D. H. Lawrence: The Reluctant Fashion Beast

 D. H. Lawrence in 1915 modelling his Edwardian 

hipster look complete with velveteen jacket

 National Portrait Gallery, London 

(NPG x140423)

 

I.

 

The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts (2020) is a big, heavy hardback book - over 440 pages divided between 28 essays, written by 27 different authors - so pretty much impossible to read from start to finish. 

 

Thus, once having read the Introduction, one begins to cruise the text, searching out those essays and those authors most likely to give pleasure. Let's begin with Judith Ruderman's essay on the importance in Lawrence's work of clothing and jewellery (though note that I'll not be discussing the latter here) ...

 

 

II.

 

Ruderman says that Lawrence's views on fashion are complex (sometimes contradictory) and often need to be discussed in relation to his other concerns to do with art, sex, and society. That's certainly true. In fact, it could be argued that the Lawrentian call for a revaluation of all values is founded upon a revolt into style: "Start with externals, and proceed to internals" [1], as he puts it. 

 

Unfortunately, however, this statement merely reveals Lawrence's metaphysical naivety. For there are no internals to which we might proceed and outer form or appearance is not expressive of inner essence or substance; things have no concealed reality. The secret of life revealed by dandyism - conceived by Foucault as a critical ontology and philosophical ethos beyond the dualism of inside/outside - is that it has no secret.

 

Thus, what's ironic - Ruderman's word - is not that "an author infamous for having his characters shed their clothes actually paid a great deal of close attention to what they are wearing" [2], but that an author who cared so much about fashion seems not to have grasped its deconstructive  logic. 

 

Strolling along the Strand in brave feathers - which for Lawrence means wearing "tight scarlet trousers fitting the leg, gay little orange-brown jackets and bright green hats" [3] - isn't simply to defy dreary social convention and sartorial dullness, it's to declare that one is Greek in the Nietzschean sense - i.e.,  superficial out of profundity [4].

 

Another thing that Ruderman highlights is Lawrence's fascination for strikingly colourful clothing. And it's true, he did favour fabulous - some might say garish - colour combinations in his battle against the drabness of those he calls the grey ones. And whilst I'd probably feel a little uncomfortable in some of the gay outfits Lawrence proposes, they would certainly have delighted Oscar Wilde, who wrote:

 

"There would be more joy in life if we could accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful colours we can fashioning our own clothes. The dress of the future, I think, will [...] abound with joyous colour.” [5]

 

Maybe, Oscar, maybe ... Though as all fashionistas and "naturally exquisite people" [6] - from Mrs Morel to Coco Chanel - know, ultimately, there's nowhere to go but back to black, which paradoxically, is the negation of all colour whilst also the most vital of colours. Sometimes, even Lawrence comes close to admitting this, when, for example, he talks of dark gods and the invisible black sun. 

 

But, push comes to shove, when it comes to clothes, Lawrence prefers sensible blues and browns and home-knit socks. What's more, he often sneers at truly fashionable people (who frighten and repulse him), openly disparaging haute couture. As Ruderman reminds us, although like other modernist writers he was happy to have his pieces published in Vogue, "being 'smart' in the Vogue sense was anathema to him" [7] - full of what he described as the vanity of the ego.      

 

That's why, despite his fetishistic fascination with clothes - particularly stockings - I think we can characterise Lawrence as a reluctant fashion beast or closeted dandy; one who is slightly ashamed of his own love for and knowledge of clothes and who regards those who always dress to impress as affected and a bit show-offy [8]. 

