The City That Ate America

Popular--that is, Hollywood--history has it that Las Vegas originated as the intended magnum opus of Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, mobster, a man known more for murder than he was for empire-building. Before Siegel happened upon the desert city 270 miles to the east of Los Angeles (the story goes), Las Vegas was a baking sandpit of a place that just happened to have legalized gambling. The way Hollywood tells it, Vegas has a nearly Ruritanian feel to it, when you throw in Bugsy's moll, his peripateia, his hubris, and his Promethean struggles with the boys back home.

Let's throw fact to the wind and accept the Hollywood version of the origins of Las Vegas, the city that ate America. Bugsy Siegel's Hollywoodized vision of a playland in the desert has gone on to become the only American city that has both eclipsed itself and remained patriotically true to its original design.

Las Vegas is today's Great American City, a place that says more about the future than it does about the past. Any idea that America might still resemble Main Street, USA is quickly lost to the formless strip mall and walled housing development; a quixotic notion that fortunes are won and lost at the spin of a wheel is belied by the number of call centers and minimum wage jobs. Vegas is the shape of things to come, once everything else is torn down in the name of progress or dies of old age. Next time you're in Iowa and see a farm that has been replaced by a Wal*Mart and a Starbucks, you are looking 2020 right in the eye. Big Shot aside, Vegas is where you take tomorrow's thrill ride today.

In order for Vegas to become the new American city, it had to go through several expensive iterations. To reach the level of child-safe hedonism it has today, it had to endure an awkward period in the eighties where the only hedonism was the snap of elastic waistbands around overfed senior stomachs. A lot of money has gone into the new PR campaign, which bills Vegas as America's new back yard, an engineered environment of Disney-like diversions and replicas for those who want everything delivered with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk.

If it appears that Vegas takes and gives nothing in return, think again. Grossly overlooked is Vegas's great industrial product: the stripper. The stripper is the new girl next door, having become in a short decade a glorified pop culture icon whether or not she winds up a millionaire property developer. Although an exact history of how this occurred is impossible to parse, the bleed-through into cheap celebrity culture cannot be underestimated. Any society that lionizes tit jobs and Hef's pussy posse to the degree that we do was only one step away from making strippers the new Disney princesses and imbuing them with the family values central to our American belief system.

This is not to say that there is anything wrong with all-American initiative, even when the get-up-and-go is not American at all but Baltic. In fact, this is the beauty of America: we own the right to dream, goddamnit--and where better to play out the fantasy than on the glittering Vegas stage?

Stripper-type garments used to be nearly exclusive to Frederick's of Hollywood. Frederick's featured naughty French maid uniforms with assless skirts or cut-out bras that had zero in the way of support other than monetary. Today, Frederick's looks almost mainstream, its feckless clothing selection differing little from what you would find in a downscale mall in areas of the country that don't get any more elegant options.

Once strippers became the new girls next door, they went international, and then their stock in trade, the pole dance, became a new fitness option. Unlike aerobics, however, which can be done in any old sneaker, it is impossible to do proper stripper pole without a proper stripper shoe. Voilà: the Adore 708UV, whose main feature (other than 6.5 inch flamingo heel) is that it glows under black lights, along with any expensive dental work one might feature in one's mouth.

And they talk about a land of opportunity. And how.

Link: Booty Cocktails UV-reactive stripper shoe, $51.95

Some of Them Got Out Alive

I lived in Chelsea at the same time I had one pair of dance tights, and that pair of tights had a run in them that looked like the scar from a botched appendectomy. When inevitably another run would appear, I'd perform surgery on it as well, until someone at a dance shop offered to sell me a new pair for two dollars.

I broke the heel of my shoe on the way home. I had no change left for the bus.

I lived in Chelsea during the time period covered in the new book from Soul Jazz Records, New York Noise. New York Noise is a coffee-table book, a big, heavy thing that pictorially catalogues the confluence of art, music, film, and dance that occurred during the decade from 1978-1988.

When has Manhattan not been fertile? The question isn't one of fecundity, but rather of degree, and New York Noise makes a good case that the fertility of those years rivals anything before or since.

I'd gone to Manhattan to be a Broadway hoofer; I ended up doing Pinter on a fire escape, then I was a stylist, then I was a writer. Somewhere in there I sang, occasionally for a date-nut sandwich or a cheap steak dinner. It was a creative period where it was marvelous to be young (in my case, 19), hungry, and fearless. Undaunted, too.

The book graphically displays the shapeshifting you could do in those years: You could be a writer and a filmmaker and a painter, sometimes all at the same time, and tap dance on the night sky for all anyone cared, so long as you created. In utmost poverty, in a circle of cockroaches beating rhythm with their wings, no brothers to spare dimes or much else except the hot shared breath of art.

Of course this couldn't have occurred if surrounded by luxe anything; it's all for the better stuffed with a nose full of snot against yet another gray winter and a blizzard of unpaid bills like February's shittiest snow.

Cindy Sherman points out that "People were experimenting with making art, being in a band, making a film, or being a stand-up comic. Perhaps it was because until then there were very few precedents for making money out of those things, so there was little pressure. You were free to try anything."

I've said before that the big question in L. A. is, "What's she done?" and by this inquiry one's relative worth is measured; not much when you look at the sheer bulk of the temples and the castles and the Hollywood feedlots. Where what you try has a calculus, must have a calculus, before you can try it, lest you slip up and fall into that category of "wannabe" or "not a player." And yet, there are similarities even as I write from inside the monster bloom of an unfinished script: And so in Hollywood have people chased tin dreams like dragons, inhaling them in sweet, hypnotic smoke.

