to an elite. These instead were places where consumers could experiment with a new look. The term “look” suggests a figurative abstraction interposed between the garment, considered in its uniqueness, and the style to which it refers, its thematic content, which may have been hippie or folk,

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geometrical or optical. To be looked at means just that: to be looked at first by oneself from within a determined figurative system. To espouse a specific look, a single, minimal detail or an accessory could now assume a new signification. Thus the role of the accessory changed as it became the highly connotative sign of a specific style—to such an extent that it could express that style in full; a simple safety pin shouts punk when assembling a look. Unlike the dictates of fashion, a look is both tolerant and pluralist. From the 1960s onward, it was through the act of creating a look, which necessarily implies establishing a distance between viewer and object, that a growing number of people could fulfill their desire to stylize their own appearances and satisfy their need to experience their clothing as an imaginative projection of their own bodies. “There is no role or gender whose fixed and defined character poses an insurmountable obstacle to the ideal movement of the garment. Clothing transfigures and transubstantiates the body, creating an image of the body which is both physical and immaterial.”1 5 Thus an ambiguous territory was mapped out between the wearer’s person and his/her fantasy selves, a territory that in the 1960s and 1970s was explored and abused by the star-making apparatus of pop and rock culture, in which everyone felt compelled to reinvent his/her appearance “as a three dimensional art object to admire and touch,” to exhibit on the stages of metropolitan areas, and to render spectacular through the mass media.1 6 It is this aesthetization of the quotidian, inscribed in a regime of reproducibility, that one must consider—for only through reproduction can a style become a look—to understand the equation Westwood draws between the punk phenomenon and the fashion event. Fashion oƒers a system of visibility ready for immediate use and communication. Punks understood this very well, having absorbed the stylistic lessons of the previous youth subcultures—such as the Teds of the 1950s, revived in the 1970s, or the mods of the 1960s. If we think of punk as a “style in revolt: Revolting style” as Dick Hebdige labeled it in his seminal text, Subculture, we are tempted to place this movement in the region of antifashion, but to do this would mean interpreting too literally the frictional and antitheti-

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cal dynamics that fashion and subculture styles set in motion the moment they emerged on the consumer scene.1 7 Punks were aware that their confrontational style was also a fashion statement: Punk reproduced the entire sartorial history of post-war working-class youth cultures in “cut-up” form combining elements which had originally belonged to completely diƒerent epochs. There was a chaos of quiƒs and leather jackets, brothel creepers and winkle pickers, plimsolls and paka macs, moddy crops and skinhead strides, drainpipes and vivid socks, bum freezers and bovver boots—all kept “in place” and “out of time” by the spectacular adhesives: the safety pins and plastic clothes pegs, the bondage straps and bits of string which attracted so much horrified and fascinated attention.1 8

The mode of composing the punk look arose from an existential practice that had in turn absorbed the artistic techniques of the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde. Surrealist collage, Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made, cut-up, body art were all techniques based on the immediate and alienating gesture of using objects removed from their functions in daily life and combining them in an unusual way. Jackets and T-shirts were ripped here and there like Lucio Fontana’s canvases, obsessively adorned with metal studs and draped and looped with chains, while a multitude of safety pins pierced the fabric creating a collage of many materials, with no continuity between body and garment. The human figure was not only visually involved, but interacted with its environment through an interplay of the senses. The composition of one’s image proceeded through contiguity, segment by segment, now privileging the sense of touch, now of hearing, in the sudden encounter with hard or soft surfaces, of cold or hot materials to wear or stick into the flesh. For instance, note the tactile surfaces of SEX, the new name with which Westwood and McLaren baptized their shop in 1974. “I decided to open a shop that was more strictly black and design oriented, which would bring out all the sexual clothes that people normally sold as a fetish but which would sell as street clothing, on the boutique strip.”1 9

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When they decided to retire the phrase “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die,” the name given to the shop after the phrase “Let It Rock,” Westwood and McLaren radically remodeled the interior of their establishment. They covered the walls and ceiling with a lightweight, spongy material, transforming the shop into a sort of maternal womb. The letters S E X cut from the same material were covered with florescent pink plastic and hung on the facade. From surface to surface, one passed from skirts made of lace and rubber to patent leather boots with incredibly high stiletto heels, from chains to whips, old tea kettles transformed into handbags, and earrings made from Tampax. In 1968, Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan published an article on fashion in Harper’s Bazaar, titled “Fashion Is the Medium,” in which he investigated the ways in which fashion works on our perceptive faculties. In the section “Hard-Edge,” he wrote: When Gertrude Stein first became acquainted with Picasso in Paris around 1905, he asked her to obtain American comic strips for him. . . . It was at this same period that he began the study of African tribal art. Most tribal art is hard-edge art. It is art of sharp contrasts, sudden juxtapositions. So is children’s art. A film-maker in Canada provided young children with the means to make animated films. The result was nearly two hundred films of Wham! Bang! With figures appearing, disappearing. There were no characters in the ordinary sense; no gradations, no chiaroscuro; just abrupt encounters à la Batman of hard-edge, cartoon art. Contemporary fashion is full of hard-edge design. The experience it evokes is not visual: it is tactile. It is full of abrupt encounters, sudden interfaces. . . . When literate man emphasized his eye, his other senses suƒered. Fashion became a purely visual experience whereas in the tribal world fashion involves all the senses together: the sound of clothes, the feel of leather and metal, the smell of skin, the movement of the body. Today we want sounds we feel, loud colors that shout, fishnet stockings with the rhythm of drums.2 0

In these reflections McLuhan seems to have anticipated a sort of punk manifesto. How could we fail to recognize “the fishnet stockings with the rhythm of drums” worn by Jordan, the famous salesgirl at SEX?

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I used to take real pride in the way I looked when I went to work. I kept the job because of the way I looked and because I could do the job. When I started, the beehive was already there: I used to go to work in that vinyl leotard and fishnets, and once in just fishnets and those big mohairs with satin padding at the front. And a Teddy Tinling tennis skirt with rackets up the side: very, very short.2 1

Jordan’s was a do-it-yourself (DIY) aesthetic, an aesthetic that, in the bosom of the punk movement of those years, simultaneously governed the evolution of look and figure, sartorial practices and music. Like her predecessors, Mary Quant and Barbara Hulanicki (the former studied illustration at Goldsmith College and the latter came from the Brighton School of Art), Westwood, a schoolteacher by profession, knew nothing about couture. Designing and creating clothes became her field of true experimentation, an art of combining, in which her initial lack of technical expertise created the conditions for a direct, new, and startling approach to the body and its clothing. One specialty of our shop was T-shirts. We were making them more and more “political.” We were experimenting with their form. One day I was playing with two squares for a T-shirt and suddenly I thought: why bother with the sleeves? So I just sewed the squares together, highlighting the seams. That became the basis of my thinking about the way garments are made, and then using this thinking as part of the garment itself. . . . we did a lot of our designs in bed. Come to think of it, that bed in our Clapham flat could tell a story or two! . . . Sometimes we would lie in very late into the morning thinking up crazy ideas and sketching them. . . . Soon there was a whole range of punk rock clothes, and it was starting to look like a proper fashion collection. Jordan came into the shop one day with an Oxford cloth T-shirt she’d painted with stripes. I liked that and a similar shirt. Then I bleached bits of it and sewed on a silk portrait of Karl Marx. I stencilled on a slogan “Dangerously close to love.” I was thinking about a Latin American guerrilla style—the kind of thing Che Guevara might wear in the jungle stalking government soldiers. . . . Then there was our famous “Destroy” T-shirt with

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an upside-down crucifix and giant swastika, where, as a final coup de grâce, Malcolm added a postage stamp with a portrait of the Queen he’d defaced. . . . But one of our most important creations was the zipped bondage trousers. These had a cloth strip connecting both legs. We copied the basic design from American pilot suits. People really used to stare when we first wore them! Once I gave a party at the flat and someone cut their hand badly so I drove them to the hospital. The nurses laughed at my bondage trousers and said they must be really constricting. To prove they weren’t I did cartwheels all down the corridor of the casualty ward.2 2

Punk aesthetic went beyond the dimension of the look to that of attitude and performance where the body was caught between its clothing and its environment, between posing and provocation capable of creating tension and emotional upheaval, of releasing energies and impulses in those compelled to participate. The event was created in the gap formed between attitude and the uncalculated and incalculable response to an eƒect produced. The ideal scene for such performativity was a Sex Pistols punk rock concert. “Whether they were good or not was irrelevant,” says Andy Czezowski: “I wanted to be excited and they filled a spot.” Performers are only as interesting as the emotions that they generate, or the situations that they catalyse: the audience gives them their power. The Sex Pistols began as a hype, a group of four disparate teenagers thrown together to sell trousers, but they quickly became a prism through which the present and a future could be clearly seen.2 3

So if music becomes sound, in punk it became the distortion of sound and of the voice: it became noise. The music was . . . distinguished from mainstream rock and pop. It was uniformly basic and direct in its appeal, whether through intention or lack of expertise. If the latter, then the punks certainly made a virtue of necessity (“We want to be amateurs”—

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Johnny Rotten). Typically, a barrage of guitars, with the volume and the treble turned to maximum accompanied by the occasional saxophone would pursue relentless (un)melodic lines against a turbulent background of cacophonous drumming and screamed vocals. Johnny Rotten succinctly defined punk’s position on harmonics; “We’re into chaos not music.”2 4

The subversive potential of noise bursting into sound corresponded to the machinelike movements adopted by the body, as in the stiƒ, syncopated, and solipsistic gestures of “pogo,” the alternatively frenetic or catatonic punk dance consisting in repetitively jumping up and down on the same spot, with hands pressed to the sides, as if bouncing an imaginary ball oƒ the top of one’s head.2 5 Or of “robot,” a series of barely perceptible movements of the head and hands mimicking the first awkward movements of Frankenstein’s monster stirring to life—a movement we might define as proto-posthuman. Once again the quality of the “impersonal,” almost like a shadow never detaching itself from the body, is mirrored in this excursus of Elizabeth Hurley’s safety-pin dress to punk aesthetic. As intermediary, one figure truly incarnates impersonality in full: Queen Elizabeth II. The icon of the queen was desecrated by corrosive punk graphics on the occasion of the first Jubilee in 1977. To promote the new single of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” with its exhilarating and irreverent text, Jamie Reid created a photocollage that displayed the queen’s lips delicately pierced by a safety pin. The image was printed on the T-shirts of the new collection designed by Westwood and McLaren for the next restyling of their shop, now called Seditionaries.2 6 Its next new slogan was “Clothes for heroes”: “That was my idea. I thought that to make people think you needed to hurt them emotionally. I also thought you had to be seductive at the same time. The word ‘seditionaries,’ which I made up, was meant to suggest you needed to seduce people into revolt.”2 7 The ambiguity inherent in the term “seditionaries” evokes an interest in the body of the queen, an icon eliciting both rebellion and, at the same time, fascination. “Putting a safety-pin in her lips was suggesting she could be one of us!” Westwood

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claimed, in an attempt to humanize Elizabeth II’s body-as-symbol.2 8 Speaking of the queen’s figure in an interview on June 12, 1977, Westwood remarked without a touch of racist irony: I’d compare her to those people in the Polynesian Islands who are taken away at a very early age, kept in a dark room and stuƒed with food. Then they bring them out once a year so everyone can revel and marvel at these very pale, fat people who can’t walk but have to be helped along a sort of catwalk. I’d compare her to them because she is a symbol of the total wastage of potential. She’s prevented from being some kind of wild, crazy, intelligent, creative human being and has to be some kind of a zombie instead. She’s an A-1 example of what this country is all about.2 9

But the existence of the queen’s body-symbol in a degraded context makes it possible to inscribe one’s own subversive present within the historical apparatus in which that icon traditionally represents continuity. Contaminating the queen’s figure with the present means involving her in the contemporary, placing her for a moment in the regime of fashion, putting her into the hands of the Goddess Mutability who so sarcastically holds her in check.3 0 NOTES

1. Richard Martin, “A Note: Gianni Versace’s Anti-Bourgeois Little Black Dress” [1994], Fashion Theory 2 (March 1998): 95–100. 2. Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 385. 3. Edmonde Charles-Roux, Chanel: Her Life, Her World—and the Woman behind the Legend She Herself Created, trans. Nancy Amphoux (New York: Knopf, 1975), 246–47. 4. Valerie Steele, “Retro Fashion,” Artforum 30, no. 4 (December 1990): 24. 5. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Death in the Eyes: Gorgo, Figure of the Other,” in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 137. 6. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage Publications, 1993), 87, 92.

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7. See Angela Carter, “Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style,” in Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (London: Virago, 1992), 85. 8. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 83; emphasis in original. 9. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin and ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 51. 10. Mario Perniola, The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, trans. Massimo Verdicchio (London: Continuum, 2004), 48. 11. See Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). 12. Chiara Buss and Richard Martin, Gianni Versace (Milan: Leonardo Art, 1998), 18–19. 13. Fred Vermorel, Fashion and Perversity: A Life of Vivienne Westwood and the Sixties Laid Bare (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 75. 14. Quoted in Paul Gorman, The Look: Adventures in Pop and Rock Fashion (London: Sanctuary, 2001), 116. 15. Paola Colaiacomo and Vittoria C. Caratozzolo, La Londra dei Beatles (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1996), 173 (my translation). 16. Carter, “Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style,” 86. 17. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), 106. 18. Ibid., 26. 19. Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 66. 20. Marshall McLuhan, “Fashion Is the Medium,” Harper’s Bazaar, April 1968, 157, 160. 21. Savage, England’s Dreaming, 94. 22. Vermorel, Fashion and Perversity, 65, 72–73. 23. Savage, England’s Dreaming, 142–43. 24. Hebdige, Subculture, 109. 25. See ibid. 26. “For Seditionaries, we redesigned the shop with a sort of high-tech look. We got in some fluorescent orange, futurist-type chairs and a charcoal-grey carpet, and made the interior clinical and cleanly lit. On one wall we put a huge blow-up of the German city of Dresden, which had been

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bombed flat by the Allies during the war. A landscape of ruins which looked startling and spectral. Opposite, we hung a blow-up Piccadilly Circus which was upside down. Then we smashed a hole in the shop ceiling to make it look as if a bomb had recently fallen through. The shop front was frosted glass so you couldn’t see in from outside. Inside, you felt trapped in a milky white light. It was a bit like one of those surgical shops in the fifties and early sixties which used to sell medical appliances and pornographic books. A small brass plaque outside announced: ‘Seditionaries: For soldiers, prostitutes, dykes and punks.’” Vermorel, Fashion and Perversity, 80–81. 27. Ibid., 79. 28. Ibid., 81. 29. Fred Vermorel and Judy Vermorel, Sex Pistols (London: Omnibus, 1989), 83. 30. In that same year, Derek Jarman shot Jubilee, valuable for its documentation of the metropolitan scene and punk movement, read through an ironic and transfiguring eye. The climatic variations of English punk were captured through an intermittent alchemy of vision shifting synchronically between 1597 and 1977, between the reigns of Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II. In this context, the punk aesthetic of the “blank generation” erased all historical perspective, manipulating and contaminating the royal apparatus of ritual and spectacle through techniques of distortion and pastiche.

