IN 1996 PERFORMANCE ARTIST Marina Abramović created The Onion, a video installation in which she eats an onion while her own voice-over repeats, among other things, ‘I want to understand and see clearly what is behind all of us.’ As she bites into the onion she smears her lipstick, a symbolic coming undone of her identity. The devouring of the onion goes hand in hand with the urge to destroy the many layers of cultural and social identity she is made of. Similarly, the voice-over for the opening monologue of The Honourable Woman, the 2014 BBC miniseries starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, recites:

Who do you trust? How do you know? By how they appear or what they say? What they do? How? We all have secrets. We all tell lies, just to keep them from each other and from ourselves. But sometimes, rarely, something can happen that leaves you no choice but to reveal it. To let the world see who you really are. A secret self. But mostly we tell lies, we hide our secrets from each other, from ourselves. So when you think about it like that, it’s a wonder that we trust anyone at all.

The voice belongs to the protagonist of the series, Vanessa (Nessa) Stein, an Anglo-Israeli businesswoman who, together with her brother Ephra, has inherited her father’s company. In order to make up for their father’s Zionist beliefs and arms dealing, which led to his murder in the presence of young Nessa and Ephra, both have engaged in extensive philanthropic work to facilitate the reconciliation process between Israel and Palestine. As the public face of the Stein Group and a politically outspoken entrepreneur, Nessa carefully crafts her appearance. Costume designer Edward K. Gibbon spoke of Nessa’s clothes are ‘a protection layer.’¹  Like the opening monologue suggests, there is more that lies behind her sophisticated armour; in fact, Nessa Stein is ‘not quite the woman she appears to be’ as Hugh Hayden-Hoyle, the head of MI6’s Middle East desk, observes in episode six. During the unravelling of the main plot of The Honourable Woman, which centres around the Stein Group’s attempt to build optical fibre cables in the West Bank, viewers also witness the peeling off of Nessa’s layers of identity.

The Honourable Woman opens with Nessa’s ceremony of ennoblement in the House of Lords, where she is given the title of Baroness due to her commitment for the Middle East peace process. At the party that follows the ceremony, she wears a Roland Mouret leopard print dress while giving a speech on a podium, her body language confident and relaxed, slightly provoking. The scene provides the blueprint for Nessa’s confident public persona and wardrobe. Whereas most political female figures seem to embrace Margaret Thatcher’s sartorial mantra ‘never flashy, just appropriate,’ Nessa’s outfit of choice for her public appearances is always a designer dress. According to Gibbon, ‘the untraditional dress choice was … a way to turn the idea of power dressing on its head.’² Nessa’s fashionability sets her apart from the traditional establishment she is now a part of and, rather than being perceived as inappropriate or garish, lends her confidence and an enviable presence. Her style consciously bends the codes of power dressing and, in doing so, lets the audience know that she is perfectly aware of, and ready to challenge, the rules of power play. As journalist Sarah Chalmers observed, ‘everything about Nessa Stein’s demeanour screamed player, before she had even uttered a word.’³ 

While it is hardly a surprise that designer dresses clothing matter in an upper-class London setting, Nessa’s armour follows her on her official trips to the Middle East. In episode four, a flashback shows Nessa give a speech at the Stein Foundation’s university in the West Bank, her first time in Gaza as official representative of her company. For the occasion she wears a long, black dress with lace details, a sombre, safe choice which reveals that her fashionable armour has not yet been perfected. The flashback also discloses a crucial secret in Nessa’s life: her kidnapping during her first visit to Gaza. This tragic event radically affects her personal and professional life. It also hints at Nessa’s conscious use of clothing as shield and profound impact on her choice of self presentation. This radical change is marked, for instance, by her forgoing of jewellery post-kidnapping, a detail that suggests her conscious attempt to project a more controlled image.

Flash forward to present-day in episode seven and Nessa, back in Gaza for a press conference on her plan for the expansion of fibre cables into the West Bank, once again commands an audience in a draped, solid peach silk dress. The soft material and warm colour seem to suggest a more vulnerable side to Nessa’s personality. In the same episode, she is later forced to renounce her dress armour altogether and opt for a more practical trouser suit, as she prepares to make an appearance for the public groundbreaking that will symbolically inaugurate the Stein Group’s project in the West Bank. The conversation with Frances, her assistant and advisor, shows Nessa’s attachment to her public uniform:  

Frances: I’m so sorry, I should have thought of this.
Nessa: What?
Frances: You can’t wear a dress.
Nessa: Why?
Frances: Think about it. You can’t go climbing up a ladder, into a cabin, in a dress.
Nessa: Really?
Frances: Really. You’re gonna have to wear trousers.