Link: New York Noise

Abstract Illustration, 1908-1930

By the 1916 debut of British Vogue, fashion illustration had evolved from the concrete to the abstract, from the static to the anecdoctal. The new abstract illustrative aesthetic was the signature style of artists who had trained at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. So enormous was the style's creative impact that it influenced the world of illustration for two decades . For the rough period from 1908-1930, the technique was used almost exclusively to decorate magazine covers, advertisements, and fashion editorial.

Fashion illustration at the turn of the twentieth century was literal and concrete, giving as much weight to the features and expressions of the model as it did to the garments. The new illustrative trend ultimately demoted the model to a representationally outlined clothes hanger.

Paul Poiret was responsible for the first commercial use of the new style in the fashion arena. In 1908 he hired Paul Iribe to sketch for "Les Robes de Paul Poiret," a folio of the designer's work. Iribe had trained at Beaux Arts, along with Georges Lepape and George Barbier. Poiret felt that Iribe's dimensional reduction would suit Poiret's designs, which were more strictly geometric than those of the preceding Victorian era. By 1912 the style became the accepted one at the French fashion magazines.

The Beaux Arts (or Deco) style as interpreted by this coterie of artists remained on the cover of Vogue until the early 1930s, when a more natural, nearly photographic cover art began to appear. The Beaux Arts style was approaching the demiurgic, being drawn not just by Iribe and his colleagues but also by the American Helen Dryden and the Spaniard Eduardo Benito. Many of the abstract artists began their magazine illustration careers at La Gazette du Bon Ton, a leading fashion magazine of the day. Condé Nast imported this group of artists to Vogue when he became that magazine's publisher.

The anti-realism of the style also found a home at the Ballets Russes, where it was drawn by Léon Bakst. Helen Dryden had seen Bakst's costume designs and credited them as influencing her own.

When fashion progressed from the heavy skirts of the Victorian era, the strokes of the illustrator became simpler and more figurative. While the illustration started out in the realm of the fantastical and the romantic, towards the final days of the genre it became somewhat tropological. The first example is from a 1916 Vogue cover by E. M. A. Steinmetz (top right). Much weight is given to the dextral parabola of the coat's hem and the outsized fur muff. The illustration highlights the importance of exaggerated shape over exact detail, something also found in Helen Dryden's cover (top left) from the same year.

In 1923, a George W. Plank cover (center right) displays a more angular stroke despite the actual flow of the garment. This blockier enunciation foreshadows the "Superman" styling of the mid- to late twenties, where the cover art metaphorically addresses man's technological achievements. A prime example of this is the Joseph Platt cover from 1924 (center left), which is almost heroic in nature.

The apex of abstraction was reached with this 1929 cover (above) by Eduardo Benito, in which strong lines are mirrored in strong colors. The hair is so figurative that in isolation--without framing the face--it is merely a meaningless shape that takes relevance only in context. The face is a flat expanse of modernity, the eyes demonstrating the era's sharp sophistication.

Another example of advanced abstraction is this 1930 "swallows" cover (artist unknown) that may have partially inspired an Erté gouache Seagulls cover from a 1938 Harper's Bazaar.


By 1932, the abstract Vogue cover was being phased out, replaced by a short-lived natural artwork that would soon be eclipsed by photography. When Miriam Hopkins made a celebrity appearance in January 1935, the era of the modern magazine cover had begun.













All images: Vogue cover archive

Carnabetian

There was a time when London wasn't considered the also-ran fashion "capital" it is today. For a brief period in the mid-sixties, London was Swinging London, the fashion portal of a youth sociocultural movement not quite so politically significant as the hippies but as critical as the Jazz Age in terms of style. If all roads led to Rome in the fifties, in 1966-1967 they led to Carnaby Street and the King's Road.

It was all down hill subsequently.

In some camps, the response to the recent British Fashion Awards underscores London's contemporary plight: There were three models worth nominating for Model of the Year, a supposed paucity that was met with the response, "But who else is there?

Had the BFA's existed 40 years ago, the response would have been the same, but for different reasons. Twiggy was it, Baby. Twiggy would have won the award without batting a black tarantula eyelash. Twiggy and her gnat's limbs were all over Swinging London that summer of 1966, inheriting the Model of the Moment tag from Jean Shrimpton. A year before San Francisco's hallucinogenic Summer of Love, Swinging London was a safe futuristic bubble that traded on gentle political statement and bold, Pop-Art designs.

George Harrison, by 1967 a Sgt. Pepper ambassador of the world's swingingest city, visited Haight Ashbury to investigate the American hippie culture. The hippies were then an organic stateside movement that had as yet to take hold in England. Harrison was perplexed and appalled at the "hideous, spotty little teenagers" who he anticipated would "all own their own little shops" in an area that "would be something like the King's Road, only more." Harrison was wrong; San Francisco was full of urchins, panhandlers, runaways, and speed freaks. His idea of a hippie utopia existed only in imagination, fueled by a desire to separate himself and his peers from conservative and stagnant mid-century values. His view was an innocently narrow one born of his own English experience and his generation's rejection of the civic machine.

The London that Harrison referred to while dismissing San Francisco was full of boutiques (Granny Takes a Trip; I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet; Lord John) and dolly birds, putative models who looked good in the Biba, Quant, and Ossie Clark fashions and could be counted on to pose for editorial. While some "youthquaker" counterparts existed in America--Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick--the Manhattan scene was not a fully encompassing one. Outside of Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy, the most visible of the dolly bird models held hands with the most popular bands of the day: The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. From these ranks came Chrissie Shrimpton and sisters Pattie and Jenny Boyd, Suki Poitier, Linda Keith, and Jane Asher.

These girls mostly shared the same long, shining hair, the headbands, and the thick dollop of bangs above the exaggerated kewpie eyes. The modernity of the cosmetic application was in and of itself a fad; no sooner had it taken root in the suburbs than it was replaced by the makeup-less hippie look.