VITTORIA C. CARATOZZOLO / 192

11

A KN OT TO U NTI E SOCIAL POWER, FETISHISM, AND COMMUNICATION IN THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE TIE

Nello Barile If fashion is a language, albeit one marked by a low semantic level, then accessories can be taken as special indicators of the meaning of clothing. Idiosyncratically arranged, they are able to create both stable structures and variations on a theme. As a starting point I would like to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “multiaccentuality” and its appropriation by Stuart Hall, who adopts it as a benchmark for his encoding/decoding model.1 His analysis of these modes of arrangement reveals decisive turning points in the social history of the tie.2 Hidden within this accessory, in fact, is a symbolic potential that corresponds to the three options identified by Hall in his interpretation of television messages: (1) a preferred reading, based on the desire to follow a social model that originates within the more prestigious classes and spreads down the social pyramid, a sort of trickle-down eƒect; (2) a negotiated reading, which exploits the semantic ambiguity of signs, subject to stylistic appropriation; and (3) an oppositional reading, which resists the status of products designed for the hegemonic class by manufacturers and proposes an alternative view limited to specific social groups. The historical evolution of the tie oscillates between oppositional and negotiated

readings, calling into question its preferred social meaning. Even if the preferred reading reflects a modern authoritarian and hierarchical conception dictating the use of the tie, through the other two readings, one notices a shift from production to consumption and from its use by privileged elites to its reappropriation by a broader public. In what follows, I focus on these two modes of reading, which question, and therefore modify, the social use of the tie according to changes in the media, in the fashion system, and in general trends of consumption. The tie has undergone an evolution that begins before the birth of industrial society. However, because sociology is a discipline that deals especially with modern and industrial societies, this essay examines the tie as a characteristic indicator of the advent and, most important, the interrogation of bourgeois society. Originally, the tie was born within aristocratic and military societies. Even though it is possible to identify similar items from antiquity, from China to Egypt to the Roman Empire, the tie is definitely a modern invention dating from the rise of the great European nations. The word “cravat,” a synonym of tie, comes from “Croat” when around 1660, Croatian mercenary troops in the service of Louis XIV introduced the use of a cloth scarf wrapped around the neck with the end left dangling on the chest. Soldiers’ scarves were of common fabric, while those of the o~cers were of muslin or silk. Within a few decades, the French army as a whole adopted these items of clothing, called steinkerques, from the battle of Steenkerque in 1692, where the Sun King’s armed forces defeated the Anglo-Dutch coalition led by William III of Orange. The fashion spread rapidly from battlefields to the salons. The end of the nineteenth century saw the beginning of the period of the regimental ties, thus called because they reproduced the colors of the various British military regiments.3 During this time, the system of signs expressed by clothing complied with the codification of a precise etiquette through which court society regulated its members. Norbert Elias points out how this attitude lies at the base of power structures in newly born modern societies.4 From then on, this power permeated daily life of subaltern social groups, influencing their attire and bodily adornments, their living spaces, and their ritual behaviors.

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F I G U R E 11 . 1

Portrait of Ivan Gundulic´, 1622.

Artist unknown. Rector’s Palace, Dubrovnik.

With the advent of industrial society, the tie underwent a semantic shift and was incorporated into the distinctive system of signs of bourgeois clothing. While in military society the tie denoted the a~liation to a regiment and the rank or lineage of its individual wearer, in bourgeois society the tie expressed the distinctive values of the merchant class: status, sobriety, respectability, and austerity—all virtues pertaining to work, trade, and ownership. In the ancien régime, the tie was a sign of power, prestige, and opulence;

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in the new regime the tie submitted to the rhetoric of the bourgeois work ethic. The bourgeois man aspired to stand out; but at the same time, often hypocritically, he needed to reflect the humbleness of a class that had worked its way up the social pyramid through commerce rather than birth. Bourgeois men’s clothing—which emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century and established itself against the former dominant class—is characterized by two fundamental elements: in terms of looks, it is sober, dark, austere; in terms of its social connotations, it is clearly civil as opposed to military. It currently consists of shirt, tie, jacket, and trousers, completed by an overcoat or a raincoat. An interesting hypothesis is that the modern military uniform owes more to bourgeois clothing than to the ancient military uniform. Indeed, the standardization of bourgeois clothing, which was a uniform in itself, prefigures the standardization of the uniform imposed on soldiers and o~cials in the twentieth century.5

Thus, the rigid, geometrical, and austere aspect of bourgeois clothing has probably influenced modern military and civil uniforms far more than martial elitist traditions, which emphasized diƒerences more than similarities and the stylistic singularity of individuals and groups more than an identification with shared values and codes. A residue of an archaic social organization, the tie was probably one of the few items that escaped the logic of rigor and sobriety. Transferred to everyday civil clothing, the tie no longer performs any specific function. However, because of its “multiaccentual” character, the tie became an expression of freedom and transgression against the rules established by the dominant culture. The result was the emergence of partial, borderline, ambivalent figures who adopted the same code system as the upper classes, yet changed some of its elements in order to a~rm a new and stronger identity. In this way, the tie became the center of a thick cluster of meanings beyond the conventional clothing scheme imposed by the bourgeoisie: suit, hat, walking stick, and so on. Dandies showed an almost obsessive identification with ties: ties symbolized their modernity as well as their attempt to escape from it; their unconditional compliance with the dictates of fash-

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ion as well as their rebellion against them. When Beau Brummell inaugurated the classic age of dandyism, he assigned a significant function to the stiƒ white tie and collar to construct his image. In general, the secret of men’s clothing was enlivening their sober and standardized suit through ties and other accessories.6 In the subsequent evolution of dandyism, the tie played an ambiguous, unpredictable, and sometimes socially unsettling function. During this period, artists and writers had lost their leading role, and therefore felt threatened by a society that no longer acknowledged them as models. When Charles Baudelaire writes in his Intimate Journals about the halo that slipped oƒ his head and onto the tarmac during a promenade in Paris, and how amusing this event was to him, he connected the artist’s life and decadence: the mud but also the authenticity of the street. Preferring bow ties to common ties, which Baudelaire saw as a residue of the lineage between the dandy and the bourgeois, in “A Joker,” in Spleen, he describes a well-dressed gentleman, gloved, polished, imprisoned in a “cruel necktie” and a brand-new suit, who bends down ceremoniously before a donkey. While the donkey can be interpreted as a satirical allegory of the poet’s destiny, the necktie that imprisons the bourgeois functions as a powerful metaphor of constriction and entrapment within the social system, suggesting also the emptiness haunting modern individuals. Indeed the tie is an accessory, something marginal, but it conveys fundamental aspects of bourgeois life. Baudelaire’s view diƒers from the traditional perspective expressed by Oscar Wilde in A Woman of No Importance, in which the author playfully discusses the anthropological implications of ties and knots, culminating in the idea of the tie as a rite of passage, summarized in Lord Illingworth’s comment: “a welltied tie is the first serious step in life.” The gesture of knotting one’s tie is a rite that both evokes and exorcizes the emptiness of the lives of dandies. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, describing another extreme dandy, Jacques Rigaut, in the act of performing the daily ritual of knotting his tie in front of the mirror, presents his action as a desperate attempt to be someone, to do something, even though absolutely useless, in order not to disappear into the “well” that reflects his image.

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He was going to go out, he was already knotting his tie. He dropped his hands to see himself better in the mirror, over which he bent as over the circle of a well. . . . Still waters. He would have liked to fix his reflection in this apparent stillness to anchor his being, threatened by sudden dissolution.7

The horror vacui of an inauthentic existence is expressed through an item symbolizing metafunctionality, insignificance, and transience. As an accessory that has lost its primary function, the tie is now at the center of the image of modern man, serving to fill the absence and the void caused when its original purpose was lost. No longer part of a highly hierarchical society, the individual becomes an extremely fluid subject, anticipating to some extent postmodern mobility. In this initial displacement, the tie becomes a fetish, responding to a double loss: of class status and of self. While dandyism in the twentieth century was part of a radical critique of the bourgeois legacy, it paradoxically ended up reinforcing the proximity and collusion between the dandy and the aesthetic sensitivity of the middle and upper classes. In this respect, René König has strongly criticized “trickle-down” theories, pointing out how the bourgeoisie does not automatically and unconditionally adopt fashions, especially extravagant ones, simply because they are new and exclusive. The bourgeoisie needs the dandies’ “explorative” function: only when certain innovations have reached an acceptable level of stabilization can they be adopted and translated into its own style. The issue of novelty is crucial. The bourgeoisie cannot immediately accept something authentically new. If the bourgeois immediately accepted any innovation, he would stand out and break the rule of decor: the bourgeois’s duty is to conform, to go unnoticed, and to live as others do. Unlike the snobs, the dandies, the Gecks, and the merveilleuses, the bourgeoisie adopts fashions when they are no longer considered weird and flashy, yet still signify distinction. Once a style’s eccentricity wears out, it can gradually become fashionable, accepted as a common sign of distinction, supremacy, and sophistication.8

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Thus, the dandy’s reflective and aesthetic function serves to stabilize received clothing habits in society so that the bourgeoisie can then adopt them. This happens because modern man has rejected the idea of being beautiful in the aristocratic sense of the term, abandoning the sociobiological model of the peacock’s plumage for attracting a partner to procreate. For this reason, the tie no longer expresses luxury but rigor, not opulence but belonging, not dysfunctionality—meaning a detachment from the labor market— but the work ethic and identification with a class, a group, a lobby. After all, the “great renunciation” mentioned by the German psychologist J. C. Flügel was produced by three historical processes: (1) the French Revolution, which broke with the order established by the ancien régime; (2) the Industrial Revolution, which transformed production practices; and (3) colonialism, which required Westerners to distinguish themselves from the primitive image of colonized cultures.9 “In the Victorian period, the more austere style and the standardization of taste helped the spread of ties with premade knots, both classic ones and bow ties, with small or enormous knots, according to taste. Even Gabriele D’Annunzio, who, when barely twenty years old, was already one of the stars of late nineteenth-century Roman salons, systematically adopted premade knots.”1 0 Going beyond D’Annunzio’s rustic dandyism, his Futurist colleagues waged a fierce battle against the traditional tie as a symbol of a decadent class and proceeded to radically reinvent it. In 1912, Giacomo Balla designed a collection of ties inspired by the geometrical patterns of his “iridescent interpenetrations.” One of these was a triangular tie that, in his self-portrait, appears symmetrical with his beard. This radical style sometimes entailed the elimination of the collar, but at other times it subverted clothing canons completely. The materials, for example, could vary from plastic to glass and cardboard (recalling Alfred Jarry’s contemporary paper clothes). “In a beautiful sketch of a dress suit of 1912, Balla designed a sensational allred choker necktie of plastic with a dangling end.”11 The stabilization of taste created long-lasting fashion trends that accompanied the rise of the middle class. In contrast, a more extreme vision was found in the Italian

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Futurist manifesto elaborated by Di Bosso and Scurto.1 2 Their tie, or rather “anti-tie,” was a knotless plaque of resistant, shiny metal, a few inches long, expressing “elasticity, strength, intelligence, sobriety, solidity of ideas, and an innovative Italian spirit.”1 3 In the intentions of its creators, this polished, sometimes even precious, metal was to reflect the Italian sun and blue skies. It is also an indication of how this “Italian spirit,” what later might have been called the Made in Italy logo, has always been the result of a creative collision between tradition and innovation, nature and artificiality.1 4 The Italian Futurist manifesto completely reinvented the tie as an accessory, from materials to design, making it more suitable for modern times and the rhythms of an increasingly mechanized society. The anti-tie that we have created can be made of: tin with horizontal creases; opaque aluminum with anti-traditional decorative patterns; bright aluminum with modern etchings; simple chrome metal; brass; copper.1 5

The standard tie as we know it today is very diƒerent from the Futurist tie and was in fact patented in 1924 by its inventor, Jesse Langsdorf. Combining the legacy of the three typical ties of the nineteenth century—régate, ascot, and lavallière—the modern tie is characterized by a marked reduction in complexity. A single standard model replaced the plurality that had engendered a dispersion of taste. This was consistent with a decisive change in the fashion system that occurred in the 1950s after the production process shifted from handcrafted to industrial. The modern tie corresponded to the dictates of a more comfortable and informal elegance; it was easier to wear and reuse. It was actually created to solve the problems caused by the previous models. As François Chaille explains, “to prevent the fabric from getting creased, Langsdorf came up with a method of

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cutting the fabric on the bias and sewing it in three segments. This technique improved elasticity and facilitated the fabric’s return to its original shape.”1 6 During the 1950s, the myth of a‰uence and the advent of consumer culture ushered in a leveling process in society that coincided with the development of an industrial model able to combine quality with the standardization of production processes. The phenomenon of prêt-à-porter radically changed clothing practices, including the tie, which underwent another wave of innovation and modernization. Slimmer, squared-oƒ models triumphed during the 1950s; then highly geometrical larger models were adopted in the 1960s. Thanks to the invention of the “Liba,” a machine capable of sewing from thirteen hundred to eighteen hundred ties per day, the modernization of the production system of ties underwent a further development during the 1970s. Engaged in the project of turning daily life into art, the artistic avant-gardes were forced to confront an intrinsic limitation of their ideological stance, that is, their distance from everyday life and the consequent separation between artist and artwork. The situation for artists who took up the legacy of the historic avant-gardes was not necessarily the same. In some cases, street styles allowed them to establish a negotiated kind of reading, in which artists accepted mainstream schemes while they continued to break the rules. In other cases, they produced an oppositional reading, which rejected the status of items, including the tie, viewed as symbols of adult society. Among the first British subcultures, the “Edwardian youth” took its name from the haute-couture collection inspired by Edward VII’s particular brand of elegance. Its fortune did not last long, and after World War II those garments were consigned to charity shops. Teddy Boys, however, reinterpreted the content of that collection, inserting elements taken from American culture, such as jeans or leather ties, thus challenging traditional British culture and its reservations about the commodities and lifestyles arriving in England from the other side of the Atlantic. The leather tie was a new fetish, which, once inserted in the visual system of the Edwardian uniform, had a disorienting eƒect, redirecting the observer’s gaze toward an image of Hollywood Westerns. The bootlace tie had a similar eƒect and

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was used with large silk-collar jackets, jeans, and black suede thick rubber-soled shoes: the famous or infamous brothel creepers.1 7 With the arrival of mod youth in the 1960s, ties became thinner, with a simpler knot and a slim, essential, minimalist look. There are many reasons why the mod style is still very interesting to anthropologists and fashion sociologists. First of all, these young people promoted a view of modern life that immediately aƒected the entire society, including the older generations, whose style they influenced. According to Gilles Lipovetsky, a process of reification of youth changed the views of fashion designers.1 8 Also, the way the mods reinterpreted bourgeois clothing is typical of a negotiated attitude, which, in later decades, continued to be a distinctive mark of youth subcultures, eventually entering the mass market. The box jacket could have small side vents, 1˝, 2˝ or 3˝ long. . . . Cuƒ could be open, with or without a link button. . . . Trousers were narrow . . . finished with a small slit in the side seam at the bottom. . . . There could be little details like small buttons sewn on the seams of trousers just above the shoes. Suits were still predominantly [sic] blue and dark blue or had strong black and blues stripes. . . . The shirts which at first had a short pointed collar gave way to long pointed collars with a very close gap at the front. This made ties a lot slimmer and the knot smaller. Narrow knitted ties were the favourite.1 9

The mod tie was very thin, thus marking a stylistic as well as a cultural diƒerence. Because of their inclination toward a modern aerodynamic design, at odds with traditional British culture, these ties were generally viewed as eƒeminate. According to Phil Cohen, the mod movement, which reached its peak in the early 1960s, generated two other movements: the hard mods, who became the skinheads, and the soft mods, who crowded King’s Road and Carnaby Street. The first were characterized by an oppositional reading aimed at retrieving the roots of the original mod movement—that is, an austere working-class aesthetics—and therefore banned the tie from their symbolic universe. The second, instead, developed a more negotiated sensibility. The flower power movement, which regarded the bra as a means of patriarchal op-

NELLO BARILE / 202

pression, tried instead to reinterpret the social meaning of the tie and rethink its use value. As men and women started using colored ties as headbands or waistbands, the tie became extremely wide. With typical semiotic cross-reference between street style and market, in 1965 Michael Fish marketed this type of wide tie, followed a few years later by Ralph Lauren.2 0 Michael Fish . . . inundated Saville Row (or more precisely Jermyn Street, at Turnbull&Asser) with Indian silks and kipper ties (about 6 inches wide, so called because they resembled the shape of smoked fishes split in two and served for breakfast) before opening his own boutique—Mr. Fish—in Cliƒord Street. Among his most famous clients there were Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Lord Snowdon, Terence Stamp. . . . A few months later, in 1967, with quite another spirit, Ralph Lauren created his Polo brand and made his fortune imposing a tie that was larger than the traditional ones: about 5 inches wide.2 1

While the glam phenomenon rediscovered the peacock model, with its exuberant and feminine style and aristocratic patterns and fabrics, the punk once again denied the aesthetic function of the tie. In the first Sex Pistols live performances, ties were actually present and quite visible. However, they were enriched by an abundance of iconographic elements altering their aesthetics in favor of plural interpretations. Thus, the tie no longer functioned as modern man’s center of gravity, whether with positive or negative connotations. Unlike hippies, punks didn’t need to exorcize or reject the tie, but, given their particular fetishistic vocation, they repositioned the tie within an imagery that included a vast paraphernalia of accessories, such as the red and black Nazi swastika and Soviet badges in Cyrillic; the Third Reich’s iron cross and rough copies of Stalin’s order; the torn portrait of the queen badly glued next to pornographic images . . ., crucifixes and bronzed metallic skulls, small flexible white plastic skeletons and other razorblades, rings, chains, dummies and safety pins strung together as in a rosary: in short, a bit of everything.2 2