 

Ruderman concludes: 

"Fashion for Lawrence is best adopted as a hallmark of transformation and revitalisation: not for the sake of impressing others, but, rather, for expressing the self at any given moment in time. [...] As a 'rare bird' among men [...] Lawrence appreciated fashion, but with caveats and contradictions. That Lawrence's attitudes towards this subject are complex and evocative only highlights how they are intricately woven into the fabric of the life and art of a very complicated man." [9]

I agree with that and would only add that Lawrence's appreciation of fashion isn't all that rare amongst male writers; indeed, some of the most insightful meditations on clothes have come from our poets, novelists, and philosophers - from Baudelaire to Roland Barthes. Even Kant, when mocked for wearing silver-buckled shoes, replied: Better to be a fool in fashion, than a fool out of fashion ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Red Trousers', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 138.  

[2] Judith Ruderman, 'Clothes and Jewellery', The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 371.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Red Trousers', Late Essays and Articles, p. 138. 

[4] See section 4 of the preface to the second edition of Nietzsche's The Gay Science. For Nietzsche, living courageously in the Greek manner requires remaining at the surface at the level of folds, adoring appearance, believing in forms, etc.

      Of course, the desire to become-Greek isn't the only logic of fashion; it is also motivated by the desire to become new (to constantly change one's look). To his great credit, Kant realised that fashion has nothing to do with aesthetic criteria (i.e. that it's not a striving after beauty); in this respect his writings on fashion are rather more modern than those of Baudelaire.

      The key point is that fashion seeks to make an object superfluous as quickly as possible. It does not seek to improve an object, which is why there is no ideal of progress within the world of fashion; a short skirt is not an advance on a long one. As Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen writes: "Fashion does not have any telos, any final purpose, in the sense of striving for a state of perfection [...] The aim of fashion is rather to be potentially endless, that is it creates new forms and constellations ad infinitum." See Fashion: A Philosophy, trans. John Irons, (Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 29.  

[5] Oscar Wilde, 'The House Beautiful', in the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, (Harper Collins, 1994), p. 923. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 151. Quoted by Judith Ruderman, op. cit., p. 371.

 

[7] Judith Ruderman, op. cit., 377.

 

[8] As Ruderman reminds us, in 'Education of the People' Lawrence sneers at the modern woman who follows fashion and "wants to look ultra-smart and chic beyond words", creating an effect on those around her. See D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 152. Quoted by Ruderman, op. cit., p. 381. 

 

[9] Judith Ruderman, op. cit., pp. 381-82.  

On the Politics of Lipstick

Victory Red lipstick by Elizabeth Arden

 No lipstick will win the war. But it symbolises why we're fighting. 

I.

Can we ever maintain a pure distinction between aesthetics and politics? I don't think so. In fact, it seems to me that questions to do with art, fashion, and the extraordinary profusion of forms and ideas belonging to modern culture are always at the same time questions to do with power and ways of living in the world; what I would term philosophical questions.       

And so, the question of cosmetics, for example, is just as important as a question concerning the economy. Examining our own thinking and discourse around the simple act of wearing lipstick allows us not merely to stage a strategic engagement with historical fascism, but to confront also the molecular fascism that exists in us all.   

In a preface to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault asks: How does one keep from being fascist? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? It isn't easy. But there are a number of things one can do (or not do) and a number of things one needs to watch out for.

For example, it's wise to exercise caution before exclusively tying an ideal of Beauty to Nature and to Truth (and thus also to the Good). It doesn't necessarily make you a Nazi if you do so and believe chapped lips have some kind of transcendental superiority - it might mean, rather, that you're a Platonist, a puritan, or simply a sad militant always on the lookout for signs of decadence - but it's not coincidental that the Nazis did precisely this ... 


II.

As soon as they gained power in 1933, the Nazis not only started to prepare for war and to persecute the Jews, they also attempted to control every aspect of women's lives, including how they looked.

Although Hitler wanted German women to be the best-dressed in Europe, trousers were out (too unfeminine) and so was the use of fur in fashion (too cruel). He also disapproved of hair dye, thought perfume disgusting, and hated makeup - particularly lipstick, which he never tired of telling everyone was made from waste animal fat.