The dolly bird look was heavy on artifice. False lashes, thick eyeliner, wigs and falls were accented by monochromatic Yardley and Quant cosmetics. So theatrical was the look that Marianne Faithful remarked that Chrissie Shrimpton couldn't stay out all night or she'd fall apart. This observation presaged a shift away from the Swinging London era and into the hippie era that would, by 1968, cause Swinging London to be seen as outmoded emblem of an "old" England. Faithful's comment was tinged with scorn; she and Shrimpton were of the same generation, if not the same mindset. Fads and fashions evolve at such aggravated rates of speed that by 1967 Shrimpton and her accoutrements were old-fashioned, and as Jagger put it in song, "Out of Time." Poor Chrissie, Faithful opined, would melt.


Images: Top left--Linda Keith, Chrissie Shrimpton, and Suki Poitier
Top right--Pattie Boyd for Mary Quant
Center left: Chrissie Shrimpton applies dolly bird makeup
Bottom left: Pattie Boyd with the Rolling Stones
Bottom right: Chrissie Shrimpton and Ossie Clark



All image: Mini Mad Mod 60s

A Christmas Story

Huddle 'round the hearth, children, and let me tell you a Christmas story. This Christmas story is unlike any other: It has no reindeer, no toys, no sleighs, no Santas, no holiday hams to drop on the floor and wash off in the sink.

This Christmas story is different, for it is a fashion Christmas story. Those of us of a certain age remember when there was no fashion. I see your look of incredulity; certainly there was fashion in the Ice Age, what about brontosaurus skins and Dior's New Look?

Ah, yes, I say with tired sigh, but those were fashions for magazines. For magazines and Paris and Concorde and Jerry Hall. They were not fashions for Duluth, Minnetonka, and Aurora Borealis. If you lived in Duluth, Minnetonka, or Aurora Borealis you got your "fashion" in the Sears catalogue.

I imagine that some of you reading this might not have grown up in America--I do not subscribe to insularity-- or that some of you reading this might have been born too late to enjoy an annual holiday tradition: the Sears Wish Book.

The book, a giant volume that weighed eight pounds, was dropped off not by Santa but by the regular old postman. This happened somewhere at the end of September, to give everyone in the family time to worry its 800+ pages. This is when Sears trotted out the really desirable items they'd been withholding from the more prosaic seasonal catalogues. It was important to make your selection fast and early, because Sears sold out.

All across the Midwest, up and down the Northeast Corridor, on sheep ranches in Montana and other barren pockets of the country, the Wish Book brought a small ray of sartorial hope to a blighted landscape. Here was the chance to wear an interpretation of the latest trends, three years after they had filtered down off the runways. And had been through 1,780 modifications to make them appeal to the lowest common denominator, thereby resulting in the highest gross profit.

Sometime around 1975, someone in Paris or Italy (and I blame the latter) must have done something with velvet. Whatever this might have been is lost to memory. Some designer made a black velvet jacket, and now, four years later, the Wishbook caught up to the trend. This was the disco era, after all, and velvet ran number two to spandex as the year's hottest look. At the roller rink, that is, since the disco craze was largely centered around urban areas and left those of us who lived in the tundra bopping to the Bee Gees on rented rollerskates.

Sears wasn't responsible for velour. Velour had been kicking around for a couple of years prior and was the thing inexplicable; these were the days before track suits, so the preponderance of velour in the year 1979 is another mystery. Was it a metaphor or did it just spring up organically out of some basic human need? If the former is true, what did it reflect? The advent of the Anti-Christ? Satan's headless polyester horseman? And yet, there it was, not just in the Wish Book but everywhere else you looked--if your looking was limited to J. C. Penney, Lerner's , and for those of you on the East Coast, Cummings.

This is how America shopped, children, almost 30 years ago tomorrow. In 1979, the average median household income was $16,461.00. The Time Man of the Year was the Ayatollah Khomeini. Three Mile Island dumped its toxic swill all over Central Pennsylvania. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan, stirring the shit in a pot that to this day has never refused to boil.

The Wish Book was never gung-ho political and had no agenda other than celebrating the American Way of Life. The American Way of Life was something that had been aggrandized by Norman Rockwell, although in Rockwell's case with a sly understanding of the comedic human foible. In Sears' hands, the American Way of Life was humorless, or at least not ironic. Sure, there was Mom smiling as she pulled the cookies from the oven, and there was Linda holding hands with Michelle as they modeled overalls, but this was a happy and sterile tableau.

The Book's value was two-fold. It represented America as America wanted to be seen, through the eyes of a Midwestern retail giant that had been a leader in bringing modernity to the hinterland home at the close of the nineteenth century. The Book also provided an allegiant signpost right up there with "...and our flag was still there." On the 4th of November, the Iranians had seized the U. S. Embassy in Teheran and had taken hostages. Tie a yellow ribbon. Any fear in the heartland could be (inadequately) offset by the steady comfort of the Book's homey pages. What could be more reassuring than promoting American values by offering a full page of cowboy outfits for boys? This was, after all, a generation that had grown up on Davy Crockett and Bonanza, when the only battles fought were those with the pesky Indians whom we latterly reduced to buffoons.

fashion with a lower-case "f" headlines the page of the Book's most prized items, a quartet of mix-and-match items worn by models with candy-apple lipstick. These items were part of "the Designer group," which implied that Sears either had a designer on hand anonymously or that these styles were reflective of something more urgent going on elsewhere.