203 / A KNOT TO UNTIE

Their use of the tie was governed by the same general principle that informed punk style as a whole. Through a sort of William Burroughs’s cut up, this traditional clothing element was placed into a new destabilizing frame. Dick Hebdige, in particular, points out how the no-future generation used the school uniform tie as an irreverent gesture against the established order, as well as a sign of fetishistic attraction toward codified roles.2 3 During the 1980s, the revolutionary subcultures and countercultures of the previous decade produced a new image of masculinity. Unlike the stereotype of the “great masculine renunciation,” the new man assumed many feminine traits. Conversely, the revival of the woman’s power suit and the rising myth of the career woman produced an increasingly stiƒ female image. In the 1970s, the supposed revolution was against consumerism and the fashion system; however, in the 1980s, rebellion was “deeply rooted in marketing, advertising and—more generally—in consumer culture.”2 4 For this reason, the exemplary figures and icons of this period are not solely characters from the alternative scene who questioned social models within the o~cial culture, but also, and above all, the new mythical figures retrieved from movies and television. Among them, Richard Gere represented the quintessence of this transformation of the male image, with his new look made up of “soft and mellow-colored suits never seen before, shirts and micro-patterned clothes, long thin ties combined with the unusual proportions of narrow jackets.” 2 5 Oscillating as a sort of compass needle, the tie moved gently along with the body, rather than conferring further rigidity to the image of the “armor suit.” In other cases, especially in the countless popular music bands of this period, the tie disappears or is replaced by the bow tie, which has a more ironic, less dramatic vocation. Having achieved a level of visibility never seen before, 1990s underground culture sounded the death knell for the tie, which had been so central to the imagery of the previous decade. Movements such as grunge and crossover rediscovered a purely Dionysian view of youth tribes and radically opposed establishment symbols, if only on a rhetorical level.2 6 Yet this apparent contrast hid a substantial collusion between mainstream culture and youth cultures, which was indeed the distinguishing feature of the whole

NELLO BARILE / 204

decade. The alternative scene tended to incorporate features of mainstream fashion, without any real critical intent. This is evident, for example, in the movie Strange Days where Ralph Fiennes—a dealer of digitalized experiences living in a degraded Los Angeles of the future—expresses unconditional love for his Armani tie collection. Within the more general market and culture of the 1990s, the tie began losing its appeal, probably due to the ideology of informality diƒused by grunge culture and the Internet economy. The new course was once again dictated by the influence of AngloAmerican culture, where, with its promises and icons, the technological revolution attracted many entrepreneurs and workers. The ideal was no longer the 1980s yuppie “dressed for success,” but the new Net economy businessman capable of creating financial empires from his garage dressed only in T-shirt and jeans. The heroes of the new economy were young people, who had now become the new ruling class. Inspired by people like Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and Steve Jobs of Apple, the new workers of the tertiary sector in the information society were also very diƒerent from 1980s yuppies. They combined an aspiration to success with attention to working conditions, ecology, and solidarity that was made easier by the immateriality of the new Net economy. New economy companies were located in campuses that were represented as recreational spaces where people had fun while working. The informality of this work environment relegated the tie to an older business model of conservatism and impracticality. After the tech bubble burst, despite the full reestablishment of a virile and assertive male image, the cultural significance of the tie took still further new directions. The rediscovery of yet another mythical fashion of the past, associated with the spread of cocktail and lounge music via television shows like Mad Men, determined the success of secondhand and vintage clothing. Ties and accessories coming from a variety of decades (but mainly from the 1960s and the 1970s) were dug out of closets or scouted for in secondhand shops. These items of clothing were submitted to a set of recycling practices that are very common throughout the world, and were reused by urban young people before being intercepted by the main fashion companies. The symbolic appropriation of the memory, authenticity, and everyday life experience of an unknown subject

205 / A KNOT TO UNTIE

represents in fact an added value for these items, reversing the progressive movement of fashion by focusing collective attention on the past. Recent ethnography on secondhand culture has described the deep motivations underlying these practices, which aim to endow common objects of everyday life with emotional significance. They become representative symbols of an entire period: Such passion for the decade extends though not just to clothes and records but to all the material culture of the home. Emma, for example, reveals the pleasure she gets from discovering such items: “I’ve got 60s sellotape, 60s plasticine . . . and every little thing gives us so much pleasure, to find that 60s stamp, that’s just the highlight of the day . . . and then you know, another day it’s a tie.”2 7

While the cult of the 1960s was mostly limited to a group of enthusiasts, the cult of the 1970s was more widespread and had an impact on the culture industry of the time.2 8 It is a trend that, while based on diƒerent premises, followed the same pattern of previous trends: specifically, an opposition to the cultural hegemony of the tie. After 2000, vintage clothing definitely entered mainstream fashion. Before then, secondhand fashion was actually limited to people who resorted to nono~cial channels, such as local markets or charity shops, to find clothing items from the recent past, providing an alternative value compared to brand-new clothes. Vintage, second-hand clothing, is today practiced mainly because of a communicative style that makes explicit the sensuality inherent in donning used clothes and living stories, which belong now to us as much as they belonged to others. . . . In this case, the traditional fashion mechanism is inverted: the semiotic wear and tear is more important than the material one, and defines the rhythms of consumption.2 9

The three above-mentioned phenomena—the subcultural movements of the beginning of the 1990s, the advent of the new high-tech economy, and the secondhand phenomenon that turns vintage into fashion—jointly fostered a collective ethic that rejected the image of the man in a tie.

NELLO BARILE / 206

F I G U R E 11 . 2

Necktie Day in Croatia. Courtesy of the photographer, Ole Nielsen.

All this was reinforced by the idea of the new “postmodern consumer” introduced by various sociologists. Among them, Giampaolo Fabris points out how consumption is no longer a sign of social status and class distinction. Until recently, the role of consumption could be summarized by Umberto Eco in the 1970s: “Every morning, when I knot my tie in front of the mirror, I feel like I am also making an ideological choice.”3 0 On the contrary, in the current period, clothing has begun emancipating itself from the old reference systems, ushering in an era of extreme mutability. Thus, on the one hand, the tie detaches itself from the image of the businessman; on the other hand, the deconstruction of this myth brings about the idealization of another social type: the representative of the so-called creative class, who wears an “invisible tie” or goes “without collar.”3 1 In Western societies, the tie becomes the focus of a dialectics between old and new powers, conservation and progress, gerontocracy and youth culture. A neocon ethics and aesthetics have tried to anchor this symbol to the roots of modern democracies, seeking to ideologically combine the self-made man with the evangelical preacher and the man of action. Due to crucial changes in American politics, this new style aƒected collective imagery, including fashion, and questioned the specifically

207 / A KNOT TO UNTIE

postmodern tendency to mix identities, promoting instead more rigidly defined sexual and ethnic identities.3 2 A banal object such as the tie thus became the center of a larger conflict. I remember interrupting a man who had risen from the audience after a lecture I had given at a West Bank university in 1994 and had started to attack my ideas as “Western,” as opposed to the strict Islamic ones he espoused. “Why are you wearing a suit and tie?” was the first simpleminded retort that came to mind. “They’re Western too.” He sat down with an embarrassed smile on his face.3 3

This account shows how the concept of negotiation can also be transferred to the intercultural domain. Edward Said trumped his interlocutor, turning the tables on his accusation, by relying on a limited series of meanings attributable to the tie as emblematic of a Western symbolic system. The public image of the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad excludes the tie completely, thus creating a void. Behind this image there is a radical oppositional reading, reflecting a series of political changes that are at the base of Iranian society, which was already averse to the use of the tie.3 4 The void created by the rejection of the tie actually recalls the repression of another more profound void. It is the void caused by the development of Western culture, which has built itself on the rejection of the idea of being in favor of the idea of becoming, and has established a series of theoretical and analytical instruments to dissolve the totality of being into simple elements and submit them to its will to power. According to Emanuele Severino, such a process coincides with the history of Western ontology, which has irremediably destroyed the original idea of being: the opening of the horizon of the becoming of beings—which is their coming out and going back into nothingness—is the fundamental condition for the emergence of the will to power, which assigns beings to the being and to nothingness.3 5

In erasing from memory the original meaning of existence in order to exalt the fragment, the particular, and even the fashionable, one can still perceive the quintessence of a cul-

NELLO BARILE / 208

ture dominated by fetishism, expressing its deepest essence through the glorification of technological power and the cult of the ephemeral. The fashion accessory is actually the sublimation of the ephemeral logic of fashion. Emphasizing the ethereal and mutable through the detail, it exalts the a~rmative power of the surface, thus fashion “can be viewed as an epiphenomenon of a lack of essence, of a lack of being. The dialectic embedded within clothing and identity therefore touches on categories of the metaphysical.”3 6 For this reason, a common everyday object such as the tie can hide a more radical reading, enacting a symbolic challenge that calls into question the characteristic features of an entire culture.

NOTES

1. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). 2. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding” [1973], in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128–38. 3. Patrizia Calefato, “Semiotics of the Uniform,” Exit, no. 27 (August–October 2007), http:// www.exitmedia.net/prueba/eng/articulo.php?id=218. 4. Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006), 103, 128. 5. Francesco Alberoni, “Osservazioni sociologiche sull’abbigliamento maschile,” in Sociologia dei fenomeni di moda, ed. Gerardo Ragone (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1976), 211 (my translation). 6. Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London: Routledge, 1994), 185. 7. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Will o’ the Wisp (London: Calder & Boyars, 1966), 43. 8. See René König, Menschheit auf dem Laufsteg. Die Mode im Zivilisationsprozeß. (Munich: Hanser, 1985) (my translation). 9. Ted Polhemus, “Invisible Man,” in Material Man: Masculinity, Sexuality, Style, ed. G. Malossi (New York: H. Abrams, 2000), 47. 10. Guido Vergani, “Tie,” in Fashion Dictionary (New York: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2006), 295 (my translation).

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11. Enrico Crispolti, Il futurismo e la moda: Balla e gli altri (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1986). See also Franca Zoccoli, “Futurist Accessories,” in Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being 1, ed. Cristina Giorcelli and Paula Rabinowitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 54–81. 12. The manifesto states that it accepts Marinetti’s provocation concerning the Futurist hat and therefore proposes a new tie that bans “knots, bow ties, pins, brooches,” and because “the man’s character reveals itself through the tie he wears,” it invites people to wear the Futurist tie launched on March 27, 1933, a “light, shining, resistant, metallic anti-tie.” It is very thin, very light, a few inches long. The only surviving exemplar is actually quite squat and tiny: a little metallic object, in the time machine. See Crispolti, Il futurismo e la moda, 144–45 (my translation). 13. Ibid. 14. In this respect, it is fundamental to refer to Paola Colaiacomo, ed., Fatto in Italia (Rome: Meltemi, 2006), which traces the stages of an alternative history of Made in Italy, focusing on the value of innovation rather than tradition. 15. Crispolti, Il futurismo e la moda. 16. François Chaille, The Book of Ties (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 40. 17. Eleonora Fiorani, Abitare il corpo (Milan: Lupetti, 2004). 18. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 94–104. 19. Richard Barnes, Mods! (London: Eel Pie, 1979), 8–9. 20. Nello Barile, “Moda e stili,” vol. 2 of Manuale di comunicazione, sociologia e cultura della moda (Rome: Meltemi, 2006), 23, where I propose this interpretation against the more traditional one opposing fashion and styles. 21. Chaille, The Book of Ties, 99. 22. Patrice Bollon, Morale du Masque: Merveilleux, Zazous, Dandys, Punks, etc. (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 132, 277–78 (my translation). 23. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1988). 24. Andrew Bolton, “Uomo nuovo/vecchie mode,” in Excess: Moda e underground negli anni 80, ed. Maria Luisa Frisa and Stefano Tonchi (Milan: Charta, 2004), 277–78 (my translation). 25. Giusi Ferré, “Ai nostri oochi ancora innocenti,” in Frisa and Tonchi, Excess, 124 (my translation). 26. Michel Maƒesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, trans. Don Smith (London: Sage Publications, 1996).

NELLO BARILE / 210

27. Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 150. See Katalin Medvedev, “It Is a Garage Sale at Savers Every Day: An Ethnography of the Savers Thrift Department Store in Minneapolis,” in this volume. 28. Louise Crewe, “Bjorn Again? Rethinking 70s Revivalism through the Reappropriation of 70s Clothing,” Fashion Theory 5 (February 2001): 7. 29. Patrizia Calefato, ed., Moda e cinema: macchine di senso/scritture del corpo (Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1999), 64 (my translation). 30. Gianpaolo Fabris, “Il nuovo consumatore compra solo per sognare,” interview with Gianpaolo Fabris, La Repubblica, March 10, 2003 (my translation). 31. The first expression is taken from Bruce Mazlish, while the second one comes from the research that has most influenced the political debate on business and creativity in the last three years. See Bruce Mazlish, “Invisible Ties: From Patronage to Networks,” Theory, Culture and Society 17 (2004); and Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 32. Rosanna Sisti, “Il revisionismo mette il tailleur,” interview with Nello Barile, Avvenire, April 28, 2005. 33. Edward W. Said, “The Clash of Ignorance,” The Nation, October 22, 2001: 12. 34. A rumor, circulating internationally in 2006, claimed that a new Iranian dress code required there be a yellow cloth strip to distinguish Jews, a red one for Christians, and a blue one for Zoroastrians. This colored badge, called “zonnar,” is a cloth strip sewn on the front of the clothes. According to the story, the dress code was first presented in 2004 under the presidency of the moderate Mohammed Khatami, but Parliament decided against it; yet the new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s pressure might instate it. Amir Taheri, an exiled Iranian journalist, explained that the law would eliminate “the unbelievers’ influence” on Iranian clothing. Ties would be totally banned as they are considered “a symbol of the cross.” “Ebrei e cristiani fascia sui vestiti,” La Repubblica, May 19, 2006 (my translation). This story has since been proven false. 35. Emanuele Severino, Il parricidio mancato (Milan: Adelphi, 1985), 65–66 (my translation). 36. Cristina Giorcelli, “Accessorizing the Modern(ist) Body,” in Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being 1, ed. Cristina Giorcelli and Paula Rabinowitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 2.