In fact, trouser suits are Nessa’s go-to garb for everyday life, when she does not have to appear in public, and are often worn with replicas of 1970s Yves Saint Laurent silk blouses.⁴ The suits are a second layer of Nessa’s personality, one that is only revealed to her family, colleagues and to the viewer. Her pared-down yet sophisticated style is shared by other contemporary female characters on TV, from Scandal’s Olivia Pope to The Fall’s Stella Gibson, who have all contributed to the redefinition of power dressing. Jo Ellison, fashion editor for The Financial Times, has observed how the wardrobe of professional women on TV has gone through a ‘Célinification,’ a progressive shift towards ‘sumptuously luxuriously spare tailoring, svelte silhouettes and form-skimming power skirts’ led by Céline under creative director Phoebe Philo.⁵ The ‘Philophile’ has thus emerged as a contemporary fashion archetype on the small screen and, as fashion historian Valerie Steele noted, Philo’s effortless, androgynous take on power dressing has ‘made a lot of other things look fussy and old-fashioned in comparison.’⁶ 

Yet it is in the moments when Nessa is completely alone, usually before she goes to bed, that her well-hidden self is revealed. Her nightgowns and pyjama sets by Belgian designer Carine Gilson help create a sense of casual intimacy between Nessa and the viewer. The luxurious tactility and visual appeal of silk also provide a striking contrast with the panic room Nessa sleeps in every night, possibly in response to the trauma of being kidnapped and held hostage. It is in this room that Nessa’s layers of identity are removed to reveal her fears and secrets. The all-white, clinical room evokes science-fiction atmospheres rather than those of a political thriller, and indeed the costume designer had initially intended for Nessa to sleep in ‘a Sigourney Weaver in Alien-esque tank and boy shorts set’ which, however, later seemed out of character.⁷ In the words of Gibbon, the scenes where Nessa is in the panic room show her ‘being covered, but uncovered.’⁸ 

This paradox is perhaps best embodied by silk, the material that ideally connects Nessa’s wardrobe, from her dresses and blouses to her night slips. The ambiguity of the material, which conceals the body while also following its contours, conveys the character’s desire to protect herself through layers of clothes and to still look attractive. But it also stands for the pleasure she takes in clothes, in wearing them and touching them, in the feeling of the fabric on her skin. The materiality of clothing is a powerful reminder that, in The Honourable Woman, fashion is not meant to be aspirational; or as Gibbon put it, for Nessa ‘fashion isn’t there to be pretty – it’s a layer between her and the world.’⁹ 

Alex Esculapio is a writer and PhD student at the University of Brighton, UK.

1. http://fashionista.com/2014/12/the-honourable-woman-costumes ↩

2. Ibid ↩

3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/11046592/Why-The-Honourable-Woman-has-captured-our-hearts.html ↩

4. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0e520adc-2210-11e4-9d4a-00144feabdc0.html ↩

5. Ibid. ↩

6. https://www.nowness.com/series/fashion-disciples/fashion-disciples-philophiles ↩

7. http://fashionista.com/2014/12/the-honourable-woman-costumes ↩

8. Ibid. ↩

9. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/jul/29/fashion-tv-shows-reinventing-style-working-women-honourable-woman ↩

Aaron Rose: This interview is going to be a bit different from the usual ones because we are going to speak about fashion and in particular costume…

Kenneth Anger: Yes. It’s great! You know I’ve just come from Paris where I was invited to the opening of the Valentino show.

Aaron: Yes, I would love to talk about that, but if it’s ok let’s go back for a second. My assignment here is to write about fashion and the occult, but since you are not a fashion designer this would really be more about costumes. When did you first start thinking about costumes?

Kenneth: Well, the story behind that is that my grandmother, her name was Bertha Coler, she was also known as Big Bertha, she was a costume mistress and a designer, who looked after the costumes during the silent film period in Hollywood. The most notable film that she worked on was The Eagle in 1925. It was one of the films starring Rudolf Valentino. It was the only swashbuckling action film that he made. It was done a little bit in the spirit of Douglas Fairbanks films.

Aaron: So you grew up around costumes?

