A tramp about with Maison Margiela and womanhood.
Nudes, film noir, the apocalypse, the Year of the Girl and the admiration of art.
It was the week before Christmas 2023, as I was adorning myself, as I do, in glitter, flowing skirts and of course, a large velvet hair bow, when I sadly announced to my boyfriend that the holiday season had exhausted the masses of ribbons and bows. I feared that the object I was not yet willing to part with, would quickly become passé. I am not one to ritualistically burn any item that has gone through a viral death but bows were so integral to the Year of the Girl! If the bow is gone - what happens to the girl after 2023? Certainly it is not as simple as a girlie growing up! I think that would be a misunderstanding of the embrace of the girlies this past year.
The enfoldment of all things girlie, from Sandy Liang bows, to Barbie Pink and Girl Dinners are not regressive impulses from a generation simply refusing to grow up - as it is the very meaning of being a “girl” is the act of becoming. Being a girl is not a frozen moment in time, but a moment of play, discovery and self actualization that is often stripped from the idea of womanhood. A woman bears the burden of others - a woman is a wife and a mother, a woman is not on a path to self-discovery but rather is dealing with the consequences of that…the consequences of marriage, sex, child rearing, domesticity, career building. A woman is a caretaker and in a nation that has made it evident that the care of woman is not prioritized, and a woman’s bodily autonomy is not considered a human right - why would we ever depict ourselves as woman? The world does not care about women, but the world seems to care about a girlie!
The reclamation of girlhood is liberating - the act offers a chance to redefine self actualization without [as much] toxic patriarchal norms. Heather Warren-Crow explains how girlhood in media is seen as a rich act of adaptability and plasticity. High femininity no longer is something that needs to be left behind in the past but rather is a vehicle to embrace alternative expressions and define a stronger community. The ‘girl’ trends of the past year are an indication of that, regardless of how easily they can be used for capitalistic gain. The urge to follow a trend is rooted in our yearning to be part of a community and the mass amounts of girl trends indicate that the girlies needed to come together. In the Year of the Girl, we were allowed to be light, playful and full of gusto - what is next?
Initially, I had thought the late 2023 trend of Office Siren was in direct opposition to the girlie urges that preceded it, but on reflection this feels like a further reinforcement. The Office Siren pushes feminine sensuality and play typically deemed as inappropriate in the office setting. It’s adjacent aesthetic branch being Geek Chic, à la Mui Mui, which introduces another kind of play between sensuality and ugly chic.
Thinking on these aesthetics that have been cropping up, my mind wandered to Prada’s Spring 2024 Ready-to-Wear collection. The show depicted high waisted tailored short shorts, flowing cape pussy blouses draped over boxy shoulder padded blazers, lighter than air gauzy dresses and metallic fringed belts. Looking back at the show, this felt like a beautiful merging of cultural urges. The show took classic tailored elements and reimagined them and offered a fluidity, both in the silhouettes of the tailoring and the flowing line of slime that provided an ever changing arcade beside the models. Yet there was something else - not simply with the alien like smooth caps that adorned the heads of the models but with the Film Noir feel of it all and if film noir has shown us anything - it is that there is no sure future, and surely no sure future for the girlie. Noir is an idea that crops up during social unrest, war, political turmoil and revolution. Noir is all about looking back - it is always stuck in the past. As I grappled with this notion and what may be coming ‘next’ ... The Maison Margiela 2024 Couture Show graced our digital feeds and we were asked to take a walk offline.
Under the umbrella (however ripped to shreds and tattered from the wind and rain) of what I had been pondering - this show did not depict the typical ideal women of the runways, but rather depicted women as art and play - or rather did not simply depict woman at all but dolls with augmented voluptuous curves to an extreme end tramping and rambling down the cobblestone path and Parisian bar interior. The models, gender notwithstanding, wore corsets reminiscent of Horst P. Horst photography and confronted typical norms of femininity and masculinity. A point strongly hit upon before the show really began with Lucky Love singing “Masculinity” with lyrics like “... do I walk like a boy? Do I speak like a boy? Do I stand like a boy?”
Merkins were a compelling addition to the garments, harkening back to Egon Schiele’s compelling expressionist drawings and depictions of the body:
Schiele’s drawings of nude women, unlike his mentor Klimt, showed women with confidence and autonomy. The women were in revealing positions showing off their anatomy but the women were imbued with modernity and agency. Though these images, in the full context of Schiele’s work, are heavily about his relationship with a variety of women and arguably misogynistic, within the context of the 20th century this sort of imagery that showed woman’s bodies for what they were - asymmetrical vulva and all - were in many way empowering. Unlike historical paintings of women that preceded which would eliminate pubic hair to reinforce the lack of a penis, Schiele would make a point to draw out the pubic hair. Galliano and Margiela alike have often been interested in the fluidity between feminine and masculine and the addition of a merkin should come as no surprise.