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12

O R N A M E NTS A N D FE M I N I N E C LO T H I N G TR A D ITI O N I N A LG E R I A; O R, TH E I D E NTIT Y Q U E ST Chafika Dib-Marouf Within Algerian culture, the semiology of clothing and, more generally, the code of jewelry as it encompasses all aspects of ornamentation constitute a privileged mode of expression. In the feminine universe of Tlemcen,1 this code marks the events of festivals and ceremonies, and at the same time, delimits moments of daily life, more permissive because more anonymous.2 However, even important occasions of ceremony are not rigidly prescriptive because the ritual space permits a wide range of possible choices, whose thresholds are nevertheless defined by rules of avoidance (at the lower limit) and rules of designation or exemplarity (at the upper limit). Yet the rather limited field of possibilities cannot be transposed from one ceremony to another, because each one requires a code of conduct adapted to its circumstance. Likewise, the ritual space is itself narrowed, or at least modified in the course of time, for each type of ceremony. Although the constitutive elements of “the act of ornamentation” are not significant

in themselves, and the act is not productive of meaning except for the reconstitution or structural recomposition of its dynamic totality, I posit this whole to be divisible in order to be able to treat distinctly, for purposes of illustration, two of these fundamental dimensions: the subset “clothing” (which belongs to the category of trousseau) and the subset “jewelry,” understanding that their autonomy is only formal.3 In matrimonial exchanges, the dowry system is not exhausted by jewelry, as a part of it circulates, in the form of a gift or inheritance, outside of the dowry sphere (which would be the equivalent of bridal property). Also, by extension, I consider that which, besides the jewel properly speaking, is designated as a dowry, and which has evolved over time: gold coins, fiduciary notes, textiles (caftan, bedding, bourâbah blanket). Gold coins (or silver when they are very old: mérinde coins, zeiyanides, and similar ones from the Middle Ages) in common use at the beginning of the twentieth century as dowry were utilized as use value—that is to say, as jewelry, notably when they were assembled as zmerred or cherka necklaces, or in ‘aççaba (headband with coins)—while fulfilling, in anticipation of bad times, the function of building up capital (silver coins

F I G U R E 12 . 1

Necklace of soltâni coins. Part of the bride’s dowry, these gold coins are not only

made into jewelry but serve as a hedge against bad times.

not included). These gold coins, of which the rare jewels still worn today bear witness, are of diverse vintage and carats; the principal ones may be classified and evaluated as follows: NUMBER GOLD COIN

O F C A R AT S

WEIGHT

A P P R O X I M AT E V A L U E

Dablon, known

24

4.5 grams

N/A

22

n/a

as Kharbouch Napoleon

20 fr. = One Sheep (1906 market price)

Napoleon

n/a

n/a

10 francs

Soltâni (vintage)

(titrated gold)

3.2 grams

n/a

(Turkish)

20

n/a

n/a

Soltâni

20

3 grams

10 francs

False soltâni

18

n/a

8 fr., approximately

Illegal soltâni

16

3 grams

16 francs

Mehemet-Salîm

(maximum) Half soltâni

n/a

0.75 grams

n/a

Quarter soltâni

n/a

n/a

n/a

FIGURE

12 . 2

Classification and value of gold coins composing dowry jewels around

1900. This incomplete information was obtained from an elderly jewelry artisan.

The evolution of fashion as it aƒects the constituent elements of the dowry calls for several remarks. First of all, the distribution of objects as “major” and “minor” has its origin in the fact that the former constitute central pieces and the latter are either optional or oƒered as prenuptial gifts. However, within the major group, the article occu-

CHAFIKA DIB-MAROUF / 214

pying the second position is assumed to be on its way out after having been very important. The objects that follow are either falling into disfavor or progressively evolving. But their marginal nature is sequential, that is to say, linked to the year of reference when they were supposed—some in their loss of momentum, others in their ascension—to play an insignificant role. It should be noted, all the same, that this type of hierarchical organization responds to a statistical logic: to the degree of the popularity of the object and its position in the hierarchy. But it is the minor objects whose entry on the scene, however tentative, is of great sociological and historical significance. They have come to enrich the woman who is attached to these objects because they are fashionable. Thus, minor objects and major objects simultaneously oƒer, by their very interference, a “directional” value of social change. The passage from gold coins (as use value) to fiduciary currency (as exchange value) coincided with World War II and, at least for those of Algerian origin, with the period of the black market, which culminated around 1945; thus even though the currency underwent a drastic devaluation, its valorization as dowry was essentially a result of the high price of gold connected to the crisis of war. Gold was compensated only in part, however, by money: as a reference, I have recorded, in nearby areas, the part of the dowry handed over in money to be about three thousand francs in 1943. By 1950, this value oscillated on the average between seven thousand and thirteen thousand francs. This contribution helped to buy part of the trousseau. During the same time period, the introduction of the gold brîm (ankle ring) represented a paradox because it costs a fortune: in fact, it was ordered only by a privileged minority of retail merchants whose spectacular riches were linked directly to their participation in the black market. This jewel had a certain attraction, however, and by a mimetic process, every family that aspired to possess a fortune banked on the gold brîm, the use of which became banal after the 1950s, and this fashion falls into disuse after Independence. It is precisely with Independence that the gold h · azzama (belt) makes its mass appearance. Its diƒusion was extremely rapid across the majority of households. This fashion

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was introduced by Algerians who had come from Morocco soon after the borders were opened, then relayed by traders who specialized in this kind of commerce; however, a few local artisans occasionally produced some specimens on special order. Parallel to the vogue of the h · azzama, the tâdj (royal crown), brought across the border from Morocco by the same social groups, has a similar genealogy; however, its diƒusion occurred more slowly. The tâdj eventually replaced the traditional jbîn (tiara), but the latter did not disappear altogether. The tâdj is wider, especially in the front, and fits over the jbîn, which serves as a support. Moreover, the tâdj is made of gold, while the jbîn is traditionally silver or vermeil. Also, the latter, used since the regency, has never been oƒered as part of the dowry; likewise, it is no longer produced locally. It is essentially a “family jewel”: thus it is worn for special occasions, either as a covering on a “bare head” accompanying the caraco (loose blouse) or at the base of the châchiya (conical bonnet) or, the latest style, at the base of the tâdj. Finally, the jbîn was itself considered to be the modern version of the antique ‘aççâba (band of cloth encircling the head and lined with coins that hang down on the forehead). This placement of the tâdj over the jbîn, whose competitive functions have been turned into complementary functions, is not a unique case. Rather, it sketches the model of change that applies to much traditional jewelry. The latter is reproduced as symbolic function or practice (endogenous elements) while its morphism can change, which posits its aesthetic function as a variable (exogenous elements). Another variant in this process is given by the superposition of the engagement ring vis-à-vis the traditional ring worn every day. Its innovative element comes from how the symbolic function was altered. Moreover, with its diƒerent texture (generally a delicate ring mounted with a precious or synthetic stone), it expresses, on the social scale, a certain mimetic phenomenon, as does the new ritual of the engagement itself where the ring is placed on the finger of the future bride by the happy chosen one while guests of their same age applaud. This practice was found during the 1960s in the Europeanized quarters (middle-class or newly successful social groups) and spread very quickly to all urban social strata. Currently, its rare usage in rural or village settings constitutes a new

CHAFIKA DIB-MAROUF / 216

F I G U R E 12 . 3

Part of the “family jewels,”

this coiƒe was designed in the eighteenth century (gold tâdj) and first introduced by Moroccan artisans. It has now been replaced by a gold-embroidered velvet cap.

form of the mimetic phenomenon, to the extent that one hears of it being copied by migrant city dwellers. Another interesting variant of this superposition is the modern ornamentation that made its triumphal entry in the 1980s. Composed of four articles (necklace, earrings, ring, and chain bracelet), it constituted a unique set oƒered in the dowry in addition to the caftan. Introduced at the same time within the middle social strata, where most of Algeria’s professional elites are found, this practice revealed a search for quality rather than quantity. Thus, the miniaturized jewel bought abroad replaces the spectacular golden hardware of female elders. It is nevertheless di~cult to make predictions about the audience for this new fashion in the future. At this stage, the new mode remains circumscribed within a narrow circle, and the traditional bourgeoisie tends to perpetuate old customs, as a counterweight. But this new fashion (besides its cost in currency) did not enter on the scene ex nihilo. In fact, a careful examination of the nomenclature of these ancient jewels reveals that the use of this ornamentation goes back at least as far as the Turkish period.4 This is verified by the importance of the settings of certain jewels whose metal (which is not always gold, by the way) serves as a simple support. Initially, these pieces were old family jewels, possessed by the maternal line and in turn used by the young heiresses. This

217 / ORNAMENTS AND FEMININE CLOTHING TRADITION IN ALGERIA

type of jewel is not part of the dowry; it enters into the sphere of exclusively feminine inheritance. Moreover, taking into account the undivided nature of these jewels, they reveal more a right of use than of property, because they could pass from hand to hand in the course of a century or more without leaving the family. It remains to be discovered if the internal transactions within a family do not intervene from time to time to permit the jewel to circulate in a su~ciently tight circle so that it is available for more convenient use. Since Independence, this feminine patrimony has been recycled in some manner by more recent acquisitions made at the sites where this type of jewel is still produced (at Armenian jewelers, especially in Turkey). But this broadening of the patrimony is accompanied by a renewal (and not by a change of allocation) of its traditional eƒects, its mode of transmission, and its inalienable character. The synoptic table also suggests that the privileged moments of change occur when the intended takes possession of certain elements of the trousseau. In every decade, anything can happen when money is mentioned. Thus, during the 1990s a new element emerges: this money permits the purchase of the bedding (the notation “money,” in preceding decades, enabled the purchase of wool covers and the caftan). Beyond the motives assigned to the monetary payment, it is always used as compensation for the purchase of part of the trousseau. This purchase is generally made by one or the other of the parties.5 Finally, articles considered fashionable go in and out of style across the decades so their durability varies from one “dominant” jewel to another. Still, the introduction of a new jewel never completely replaces its precedents. Unlike the classic phenomenon of fashion, the innovation incarnated in the dotal object is not exclusive but cumulative, indeed stratigraphic, for it is added to earlier objects, taking the place, for a given period, that others have assumed in the past. It is not exactly like the retro model known in the West, but rather a phenomenon of superimposition due to objective factors linked to the nature of the material (gold is, no matter what, the object favorably convertible into cash by the women of Tlemcen and thus defined as a guarantee against the hazards of life: repudiation, divorce, widowhood) and subjective factors (attachment to the ancient jewels

CHAFIKA DIB-MAROUF / 218

[clockwise from top left] F I G U R E 12 . 4

These golden earrings circulate within a family. They are worn behind the ears.

F I G U R E 12 . 5

Meskia andalousian (necklace), old jewelry made by Jews of Tlemcen and worn

by elderly women. This jewelry was part of the maternal family’s inheritance, not a dowry. F I G U R E 12 . 6

Crafache, another piece of family jewelry, unique to women of Tlemcen, man-

ufactured in Lyon by Rey Coquais Creator, jewelers since 1903.

of the family, absence of competent artisans, attachment to old things for aƒective or aesthetic reasons, etc.). An example of this phenomenon is the zerrouf (necklace), which has a long lineage as ancient as the zmerred and yet wearing it is still fashionable. It is still commonly produced in Tlemcen, even though certain Algerian families order it, in the same way as other traditional jewels that have disappeared within the country, from Israeli jewelers running prosperous businesses in Marseilles, Lyon, or Paris.

219 / ORNAMENTS AND FEMININE CLOTHING TRADITION IN ALGERIA

It is the totality of these contexts that gives meaning to the fashion of the jewels as dowry, the essentials of which we recapitulate here in order to have a general idea of their respective duration. It can be seen from Figure 12.7 that, among the jewels in fashion during the twentieth century,6 the zerrouf, still used today, is the one whose vogue is the longest (at least sixty years with no interruptions). However, the jewels that go in and out of fashion as dominant or as principal pieces over the decades seem to be of local origin. This is the case of the twisted golden brîm (also made of silver or vermeil when it is not part of the dowry), which replaced the antique kholkhâl-touma (later made of twisted silver) and which, with the rdîf (a sort of very wide golden ankle ring, reminiscent of the Roman “strong bracelet” worn on the forearm), goes back to time immemorial and testifies to the presence of a local goldsmith of Berber origin (or at least zenète [Berbers from the Middle Ages]). DOMINANT JEWEL

19 00 19 2 0 19 3 0 19 4 0 19 5 0 19 6 0 1970 19 8 0 19 9 0 19 9 8

Kholkhâl [silver ankle bracelet]

•

x

x

x

•

x

Nâb/w’nâiys [necklace with animal teeth] Zerrouf

•

x

•

x

x

x

x

x

•

x

•

•

x

x

x

x

•

x

x

x

x

•

x

x

•

Crafache [heavy, long necklace] Brîm [gold ankle bracelet] H · azzama [belt] Tâdj [crown]

x

Parure [set of jewels] FIGURE

•

12.7. Jewels in fashion from 1900 to 1998. The dot indicates the period when the

jewel was at its peak.

Since 1960, each new article is less a resumption, or a perpetuation under diƒerent variants, than an importation ex nihilo. This accounts for the rather long freeze on all sorts of jewels (during the War of Liberation), broken abruptly by an unprecedented torrent of creativity, drawing first from models of reference in the Maghrebi lands in general, and Morocco in particular, and then in areas close to the Middle East, before landing in the new European space of the goldsmith’s trade. These three successive moments after the war correspond to the emergence of social strata correlated to the diverse models of consumption of which they are respectively, indeed contradictorily, examples. The Moroccan space is illustrated by the diƒusion of the h · azzama (this is less the case with the tâdj, which, in fact, is superimposed on the traditional jbîn), the Oriental space by the renewal of interest in Turkish jewelry (but even more so in the domain of clothing) that was added to the box of family jewels, while the European space, hardly forgotten (on the level of the goldsmith’s trade), reappears in the form of modern jewelry, after having barely, but not insignificantly, existed in the form of the engagement ring. Like jewelry, the clothing semiology that emerges from the trousseau of the bride is both vast and complex.7 The evolutions noted do not carry across a long period because a typical synthesis of trousseaus was put together only during the last thirty years. It is possible, nevertheless, to propose a more nuanced periodization, gleaned from examining significant intervening novelties, permitting us to set the principal stages of change. Just as the dowry is not limited to a jewel, the trousseau is not reducible to a single article of clothing; in fact, at all times, furniture was included, paid for by the bride (or her family). Around 1900, it consisted of the large wooden chest (nailed and sculpted like the Kabyle chest); after the 1940s, the armoire gained the upper hand; today, it’s the era of the modern salon, although this fashion is for the moment circumscribed to wealthy circles.8 Clothing constitutes the second dimension of feminine wedding apparel. After the fashion of the dotal jewel, the trousseau clothing is notable for its triple character: permanence of its function, evolution of its design, disparity of its accessories.9 Here, too,

221 / ORNAMENTS AND FEMININE CLOTHING TRADITION IN ALGERIA

F I G U R E 12 . 8

Bride’s caftan, made

originally by the Andalusian Jewish artisans of Tlemcen and since taken over by local women artisans.

the traditional dress has never been supplanted by concurrent outfits of an exogenous nature. Apparently fulfilling the same ceremonial function, these outfits in fact revolve around the generic dress, either to be passed down in ceremonies peripheral to the one they consecrate, or to be inscribed in a space and time more permissive of novelty, or in a ritual “decomposed” for the circumstance. Thus, the last thirty years show that neither the Moroccan mansouria (a variant of the caftan), carried in by refugee families after Independence, nor the Syrian caftan, introduced by foreign aid workers, nor the Hindu dress, thanks to shopping done by Algerian “hadji” around Mecca,1 0 has gained ground in Tlemcen today; none has succeeded in supplanting the antique local caftan. Furthermore, at the moment when the war in Algeria was at its height, the imperative orders of sobriety and restraint did not fail to have repercussions on marriage protocol throughout the country. But while elsewhere the white dress borrowed from the pied noir community might have been adopted to dress the bride on her wedding day, the society of Tlemcen appropriated it for less solemn occasions: as such, the white dress can be worn without jewels. It is thus doubly functional: in an aesthetic aspect and in a moral one. In fact, the fami-

CHAFIKA DIB-MAROUF / 222

lies of Tlemcen preferred to bring out their daughters in a caftan without jewels for the marriage day, even at the risk of devaluing the outfit. Then, the white dress is worn the next day (sâba‘). More recently, the Syrian or Moroccan caftan begins to fulfill, in a context of acculturation more or less voluntary, the same peripheral functions as those which were fulfilled by the white dress. All the same, the latter, with its exotic contributions to the period after the war, notably as ceremonial outfits, interested a wider clientele than that of the bride: the súurs (sisters) of the bride or friends participating in the festival wear these outfits. They are less solemn so that a very clear demarcation may be established between the ‘aroussa11 and the others. It must also be said that the propensity to import foreign clothing fashions is not a recent phenomenon: curiously, in fact, an act of marriage (drawn up by the Muslim judge of Tlemcen) mentioned, already in 1798, a “Tunisian outfit” figuring in the dowry! Di~cult as it may be to reconstruct the diverse sociological contexts that have governed these fashion phenomena, which go back to a rather distant era, it can nevertheless be a~rmed that the traditional local outfits, which constitute the irreducible core of the trousseau (or of the dowry, if the case arises), have remained the same without interruption for a very long time. Dress for ceremonies—caftan, caraco (three-piece wedding outfit), r’dâ (sari), etc.—are, according to economic status, all owned and used concurrently or, for poorer families, only one will be the outfit for the trousseau. Besides these solitary ensembles, some clothes can be possessed in multiples: such is the case for the blousa; however, this article may not be standardized (one will have, for example, a blousa in pearled tulle, another in netting or sequined guipure, a third in crepe de chine or in embroidered tulle, etc.). The mass-produced articles are brought in on a third level, that of underclothes, bedding, etc. This latter category, part of the accessories, evolves very quickly, and the fashion dynamic here follows the same rhythm as in Europe, for these articles are exclusively imported from there. The second level (blousa and comparable articles) evolves less rapidly. Such an evolution depends less on the cut of the cloth than on the cloth itself: the introduction of synthetic textiles in Algeria followed closely their appearance in Europe, while the cuts in Parisian boutiques, notably Rodier and

