Westwoodiana: Carnivalesque

"Ne clochez pas devant les boyteus." (Rabelais, Gargantua)

Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that the Renaissance carnival temporarily upended the notion of church and state as ideological governing bodies, giving way to a fruitful period of conscious Pyrrhonism. Thus, the intellect was liberated from religious, political, and moral strictures and given the freedom to explore skepticism and to engage in forward philsophical inquiry.

Bakhtin advanced a literary trope known as "carnivalesque," in which the principles of intellectual liberation viz the carnival tradition had as logical rejoinder a rejection of stale patterns. A defining feature of the carnivalesque in literature was the ad hoc social statement.

By the 1970s, England had spent nearly 30 years climbing out of the ashes of World War Two. The cradle-to-grave protectorate platform of the 1945 Labour Party was seeping through the cracks of economic and population growth; what had been seen as restorative and affirmational was now seen as a stodgy reflection of a quaint England that could not hold up a mirror to the modern world.

Into this social dialectic stepped Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, who in 1971 opened a shop selling records and clothing to Teddy Boys. When McLaren grew bored with selling to that subculture, he conceptually rebranded and changed the shop's name to SEX. Both McLaren and Westwood then set about rejecting the English value system by way of exploring design themes McLaren had encountered on the streets of New York.

SEX integrated underground fetish wear with street fashion, setting forth what would become one of the key tenets of the nascent punk movement: traditional sexual congress belonged to Churchill's doddy old England and was itself the repellent and outmoded act. At SEX, Westwood and McLaren sold latex attire wholly derived from the kinky side of the sexual spectrum. It was then that the store's manifesto began to express the concept of the carnivalesque, an idea that reached its fullest articulation with the punk movement and the reconfiguration of SEX into Seditionaries.

The punk movement in England grew out of perceived stagnation in the political and artistic climates, coupled with a burgeoning restlessness and hostility towards the status quo. Although Westwood's career has always rested on an educational and elucidating foundation, with the punk movement she was at her most didactic.

"Don't limp before the lame" seems an apt phrase to describe the political message in the punk credo, which Westwood's designs carried to the eagerly disaffected English youth. Nihilistic messages savaged gentility and the English way, mocked it, and threw dung in its face, the latter much as Bakhtin observed in the works of Rabelais.

Punk was an emotionally affordable mindset available to all, but most especially to those who refused connection with the cradle-to-grave welfare system philosophy. The most famous of the punk clothing designs and emblems--the bondage pants and the safety-pinned Queen--are only a fraction of the dichotomous catalogue of Seditionaries'-era Westwoodiana. In bondage, Westwood investigated both imprisonment and liberation, anticipation and disappointment; with the message"DESTROY" she gave a generation of alienated youth the responsibility of creating a new order out of chaos, giving them permission to first take up and then abandon arms. This was the true realization of the carnivalesque in the context of Westwood's work, and one that is in the present too often glossed over as a mere cartoony trend without full appreciation for the apparel's semantic narrative.


Image: Amor Vincit Omnia by Caravaggio, punked.
Link: Seditionaries