On the Erotics and Etiquette of Wearing Gloves

Jean Patchett by Erwin Blumenfeld 
Variant of US Vogue cover (May 1949)

I.

I'm just old enough to remember a time when respectable women (including my mother) still wore gloves as a matter of course; not just as an elegant fashion accessory to be matched with hat and shoes - nor simply to protect the hands - but as a sign of culture, discipline and breeding. 

Gloves encoded a set of values. They were worn to display one's knowledge of (and conformity to) a complex series of social norms governing polite behaviour.

In other words, the wearing and - just as importantly - the removal of gloves was a question of etiquette, belonging to a wider politics of style. If one wanted to look just the ticket, then one was obliged to follow a whole series of (often unwritten) dos and don'ts.

These rules can briefly be summarised as:

Don't leave the house without gloves; whether attending a formal reception, a garden party, a church service, or simply popping down to the shops, gloves should be worn at all times. However, don't eat, drink, or smoke with gloves on - and don't play cards or apply makeup wearing gloves either. Note also that, with the exception of bracelets, jewellery should never be worn over gloves.

Finally, whilst it is perfectly acceptable to shake hands wearing gloves, they should be removed if the other person is clearly of a higher status (such as the Queen). But, when removing gloves in public, one should always do so discreetly and not as if performing a striptease of the hand.

This final point brings us on to what might be termed the erotics of the glove ...

II.

For the amorous subject, the erotics of the glove (a sign of high culture) is often tied to the pleasure of glimpsing naked female flesh (a sign of base nature) exposed between two edges. In other words, it's "the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing" which they find arousing.

Long black evening gloves, for example, which reach over the elbow but not as far up as the armpit, have an analogous function and provoke a similar frisson of excitement to black stockings; they do for the arms of the woman wearing them what the latter do for her legs.

Of course, there are fetishists who love gloves in and of themselves and couldn't care less about glimpsing the flesh or intermittence; their concern is with the length, style, colour and - often most crucially of all - the material of the glove (be it leather, silk, cotton, or latex).

For the sophisticated pervert, the devil is always in the detail (and the object) - not the beauty or the wholeness of woman as created by God.

See: Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 10.

This post is for Tim Pendry who suggested it.

Mr. Erbil: Revolt into Style

Members of Mr. Erbil Gentleman's Club

Photo by Hugo Passarello Luna

I.

Some stories are just too perfect to be true: and the story of Mr. Erbil - a Kurdish gentleman's club spreading positive socio-cultural change via sartorial elegance - is one such story. For theirs is a genuine revolt into style that demonstrates the importance of fashion in the never-ending struggle with fundamentalism and militant stupidity (of whatever shade or stripe).

London hipsters should, I think, take note and learn from these Kurdish dandies that it's not only important to dress well and look good with lovingly-trimmed beards, one must also endeavour to construct an ethical life. In other words, as the chaps at The Chap have always rightly insisted, the key thing is to expand your mind at the same time as refining your wardrobe.
  
  

II.

While the autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq was somewhat sheltered from the war, in 2016 the black flag waving lunatics of Islamic State descended from Mosul and onto its borders. Most young men - and many women - joined the Kurdish military (Pashmerga) ready to fight not only for their way of life, but their very lives.

Obviously, armed resistance was absolutely crucial. But a small group of friends who liked to talk clothes and football over tea and shisha, realised the importance of also displaying cultural defiance in the face of an enemy that despises art, fashion, beauty and joie de vivre. And so, Mr. Erbil was founded, cleverly mixing Western styles with their own history and heritage.  

Starting with an Instagram page, they soon established a large following across social media and grew to over thirty members. They also launched their own line in men's grooming products and began to advocate for women's rights and equality across the Middle East (female activists and artists were invited to address events held in Erbil).

One can but admire and respect the founders and members of Mr. Erbil and send them the very warmest of fraternal greetings.

Notes

Mr. Erbil can be followed via: Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

For an excellent feature on Mr. Erbil in The Chap (13 Dec 2017) by freelance photojournalist Elizabeth Fitt, with pictures by Mustafa Khyat and Shwan Blaiye, click here.

This post is for my beautiful friend Nahla Al-Ageli at Nahla Ink. 