223 / ORNAMENTS AND FEMININE CLOTHING TRADITION IN ALGERIA

Bouchara, were already known to the clientele of Tlemcen. Other details, such as the trimming or the motifs of embroidery or sequin work, may also evolve according to the inspiration of the interested parties. But it is ceremonial dress that is the most significant in the dialectic of the ancient and the modern that ties into the functional permanence of the ornamental code. In fact, if the nodal dresses can be held concurrently in a trousseau (for example, a caftan plus a caraco plus a r’dâ, etc.), each one fulfills a specific function (wedding day, the sâba‘ 1 2 ceremony, staghnîss1 3 ), which, apart from the caftan, may be replaced by borrowed clothing. Moreover, each one of these nodal dresses is matched by a range of accessories that, on the one hand, do not accompany the generic dress automatically or simultaneously (for example, the belt in mensoudj is only worn around the caftan after the deflowering, which the morning ceremony of the next day consecrates)1 4 and, on the other hand, are partly transposed from one type of dress to another. This double indication could be formalized by a “generic ensemble” matrix, where one would put on one axis the standard accessories and on the other axis the diƒerent “moments” of wearing the given dress: each one of these moments implies a sequence within the symbolic nuptial field and consequently brings out a diƒerent structuring of accessory elements in reference to the same dress. One might draw as many combinatory matrices as there are generic dresses or make a “typology of generic ensembles,” where the diƒerent generic dresses are plotted on one axis and the standard accessories on the other: this permits one to isolate the degree of multivalence or of interchangeability of each accessory, as well as the global structure of combinatory correlations; indeed it shows the nature and relative importance of the linkages that are carried out among diƒerent generic dresses. This ritual of recomposing the modular elements of the arrangement as a function of their symbolic moments of dress and of potential intergeneric translations risks missing the rich semiological field of ceremonial clothing in all its social dynamic, all its historical totality. For instance, one aspect of this dynamic: the code of avoidance, on the one hand, and the code of exemplar-

CHAFIKA DIB-MAROUF / 224

F I G U R E 12 . 9

Young women dressed in

caftans to accompany the bride. F I G U R E 12 . 10

Arrival of the veiled bride.

ity, on the other hand, which assigns to the actors in the nuptial ceremony types of specific ornamentation according to the position occupied by each one of these actors in relation to the Ego (the bride, in this case) and according to their age classification (not in the demographic but the anthropological sense of the term). This code of ornamental dress is not static: it is superimposed on roles played and on a more or less rigid code of conduct, according to the sequence of ceremonies and the degree of kinship within the couple, starting with the bride herself (these might include rules, such as don’t speak, be seated in a chair, etc.). Guests coming from a distance must leave the sites at conventional hours, the closest departing post-festum. It goes without saying that the clothing code itself does not prescribe a unique dress for the same ceremony: each one of the young women comes with her suitcase in order to change her clothes, as suitable, at the times indicated, all the while conforming to the range of dress corresponding to her position in the family and her age classification. This code of ornamental dress takes on its full dimension the day of the sâba‘ (which lasts late into the evening) when one sometimes attends a veritable fashion review. This is not automatic as, according to fortune and social rank, the exhibitionism of some rubs shoulders with the discretion of others, all this going back, beyond the ritual, to another language, more informal, apparently less codified, that leaves room for social diƒerentiation and individuality. Furthermore, fashion is not absent from this context, since the nuptial ceremonies provide the observer the opportunity to see that the design, whose temporality is on a short cycle, ends up modifying the function itself. However, such a modification has not fully entered the space of the traditional ceremony, where the generic dress continues to be passed on from one generation to the next, at least up to the present. In fact, despite the restructuring of the design (cut, form, fabric, motifs), the function in the ritual sphere remains; it is only altered in order to occupy the sphere of the new modern society. In this way, the caftan becomes trite (notably in its Tunisian or Constantine or even Fez versions), undergoes some touching up, and retains a relative sobriety in its motif, in order to make its recent entry—with success—at diplomatic receptions or in more intimate encounters among the high society of Algiers.

CHAFIKA DIB-MAROUF / 226

CEREMONY

C A F TA N

(chronological

DRESS

R’D A

GOLD OR

EMBROIDERED,

FA N CY

SOMBER

(Constantine)

(sari worn

S I LV E R

PEARLED,

SILKS

FA B R I C S

year-round)

C LOT H I N G

OR SEQUINED

order)

B LO U S A

Engagement

b

b/c

b/c

b

b/c

c/d

E

a/b

b

b/c

b/c

b/c

d

E

a/b

b/c

b/c

b/c

b/c

d

E

b/c

a

b/c

c/d

E

First Afternoon of Marriage (sâba‘ ) Second Afternoon of Marriage Staghnîss F I G U R E 1 2 . 11

Code of clothing ornamentation in the diƒerent marriage ceremonies. A = bride. B = young wives, young sis-

ters, and sisters-in-law. C = young women (married approximately ten years). After ten years of marriage, a young woman may wear the caftan on the exceptional occasion of the marriage of her first cousin, but only on the first afternoon. D = young mothers, young mothers-in-law, and women forty to fifty years old. The mother-in-law of the bride, no matter what her age, always wears on the first afternoon the blousa tissée mensoudj (woven with silver or gold thread) accompanied by a headband ‘aççaba (in mensoudj) or the zerrouf, in the same way as the mendîl (a piece of mensoudj cloth fastened at the temple and falling in two trains down the back). This demarcation of the mother of the groom in relation to the mother of the bride signifies a valorization of the camp of the “takers.” E = mothers-in-law, mothers, women older than fifty, or women in mourning.

This cocktail of clothing genres, where traditional dress is both valorized (in a social space that was not its own) and deritualized, augurs new significations.1 5 The popularization of the antique ceremonial dress, moreover, has also gained ground among the youth: young girls performing an Andalusian touichia (dance) in a coeducational orchestra that appears in public; young honors scholars receiving their prizes at the end of the school year; little girls chosen to oƒer the protocol bouquet of flowers to a political personality visiting the community—all have chosen to wear the caftan, unless it has been chosen for them.

NOTES

1. These aspects are limited here to jewelry and clothing. It will be recalled that there are other styles of ornamentation that are part of its language, such as coloring the face and hands with traditional henna or modern cosmetics (the motifs of which are subject to the same interpretation as those of tattoos). 2. This study is the outcome of research into matrimonial exchanges (gifts and gifts in return) in a city of western Algeria, Tlemcen (400,000 inhabitants), a traditional city-state that was a kingdom until the beginning of the sixteenth century. 3. They may be partially superimposed as the result of an evolutionary translation of certain elements of the trousseau henceforth governed by the dowry. 4. An important period succeeds the regency: the Napoleonic epoch, judging by the preponderance of imperial coins in the fabrication of jewelry. 5. During the negotiations about the dowry, the parents of the girl will say, for example, that the caftan cost such and such a sum, taking into account the rates of production and material, and will require, in place of a jewel, the payment of an equivalent sum, not in jewelry, but in clothing as a substitute. 6. Delicate pearls on a twisted necklace or in superimposed rows have always been worn as ceremonial jewels (sometimes oƒered as a nuptial gift) or even as the soltâni necklace. The period after Independence (1962) saw the appearance, with the opening of North Africa and the Arab world in general, of dozens of rows of pearls in the baroque style for the bride’s ornamentation.

CHAFIKA DIB-MAROUF / 228

7. The clothing inventory that I drew up in earlier research work dealing with cost suggested the interplay of fashion and tradition. Chafika Dib-Marouf, Fonctions de la dot dans la cité algérienne (Algeria: O~ce des publications universitaires, 1984); Dib-Marouf, “Dot et travail féminine en Algérie,” in Femmes du Maghreb au present, ed. Monique Gadant and Michele Kasriel (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1990); Dib-Marouf, “Dot et condition féminine en Algérie,” Les Cahiers de l’Orient 47 (1997): 83–92. 8. The armoire and the bed, or nuptial furniture, are currently the responsibility of the husband. 9. The term “accessory” designates here everything that does not figure in the composition of the ceremonial outfit, essentially a series of articles added to others that are wholly contingent and perfectly capable of being replaced. Consequently, the term has nothing to do with the structural nomenclature of accessories composing the generic outfit: see the following discussion in the text. 10. Are not the act of pilgrimage and the act of commerce, moreover, inseparable from the precapitalist Muslim ethic? 11. ‘Aroussa means both bride and doll. 12. Seventh day of marriage. 13. Fourteenth day of marriage. 14. This ceremony curiously resembles that of the morgangabe once practiced in Europe. 15. This readoption of a model of consumption contrasts with urban society that has notably distanced itself from this practice: this readoption proceeds from interior exoticism.

229 / ORNAMENTS AND FEMININE CLOTHING TRADITION IN ALGERIA

13

IT I S A G A R A G E S A LE AT S AV E R S EV E RY D AY AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE SAVERS THRIFT DEPARTMENT STORE IN MINNEAPOLIS

Katalin Medvedev My biggest di~culty after I moved to Minneapolis a decade ago to attend the University of Minnesota as an older doctoral student was admitting to myself that I was poor. I had exchanged a relatively comfortable life of a college professor in Hungary for the life of an underprivileged foreigner on campus. With my small stipend, I had to ration my meals, stint on my living conditions, and use public transportation. Although I gained a lot of knowledge at the university, my real “schooling” in the United States took place on the Lake Street No. 21 bus and subsequently at the Savers Thrift Department Store on Lake Street. My daily commute greatly shaped the ways in which I see the world today. It taught me more about race, ethnicity, and class than any academic course I took on the same subjects. It instilled in me an empathy for those with limited means in an environment that glorifies economic achievement (as if poverty was voluntary). Over the years, my respect grew for my fellow commuters, who I believe struggle to make life better for themselves. Facing a similar situation, I could not but wonder how they made ends meet and how they fulfilled their desires within the constraints of want. Further, as an expatriate,

I was mesmerized by the unfamiliar languages and drawn to the rich and varied colors, patterns, and styles of dress worn by commuters, who I could tell were primarily new immigrants. One day, the bus ride led me to Savers. Two black teenagers entered the bus with brimming bags of clothes and took up two seats each. They began pulling out items, touching and displaying them to each other. “Oh, that’s cool, girl,” they shrieked with delight. That exchange brought home to me my own fascination with clothing, which was my primary reason for pursuing a second academic career to train as a dress scholar. I am a clothes junkie, but while living on a tight budget, I had to look for bargains. I would shop at consignment and thrift stores regularly because they oƒered a range of selections, were not limited to seasonal fashions, and were aƒordable. Although I used to pass by the Savers store on a weekly basis, its desolate parking lot and the battered look of the entire strip mall in which it is located did not seem inviting enough to get oƒ the bus and explore it. After seeing the excitement of those teens on the bus, however, the next time I rode by the Savers on Lake Street, I got oƒ and made a beeline for the store. Since then, I have become a Savers devotee; I pay a visit to the store as often as I can. It has been a pleasure to learn that I am not alone in my attraction to the store. I have spoken to dozens of Savers shoppers who say they are regulars. My informants’ insights into what is appealing about the shopping experience at Savers could be useful in gaining a better understanding of consumer behavior in our postmodern age.

M E T H O D O LO GY

I wrote the following study based on my field notes recording my observations at the Lake Street Savers. When I initially worked on this study, I spent a couple of hours at least twice a week at the store. I carried out three extensive interviews with the manager, who has since left, each lasting about two hours. I conducted a follow-up conversation with

231 / IT IS A GARAGE SALE AT SAVERS EVERY DAY

the new manager. I have also incorporated many insights that I gained through casual exchanges with other shoppers as well as my feelings as a customer of the store for many years. This ethnography has a number of limitations. It investigates Savers’s company culture in general, but many of its findings are based on research carried out only in one store. The Lake Street store where I conducted my participant observation and interviews is an atypical store in many ways, but I believe it is still representative of any Savers chain store in a big metropolitan center. The study also focuses primarily on one profile of the store, namely, clothing, and mostly on women’s clothing. Future research needs to be done to draw a more comprehensive picture of this store and the chain.

T H E H I S T O R Y O F T H E C O M PA N Y

Savers/Value Village is a privately held, for-profit secondhand chain operation. William Ellison started the company in San Francisco, where he opened his first thrift store in 1954 under the name Salvage Management Corporation. The company is now partly owned by Ellison’s son, Thomas. Thomas Ellison, who used to pay regular visits to the Savers stores to check on operations, has of late become more involved with the real estate side of Savers operations. He is the chairman of Savers, and Ken Alterman is the CEO. William Ellison started out as a youth working for the Salvation Army, handling material donations. He soon realized that the organization’s distribution could not keep up with the donations. He began to wonder about the surplus items—the Salvation Army’s storage infrastructure had its limits—and about their resalability to the public. He soon decided to leave the Salvation Army and set up his own business in the same field. Ellison conceived a groundbreaking idea to establish partnerships with respectable local charities and have them solicit merchandise for him. As a result, he was ensured of a regular and steady supply of goods, for which he did not have to scour and which were

KATALI N M E D V E D E V / 232

delivered to him by the charities. What’s more, the merchandise did not cost him very much. Ellison’s policy involved buying everything available from the charities, regardless of the quality, condition, and salability of the items. The goods were delivered to him by the truckload, and he paid for them by the truckload. He sorted through the merchandise and tried to sell to the public as much of it as he could. At the same time, the charities benefited, too, because they could spend the money they got for their wares on their specific causes.

T H R I F T “ D E PA R T M E N T ” S T O R E S

Today, Savers Inc. Chain Thrift Store is a booming business operation. It has more than two hundred retail stores in the United States, Canada, and Australia. In Canada, Savers is called Value Village; in Australia, it is Savers Australia Pty. Ltd. The company employs more than ten thousand people throughout the Savers network. Savers has a unique “everyone wins” business model. Purchasing donated items from local nonprofits, it cooperates with more than 120 charities worldwide, providing them with a steady income, while it generates a large profit itself. According to the company’s Web site, “in the last 50+ years Savers has paid over a billion dollars to its non-profit alliances, while achieving positive sales growth totaling over 550 million dollars.”1 The company’s operations are directed from its headquarters in Seattle, and it has a three-tier management structure: regional, district, and store. The company is run on comparable terms everywhere. The stores are likely to be “located in high tra~c retail centers, in densely populated areas, often next to other discount retailers.”2 The Savers chains in Minnesota are no exception. The stores have diƒerent configurations, but the size of the premises, averaging twenty thousand square feet, the floor plans, the bright lights, the racks, the cash registers, and the operational and production rules are by and large the same from Orlando, Florida, to Anchorage, Alaska. The store and production infrastructure is kept to the minimum; thus the biggest company expenses are the cost of the merchandise and the payroll.

233 / IT IS A GARAGE SALE AT SAVERS EVERY DAY

The quality of the merchandise diƒers from store to store as it is largely dependent on the general welfare of the surrounding area. Because Minnesota is one of the most well-to-do states in the nation, the quality of the goods in the stores statewide tends to be above the national average. The amount of contributions reportedly depends on whether the local population believes in charitable practices. The Minneapolis-area stores are well-known for being one of the best supplied in the United States. Savers stores in Minnesota often get too many donations, which prompts the stores to send them to other states, especially in the South. Profitability of the stores also varies. Although the rate paid to the charities is the same and the diƒerent stores process similar amounts of merchandise, the trucks do not deliver the same quality of merchandise. Profitability also depends on factors such as the accessibility of the store, the availability of competing thrift stores, or other area shopping alternatives. Although the Lake Street store was not doing too well for a while, in 2007 it reported one of the highest growth numbers in the entire company: its sales increased seventeen percent. The prices often vary in the diƒerent stores and depend primarily on how the pricers are taught to do their jobs. That is why pricing is one of the key aspects of the Savers operation. Some stores carry not only unique used merchandise but new items as well, which the company acquires during closeouts. These items are often very good value. Wages across the stores nationally are generally the same but tend to reflect the cost of living in the store’s area. Despite this, wages at Savers are low and comparable to those at other chains, such as McDonald’s restaurants. Because the work is physically challenging and not for the squeamish—workers never know whether they are handling items of people with infectious diseases or of the dead—most of the employees tend to be young people with low educational qualifications or new immigrants.