Which, of course, they were not. They were simply slightly more au fait than what had appeared in the prior year's catalogue, but as historical markers they are brilliant. This was exactly how one aspired to dress in 1979, if one were without any other option (more than half of the country). Consider the beauty of the red/black ensemble in the bitter Christmas landscape of Rochester, Minnesota. Consider the smallest notion that this was indeed "the latest thing" and was, in fact, "fashion," when everyone else was still pulling on 1968's stretch pants, stuffing them into go-go boots and pronouncing it swell. We may have wanted to look like the Cosmo cover, but deep down inside we knew differently. It's an awfully long way from here to there, assuming you had hubris enough to ignore the competition.

The Wish Book was us. Big capital U. capital S. us. It was a silent annual treatise on homeland, backyard America, as valuable a historical reference as any magazine or newspaper. The book was a retail quotation of the real America, the egocentric Andy Hardy America with ice cream shops and Main Streets, the America that never cast a jealous eye anywhere else because we had it all right here, right now, so let's dig in and enjoy the harvest.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Image source: Flickr

It's a Mad, Mod World

"Nothing gets in my way, not even locked doors
Don't follow the lines that been laid before
I get along anyway I dare
Anyway, anyhow, anywhere"
--The Who, Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere, 1966

When Roger Daltrey sang those lyrics in 1966, he was throwing down a challenge to the stale crumpet of British society that remained entombed in "the English way." The English way was not merely, as Pink Floyd put it "hanging on in quiet desperation," it was also a romanticized postcard rubric both exploited and enjoyed by the British government.

Daltrey was anthemizing the aggression his generation felt towards the quaint, the genteel, the seaside hotels and the tea rooms, residual Victoriana, the wartime deprivation. The difficulties of the post-war years still lingered in certain pockets of the country, with inadequate countermeasure being taken to address them. Meanwhile, a number of British youth were finding dynamic cultural clues beyond borders. From Italy came the Vespa and Lambretta scooters and the sleek suits; jazz, the fishtail parka, and Benzedrine were imported from America.

Remember when America was cool?

Between the Teddy Boys and the punks were the Mods and Rockers, with Daltrey's The Who being one of a number of musical spokespersons for the former. Consider Keith Moon's full-frontal attack on My Generation, propelling the non-conformism forward one ballyhoo crash at a time, and the disintegrating feedback Townshend employed to advance chaos in the ranks.

The Mods and Rockers enjoyed a brief day in the English sun, for a period lasting roughly from 1964-1966. Forever intertwined as opposing cultural forces, they became post-history emblems of media-manufactured aggravation. Nothing that boys don't do when boys get together, burning a few deck chairs, smashing a few windows, but certainly not the moral epidemic the British public were led to believe.

Every gang must have its colors, so the Mod had his slim Italian suit, his coif, his Chelsea boots, and his surplus jacket from the U. S. Army forces in North Korea. The M1951 this coat was called, with a genuine wolf-fur collar attached. You can see one today on the cover of Quadrophenia; if you want to buy an original it'll set you back 347 quid or more but you'll have to paint the logo on yourself.

Even if Daltrey and Co. went on to become one of the biggest arena-rock bands of the seventies, they were still Acton garage Mods underneath it all; even if they jettisoned their skinny duds for rich-hippie rags they still burned Mod fuel: purple-heart speed and sonic noise. Put your ear to the canyon of time; you can still hear the roar of the crowd, the reverb, and the sound of the television going thud, SPLAT as it flies from the hotel room window and hits the ground of Anywheresville, USA.

Vintage fishtail parka

You've Got the Silver

While Nicole Kidman's de trop silver Balenciaga pantsuit fairly horrified the world's press camps, here in Los Angeles it struck an altogether different drumbeat, at least in my teepee.

It's not the suit that is important. All that slick silver that made Kidman appear as if she'd been glued by Elmer's and not a stylist is completely irrelevant.

It's the designer that's important. Balenciaga. The name.

In Los Angeles, the name is everything. A two-line role on a hit sitcom must be filled by a "name," so the most frequent question out of a casting director's mouth is, "What's he done?" In the Hollywood hierarchal order, one is nothing without a credit, and not all credits have value.

The whole thing is very complicated, often reaching Kafkaesque levels of bureaucracy.

I was reminded of this while shopping on Rodeo Drive. Rodeo Drive isn't my kind of place, not really, because I can only truly tolerate accidental conspicious consumption and am therefore in the wrong place most of the time. It's the staginess of Rodeo Drive that gets to me, as if it were not just a mere street but an overlit theatrical set mostly full of what Shakespeare called "merely players."

The stars come and go out of limousines and town cars while that sun beats down upon them as bright as any California navel orange, before we started shipping our oranges to Japan and taking South America's in return. (See what I mean? Kafkaesque.)

Scurrying around the fringes of this are the extras, the "merely players," which includes you, me and the guy over there who's bitten off the end of his cigar and spit it a guiltless distance away.

It's Christmas. And with Christmas, the unremarkable pastime of waiting for a purchase to be rung up. I listened while a salesclerk tried to sell a scent to a young, Miu Miu-clad customer.

"I've never heard of it," Miss Miu Miu said.

"Oh, it's very chic, " the salesperson assured her. In fact, we are one of only two stores that carry it. The other is in Manhattan. It's made in Italy by blind nuns who have taken a vow of silence. Fifty bottles a year, that's it. Limited edition."

She then added, "You're lucky. We got in just in time for Christmas. No one else will be wearing it."

"What good is that, then?" Miss Miu Miu pouted.

Indeed. It might have smelled like the sweet breath of a sacred Balinese goddess, but it had no worth whatsoever. Underneath that navel orange sun, it had no perceived value. Someone would come along and question its identity in the status hierachy and fumbling, sweated explanations would follow.

She bought something by Valentino, an innocuous rosy thing not likely to get her banned from Paperfish.