Another reference Galliano has been interested in that rose up again in the 2024 show, is Fellini’s Casanova. Interestingly, Marie Jean Lederman sees this film not about Casanova himself but instead about the director’s (and any artist’s) fears of death , aging and accomplishments as an artist. In the film, Casanova’s only one true love is a macabre robotic doll that encompasses elements of antiquity and futurism. The doll here is art - the doll unlike the artist - will always be - as art does not adhere to the passing of time but transcends it. Thus, the dream of an artist is to break from the confines of space and time and reach immortality. Luckily for Galliano, this show will likely become a memorable historical moment in fashion and culture, (a difficult task to achieve in today’s mediascape - where the influx of images daily has made me question if history exists at all anymore). Lederman also suggests the repetitive robotic bird and doll are symbols of Casanova being forced to perform the same repetitive acts (sexual or otherwise) in life over and over again (much like the sex workers visually referenced in the show and in the show’s direct Brassaï references). Perhaps Galliano himself thinks the luxury fashion industry has been forced into the same meaningless repetitive stunts…
As mentioned above, Brassaï was a direct reference for Galliano. Brassaï, known for photographing high and low society all the same, was endlessly in search of beauty, regardless of the societal status or preconceived notions of a subject. He ran off of the pursuit of pleasure and excess - making him a clear gateway to the film noirs that would follow him later that century and an obvious reference in the Maison Margiela show that quite literally took place in the underbelly of Paris. Fittingly, it also began with Lucky Love, a one armed, queer singer, who has struggled with drug addictions, is HIV positive and is often shunned by society. Lucky Love, who found poetry at night working in drag cabaret in younger years, has said “My music is right between the party and the moment just after the party because I am extremely melancholic.” Is film noir not similar and are we not ourselves - while referencing the shiny days of Y2K- hanging onto the lasts threads of life in the Anthropocene?
In Jennifer Fays’ Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene, she says:
“Film noir is a genre most devoted to the pedagogy of death and it is an elegy, of sorts, to a deadly and damaging civilization to which characters and viewers are nevertheless drawn…Hard boiled detectives investigate an ecology of misery and crime in a world that is artificial and in some sense already past.”
Jennifer Fay goes onto explain that film noir “most devoted to the art of bad living” is about a society, that for the sake of progress, has so immensely tried to imprint themselves on a environment that is outside of them that this “human-built environment is experienced as anti-humanist, a world that negates rather than yields to the individual human imprint”. To reflect back on John Galliano’s work here within this context, we can see a mixing of artificiality or man made materials with natural fibers in order to create an illusion - things are not as they seem. The garments underwent silicone treatments to make fabrics seem as if they had been out in the rain all night and polished leather was treated and cut to appear as if it were a porcelain neck piece. Most concerningly, plastics of all sorts have covertly assumed their place amongst the clothing (as it has on our world).
“Posing as heavy-duty wardrobe staples, featherlight jackets, coats and trousers are constructed through the technique of milletrage: a mirage created from a filtrage composed of a mille-feuille of organza and felt under a wool crêpe printed with a trompe l’oeil of the texture of a classic gentleman’s cloth. It is draped – aquarelled – in a voilette of tulle illusorily printed to appear moon-faded, sun-bleached, tobacco-stained or oily as if illumed by the reflection of water at night. Exercised through emotional cutting, the garments are imbued with the unconscious gestures that shape our expressions: a caban pulled over the head in the rain, a lapel raised to cover the face, a trouser hoicked up to evade a water puddle.”
Even here, baked with artificiality, the Anthropocene finds no refuge or mercy in the elements…Models came down the path shivering and hugging their shoulders tightly to shield themselves from the cold, another shivered uncontrollably while holding their tattered umbrella over head. Afterall, cinched waists, silicone bodies and unageing doll like faces have no place in claiming the natural environment. (Fay references the damages done by the Three Gorges Dam in China, intended to respond to a climate crisis, has negatively impacted the natural environment and wildlife, disrupting natural processes…) Galliano's masterful work in manufactured fabric reactions to the environment are not all that dissimilar to Buster Keaton fabricating a windstorm through wind machines powered by Liberty airplane engines - in both ‘nature’ is a product of culture (and capital).
Perhaps, in this world Galliano has created so injected with silicone, taking a walk offline is not simply about a walk across a cobblestone path. Perhaps instead we are being asked to stroll, loiter, wander and loaf about as a spectator of our surroundings - or more specifically to be more akin to the flaneur. In explaining Walter Benjamin’s approach to Baudelaire’s flaneur, Kirsten Seale writes:
“The flaneur’s movement creates anachrony: he travels urban space, the space of modernity, but is forever looking to the past. He reverts to his memory of the city and rejects the self-enunciative authority of any technically reproduced image. The photographer’s engagement with visual technology is similarly ambivalent. The photographer reiterates the trajectory of technological advance through his or her acculturation to new technologies, yet the authority of this trajectory is challenged by photography’s product: the photograph, a material memory which is only understood by looking away from the future, by reading retrospectively.”
According to Benjamin, the valuable element of the flaneur, is that they become a tool for understanding modern culture and they become a wayfinder for us to an awakening or enlightenment. The flaneur does not run to an appointment and the flaneur does not sit through a revolving door of Tik Tok videos. The flaneur, instead sits outside of it all.
For Jennifer Fay, cinema (namely film noir) provides a useful means of separating the subject from the world it is seeing. Perhaps this was the next step of observation for the flaneur…This separation or act of alienation and becoming alien, then proposes new forms of hospitality or being hospitable. What do we own, or rather who have we taken all these resources from? If we are to radically reimagine hospitality as an act of being self negating, then this form of hospitality is to be so open to being hospitable that we are then willing to open a door to a world that is no longer simply ours (and thus is a world suitable for other living beings).
Womanhood itself is deeply intertwined with the act of being hospitable, whether by choice or force, we are often the host whether that is in a domestic setting, or sexual and/or life giving. So, in the year after the Year of the Girl, who are we to become? Are we to become a theatrical, playful conception of womanhood, or a doll that no longer adheres to confines of time (and I do not mean by getting botox) and takes notice that the earth does not concern itself with time, as time itself is a human construct for the Anthropocene… Perhaps all we can do to gain more clarity is pull up our merkinis, take a Womanly Walk and begin to notice.
If you have not seen the full Maison Margiela video yet, go see it immediately!