For the Führer, the fashions coming out of Paris, pioneered by designers like Chanel, encouraged an unnaturally slender (boyish-looking) silhouette; that was no good, as he wanted German women to be physically robust breeding sows; all hips and tits and no cigarettes, paint, or powder. Aryan beauty would be wholesome, clean, and fresh-faced; the antithesis of that artificial and androgynous look favoured by the Neue Frauen parading around Berlin during the Weimar period.    

Thus it was that the Allies - whether they liked it or not - were obliged to affirm the use of cosmetics. If loose lips sunk ships, then painted red lips would provide the kiss of death to the Third Reich. 

British women, therefore, applied makeup  - even though it became an increasingly scarce commodity traded on the black market - as a patriotic duty. It was what we might term an essential non-essential and even government officials realised that lipstick mattered as much to women as tobacco mattered to men.  

American girls - including those serving in the armed forces or working on factory lines - also continued to wear their lipstick with pride in order to retain their femininity, boost morale, and stick it to Hitler. Shades including Victory Red and Fighting Red were created by cosmetic companies such as Elizabeth Arden keen to do their bit for the war effort.

Feminists still celebrate J. Howard Miller's iconic figure of Rosie the Riveter, but it's often overlooked that she always had perfect makeup and never surrendered her right to be glamorous as well as strong and free.         

See: 

Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. xi-xiv. 

Marlen Komar, 'Makeup and War Are More Intricately Connected Than You Realized', Bustle (28 Oct 2017): click here to read online.

Sandra Lawrence, 'Beetroot and boot-polish: How Britain's women faced World War 2 without make-up', The Telegraph (3 March 2015): click here to read online.

Elizabeth Nicholas, 'The Little-Known Lipstick Battle of World War II',  Culture Trip (14 June 2018): click here to read online.

Jane Thynne, 'Fashon and the Third Reich', History Today (12 March 2013): click here to read online. 

Note: this post was written in response to a series of comments on an earlier post on lips and lipstick: click here. 

Rocking the Lobster Look with Elsa Schiaparelli, Salvador Dalí and Cosmo Kramer

Lobster evening dress by Elsa Schiaparelli in collaboration with Salvador Dalí

Michael Richards as Cosmo Kramer in Seinfeld wearing his lobster shirt 

I.

The surreal genius of Michael Richards as Cosmo Kramer in Seinfeld is not to everyone's taste. In fact, of the four central characters I find Kramer the least interesting and sympathetic. But I do like his comic hipster dress sense, including the short-sleeved white lobster shirt with red print.   

I don't know from where the character drew his sartorial inspiration, but it's nice to think that this particular item is an hommage to the work of the great Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, who had a penchant for marine crustaceans with their hard protective shells and soft insides, particularly lobsters, which appear in several of his iconic works, including a dress made in collaboration with the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli ...       

II.

If Coco Chanel ever had a serious rival, it was Elsa Schiaparelli - one of the most fabulous figures in fashion between the wars, whose designs displayed the influence of several prominent artists, including Dalí and Jean Cocteau, though it should be noted that her great inspiration and teacher was master couturier Paul Poiret.

Punk rockers may be amused to discover, for example, that it was Schiaparelli - and not McLaren and Westwood - who first made clothes with visible zips as a key element of the design. She also loved to experiment with synthetic materials, unusual buttons and outrageous decorative features. It was her designs produced in collaboration with Dalí, however, that remain amongst her best known, including the so-called Lobster Dress of 1937.*

As can be seen from the above photo, the dress was a relatively simple white silk evening dress with a crimson waistband and featuring a large lobster - painted by Dalí - on the skirt. Whilst not as amusing as his Lobster Telephone created the year before, the dress - famously worn by Wallis Simpson - is just as provocative I think, bringing surrealist elements of eroticism and cruelty into haute couture (for Dalí, lobsters invariably symbolised sex and suffering). ** 

Notes

* The three other works that came out of the Schiaparelli-Dalí collaboration are the Tears Dress (1938), a pale blue evening gown printed with rips and tears and worn with a long veil; the Skeleton Dress (1938), a black crêpe number which used trapunto quilting to create ribs, spine, and leg bones; and the Shoe Hat (1937-38), which, as one might guess, is a hat shaped like a high heeled shoe.