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).

On Mini-Skirts and Morality in Africa

A young woman modelling a mini-skirt 
with an African print: what's not to love? 
laviye.com

Someone wrote to ask why it is I often return to the topic of fashion which, in their view, is both besides the point and after the fact and thus, ultimately, an irrelevance. Surely, they say, there are far more important things to write about than shoes, mini-skirts and stocking tops.

Obviously, as a passionate exponent of a philosophy on the catwalk which is primarily concerned with a politics of style and the interplay between art and popular culture that fashion exemplifies, I don't agree with this. And so, here's another post that demonstrates how and why clothes are a crucial concern and the body - particularly the female body - remains a battleground around the world ...

Back in the sixties, the question of hemlines and morality in wake of the mini-skirt was an issue that exercised many minds. Nowhere more so than in Africa, where those newly in positions of authority saw Mary Quant's creations as fundamentally un-African and believed them to be yet another example of the West's corrupting influence, particularly on young, urban, independent women who were susceptible not only to fashion, but to feminism.     

Such women, who felt liberated by wearing mini-skirts and earning their own income, were branded as prostitutes and as witches who drained phallocratic society of its vital energy. They were subject not only to verbal abuse, but often serious physical violence.

In Tanzania, for example, the ruling party launched a campaign targeting what it regarded as indecent clothing. Gangs of youths patrolled the streets on the lookout for girls they deemed to be inappropriately dressed. Similar attacks on women wearing mini-skirts also took place in Ethiopia, one of which resulted in a riot that caused at least fifty people to be injured.     

In Malawi, meanwhile, president Kamuzu Banda, described mini-skirts as a fashion that was diabolic in origin and which he intended to completely eradicate from his homeland. Kenneth Kaunda, president of Zambia, agreed; citing the mini-skirt and apartheid as the two great evils.

One might have hoped that things would be different in Africa today. But, alas, with the increase and spread of religious stupidity - both Christian and Islamic in origin - things have, if anything, only got worse for those women who would otherwise love to show off their legs. Early this century, for example, idiots in Uganda called for a ban on mini-skirts worn in public, claiming that they were a dangerous distraction to (male) drivers. (To be fair, this is at least conceivable.)

More seriously, cases of women being stripped and beaten by gangs of men acting as both morality police and fashion critics continue to be reported in numerous countries including Kenya, Sudan, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Happily, groups of astonishingly courageous women have staged defiant mini-skirt protests in which they demand the right to dress as they please and to be afforded legal protection from violence.      

The irony, of course, is that the notions of deceny that are being defended are arguably more un-African than the alien fashions and other cultural expressions that are so feared. I would suggest that those gripped by a post-colonial determination to be free of foreign influence might want to conduct a genealogy of morals, rather than just dabble with dress codes ...     

Note: those interested in an alternative take on the politics of the mini-skirt in Africa might like to see an article from 2014 by the Kenyan blogger Owaahh: click here.

On Black Dandyism (With Reference to the Case of Jean-Michel Basquiat)

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 - 1988) 

The New York Times Magazine (10 Feb 1985)

"Being a black man", says Ekow Eshun, "means being subject to the white gaze". 

But if that means becoming an object of prejudice, suspicion and negative stereotype, so also does it mean becoming an object of fascination and, indeed, admiration. Certainly when it comes to the crucial question of style, it would simply be churlish to deny that many black men possess it to a high degree and fully understand its importance as a politics of resistance.

Indeed, without wishing to appear full of self-loathing or a sense of racial inferiority, I know exactly what Adam Ant means in Kings of the Wild Frontier when he says that for those of us with pale skin - even when we're healthy and our colour schemes delight - down below our dandy clothes we remain a shade too white.        

And so, whilst there are plenty of good-looking, very elegantly dressed white men in the world, the dandyism of the black man always seems to have something extra; to be that bit sexier and more provocative; to be invested with attitude (which is why the idea of a black actor playing James Bond isn't as outlandish as some suggest - it could only add a certain frisson to the character). 

This is exemplified in the above photo of Jean-Michel Basquiat on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 1985; arguably the greatest artist of the late-twentieth century, he was certainly the most fashionable.

