As I pointed out in a sister post to this one, the belief in the power of enchanted clothing has deep roots in magic, mythology, and the popular imagination. Everyone has something that they like to wear for luck or to feel good about themselves; or something designed to capture the admiration of strangers.
And that includes artistic genius and showman Salvador Dalí who, in a 1936 Paris exhibition of Surrealist Objects (designed to transfigure and transform everyday things), submitted his veston aphrodisiaque or, as it is known in English, Aphrodisiac Jacket.
The jacket - which reinforces me in the view that the most interesting Surrealist works were not those confined to the canvas - came with over six dozen shot glasses filled with crème de menthe (believed to be a mild aphrodisiac as well as a digestif). Each drink also had a dead fly floating in it. Nice.
Dalí instructed that the jacket should ideally be worn for outings on evenings when the weather was calm, but pregnant with human emotion; "provided that the person wearing it be transported in a very powerful machine travelling very slowly (in order not to upset the liqueurs)".
Visitors to the exhibition were invited to take a drink if they wished (straws were supplied by the artist) and also encouraged to top up the glasses, thereby making it not only a wonderfully wearable work of art, but an amusingly interactive one (provided you didn't swallow the fly).
And that includes artistic genius and showman Salvador Dalí who, in a 1936 Paris exhibition of Surrealist Objects (designed to transfigure and transform everyday things), submitted his veston aphrodisiaque or, as it is known in English, Aphrodisiac Jacket.
The jacket - which reinforces me in the view that the most interesting Surrealist works were not those confined to the canvas - came with over six dozen shot glasses filled with crème de menthe (believed to be a mild aphrodisiac as well as a digestif). Each drink also had a dead fly floating in it. Nice.
Dalí instructed that the jacket should ideally be worn for outings on evenings when the weather was calm, but pregnant with human emotion; "provided that the person wearing it be transported in a very powerful machine travelling very slowly (in order not to upset the liqueurs)".
Visitors to the exhibition were invited to take a drink if they wished (straws were supplied by the artist) and also encouraged to top up the glasses, thereby making it not only a wonderfully wearable work of art, but an amusingly interactive one (provided you didn't swallow the fly).
Note: readers interested in the sister post to this one - on Icelandic necropants - can click here.
Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this post (though I suspect he might have wished for more details on the paranoiac-critical aspects of the jacket).
Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this post (though I suspect he might have wished for more details on the paranoiac-critical aspects of the jacket).