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S O L I C I TAT I O N F O R M E R C H A N D I S E

The participating charities also diƒer. In Minneapolis, the company works with such organizations as Big Brothers and Big Sisters, the Epilepsy Foundation, the Association for Retarded Citizens, and veterans’ organizations, among others. The company says it pays millions of dollars every year to these charities. The solicitation for merchandise takes place over the phone. Potential donors are contacted by charity representatives in the name of various charities and are asked about any used clothing or household goods. Once the charity personnel have people’s commitment, Savers’s truck drivers pick up the donations. Needless to say, a lot of people are glad that the items will be taken oƒ their hands. In fact, many of them often use the solicitation calls as a welcome impetus to finally clear their closets, garages, or storage spaces. In return for the goods received, the truckers leave a donation slip so that the donors can claim tax deductions for their charitable contributions. So, although the act of donating might not be entirely selfless, it allows people to feel good about their actions. Interestingly, charities do not simply target the wealthier segment of the population, which usually gets the highest number of solicitations and thus is less likely to donate to any single cause. Instead, charities go by zip codes or by general areas. The denser the population, the better the chances are for numerous donations. Records of donations are kept on file, so a charity will know what pickup ratio can be expected of a particular location when its turn comes again. In other words, charities are not concerned with the donors’ class status; they solicit contributions from everybody. It is in the best and long-term interest of the company to keep its relationship with the charities immaculate. Therefore, the charities get paid for every eƒort, even for backdoor donations, which are voluntarily dropped oƒ at the store and not the result of solicitations. As soon as the donations hit the store, they become company property. Since there is a record of how many “OKs” arrive at the store—OK is company lingo for a grocery shopping bag full of donated items—any extra donation will be added on to the

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regular payment of bills. Extra donation slips will also be promptly faxed to the charities. Still, as with any other business, Savers’s goal is to maximize its profits on the fixed prices it pays to the charities.

T H E W O R K F O R C E AT S AV E R S O N L A K E S T R E E T

Wages and Bonuses In the company’s language, the staƒ members are referred to as “team workers.” In 2008, the hourly wage for them was $7.13. The people who unload the trucks, move heavy carts, and make the 1,100-pound bales of clothing that cannot be sold at the store receive higher wages. Workers who have relevant job experience, such as cashiers, are paid more, too. The regular workers receive a bonus on top of their hourly wages if the store achieves its prescribed sales goals. A certificate and $100 cash are awarded to the best worker each quarter. Once a month, the manager provides free pizza or fried chicken lunches for the workers or oƒers doughnuts in the morning to help them get oƒ to a sweet start. Other bonuses include vending machines, which sell soda at cheaper than the usual store prices, and a kitchen area equipped with a microwave and refrigerator. Employees are given the choice of participating in the company’s health care insurance program. They also are entitled to a 50 percent discount on everything in the store, provided the merchandise has been on display for a minimum of one day. At the Lake Street Savers there are several management spots. Three of them are salaried positions. These three workers also get an annual special bonus if the store is doing well. Further, the company also rewards the store manager and the main supervisor with its legendary annual retreats, where managers are put up in upscale hotels and treated to quality food and entertainment. About 65 percent of the workers at the Savers Store on Lake Street are women. The ethnic breakdown of the workers is currently mostly African and Latino, some African American, and some white. The visibil-

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ity of various ethnicities among the service personnel, as well as their insights into the tastes and cultural practices of their groups, provides valuable information for business decisions.

The Manager The former manager of the Savers on Lake Street, Joe B., has a college degree but no academic background in retail. As he put it, “They don’t teach at the university how to run a thrift store.” One can learn basic management skills elsewhere, too, but real mastery comes from on-the-job experience. That is why managers tend to get “groomed out of the company workers,” Joe said. No wonder then that the next manager of the store, Nadia, was herself trained by Joe. The exceptional success of the new manager can perhaps be attributed not only to her training but also to the fact that she came with a background in retail and had worked for a consignment store before. Still, nothing much has changed at the store since Joe left to become a manager at another Savers store. Joe considered his work a “high maintenance” retail job. Of course, he argued, it is not retail as it is usually defined because it involves producing what one puts out on the shop floor as well as selling it. If a customer needs a particular ladies coat, for example, one cannot just go to a stockroom to pick one or order it on the computer. In Savers, before one can put a ladies coat out on the shop floor, “one needs to sort through a bunch of merchandise,” Joe said. Beyond maintaining smooth operations, the manager’s main job is to make sure the store is profitable. This is being achieved primarily by keeping the workforce to the minimum and by not buying too much merchandise. The Lake Street Savers has about seventy employees. Managers also can influence the store’s profitability by constantly making sure that the pricers mark items at the maximum level that the public would be willing to pay for them. Under Joe’s and his successor’s management, the Lake Street store has become highly

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profitable, despite the fact that regular Savers customers in the Minneapolis metropolitan area tend to patronize all four Savers stores. Both managers I talked to have a downto-earth attitude toward their job. For example, when his family members asked Joe why his store sells used socks or underwear, his answer was “Because people buy them.” The managers at Savers are active, enthusiastic workers who are not afraid to get their hands dirty. Also, although it is not their job to work the cash register, they often elect to do so because they then get a chance to talk to customers and find out about their concerns and complaints. They also like to meet customers who are regulars.

Team Workers The staƒ members work extremely hard. According to the former manager, “They earn every penny they make.” Most job training is hands-on, but managers use a variety of videos as well, primarily on safety issues such as how to avoid back injuries while at work, to complement the training. Although the manager conducts the orientation by showing the videos and explaining the company’s philosophy, the immediate supervisors are responsible for the actual job instruction. Employees first observe their future tasks, but fairly soon start working in their designated position. Despite this, their training is meant to cover more than just their specific jobs. Ideally, if workers from the production area end up helping out on the shop floor, they should be able to answer basic questions, such as the names of the charities that work with the company. Furthermore, it is company policy that if a sales clerk goes within ten feet of a customer, she or he will greet the customer, although this does not happen all the time. Good physical condition and stamina are required for all positions at Savers. No wonder that there are not many elderly people working at Savers. They are still hired “because they show up for work,” but mainly only for this reason. Although chain stores like to call their employees team workers primarily as a way to boost morale, at Savers, especially in the production area, everybody indeed needs to work as a team. This is because in the

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production line everybody’s work is interdependent. If a worker is not quick and e~cient or makes bad decisions, it will hamper or negatively aƒect everybody’s work. Therefore, the most important principle in hiring is finding employees who will “consistently show up for work.” The next most important hiring principle is “that people take ownership of their jobs.” Such cooperation and dependency on one another among the workers fosters a close community. Therefore, workers are often recruited through informal channels, and the recommender’s character usually is a factor in the hiring decision. Many of the workers are relatives or friends, who sometimes socialize together after work as well. Production-line staƒers work at the back of the store in artificially lit, dusty, and noisy surroundings. The bale machine, the compactor that crushes the merchandise unfit for sale, and the carts and bins that are constantly being pushed around produce a screeching and deafening sound. To block the noise out and also for entertainment, the workers are allowed to blast their stereos. The jobs require being on one’s feet the whole day on a hard, concrete floor or on wooden platforms. The biggest health hazards are back strains for those who unload the carts or make the bales, and respiratory ailments for people working in the production area because of the large amount of dust from donated items. Books are the most prominent sources of dust. Pricers tend to suƒer from carpal tunnel disorders because the industrial stapler, which is used for ticketing, is not only heavy but also “quite a handful.”

Operation in the Back Early in the morning a truck arrives at the back door of Savers. Workers begin to unload the merchandise and place it on eight huge cast-iron carts. Right oƒ the truck the items get sorted. Textile-linked goods—the majority of the donations—go on some of the carts, while dishes, toys, and furniture are placed on others. When a cart is full, with a weight of five hundred pounds, the sorters push it into the processing area. A clothing

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cart, filled with merchandise stuƒed into shopping bags designated “OK,” takes about an hour and ten minutes to process. The production area is brightly lit and has been remodeled for the specific purposes of the store. It consists of a conveyor track attached to the ceiling with hangers. The first stop is a huge sorting table. A worker takes the bags oƒ the carts, tears them open, and decides what qualifies as clothing, linen, decorations, etc. The sorting is done with amazing speed. If a clothing item is in good condition, it is added to a growing pile, and the next worker will place it on a hanger and send it down the conveyor-track clothesline. Shoes are sorted on counters. Items that will go out on the shop floor are placed in one pile; items that are intended to be sent to a developing country for reuse are put in a separate pile. Because men apparently tend to wear their shoes until they are in tatters, the store has a hard time providing a decent selection in men’s shoes. Because women in general own more pairs of shoes than men do, and as a result do not wear them out, the choice is wider in women’s shoes. Lately, shoe sales have been the most profitable at the Savers Lake Street store. The standards for men’s clothing are lower than those for women’s clothing—especially with jeans, which workmen such as painters usually use for a short time. Therefore, it does not really make a diƒerence to Savers if a pair of men’s jeans is stained or even ripped. However, the new manager at the Lake Street store encourages her workers to stock the store with cleaner items than the previous manager did. If the clothes are deemed unwearable, they are put in a bin and will end up in the bale machine, located at the back of the store. The sorters come across all sorts of clothes, some of which are heavily soiled and damaged. Clothing at the Savers store does not get cleaned or ironed as in most consignment stores. The biggest taboo seems to be not cleanliness but smell. Anything that smells foul or of mothballs will not hit the shop floor. Exceptions are made only for high-quality goods. Interestingly, more time is spent on “bad” clothing because, if a worker notices that the clothing has a stain or tear, for example, then further investigation is planned. The decision to put a price tag on it is made only after closer examination.

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Clothes are separated into men’s, women’s, kids’, and infants’ sections. The examination of clothing items is brief, lasting perhaps a second. With a man’s shirt, for example, the worker will hold it out and glance at the armpits and collar. Those are the two critical areas because it is understood that a customer is unlikely to buy a shirt that is sweatstained, grimy, and smelly. Next, the worker’s eyes move to the buttons and finally, she or he will look for stains or rips. If the shirt passes muster, it is moved on. The worker next in line looks at the shirt again, checks its overall condition, and then hangs it. The next stage is stapling, when the shirt is looked at from the back for the first time. The stapler, who has a big wad of tickets in front of him/her, firmly staples a price ticket on every item and passes it on to the pricer. The pricer looks at it as closely as time allows—a maximum of three to four seconds—and also checks the label for size, style, and brand and makes a determination about the price. When the item has a label, and in 90 percent of the cases it does, such decisions are routine. If it does not, pricers use a tape measure across the back to decide the size. If they need help with the measurement, they consult a chart above their heads. This occurrence is rare though because pricers learn to size things up just by looking at them.

The “Basic Eight” Pricers are taught to bear in mind the “basic eight” when they make their decisions: style, condition, quality, supply/demand/stock level, seasonality, rarity, use, and size. Stock level is an important consideration in pricing because most customers will not buy things that are out-of-season. For example, the stock level of winter items needs to be low in the summer. However, diehard Savers shoppers often get their best deals on out-ofseason brand names. Extra-large clothes also are more expensive and tend to be in high demand. In terms of usefulness, the pricer needs to develop an eye for recognizing the potential of the item for creative reuse. For example, if a coat is torn but sports a valuable fur collar, it gets priced and hits the sales floor.

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The pricer’s job is the most complex in the production line. Experience, taste, and a good eye are very important. For example, diƒerentiating between a man’s and a woman’s sweater, especially when items are faded, is not easy. Pricing is uniform. Items start at 99 cents and progress upward by the dollar in the same denomination, such as $1.99, $2.99, etc. Items in like-new condition are priced at half the price of their original value. The “expensive” items—priced above $20—not only have a tag on them but also are marked on the inside to make sure shoppers do not try to reticket them. Ultimately, however, the most important rule a pricer needs to learn is to recognize quality and the potential profitability of the item.

O U T O N T H E S H O P F LO O R

Fresh merchandise—more than five thousand items—is put out on the shop floor every day. This, by itself, is a huge attraction for many Savers fans. Not only is the turnover of goods high, but items remain in the store for no longer than six weeks. This principle is enforced by using a five-color tag rotation system. The colors help identify how long an item has been sitting out on the shop floor. If the shop floor is small, the company uses a four-color scheme. The Lake Street store is among the bigger Savers, so it uses five colors: orange, blue, yellow, purple, and green. If an item at the Lake Street Savers has not sold in four weeks, it is reduced to half price. Occasionally, if an item is found to be in good condition and is believed to have remained unsold because it had been overpriced, it gets reticketed to a lower price. Finally, on the first Monday of the sixth week any unsold items go on sale for 99 cents each. Lately, because prices have gone up considerably, Mondays have become one of the busiest days. If an item still does not get sold, then on Tuesday the production crew removes it, and it ends up in the bale machine. While the team made up mostly of pricers collects the unsold items from the sales floor, it gets a chance to glean information about customers’ interests and disinterests in goods. Shoppers are informed about sales or price cuts through store loudspeakers. Obvious

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F I G U R E 13 . 1

Savers Department Store, Minneapolis. Photograph by Katalin Medvedev.

signs inform customers about the particular color that denotes items on sale during that week. The Savers regulars, however, know that the best day for deals is Monday. Tuesday is seniors day, when seniors get a 40 percent discount. To get them into the store and to maintain an appropriate atmosphere, Savers even changes its music repertoire on Tuesdays, playing songs of the 1950s and 1960s. On Wednesday, the store’s “wacky Wednesday deals” mean that anybody who buys more than $30 worth of merchandise gets $10 back. The sales floor of the Savers on Lake Street is vast, about ten thousand square feet. Maneuvering on it is not easy because the racks are packed closely. It also takes a while for customers to find the aisle they are seeking. Although this annoys some shoppers, those who come for the “thrill of the find” think that the profusion of items is one of the best features of the store. Clothing items, by company rules, are supposed to be grouped by size, type, and color, but this has rarely been the case in the Lake Street store. Lately, however, a lot of improvements have been made in this regard.

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The goods are displayed primarily on hangers or shelves. Jewelry is kept in glass cases; to see any items up close, one needs sales assistance. The most valuable items, such as fur coats or brand-name bags, are kept behind the counter to deter thefts. Women’s clothing is displayed closer to the cash register, men’s more toward the back. Women’s shoes are displayed on the wall on the right-hand side, men’s on the left-hand side. Children’s clothes are in the middle. One of the most popular areas is the retro section, but most customers need directions to locate it. The shopping experience at the Lake Street Savers is limited. Customers appear to like the music, but expressed a desire for more fitting rooms. The few fitting rooms in the store are poorly lit and often messy or downright dirty. The line and the wait to use them are usually long. The mirrors inside have so many fingerprints that it is hard to make a reasonable judgment about an item. Therefore, customers—primarily women— often come out of the fitting rooms to ask another’s opinion on an item. This makes the fitting room area the most vibrant section of the store. Only three items are allowed into the fitting room at one time, but shoppers habitually violate this rule. Besides, shoppers tend to leave the unwanted items inside, so the first step, if one wants to use the fitting room, is to remove those items to make room for one’s own. The fitting rooms are often locked because the workers are too busy arranging the shop floor to monitor them for potential theft. Some shoppers have been known to discard their own clothes in the fitting rooms and walk out dressed in Savers’s “new” clothes. To get lower prices on one’s selection, an often-used trick is to attach to it the sales tag of a lower-priced item. Because of the many thefts in the past, the store installed a surveillance system.

S H O P P E R S AT S AV E R S

The Savers Inc. Web site refers to Savers as “a retail melting pot.” Savers/Value Village “customers range from urban hipsters, to families on a budget, to six-figure professionals, hobbyists and more, who readily visit thrift stores to get the best bargains and value

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for their money.” Drawn to the thrill of the hunt, customers from all economic backgrounds spend time scouring the predictably unpredictable sales floor where bargains abound. Frequent shoppers include young adults and teens looking to express individuality through clothing, families on a budget, costume designers, eBay sellers looking for stock, penny-pinched college students in need of dress and décor, garage sale lovers, creative costume shoppers, antique enthusiasts, do-it-yourselfers who want to make the old look new again, vintage aficionados, thrifty moms with quickly growing children, and arts and crafts fans. On a first visit to the Lake Street Savers, one is likely to perceive that most of the customers are women, people of color, or people from a low-income background. The most noticeable would be Latinos, followed by Native Americans, often accompanied by small children. This, however, is only a first and superficial impression. The more time I spent at the store, the more the diversity of the shoppers became clear to me. It is fair to say that the Savers on Lake Street is one of the few sites in Minneapolis where the American melting-pot ideal, or perhaps the “salad bowl” idea, can be observed firsthand in a condensed way. My conversations with selected shoppers led me to conclude that people of all races and ethnicities, people from all class backgrounds, and people having diƒerent sexual orientations frequent the store. In fact, I was at first surprised to notice that Savers appeared to be a favorite shopping site for the gay and transgendered community in Minneapolis; but when I familiarized myself with the Savers culture, the choice began to make sense. Because of the relative autonomy in the store and because the shoppers come from varied backgrounds, “drag” items can be bought without prejudiced looks, comments, or actions. Furthermore, the low prices are an added bonus. In general, most of the customers I talked to do not shop at Savers only on impulse. They are regulars and tend to visit the store at least once a month. It is the agenda that diƒerentiates the customers, I realized. Poor people shop at the Lake Street Savers primarily because they find the goods aƒordable and the selection wide. For most, the store is often the primary source of children’s clothes, which are items that will be used for a

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short time. Workmen frequent Savers to buy cheap clothing for the same practical reason. Some customers simply like the fact that they can buy so many things for a relatively small amount. Budget-conscious people, regardless of gender, race, class, and sexuality, also patronize the store. As Jacqui J., a black woman in her early fifties who clearly was not shopping at Savers out of necessity, put it: “Why would I spend $75 on a pair of pants, when I can buy it for a nickel?” However, many of these customers often shop at nondiscount stores as well. At the same time, interestingly, many white shoppers, especially the middle-aged, revealed that they do not publicize at work, for example, that they shop at Savers. While they do not specifically hide the fact, they prefer that people not know it. According to them, buying items at a garage sale is OK to declare, but not shopping at Savers. My impression from their evasive explanations was that these people wanted to dissociate themselves from any taint of poverty. It struck me that these shoppers were pretending that they were in the store only to look for a “find.” A forty-two-year-old white man, Tom L., for instance, said: “You know, one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. I just love the thrill of the chase and then coming on a find.” Most regulars admit that the hunt for the find is an obsession for them and that it is rare they leave Savers empty-handed. Some shoppers are professionals who look for items that they can resell at a higher price in their own stores, the previous manager said. They do not amble around, but make focused searches. However, most people I talked to like the anarchy of the store and its randomness. It does not matter to them that the sizes, styles, and colors are all mixed up, although a few shoppers reported that the messy display puts them oƒ. They revealed that shopping at Savers is more time-consuming than at another thrift store in Minneapolis’s Dinkytown, a popular shopping area for youth. “Not only are the things there clean and steam-ironed, but they are always in the right place,” said Sonia G., twenty-three, a Hispanic professional woman. Besides, the owners or sales clerks at the Dinkytown store know every item in that establishment and can help with one’s purchase as well, Sonia added.