Kidman must have recognized the titulary power of that suit, and in a moment of huge overconfidence considered her thighs and backside and that labyrinthine network of favors before, well, the whole tinfoil enchilada. And it should be, ideally, above criticism, since it bordered on the surreal.

There have been huge fashion moments in Hollywood, ones that say, Baby, I'm a comer (Elizabeth Hurley's diaper-pin Versace) or Stardom or Bust (Jennifer Lopez, again Versace), but Kidman's differs in that it is the Star on Top of the Christmas Tree, the star in the east, the star that shines the way for all who follow and believe to bask in its holy irradiating glow.

Applauding Wildly

Sometimes people write things that are so elementally truthful and beautiful that they make stop you in time.

Behold one of those things, written on the blog The Sunday Best.

Westwoodiana Part 2: Puer Aeternus and the New Romantics

Vivienne Westwood didn't consider herself a designer during her Sex and Seditionaries eras. It wasn't until the New Romantic sartorial crest of the early 1980s that Westwood assembled what she deemed a proper collection.

The 1983 collection was, of course, Pirates, a design theme Westwood stated was inspired by an engraving of a pirate that she encountered at the V & A in London.

It was said that the New Romantic/Pirates look was free from the neo-political, anarchic agency that permeated punk rock and its trappings. The punk clothing was a visual externalization of this agency, whereas the New Romantic was more about "dressing up," and doing so for the sake of the costume and the pleasure it gave.

The New Romantic (and most specifically in his pirate incarnation) indeed had an agenda, and one that has not often been discussed. This was a psychological agenda rather than a social or political one, for the New Romantic was an expression of Puer Aeternus at his most Crayola fantastic.

Puer Aeternus is the Latin term for "eternal boy," one with a strong Peter Pan streak. In extremis, certain New Romantics played at a kind of warpaint narcissism suited to a child's concept of enhancement. By adopting the full monty of pirate gear and playacting accordingly, the trappings became more than mere trend, forcing a statement whether the intent existed or not.

Although the punk movement also housed the Puer Aeternus (Steve Jones and Johnny Rotten are prime examples of this), the punk mask was one of ugliness and loutish behavior (and we leave it to Umberto Eco to determine if this were the more exciting and rewarding mask to don). The New Romantics, on the other hand, celebrated a flamboyant beauty antithetical to the punk image. With their sartorial swagger and cosmetic plumage, they engaged in one of the most fulfulling of childhood fantasies--that of the pirate--while maintaining an extremity of beauty completely adrift from the pirate actuality.

Although not taking herself seriously as a designer until 1983, it seems clear that Westwood was serving at least Malcolm McLaren's notions of oppositional beauty as far back as 1971, and then addressing her own eternal child with the New Romantics. Either image was not a disciplined and restrained one, but one that resulted in grandiose gestures in either behavior or decorative adornment. It might be said that the punk styling was a case of fashion res ipsa loquitur. From that vantage point, it was a wellspring of its own necessity pre-existing in economically depressed cultural pockets that Westwood and McLaren simply mined and translated from the rag bin.

Puer Aeternus has a female counterpart called Puella, and as with punk the pirate look assumed no gender bifurcation. The image was a unisex one that could be enjoyed and exploited equally, and again there was an implied lack of the responsibilities of adulthood. The New Romantic had as his or her closest (British) relative the fop or dandy, a literary character who so overdid his costume that he became an outsider simply by means of his outrageous affectations.

Throughout her career, Vivienne Westwood has created and discarded mantles that have almost a psychic's knowledge of vibration, if we can assume the view of the thing unto itself. In the New Romantic/Pirate look, the cocksure beauty demonstrated a purity far beyond fashion and into the mindscape of our own creatively unfulfilled adult children. That child, as you know, may always scratch just below the surface, ready to brandish his black powder pistol.

Images: Adam Ant
Pirates, V & A

Pot Head

In an editorial about the winner of the 2007 Turner Prize, the Telegraph took a swipe at the dignity of the award and at the potter Grayson Perry, dismissively sniffing, "...a prize that thrives on publicity and controversy--one year it was won by Grayson Perry, a cross-dresser who makes pornographic pottery..."

Perry's been in the news twice more recently, once for stating that he wouldn't use his work to broach the subject of radical Islam, and again in a column called "My Life in Fashion," (Times, 12/12/07) in which he openly discusses how his sexual fantasies inform his style choices.

Mileage-wise, Perry has had more than one spin around the damning media wheel, as well as a concentric whirl about a belittling art circuit, and that's only taking the critical "craft" view of his ceramics into account.

Claire, his transvestite persona, is both a separate and an inclusive subject.

Perry's Disney-primped alter ego and the pots themselves address the subjugated state of women and ceramics in a male-dominated world where leaders must be audacious, loud, and aggressively self-confident.

I first came across Perry's work some years ago, when an artist friend mentioned something about a "pervert English potter." There was an urn with penises doing what penises do other than pissing; others had titles like "I Hate You, I Hate Myself" and "We've Found the Body of Your Child." The artist friend--a Manhattanite who had moved to Los Angeles--was hostile, and not for the usual Los Angeles reason, that someone else might get noticed first.

That's the thing about Los Angeles. It's not what you do or how you do it, but that it might be recognized when whatever it is that someone else does remains mysteriously the shadows, never to see the light of day. People have thrown themselves off the Hollywood sign for this, but most of them end up like the people in Perry's pot entitled Boring Cool People. These are the terminally hip whose cool facade must be maintained above all else: the performance. This is what gets you noticed eventually. There is no communication or reaching out or any of this feel-good Oprah bullshit. The outer shell, like the glaze on the pot, is tout.