** Two years later, at the New York World's Fair (1939), Dalí unveiled a multi-media experience entitled Dream of Venus, which featured semi-naked female models dressed in outfits made of fresh seafood, including lobsters used to cover their genitalia. See the photo below taken by German-American fashion photographer Horst P. Horst.

Surprise musical bonus: click here.

In Praise of the Bob

Louise Brooks with trademark shingle bob 
in The Canary Murder Case (1929)

As is evident throughout his work, D. H. Lawrence had a decided preference - I wouldn't quite say fetish - for long hair and beautiful women who liked to sit and brush their flowing locks in the sun: an action in which, according to Lawrence, we glimpse something divine; a manifestation of god, with the latter defined as a great creative urge towards being incarnate.   

Not surprisingly, therefore, Lawrence didn't approve of the fashion for bobbed hair. Not only were such cuts at odds with his sexual politics, but they presented him with theological problems too. Which is a shame, as the bob remains, in my eyes at least, one of the wonders of the modern world. Always contemporary and liberated-looking, the bob is sexy, stylish and subversive in its atheistic chic.    

Post-War, although still seen by many within the older generation as a sign of immorality and decadence rather than youthful independence, the bob became increasingly popular thanks to society beauties such as Lady Diana Cooper, trendsetters like the dancer Irene Castle, and, of course, movie stars, including Mary Thurman, Colleen Moore, and the iconic figure of Louise Brooks (everybody's favourite flapper).

By the mid-1920s, the bob in all its numerous versions, including my personal favourite, the so-called shingle bob - a cut that is tapered very short at the back thereby exposing the hairline at the neck, whilst the sides are formed into a single curl or point on each cheek - was the most sought after female style in the Western world (and beyond), as women everywhere signalled their modernity and rejection of traditional roles, norms and values.

As Coco Chanel once said: A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.   

 

Since then, the bob has passed in and out of fashion - but never out of style. In the mid-1960s, for example, Vidal Sassoon gave us his distinctive take on the cut. Whilst Uma Thurman's character, Mia Wallace, in Tarantino's 1994 cinematic masterpiece, Pulp Fiction, will forever be remembered for her ankle-cropped black slacks, crisp white shirt, and beautifully bobbed hair; she looks clean, she looks sharp, and she looks powerful.

In a word, she looks perfect ...         

Lipstick Traces: Lessons for Lucia

Lucia Pica photographed by Daniel Jackson 

Vogue (Sept 2015)

Like many people, when I heard a couple of years ago that Italian-born, London-based Lucia Pica had been appointed creative director at Chanel cosmetics, I was very happy for her and very hopeful of what we might expect; for she is undoubtedly a makeup artist with a bold and brilliant understanding of colour and unafraid of taking risks.

Expectations were further raised when it was revealed that her first collection for the label would in part be inspired by the work of Jean Baudrillard; that we could finally delight in nail polish and lipstick that pops with hyperreal playfulness.  

Unfortunately, however, if you take time to read interviews with Ms Pica, you discover that she subscribes to a disappointing model of aesthetic idealism, in which beauty is something essential and makeup merely a method of enhancement that should never be allowed to mask the natural character of a face, so that the real woman can shine through.

In other words, the ultimate personal expression is that of your own true self.   

Having resisted the urge to vomit, I'd like - at the risk of repeating what I've said elsewhere on this blog - to provide some lessons for Lucia on artifice and nature (and the nature of artifice), in relation to the question of Woman conceived in terms of style and seduction ...  

