Floral headpieces designed by Joshua Werber
Leis designed by Lauren Liana Shearer
(For more details see Note [1] below)
It's highly likely that even before people thought to paint their faces and adorn themselves with handcrafted jewellery, they wore flowers, leaves, and twigs in their hair.
In other words, mankind's fetishistic obsession with stylising the body was born of his floraphilia and that which D. H. Lawrence contrasts with the rage of self-preservation; namely, a will to excess via which we spaff our resources, with no thought for the morrow, and seek our own blossoming into splendour: "If this excess were missing, darkness would cover the face of the earth." [2]
It's heartening, therefore, to discover that the tribal peoples of the Omo Valley in Ethiopia still love to wear floral garlands, make shaggy wigs from dried grasses and headcoverings from giant leaves. If there's a practical reason for this - protection from the sun, for example - or perhaps a sacred-symbolic motivation, it's undoubtedly done primarily for the sheer pleasure of looking good and becoming-poppy.
And it's this same pleasure in transforming ourselves with elements of the natural world that we find in the sophisticated world of fashion. As the journalist Ligaya Mishan notes:
"Decorating ourselves with flowers may be one of the few things that still unites us as humans, as one tribe across the world - our capacity to transform ourselves with nothing more than a handful of fallen petals; to find, in a bloom slipped behind an ear, glory." [3]
Notes
[1] The model on the left in the above picture wears a headpiece of aspidistra leaves and lily of the valley, paired with leis made of white crown flowers and scarlet Ixora blossoms. The model on the right, meanwhile, is wearing a crown of dracaena leaves and purple clematis, with leis strung with octopus tree berries, Sodom’s apple and ice plant. Photo: Gosha Rubchinskiy. Styled by Mel Ottenberg.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 11.
[3] Ligaya Mishan, 'The Power of Wearing Flowers', New York Times (Feb 16, 2018): click here.