This behavioral model never failed to confuse me. I write, someone else acts, and still another makes headdresses with the eyes of dead birds for a revue on the Vegas Strip, and yet there exists this thing, the pulse that keeps creative Los Angeles alive, that says you are not allowed to be more (or less) successful than your acquaintances. Boring Cool People are too hip to admit to either failure or defeat; they simply sit like a Pismo clam sucking the air-conditioned breeze of everyone else's coolness.

At first glance, Boring Cool People seems to be one of the simpler of Grayson Perry's works, and one without guerrilla-sexual premises. He constructed it, he said, to remark on hip irony versus sensualism, which it does accomplish, one glazed expression after another. Yet it is the viewer's experience of the pot and his or her relationship to the pot that is important, which ties into another key tenet of Perry's artistry: the artist in absentia. Perry absolves any responsibility for communication--passing the buck, so to speak, to the Freudian components of the psyche.

Another fun metaphor for Los Angeles is found in the pot titled Barbaric Splendor, in which the illusory no-escape, dream big, dream often clause is revealed as appearing from beneath the veneer of a traditional Oriental urn with its motif of birds, branches, and flowers. This work is particularly British, or at least particularly parts of Britain, with its promise of "Dream Homes" and "Holiday of a lifetime" in a wet and dreary northern industrial town. It happens here, too, and it's a killer, as much of a killer as any dead dream that was supposed to happen but didn't. The sun only shines in the absence of empty promises; all it takes is a one-way ticket and a lucky break. Most of Hollywood dines out on stories like that, and chokes on them. The girls at the bus stop, the boy with the hair, the screenwriter with bad grammar and a bad pitch.

Further relationship can be drawn between the warm, enhancing coloring of the original motif and the cool, almost fluorescent hue of the street scene, as ghastly and revelatory a lighting as man can design. And on top of it all, a teddy bear hanged in effigy. Death to the childhood Pooh-dreams.

Images: Grayson Perry, This Is London
Pots: Saatchi and Miro Galleries

Mo Fo No Mo

The Village Voice reports that Motherfucker is no longer. The roving bacchanal was done in by internecine squabbling, the usual cause of collapsing empires.

Motherfucker lasted for six years times eight events, longer than most artistic movements or fashion trends. Someone else will pick up the slack; Manhattan is never without its big top, big time, big apple pie in the sky.

Images: Village Voice

More Ungulates, Even-Toed

There may be some ongoing Biblical controversy over the presence of camels in Egypt, but there was no doubting the presence of their toes at the Marc Jacobs holiday shindig.

Sometimes I wish I were this creative. This is not one of those times.


Source: Style.com

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

Her Odd-Toed Ungulate

U. S. Highway 101 spawns California Highway 1 up in the redwood forests by Leggett, and then the two roads have a semi-symbiotic relationship all the way to San Juan Capistrano. Highway 1 is the long coastal vein running off Highway 101's pulsating north-south artery.

Back in 1989, I flew up to San Francisco and spent a couple of weeks orchestrating an event for a major client. Instead of flying home, I decided to rent a car and drive back to Los Angeles via a laughably indirect and highly scenic route.

After meandering around Carmel for a couple of hours, I headed south on Highway 1. A rough mental calculus told me that Highway 1 stopped being worth the long serpentine poke after San Luis Obispo, so I picked up the 101 and headed south through the Santa Ynez Valley.

Just south of the go-nowhere town of Los Alamos, there was a signpost on the eastern side of the road: Rancho La Laguna. I was going too fast to read the rest, but as soon as I'd gone by it I had the oddest feeling that I should be able to place the name.

Three miles later, I snapped it. Edie Sedgwick grew up on Rancho La Laguna and its neighboring ranch Corral de Quati.

I don't wish to indulge in further Edie tautology here, but I will say that land like that could swallow even a strong person whole. Mile after mile of scrub-crusted hill, brown plain, dust that scratched your throat even with all the windows closed and the air conditioning on full blast. Land like that looked as if it could chew a girl up and spit out her silvery bones.

Which it did; Edie is buried up in Ballard, near Solvang. Near Solvang, with its Danish pastries, creamery butter, and hide-baking heat.

On a decorative and less morbid note, those of you who read Jean Stein and George Plimpton's excellent oral record, Edie: An American Biography may remember an old photo of Edie in arabesque on top of a leather rhino. The rhino, someone recalled, was an Abercrombie and Fitch status piece, the type of heavy, unnecessary item that the wealthy purchased to stock heavy, overstuffed residences.

Abercrombie and Fitch started life as a sporting goods-amenity retailer, before it was bought and sold and bought and sold again, finally roosting under the giant wing of Limited Brands. Limited Brands relaunched Abercrombie as an apparel line for the youth market, forgoing the store's past as a bastion of elite adventure pursuit.

Sedgwick's rhino is arguably the most memorable item from Abercrombie's original catalogue. The rhinos were not name-brand; they were manufactured in England by the small, family-run company Omersa.

The charming fellow above is member of Omersa's Out of Africa collection. He's six feet long, handmade in rural Leicestershire, and indeed one could imagine resting one's feet upon his back, if not performing an arabesque.

A rare and fabulous beast, and, like Edie, much prized for its horn.

Image: Edie: An American Biography
Link: Omersa leather Super King rhino, £1,600.00

Good (Hippie) Shit

Watching the movie Woodstock today, or, for that matter, watching the History Channel's 1968 with Tom Brokaw, feels as stylistically alien as examining a nitrate film reel of Patou-clad dowagers exiting transatlantic cruise ships. Whereas the political, musical, and cultural zeitgeist of that year evolved and then went into a slow fadeout over the yardarm of the sixties, the fashion burned out in the graveyard of American design: catalogue retail.