1. Woman is a myth activated through a system of signs encoded, for example, in art and fashion.

2. Those things which serve to construct her femininity, such as her shoes, her makeup and her lingerie, matter more than her biology. For whilst the latter determines her as a female belonging to a species of domestic animal, it does not determine her as a woman. In other words, her being is not naturally given; she is not born a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, but becomes such via culture.

3. Because of this, woman fully understands the need for illusion and defends the right to lie. She uses cosmetics not because she wishes to conceal an essence or a hidden reality beneath appearance, but because she has no inner self and only wants to make us think she does. To mistake the exceeding of nature for a crude camouflaging of the truth, is to commit a cardinal error. Makeup isn't false - it's the falser than false and so recuperates a kind of superior innocence.       

4. Further, via a confident and sophisticated use of clothes and cosmetics, a woman can strike a blow against the puritanical drabness of the world with its neutral tones and sensible footwear, rediscovering the power of witchcraft known as glamour. As Baudelaire writes:

"Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accomplishing a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. [...] It matters but little that [her] artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible."

5. If this means that woman risks surrendering to emptiness and reification on the one hand, whilst becoming commodified and fetishized on the other, this need not necessarily be such a bad thing; models, actresses and prostitutes, for example, have all cleverly turned their object status and vacancy into an art, exploiting what Walter Benjamin termed the sex appeal of the inorganic (i.e. that pale power of seduction and stillness founded upon the ecstasy of a blank gaze and a Pan Am smile).   

6. Finally, Lucia, you might like to consider how it is only at the symbolic level of appearances that systems become fragile and only via enchantment that the power and meaning of these systems becomes vulnerable. In other words, the idiosyncratic feminism of Coco Chanel - in which you profess an interest - needs to be understood as a politics of style that is all about a light manipulation of appearances, rather than a politics of desire and identity that still concerns itself with libidinal and psychological depths.

Why become fixated on true feelings and ontological foundations, when you can just add more lipstick and attack?

See:

Stephen Alexander, Philosophy on the Catwalk (Blind Cupid Press, 2011).

Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life' in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, (Phaidon Press, 2006).

Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer, (St. Martin's Press, 1990).

Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, (University of Chicago Press, 1979).

Fragments from a Dark History of Black Fashion (V-VII)

V.

The colour is black ... the seduction is beauty ... the aim is ecstasy ... the fantasy is death - or how fascism exerted its sartorial fascination ...

Initially, Mussolini seemed to have a better eye for fashion than Hitler; for clearly black shirts look so much better than brown! But the paramilitary thugs of the Sturmabteilung only wore brown shirts because a large number were available on the cheap following the end of the First World War and the fledgling Nazi Party had to watch the pfennigs. However, once in government and receiving the backing of big business - and once Röhm had been dealt with and the SA superseded by the SS - the Führer ensured that his Nazi elite were dressed to kill in a close-fitting, all-black uniform designed to make its wearer not only feel superior, but look supremely stylish.

Manufactured by Hugo Boss, the uniform was tailored to project malevolent authority and perpetuate the fascist aesthetization and eroticization of power. If many people felt sick with fear when they saw it, a significant number felt sexually aroused and the SS uniform has secured its place not only within the annals of terror, but the pornographic imagination.


VI.

In the post-War world of 50s youth culture, however, black - particularly the black leather jacket - became a symbol of individuality and rebellion; the colour of beatniks and bikers who didn't accept the established norms and values of society. In Paris, meanwhile, it was worn by Left-Bank intellectuals; painters, philosophers, writers, and über-cool performers such as Juliette Gréco, muse to Jean-Paul Sartre and lover of genius jazz musician Miles Davis.

The hippies who followed in the 1960s, with their love of psychedelic colours, tie-dyed clothing, paisley prints and floral patterns, subscribed to an almost anti-black rainbow aesthetic - one of the reasons that Malcolm McLaren despised them. But those within the punk movement of the mid-late 70s, shaped by McLaren in his own image, would again make black an emblematic colour. Finally, mention must be made of the post-punk goths and devotees of kink within the world of fetish fashion taking black outfits to a whole new level of perverse dark beauty.