Pictured here in one of the Armani suits in which he loved to work, Basquiat knows that dandyism is, at its most interesting, not merely a method of flaunting one's individual beauty, but of flouting social conventions governing ideas of class, race, gender and sexuality; a means of saying fuck me and fuck you at one and the same time. 

To be clear: it's not what he's wearing, but how he's wearing it that matters; with barefoot insouciance, completely unconcerned about the fact that the expensive suit is paint-spattered (for he knows he still looks clean) and "confounding expectations about how black men should look or carry themselves in order to establish a place of personal freedom: a place beyond the white gaze, where the black body is a site of liberation rather than oppression" ...

In other words, black styles matter ...

See: Ekow Eshun, 'The subversive power of the black dandy', The Guardian, (04 July 2016): click here to read online. 

See also: Shantrelle P. Lewis, 'Black Dandyism is Back, and It's Both Oppositional Fashion and Therapy at Once', How We Get to Next (30 Sept 2016): click here. 

To read The New York Times Magazine feature on Basquiat, 'New Art, New Money', by Cathleen McGuigan, click here.  

Note: the first large-scale exhibition in the UK of the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat is currently showing at the Barbican (London) and runs until 28 Jan 2018: click here for details. 

On the Malign/ed Art of Faking It (Part III) - A Guest Post by Thomas Tritchler

Cover of the 2010 Penguin edition of 
Wilde's 1891 essay 'The Decay of Lying'

The Romantics understood that all poetic mendacity begins in childhood, which is why children should be extravagantly rewarded for their relentless pleasure in confabulations of all kinds; from invisible friends to self-incriminating fibs. 

But adult pretension matters too, for, as Dan Fox has succinctly argued in a valuable piece for 'Frieze Magazine', pretension is a form of pretending - and pretending can be extremely productive.

Thus, in contrast to the cynic's inability to see beyond affectation, charlatanism, and self-aggrandizement in such matters, the idealist perceives an innocent, adventurous and sometimes tragicomic excess of ambition over attainment - something Fox suggestively correlates to Susan Sontag's depiction of camp as a 'sensibility of failed seriousness'. 

The melted wings of Icarus depict the tragic potentiality of the soul's imaginative flights, not a mythological excuse never to test one's creative limits. If we remember that the Greek word for actor was hypokrites, then it becomes apparent how the thirst for such performative slippages between who we are and would like to be, is woven into the West's cultural DNA.

What is needed - I am suggesting - is the pursuit of a strategic (if not satanic) reversal of the hypothetical value of our key terms. Like Brian Eno, we should turn the word 'pretentious' into a compliment and move beyond the mistaken assumption that there are authentic individuals and others who simply pretend to be something they're not. As a matter of fact, to fake it, is probably the most creative - and important - thing we might do. For it's the way in which we learn about art and experiment with becoming-other     

Further, if the accusation of pretentiousness essentially rests on the idea of people getting above themselves, it is also not hard to follow Fox into regarding the politics of pretence as implying a kind of informal class surveillance. He is right, I think, to highlight the corrosive snobbery embedded in both historical and contemporary England, with its craven obsessions with rank, accent, and the cynical coalition between sex and social exploitation. 

At the same time, even in toxically class-conscious Britain, we should not make the mistake of confining the codices of class to a socio-economic integer rather than an ontological domain. From whatever walks of life, there is a self-selecting unnatural order of romantics, outlaws, aliens and poseurs - let us call them the constituency of the counterfeit - who refuse the rat-race of reality, whose experimental aesthetics configure the vectors of artistic escape and who understand, in a much over-used phrase, that all style is risk. 

In conclusion, we might do well to remember Wilde's words in 'The Decay of Lying', spoken by the decadent aesthete, Vivian, sworn enemy of the old, the conventional, and the well-informed: 

"Many a young man starts life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful." 

Thomas Tritchler is a poet and critical theorist based in Calw, Germany. He has written and researched extensively on a wide range of authors, including Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Ted Hughes and Jean Baudrillard, and on topics including Romanticism, the Holocaust, and the politics of evil. He has recently worked with the Berlin-based art cooperative Testklang.   

Thomas Tritchler appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for his kind submission of a lengthy text written especially for this blog, edited into three separate posts for the sake of convenience.