The strongest signifiers of hippie fashion included tie-dyed shirts, the fringed or mirrored vest, the headband, the torn and patched jeans, and the peace sign or love bead jewelry. This image of hippie fashion was the most widely disseminated one (always shown on a bearded longhair, to cultivate the impression of social menace), the one most associated with free love, dropping acid, and communal living. It was also the one responsible for a great moral surge that occurred near the end of the era, after the Manson murders.

In actuality, hippie fashion was a magpie that feathered its nest from hundreds of disconnected and at times oppositional sources. A short list of influences would include:

19th-century pioneer
Native American
Gypsy
Religious
Circus/Minstrel/Burlesque
Victoriana
Renaissance
Mythological
Arab/African/Oriental/Moroccan
Peasant
Wild West
Military
Mountain Man/Daniel Boone/Davy Crockett

The largest embryonic influence on hippie fashion was not hippie at all, or at least not hippie as it came to be known at the end of the era. Initially, the hippie of 1966-67 borrowed heavily from Carnaby Street and the King's Road, or from the remnants of Swinging London. From London and the Beatles came the Nehru collars and from Africa by way of London the colorful djellabas and dashikis.

There were as many hippie "looks" as there were youths turning away from mainstream culture and the Johnson-era White House. With fashion thus diversified, it becomes hard to pigeonhole a hippie style by means of geography, although Los Angeles bred something we might call the "rich hippie," of which the foremost practioners were Sonny and Cher.

Sonny and Cher, you ask? Sonny and Cher were so uncool they probably bathed in hot milk. Your apron-wearing, cookie-baking mother knew the words to "I Got You, Babe" and deemed it safe to sing at the family cookout. That Sonny and Cher.

Sonny Bono pioneered the rich hippie look, which included his trademark Prince Valiant haircut, and, more importantly, a fur vest. For the short year from 1965 to 1966, Sonny Bono (and by association Cher) was a fledgling hippie icon, even if within a year he would look as awkward as a middle-aged commodities trader trying to "get down" with the kids in the street.

The rich hippie look was later adopted by the band Three Dog Night (who added circus inflections), and by 1968 there was a Los Angeles fashion sub-speciality, the Topanga Canyon "pioneer" hippies, a group that sprang out of the refrain of the Sunset Strip folk music scene. In San Francisco, the "mod" look had given way in part to an influx of bells, beads, and whistles thanks to the transformative power of religion, and then to a full-out tie-dye epidemic strongly associated with the transformative powers of lysergic acid diethylamide.

Elsewhere, the mere act of growing one's hair downwards towards the collar signified a hippie ethos; this was after all the era of what I'll call NASA fashion, a faceless aesthetic that involved short-sleeved button-down shirts and hair cut to make Uncle Sam throw a snappy salute.

The Woodstock film proves that the media-promulgated image of the hippie was for the most part somewhat isolated. Men's hair doesn't universally touch the shoulders, tie-dye isn't blooming in the field; where are the mirrored velvet vests and the slouchy felt hats?

The answer was: on television and in boutiques. By 1969, hippie fashion had become a retail breadwinner across America. In those pre-mall days, most of America patriotically shopped the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. Most of America also tuned in to Rowan and Martin's Laugh In, a weekly comedy series where Dick Martin often donned a Bono-like wig and vest to satirize the hippie's sartorial customs. America got the joke and laughed along in the safety and sanctity of the family living room, after eating a meal of pot roast and mashed potatoes.

It wasn't Laugh In and that program's gentle jibes that signaled the death of hippie fashion, it was the long-running American television series The Brady Bunch, specifically an episode occurring in the show's second season. It was then, on February 5, 1971, that hep-talking Greg Brady (played by actor Barry Williams) bought some "threads" to impress "a chick" and the whole thing went to hell in a handbasket.

Sears, Roebuck sat up and took notice. By Christmas of the next year, the giant retail monolith was advertising hippie-inflected clothing in its cornily named "Put On Shop" and "Groovy Group" (forever after cementing its uncoolness in junior high schools nationwide, the exact opposite of the intent). Hippie fashion had now reached Mittel America, some five or six years after its genesis, and it was gone again when it became a hopeless pastiche of smiley faces, peace signs, and lava lamps. By this time, the fashion had completely and irredeemably lost its cred with all but the Deadheads, and the hippie himself had started on his long assimilation into the financial lap of corporate America.


Images:
Time Magazine, July 7, 1967
Hippie Bus (note short hair and mainstream clothing on a number of the men)
Media-reinforced "hippie" image as the wild-haired "freak"
Sonny and Cher, circa 1965
Sears takes on the hippie look by way of the Partridge Family, Christmas 1971

Soldiers by the Sea

A keen eye might notice the Spanish-style building moored against the eastern palisades just north of the western terminus of Sunset Boulevard. It was there, in a garage above the property, that the comedienne Thelma Todd was found slumped dead on the seat of her car.

Todd's December 16, 1935 death was and remains a mystery.

When I first moved to Southern California in the late eighties, I lived just down the road from this Castellammare architectural curiousity. To my northern eye, the building looked like the relic of a silent-film set, somewhere with a lungful of aphonic history whispered only on high Santa Ana winds.

The building is as much tethered to the history of Malibu as it is to the tectonic geography. May Knight Rindge's stronghold on the last unified Spanish rancho impeded retail and residential development until 1926, when Rindge released her grip in order to pay legal bills accrued during long battles with Los Angeles County over the building of roads and railways.

Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Cafe, as the structure was known 72 years ago, is something you zip by on your way to Ventura County or, in the other direction, Santa Monica. It is no more unusual than the rest of the fantasy polyglot architecture of Los Angeles, except that it has been impervious to the strip mining and redevelopment that occurs most everywhere else in the drive-thru empire.