VII.

According to Coco Chanel, a woman only needs three things to look elegant - and one of these three things is what has become known as the little black dress, a vision of which she published in Vogue in October 1926, radically changing women's fashion forever. After this date, a full-length gown might still be required for formal occasions, but, apart from these ceremonial social events, the LBD could be worn anywhere, anytime with the assurance that one would not be committing a faux pas and never not looking anything but chic, stylish, and sophisticated.

As Karl Lagerfeld has explained, black is the colour that goes with everything; if you're wearing black, you can't go wrong. Ultimately, black is fashion and fashion is black. And all those designers who suggest other colours upon which to build a wardrobe by declaring them to be the new black are basically fraudsters looking to push the latest trend and sell a few more frocks while they can. Hemlines rise and fall, accessories come and go, but the LBD is the essential must have item.           


Notes 

The image of the good-looking SS officer is by CainIsNotMyEnemy and can be found on Deviant Art by clicking here.

The photo of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly is a publicity shot for Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961); she is wearing a sheath little black dress, designed by Givenchy in Italian satin. 

Those interested in reading fragments I-IV of this dark history of black fashion should click here. 

Post 555: The Scent of a Woman

The number five has no special significance or interest for me, although I'm vaguely aware of its symbolism within certain circles and that ancient Greek philosophers were endlessly fascinated by the mathematical beauty and symmetry of those three-dimensional shapes (or regular polyhedra) that became known as Platonic solids and of which there are five. 

The French fashion designer and couturier, Coco Chanel, also had a thing for the number five and it was rich with powerful associations for her. Indeed, for Chanel, five was the essential number and one which, she felt, always brought her luck. Thus, for a woman who liked to regularly launch her new collections on the fifth of May, it was only natural that she should choose the name No. 5 for her first (and to this day most famous) of perfumes.

Created by Franco-Russian chemist and perfumer, Ernest Beaux, Chanel No. 5 was released in 1921 and was designed as a scent for a new generation and a new style of independent, post-War women, with their short skirts, bobbed hair, and outlandish behaviour that pushed social and sexual boundaries.

Beaux worked from a rose and jasmine base, but brilliantly managed to make it cleaner and more daring than might be expected, by adding what he described as an element of pristine polar freshness. He also experimented with modern synthetic compounds and notes derived from a new commercial ingredient called Jasophore (an artificial source of jasmine). His complex formula also contained elements of orris root and natural musks. The revolutionary key, however, was Beaux's use of aldehydes; organic compounds which, when skilfully manipulated, can arrest and isolate specific scents, intensifying their aroma.

The bottle that the fragrance came in was also designed to counter the overly-ornate character of Victorian crystal which was then still in fashion and made popular by companies such as Lalique. Chanel wanted a container that would be lovely in its sheer simplicity and pure transparency; what she thought of as an invisible bottle. The perfection of the scent itself, she believed, meant not having to rely upon fancy packaging. As an ad from 1924 put it: Chanel is proud to offer its precious teardrops of perfume - unique in composition and of incomparable quality - in bottles that reveal the personality of their designer and not the customary art of the traditional glass-maker.    

Over the many decades since its release, Chanel No. 5 has managed to retain its magic and its allure, establishing itself as an immediately identifiable cultural artifact, worn by many beautiful women the world over; this despite the fact that the reputation of its creator has been somewhat tarnished by ugly revelations concerning her conduct during the German occupation of Paris ...

A girl, Chanel once said, has to keep her heels, head, and standards high; always remaining classy and fabulous. Quite how that squares with Nazi collaboration is debatable. For as a friend of mine once said, even the finest perfume in the world doesn't mask the malodorous smell of fascism.