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When asked about their shopping experience at the Savers on Lake Street, middleclass white people often said it was an attempt to make their consumer practices socially conscious. “I shop here because this way I am removed from the cycle of buying things expensively when the actual thing is made in a sweatshop and almost nothing was paid for it,” said one of them, Annie B., in her thirties. Another woman, Nancy Y., around the same age, added, “I feel bad about letting all this go to a landfill when somebody could still use it.” One person, Kathleen D., twenty-seven, mentioned that she shops at Savers because she does not want to be “part of producing more capitalist waste.” A woman with a college education, Judith K., thirty, liked the idea that the money she spends at the store goes to charity. She also professed that she was an ardent “believer in recycling.” A stylish, middle-aged white woman, Suzanne J., in her early fifties, declared that she hated department stores and malls, in general. They are “too sterile and impersonal,” she

F I G U R E 13 . 2

Savers Department Store, Minneapolis. Photograph by Katalin Medvedev.

said. She also said that those upscale stores make too much money and produce too much waste with packaging, which people throw away the minute they arrive home with their purchases. She added, “We do not need to pay all these middle men. Trust me, if there was a decent bartering system, people would opt for it.” She also called my attention to the fact that in the last decade more outlets and dollar stores than corporate stores have opened. In Suzanne’s opinion, this trend has come about because people do not want to pay a lot for their clothing any longer and they also want to engage in the least wasteful consumer practices. She further said that she liked the music in the store because it was “real music,” not “muzak,” the purpose of which is to dupe shoppers. Another white customer, Lesli L., in her early thirties, contended that “you have less peer pressure of consumerism and mass marketing at Savers.” She then disclosed that she liked buying “real people’s clothes, which have smells, shapes, and identities,” which, in her opinion, can still be traced in the clothing. She was not the only customer who found such an odd intimate association attractive. Such customers seemed to like the excitement, the risqué nature of connecting with unknown people, “a thing that we do not dare to do in our normal, daily lives,” as Esperanza H., a Latino middle-aged elementary school teacher, said. To my surprise, most customers were not squeamish either about the odor or the cleanliness of the items. Contrary to what one would expect, some Savers shoppers do not care about near-mint quality in clothing. They pointed out that, if one is so particular about putting on other people’s clothes, why would one not object to trying on brassieres in retail stores that previous customers have tried on? Some people also seemed to find it pleasurable that secondhand clothing helped them perform class cross-dressing. In fact, some customers shared with me that often they do not wash the items before wearing them “if they look clean.” Many people also pointed out that they appreciate the notion that the “clothing had been broken in.” “This makes them so much more comfortable and pleasant to wear,” said Audrey W., twenty-four, a black woman. In general, Savers customers did not seem to mind at all that that they were not the first users. A middle-class white academic, Amy C., fifty-three, went so far as to say that she liked to shop at the store because she “might put life into the clothes of a deceased person.”

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All this seems to challenge the idea that products in the First World are attractive only in the first cycle of consumption. Savers regulars, who visit the store not only because of the low prices, also like the fact that the clothes they are purchasing have a prior history or, as one customer put it, a “biography.” A white woman, Sarah S., forty, stated that often “the clothes bring back memories of other, happier times.” They also take one back to “bizarre historical times, like the Reagan era,” for example, she said. Today, she added, she finds looking at “the contradictions of styles and materials in the Reagan era simply fascinating.” Sarah also appreciated the fact that so many grotesque items end up in the store because she likes the “humor in the dreadful.” She said she often wonders how “so many ugly items could survive and find their home in the store.” Besides these postmodern shoppers, there are a considerable number of people who find the store a source of creativity. They like to move around and let particular items generate ideas. For instance, two professional bead-jewelry makers, Tien Yin L. and Sandi F., in their late twenties, said they often buy an item only for some “cool buttons.” The creative shopper is very knowledgeable about textiles and accessories, especially regarding styles, sizes, and colors. Such customers see potential for transforming the item into a diƒerent material object. Their dress sense also is unique—a mixture of old and new clothing. They seem to be true practitioners of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s bricolage, the process of using ad hoc materials from across social divisions to create new social and cultural identities. Many women visit the Lake Street Savers “just to hang out.” Two young black women in their late teens, who are close friends, disclosed that they play a game of speculation about the clothing’s former owners, especially if the item is “totally weird, over the top, or way out there,” as one of them, Lanita P., said. They derive a lot of enjoyment from this mental exercise. In fact, when I approached the women, they were looking at a pair of jeans with a strip of pink lace running down its seam. They told me that they were wondering about the wearer’s intention, and the second woman, Evelyn G., concluded that “something really went wrong here.” Erin C., a white woman in her middle thirties who likes to shop in the retro section, said that despite the feeling of “being in a giant microwave” that Savers evokes in her,

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she continues to be a customer because by buying vintage clothes she can be original in her attire. She also added that if she makes her purchases at Savers, it is unlikely that she will come across anybody wearing the same clothing and that she will feel as well dressed as the trendy customers of any upscale boutique in uptown Minneapolis. Besides, she also remarked that clothing items of the past were better made and of higher quality. Fabrics were more durable twenty to thirty years ago, Erin said. “Earlier, people were not lazy, things were made to last for a long time and . . . had French seams,” she said. Erin shared with me that it was “insane” to have only one person use a clothing item. She explained that such a limitation did not exist historically. As she put it, “This sense of entitlement is a relatively new cultural phenomenon.” Why do we always need new items? she asked. If something fades in the washing, for example, it can be redyed and reused, Erin said. She finds this kind of “American selfishness” not only materialistic but very much at the core of a capitalistic attitude as well. An orthodox adherence to the latest fashion, in her opinion, helps to fuel capitalism. She felt that in the capitalist marketplace the constant demand to put out new items produces an enormous amount of waste that pollutes the environment. According to her, when one makes a conscious decision to buy at Savers, instead of a regular store, one can get out of this cycle and successfully subvert the system. Although the majority of the shoppers at the Savers on Lake Street are women, the gender breakdown seems only to reflect the belief that traditionally it is the woman’s job in the family to shop for clothing items. When I began to pay regular visits to the store, I noticed a lot more men shopping. What appeared diƒerent, however, was that the men tended to come to the store on their own, while women mostly came in pairs—with family members or friends. On one visit, I met an elderly white woman shopping with her middle-aged daughter. The two said that they had been going to thrift stores all their lives, and to this day, when they spend time together, they almost always end up going to a thrift store because it is their favorite pastime. Many women reported that they often came to the store “just to relax.”

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R E TA I L I N G AT S AV E R S : L E S S O N S A N D L A R G E R I M P L I C AT I O N S

Based on empirical observations, the company’s managers and production supervisors have created a useful internal resource book for their pricers. In it, they have alphabetically listed all the name brands available in the United States and ranked them as “good,” “better,” or “best.” In the field of apparel, a professional analysis of this data would provide corporate buyers or retail professionals with valuable information on consumer preferences. However, the Savers phenomenon might warrant the attention of retail analysts for another reason as well. In the past decade, outlets and dollar stores have mushroomed, indicating that shoppers are not willing to or cannot aƒord to pay high prices. The interest in retro clothing and a booming secondhand merchandise market might be indicative of another trend, too. Environmental education has made people aware that packaging, Styrofoam or plastic, for example, produces an enormous amount of hazardous waste. Those who take this idea further also realize that recycling often is not possible or requires more energy and resource investment. People who buy secondhand goods begin to see that the best way to minimize waste is to cut production. As they cannot easily influence manufacturers, the next best move is to opt out of first-cycle consumption. They can refuse to patronize shopping malls, department stores, or upscale boutiques. Instead, they can shop at thrift stores. In the industrialized world, up until now, extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, distribution, and sales formed a linear process. However, due to new consumer initiatives and to the profitability of the secondhand market, we are witnessing a change. A circular economy is on the rise. After first-cycle consumption in the West, items go through other cycles there and further ones in the developing world. Thus, in the new developments of retailing we can detect a drive for economic, political, social, and environmental change.

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T H E P O L I T I CAL E C O N O M Y O F C LOT H I N G WAST E : W H AT ’ S R A C E G O T T O D O W I T H I T ?

Donated merchandise at Savers is almost never refused. The company rejects merchandise only when it is completely useless. Despite the fact that about one-third of all items received are in tattered condition, the company makes a profit. This begs the question: what happens to the merchandise that is removed from the shop floor because nobody is interested in buying it or to that which never even made it to the shop floor because of its condition? At Savers, goods that are deemed by the sorters to be junk are taken straight from the sorting table to the bale machine, which is located at the back of the production area. Things that are not purchased also end up there after five weeks in the store. When the 1,100-pound bale is ready, it departs for a Third World destination, mostly to countries in Africa. Savers employs special rag buyers who find customers for the bales and negotiate the prices with companies in Africa. Until recently African countries bought everything that was oƒered to them, so the company made quite a profit even on the resale of its leftovers. After Savers’s competitors became aware that the bales are lucrative income sources, they also took up buying and exporting clothing waste to Africa. This brought the prices of the bales down considerably for Savers. One of the positive oƒshoots of this increased competition is that now African consumers have more bargaining power and choices. Therefore, nowadays, middlemen open the bales up in the United States and separate the merchandise according to cloth types, such as polyester, cotton, or denim, as individual countries buy diƒerent materials.

CONCLUSION

The Savers Web site lists the summary of the company’s philosophy. Savers’s ultimate goal is that the nonprofit organizations it is involved with gain revenue for their pro-

KATALI N M E D V E D E V / 252

grams, customers gain the opportunity to buy quality resale merchandise that fits their budget, and the environment benefits from reduced landfills. The case study of the store on Lake Street shows that Savers is a vibrant business enterprise that makes millions of dollars every year. However, its profit is not only due to the fact that more people are looking for ways to economize on clothing but also because of its low worker wages and its trade links to Third World countries. The company seeks to project an image of environmentally responsible consumption. Ultimately, however, Savers is a regular business operation with a politically correct rhetoric that is cleverly crafted and promoted. What diƒerentiates it from other sites of consumption is the wide population—multiracial and cross-class—of its customers, both within the United States and elsewhere. At the same time, Savers and its counterparts, such as Goodwill, have broader cultural, economic, and environmental significances as well. Together with other thrift stores, Savers demonstrates that retail, as we know it, is changing its face. Many customers find shopping at Savers not only financially rewarding but also ecologically sounder and politically more correct than shopping at a mall, for example. The most important insight reached in this study is that the cultural significance of the Savers phenomenon is not its services for the needy, but its provision of a flexible infrastructure for managing waste in the First World.

NOTES

1. http://www.savers.com. 2. http://www.valuevillage.com.

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CODA

S PE A KI N G O UT A N D S PE A KI N G U P THE CIRCULATING POWER OF FASHION

Cristina Giorcelli Fashion is that which unfashions itself. coco chanel The subject of dress . . . is dangerous— It has a flowery head but deep roots in the passions. e l i z a b e t h b o w e n , “Dress”

In the West, fashion (in French mode, in Italian moda) is one of the modes of modernity; in the two languages, the punning contiguity, the etymological kinship, between the two words is significant. Mode and moda derive from the Latin word modus, which has several meanings, among them “way, measure, form, rule, rhythm, temporary state of being.”1 If one of the imperatives of modernism is Ezra Pound’s exhortation to “make it new!” such a demand strictly coincides with fashion’s “way”: its need for constant change. And if rupture, fluctuation, surprise seem to be the rule of fashion, it is also true that its present is often built on the past, while tentatively guessing at the future. In an age of persistent self-referentiality, even of narcissism, however, past, present, and fu-

ture tend to blur in an endless process of recycling, of hyperbolic déjà vu.2 While showing Walter Benjamin’s “eternal return of the new” that “stirs in the thickets of long ago” (through “the tiger’s leap into the past”), fashion lately presents the eternal return of the same.3 In 1827, the Italian poet and thinker Giacomo Leopardi imagined a dialogue between Fashion and Death. In it, Fashion, running incessantly with Death, calls him sibling, as they are both born of Transience. She reminds him that she too compels humankind not only to bear all sorts of toil, grief, and pain but even to die for her sake. After listing all she does in regard to beards, hair, clothes, furniture, buildings—just to mention a few of her fields of action—she succeeds in establishing a treaty of nonbelligerence with him. The profundity of this dialogue arises from the fact that, drawn into the territory of small changes where only what is external and insignificant counts, Death (and with him Time) is beaten. When neither the sense of an ending nor of Time’s continuity and finality reign any longer, there is no real and definitive Death. This is why Fashion tells Death that she has abolished the very concept of immortality (provided anyone would ever deserve it).4 And with it, implicitly, also the concept of Truth. Leopardi is the only Italian writer of prominence who probed the essence of fashion in the nineteenth century. A totally diƒerent view on the matter was expressed by subsequent French writers. In his Traité de la vie elegante (1830)—in which the rules and codes of recognition that the bourgeoisie of Louis Philippe’s government was trying to devise for itself are drawn up—Honoré de Balzac considers dress the most powerful symbol and expands on clothes as important signifiers. “The elegant life,” he comments, “excludes neither thought nor science: it consecrates them.” Mockingly, however, he maintains both that elegance can be acquired and that it is instinctive—which is the dandy’s belief. He even goes so far as to a~rm that the French Revolution was as much a debate about silk and cloth as it was about politics (a juxtaposition that may bring to mind the later story of the twenty yards of linen and the coat—raw material versus cultural product—with which Karl Marx would explain the meaning of surplus value). Given the extraordinary rise in France of the fashion phenomenon during the Second Empire, when

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Paris was established as the capital of haute couture, it is not surprising that some very important French artists pondered the subject of fashion. Those were the years when British-born Charles Frederick Worth triumphed with his compelling suggestions to the French nobility and the rich about how to dress. In The Painter of Modern Life (1863), Charles Baudelaire proclaims that fashion is the victory of beauty over nature because while the latter is ugly, rude, and vulgar, the former stems from reason, from calculation. For Baudelaire beauty consists “of an eternal invariable element” and “of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be . . . the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions.” But this “second element . . . the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the cake” is crucial.5 As beauty comes from the eƒort to reach the ideal through the historical, fashion, as clothes, pursues an abstract ideal and transforms the imperfect body into a sublime presence, so that body and dress become an indivisible totality. But as the magic of the ideal is transitory, fashion is the embodiment of the ephemeral. Its momentous apparition produces the ideal, but it can last only for a brief time. Thus the perpetual need for ever new fashions. Stéphane Mallarmé—who, under various feminine and masculine pseudonyms, edited eight installments of the fashion magazine La dernière mode (1874)—conceived of fashion as the goddess of appearance, as the beautiful woman who fleetingly appears in the streets of Paris, “en passant.”6 Dressed perfectly, but often with clothes intended to be worn only once, she is a short-lived beauty. Beauty for Mallarmé is to be found in the absolutely temporal. According to him only language can be entrusted to evoke the momentary appearance of beauty in fashion, to capture the essence of its creative process, and to give it a place beyond the immediate present. Mallarmé transformed/translated the sensory (visual and auditory) qualities of garments and fabrics into language. The fabrics, colors, textiles, forms, jewels he touched on in his notes and articles are rendered in delicately but precisely nuanced sounds and visual sensations: in poetic images. This succinct and limited panorama of nineteenth-century views of fashion is meant to show how deeply this complex social and cultural phenomenon interested writers, and especially poets, probably because dealing with (a concept of ) beauty, Fashion—a newcomer on the world scene, since it arose with the birth of mass society and haute cou-