17575 Pacific Coast Highway hulks out there like a fortress frozen in time, waiting for its lost soldiers, unaware that they are not returning. It waits, shouldering history, while history moves by without a nod in its direction except for that of the odd archivist of places and things who keeps a record of addresses and events. And of course the itinerant admirer born a half-century too late: Todd was a dame who liked rogues, turf warriors battling for a piece of the larger Hollywood parcel. Todd died shortly after Lucky Luciano tried to muscle gambling into the cafe she owned.

Constructed in 1928, the building had a short run as a seafood restaurant before Todd and business partner Roland West bought it and rebranded the location as a steakhouse. For 1935, this was out of town, a retreat from the kliegs and the all-seeing eyes of Buron Fitts, the Los Angeles District Attorney. On this slab of former oceanfront farmland, politicians, mobsters, playboys and a comedic actress made a fashion of survival.

Like much of cobbled-together Los Angeles, the building rests in a pocket of architectural multiculturalism, the bluffs above containing modern residences each with an anxious eye towards the western ocean vista. Todd's restaurant mutely hugs the cliff below the encroaching armies, stoic in its defense of Hollywood narrative.

Baubles, Bangles, and Byzantine Birds

The heraldic double-headed eagle is older than Christ. Its use in Russian vexillology dates back to the reign of Ivan the Great, who adopted it from the Byzantine Empire following his marriage to a niece of Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI.

Ivan III Vasilevich was an ambitious, if somewhat reticent, ruler whose borrowing of the Byzantine eagle underscored his intentions to put Moscow on a political and cultural parallel with Constantinopole.

The eagle represented on the brooch above (with eight coats of arms) dates from 1857, during the reign of Alexander II. The brooch itself dates from around 1900, placing its creation in the reign of Tsar Nicholas II. Originally a ring, the piece was later converted to its current brooch form. Ten carats of Old Mine-cut diamonds girdle the eagle emblem.

According to the Web site Romanov Russia, which specializes in the sale of Romanov memorabilia, "Each wing with (sic) four armorial shields representing formerly independent kingdoms, which became provinces of the Russian Empire: Astrakhan, Siberia, Georgia, and the Grand Principality of Finland (right wing); Kazan, Poland, Kherson & Tavria (Crimea), and conjoined arms of Grand Principalities of Kiev, Vladimir and Novgorod (left wing)." Territorial expansion was a program that dated back to before the time of Ivan the Great. The double heads of the eagle represent the conjoining of Church and State.

In the center is a horseman slaying a dragon; this figure was not identified as St. George until the reign of Peter the Great, although it was Ivan III who added the dragon to the horseman motif. Due to clerical concerns and the large number of different faiths in Russia, the figure has lost its identity, becoming once again an anonymous horseman. The chain of the Order of Saint Andrew encircles the image.

The autocracy supported by Ivan the Great and his mighty Byzantine symbol ended with Nicholas II, an ineffectual leader who used the bird's powerful allegory to shield himself from the idea of reform and to protect his notion of absolute tsarism. Such a defensive stance changed the course of Russian and world history, with the double-headed eagle not reappearing until 2000, the year that the Russian Federation resurrected it as a coat of arms.

Above: A plate from the reign of Alexander II that displays a similar eagle.

Russian Imperial Eagle diamond brooch, A la Vieille Russie, P. O. R.
French-made porcelain plates, $3,600. the pair, at Romanov Russia
Romanov Russia is a treasure chest of Imperial Russia memorabilia.

Antiquarian Assets

Ruven Afanador cites vintage postcard erotica in the photo (right) of Crystal Renn from December's Elle Italia.

Renn's womanly curves prove an ideal subject for this allusive portrait. Her body type, while still an anomaly in modern fashion photography, is the epitome of the preferred turn-of-the-century physique.

It is generally agreed that France was the provenance of erotic photography and the nude postcard, and that the erotic photographic postcard as an art form originated with the invention of the Daguerrotype. Although called "cartes postale," the cards could not be legally sent through the mail.

The poses used in nude postcards may be generalized as either arranged (often referencing classical art) or natural, with E. J. Bellocq's Storyville series a major example of the latter. Here, Renn is arranged in a dark example of a classic pose. While the vintage model looks almost beatific, Renn's expression is far more sensual. Posing with bouquets was commonplace in vintage erotic photography, implying the ripe bloom of femininity. Afanador replaces flowers with a black fabric suggestive of a funereal sheath, lending his portrait a slightly corrupted air of sex and decay.

It seems clear that Afanador has more than passing familiarity with the art of the erotic postcard, much of which was done in anonymity, and that he saw in Renn the perfect subject for associative commentary. The photograph might be said to address the metamorphic nature of female beauty over the past century, tethering Renn to the corporeal form of her curvaceous erotic sisters.

Images: Crystal Renn, Foto Decadent
Erotic postcard from Vintage Pulchritude

Une Bougie and Un Book

I am well aware of the power of the last-minute gift. The last-minute gift is a political juggernaut that can make or break careers, destroy reputations, wreck a love affair, or forge life-long alliances.

The selection of such gifts can be fraughter, especially when selecting for the urbane male .

Here, two things I am giving this holiday season, multiply:

Aedes de Venustas-exclusive L'Artisan Parfumeur bougie, scented with Japanese incense, strawflower, leather, balsam, and musk. This is not a girly candle. It broods incongruously with muscularity and Zen. The burgundy color and introspective, pelt-like undertones make it a distinctive gift for men with libraries, as is...

The Letters of Noël Coward, no explanation necessary. Indispensable for anyone needing a a lesson in the quip. "I'll go through life either first class or third, but never in second." Bitchy, brittle, arch, arcane, and those are just the B's and the A's.

Two gifts: A book of letters from a high intellect and an intellectual candle. Sublime alone; together, they are nearly devastating.

L'Artisan candle, $65.00 at Aedes de Venustas
The Letters of Noel Coward, Amazon.com