CRISTINA GIORCELLI / 256

ture—intrigued them.7 Furthermore, implicitly (Leopardi) or explicitly (Baudelaire and Mallarmé), these writers must have perceived fashion to be connected to language, as it entailed a rhetoric. More, it could be used as a metaphor and even as a symbol. In sum, dress is a language, a social system of signs, that can speak of seduction, hatred, envy, tenderness—to mention just a few of the emotions it can elicit. It is a visual language equipped with a grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, as well as with idiomatic and slang expressions (as Alison Lurie maintains).8 In the twentieth century, fashion has been seen as a semiotic system that in some ways operates like language. As costume, a social phenomenon, fashion can be contrasted to clothing as langue is contrasted to parole (Ferdinand de Saussure). And it can be converted into language, into referents or signifieds (Roland Barthes). There is an ongoing debate, however, on this point. Some cultural theorists and anthropologists have underlined the diƒerences between fashion and language, pointing out that language needs and implies sociality, while fashion looks for a sociality that is only theatrical as it rejoices uniquely in itself. It does not really communicate, but it only imitates communication by exchanging “signs” without a message (Jean Baudrillard).9 For others, fashion is purely a metaphorical language, because it is highly arbitrary and ambivalent (Fred Davis).1 0 Still others view it as a network of messages rather than a means of creating messages because the context may subtly and profoundly change its signification (Grant McCracken).11 In spite of these diƒerent perspectives, for many cultural historians and psychologists fashion is “a modern mechanism for the fabrication of the self . . . a fulcrum for negotiating the meeting of internal and external worlds” and, as such, it involves an articulated relationship between Self and Other.1 2 If clothes are seen as linked to the structure of society, they “are of primary importance in social orientation in unfamiliar situations, serving as cues in impression formation and social perception.”1 3 It may be maintained that as language is the articulation of thought, clothing is an articulation of the body: it fragments and recomposes it. In the act of dressing up, people confront the reality of their bodies, while also registering the reality of their dispositions, expectations, and perspectives. Clothes can express roles and beliefs. One may go so far as to a~rm that

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fashion, as a symbolic code, may even precede language by revealing new social fluxes, new unrests, new behaviors. Clothes can also impose a demeanor by compelling their wearers to focus attention on the exterior world. As Mario Perniola maintains, clothes give human beings their anthropological, social, and religious identities, whereas nudity conveys only a deprivation, a lack.1 4 Clothes can be not only an intimate experience of the body and a public presentation of it,1 5 but, as constructions that surround the body, they may also change the relationship between the body and space—like architecture. (Not by chance, many fashion designers come from schools of architecture.) “Clothed bodies,” claims Dirk Lauwaert, “provide the law of distance. They regulate the approach, the first contact, the disposition of the one to the other. Clothing generates the spatial house rules for the body. . . . Just being clothed, one dramatises a space of one’s own and the space of the other. Clothing is a stage direction.”1 6 Today, in a visually oriented culture, fashion is approached through a number of venues: the evaluation of materials, of production processes, of manufacturing costs, of commercialization of products; fashion is studied by anthropology, psychology, semiotics, and sociology but also by philosophy, art history, economics, and politics. In the latter cases, it is analyzed through the lens of diƒerences within and between groups and societies. Because it is the “cultural construction of an embodied identity,”1 7 “none of us can escape fashion.”1 8 If one sees clothes as a means that allows people not to be but to become, not to be represented but to be presented, not to be defined but to be positioned, clothes talk of the ever-mobile relationship between the individual (in his/her actual or intentional goals) and the social.1 9 They talk both of one’s strength of will as well as of one’s attitude toward one’s community, toward one’s world. Clothes are at the intersection between body and culture because they may signal humankind’s necessity to express, to communicate. In Exchanging Clothes, the second volume of Habits of Being, as indeed in the first one, fashion as a cultural system is less of a focus, even if it cannot but be its implicit common denominator. Instead, mostly what is “worn” by bourgeois Western individuals of the last two centuries is taken into consideration. Like the others in this series, this vol-

CRISTINA GIORCELLI / 258

ume looks at the semantic valence of dress: its ability to speak out and speak up. Through their fabrics, cuts, colors, textures, patterns, shapes, the astute modulations of showing and concealing, clothes’ and accessories’ capacity to signify, to underline the characteristics of a character or a personality, is examined. In eƒect, clothes and accessories are treated in these essays as a means of delving into, exchanging and circulating, an identity: psychic, ethnic, and social, including gender identity. With Hélène Cixous one might say that clothes and accessories are not only a shield for the body but also its extension: “There is continuity between world, body, hand, garment. . . . Everything is continuous. It brims over the edges; the garment doesn’t stop short, doesn’t declare its boundaries, doesn’t gather in its frontiers. The gentle unbordering of fabrics, the terrestrial fabric, takes place in gradual, light changes of color and substance. Skin of the world.”2 0 Or one may go even further if, as with Quentin Bell, one is persuaded that “our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us to be entirely indiƒerent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.”2 1 If the body can be seen as the envelope of the self, all that dresses the body is its envelope. Given clothes’ complex meaning, the fundamental assumption shared by all the authors in this volume is that the language of clothes and accessories evokes a long shared cluster of images and associations.2 2 Clothes and accessories are seen in some of these essays as a means by which not only the body’s movement and expressiveness are enhanced (“dress is an embodied activity”), but also social or sexual stereotypes may be abandoned or reinvented.2 3 And this is because the clothed and accessorized body is “the physico-cultural territory in which the visible, perceivable performance of our outward identity takes place,” drawing on such elements as “gender, taste, ethnicity, sexuality, sense of belonging to a social group or, conversely, transgression.”2 4 Pondering clothes and accessories also makes vivid their usage for ambiguous, deliberately disconcerting, play. Because what dresses the body may also be a travesty, a disguise, it allows the individual to enter the exciting adventure of performing, of acting out a self according to a mood. The spectacular, theatrical, side of clothes and accessories is thus not to be denied and, with it, their sensual and/or erotic and even libidinal dimension. Whereas

259 / CODA

the sensual dimension is often at the basis of one’s act of dressing, the erotic one, as far as garments are concerned, specifically takes place (as Roland Barthes has argued) in intermittences,2 5 where “the garment gapes,” where “appearance-as-disappearance” is staged or when specific stimuli (such as corsets or high heels) are used for sexual arousal and turned into fetishes (as Valerie Steele and David Kunzle have debated).2 6 Employed in various communication media, including literature, one can claim with Clair Hughes that, besides contributing to the reality eƒect, lending “tangibility and visibility to character and context,” dress and accessories are a “material index of social, moral and historical change which helps us understand and imagine historical diƒerence.” They can also “illuminate the structure of [a] text, its values, its meanings or its symbolic pattern.”2 7 Anne Hollander has demonstrated that clothes in literature have a “power” that is “of much greater importance than that of other inanimate objects,”2 8 while John Harvey has maintained that they are “values made visible.”2 9 In novels closer to the present, dress and accessories can go so far as to “convey what it is like to wear, to observe, to ‘undergo’” them as well as to show how, because of them, characters’ sensory perceptions change.3 0 Giving significance to clothes’ and accessories’ semantic code (unstable as it is since it depends on a given historical context and it varies according to diƒerent social groupings) is the intention of the authors of these essays—aware as they are, however, that, as with any analysis, other and diƒerent meanings from the same or from other perspectives are always possible. “The attempt to view fashion through several diƒerent pairs of spectacles simultaneously—of aesthetics, of social theory, of politics—may result in an obliquity of view, even of astigmatism or blurred vision, but it seems that we must attempt it.”3 1 In postmodern society, one must also take into account the fact that, rather than transmitting information or a specific message, fashion is often in itself the information, the message, and therefore, clothes and accessories as signifiers have become more and more open to multiple interpretations. They have become a larger metaphor of our time—yet another of their many aspects that these essays circle and explore.

CRISTINA GIORCELLI / 260

NOTES

1. “Fashion” also means “according to the way of” (OED). It comes from the French word façon (way) that derives from the Latin facere that means “to do, to fabricate.” 2. Gilles Lipovetsky, “Art and Aesthetics in Fashion Society,” in The Power of Fashion: About Design and Meaning, ed. Jan Brand and José Teunissen, with Anne van der Zwaag (Arnhem: ArtEZ Press, 2006), 74. 3. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 263. Benjamin’s comment on fashion is found in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 1–2:677. 4. Giacomo Leopardi, “Dialogo della moda e della morte/Dialogue between Fashion and Death,” in Operette Morali: Essays and Dialogues, trans. Giovanni Cecchetti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 67–75. 5. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 3. 6. Mallarmé’s ideas on fashion are strongly indebted to Baudelaire’s, as this specific point shows. Let us not forget that Baudelaire had written a famous poem titled “A une passante.” 7. Fashion in Europe is believed to have started between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century among the aristocrats and the rich, when clothes of men and women began to be distinctly diƒerent and signal class, sex, and age. According to others, European fashion started with Louis XIV of France (1643–1715). 8. Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes (New York: Henry Holt, 1981). 9. Jean Baudrillard, “Fashion, or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code,” in Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage Publications, 1993), 94. 10. Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). 11. Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of the Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 12. Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans, eds., Fashion and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 2–3. 13. Kurt W. Back, “Modernism and Fashion: A Social Psychological Interpretation,” in Fashion Theory: A Reader, ed. Malcolm Barnard (London: Routledge, 2007), 399.

261 / CODA

14. Mario Perniola, “Between Clothing and Nudity,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 2, ed. Michel Feher et al. (New York: Zone, 1989), 237. 15. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1985). 16. Dirk Lauwaert, “Clothing and the Inner Being / Clothing is a Thing / Clothing and Imagination / Democratic Snobbery,” in Brand and Teunissen, Power of Fashion, 176. 17. Valerie Steele, “Letter from the Editor,” Fashion Theory 1 (February 1997): 1–2. 18. Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1997), 19. 19. Dirk Lauwaert, “Morality and Fashion,” in Brand and Teunissen, Power of Fashion, 17. 20. Hélène Cixous, “Sonia Rykiel in Translation,” in On Fashion, ed. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 95–96. 21. Quentin Bell, On Human Finery (London: Hogarth, 1976), 19. 22. Valerie Steele, “Fashion: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” in The Fashion Business: Theory, Practice, Image, ed. Nicola White and Ian Gri~ths (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 7–19. 23. Joanne Entwistle, “Addressing the Body,” Fashion Theory 1 (February 1997): 276; emphasis added. 24. Patrizia Calefato, “Fashion as a Sign System,” in Brand and Teunissen, Power of Fashion, 132. 25. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 9–10. 26. Valerie Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); David Kunzle, Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of the Corset, Tight Lacing, and Other Forms of Body Sculpture in the West (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982). 27. Clair Hughes, Dressed in Fiction (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 2, 6, 8. 28. Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 424. 29. John Harvey, Men in Black (London: Reaktion, 1996), 17 (quoted in Hughes, Dressed in Fiction, 2). 30. Hughes, Dressed in Fiction, 8. 31. Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 11.

CRISTINA GIORCELLI / 262

Contributors N E L LO B AR I L E

teaches sociology of cultural processes at IULM University in Milan, where he

is coordinator of the graduate program in creativity management. Among his books are Brand New World: Il consumo delle marche come forma di rappresentazione del mondo and Manuale di comunicazione, sociologia e cultura della moda. V I T T O R I A C . C A R AT O Z Z O L O

teaches fashion cultures at Sapienza, University of Rome. Her

principal areas of research are Italian fashion of the 1940s and 1950s and the “dressing design” of the 1970s. With Paola Colaiacomo she coauthored La Londra dei Beatles and Cartamodello: Antologia di scrittori e scritture sulla moda and coedited Mercanti di stile: La cultura della moda dagli anni ’20 a oggi. She is coauthor, with Maria Luisa Frisa and Judith Clark, of Simonetta: The First Lady of Italian Fashion, published as a catalog for an exhibition at the Galleria del Costume di Palazzo Pitti, a Fondazione Pitti Discovery project. AL I S I A G R AC E C H AS E

is associate professor of art history and visual culture at SUNY, College

at Brockport. Her research focuses on the visual representation of women in American art, film, and popular culture. She regularly reviews exhibitions for Afterimage: Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. CHAFIKA DIB-MAROUF

is a socioanthropologist and holds a doctorate in human sciences at

the École Pratique des Hautes Études and at Paris IV–Sorbonne. She taught at the University of Oran in Algeria and is now maître de conferences at Jules Verne University in Picardie, France. She published a book on dowry and women in Algeria, as well as many essays on women and Islam, and on marriage and litigiosity in cross-cultural family relations. She directed an

international research group on women, family, and society, and is now working on religious marriage in Islam, free unions, and new forms of polygamy in Algeria. CRISTINA GIORCELLI

is professor of American literature at the University of Rome Three,

where she chairs the Department of Euro-American Studies and supervises its PhD program. Her primary fields of research are nineteenth-century fiction (including Henry James, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, and Edith Wharton) and modernist poetry and prose (Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Willa Cather, Louis Zukofsky, and Denise Levertov). She is cofounder and codirector of the quarterly journal Letterature d’America and the editor of Abito e Identità. ANNE HOLLANDER

has written widely on the histories of art and clothing. Her many books

include the groundbreaking Seeing through Clothes, which established her as the leading theorist of the representation of clothing and material in art; Moving Pictures, on the relationship of cinema to painting; Sex and Suits, which traces the evolution of men’s attire; Fabric of Vision, the catalog of an exhibition she curated for the National Gallery in London; and the accompanying text for Richard Avedon’s last book, Woman in the Mirror. MARIUCCIA MANDELLI

(also known by her pseudonym, K R I Z I A ) is renowned for her fash-

ion based on research, creativity, project, and design. Founded on clean geometry, rich in cultural references and precise details, her fashion is characterized by the influence of modern and contemporary art and by a constant search for new materials, as well as by her famous plissé. At her first catwalk show in 1964, staged at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, she won the Fashion Critics Award, and she has since received many Italian and international prizes; exhibitions of her work are planned for museums in Paris, New York, and Tokyo. Her pseudonym is borrowed from Plato’s dialogue on feminine vanity. ANDREA MARIANI

is professor of American literature at the Gabriele d’Annunzio University

in Chieti-Pescara. He has published on several nineteenth-century American authors (including Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson) and on twentieth-century poets and prose writers. He edited six volumes of essays on gardens in the literary and artistic imagination, Riscritture dell’Eden. K ATA L I N M E D V E D E V

is associate professor in the Department of Textiles, Merchandising, and

Interiors at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on the social, political, and gendered aspects of dress and material culture. She has published widely on the history of dress in Hungary, Tanzania, and the United States.

CONTRIBUTORS / 264

L A U R A M O N TA N I

is a psychoanalyst in Rome. She has published several essays and translations

in Italian and international professional journals. In addition to her clinical work, her research addresses the liminal territory between philosophy and psychoanalysis, with a particular attention to Derridean diƒerence/diƒérance thematics. PA U L A R A B I N O W I T Z

is professor of English at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches

twentieth-century American political, literary, and visual cultures. She is the author of Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America and They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary. Her book Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism examines the noir sensibility within postwar American film, photography, and literature. KAREN REIMER

makes craft-based conceptual art, frequently involving language. Her recent

exhibitions have been at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, Oregon; Wallspace, New York; and School of Creative Arts, University of West England, Bristol. Her work is published in The Object of Labor; By Hand; and Contemporary Textiles, among other books. She is publications director at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and instructor in fiber and material studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. C R I S T I N A S C ATA M A C C H I A

is associate professor of American history at the University of Pe-

rugia. She studied at Sapienza, University of Rome, and received her PhD in American history from the University of Missouri–Columbia. She is the author of several books and essays, including the only biography of Nellie Bly published in Italy.

265 / CONTRIBUTORS