Kenneth: Yes, and then when my grandmother died she left me her collection of robes from the films that she had worked on. This included some costumes from Clara Bow films, and of course these costumes are very fragile! Silk is an organic substance and it has to be looked after very carefully or the fibres will tear. I gave all those costumes to the British Film Institute in London some years ago. I don’t think they have put any of them on display, but they do have them.

Aaron: When I was first given this assignment I immediately thought of the opening scene from your film Puce Moment where you have all the vintage dresses sliding towards and tearing away from the camera.

Kenneth: Yes! Those belonged to my grandmother as well. They are different dresses from the 1920s – from the Jazz age. Those are flapper dresses.

Aaron: Why did you decide to tear them away like you did?

Kenneth: Because in the slightly satirical idea behind that particular short film, the girl in the film is supposed to be sorting through her closet to find the dress she wants to wear. So she’s pulling one after another off the rack, then looking at it and tossing it aside.

Aaron: It seems as though costume and fashion have played a major role in most of the films you have made. Why is that?

Kenneth: You have to consider the fact that I’ve never had budgets; my films have always been very modestly produced by myself. I mean, my entire budgets are what a major film would spend on hairpins! But costumes are important. I’ve used a lot of uniforms and I do consider those costumes…because they are. They’re not ordinary street wear. I’ve made several films with military uniforms, and finally I made a film recently called Uniform Attraction, which is about the fetishistic interest in military uniforms. In fact, I don’t care whether it’s a policeman or an orderly in a hospital or a fighter in an army; the purpose of uniforms ever since Roman times is to transform a person from a civilian into a unit. So the fact that everyone wears the same type of uniform makes you into a cohesive unit.

Aaron: Weren’t the costumes in your first film uniform related?

Kenneth: Yes. Fireworks has the white summer uniforms, they’re called Summer Whites of the United States Navy. Those were genuine uniforms too! In other words, I used real sailors in my films. I didn’t have to hire the uniforms from a costume house, so they are authentic because the uniforms are real and so are the bodies inside.

Aaron: Symbolism is very important to you. You seem to continually reference the fact that things in life happen by chance and I’m wondering if that plays into the symbolism you use in the costumes for your films?

Kenneth: It definitely does. I know what I’m doing. I’m not what you’d call some kind of drug-crazed maniac like some other film directors. I’m talking about somebody like Jack Smith who was kind of crazy. I knew him quite well and I even helped him on a couple of his projects, but I’ve had a longer life span than Jack.

Aaron: Well, it seems like everything you do has a very specific meaning, as well as very strong historical and personal ties.

Kenneth: I hope so. You know, I’m making personal films. I’ve never tried to break into the commercial film world because I like making short films. I don’t like making three-hour films or even two-hour films. I also like working with found footage. The film I made on the Hitler Youth is using found footage that I got from the Imperial War Museum in London. They were the boy scouts of Hitler’s Germany.

Aaron: Which is again very costume oriented…

Kenneth: Oh absolutely! Of course if you take off the armbands with the swastikas, what the boys are wearing with the short pants and beige colour are practically identical to the traditional Boy Scouts! The Nazis copied the Boy Scouts. The Nazis took it over for their future brainwashed warriors. I don’t know how much you now about the Boy Scouts, but the idea at the beginning was always to prepare the boys to go into military service.

Aaron: I didn’t know that…but it makes a lot of sense. I’m starting to grasp the historical references, but what is your personal connection to uniforms?

Kenneth: Well, I served in the United States Navy when I was a teenager in the closing days of World War II. I didn’t do the whole term because I came down with scarlet fever. I do have a photo someplace of me in a sailor uniform.

Aaron: Let’s switch gears for a minute. In preparation for this, I was looking back at your film, Invocation of My Demon Brother and I noticed that the way you shot that film is very reminiscent of the trends in fashion photography from that time. Were you looking at those fashion images for inspiration?

Kenneth: I have always been very aware of fashion, and I certainly looked at a lot of it. I mean, not just Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue… and after I moved to Europe, in Paris in the 1950s, I became a friend of Yves Saint Laurent. This is just when Yves took over from Christian Dior and I was invited to some of those early shows.

Aaron: So you were aware of what was happening in fashion imagery at that time?

Kenneth: Oh yes! Absolutely. However I’ve never gone into commercial work. Luckily that’s something that I’ve never felt like I’ve had to do because I had enough money to get by in my bohemian lifestyle. However, if I ever had to go commercial, I probably would have chosen something in fashion.

Aaron: I’ve noticed in your films from the 1960s and 1970s, there seems to be repetitive symbolism in your costumes. In particular, images of triangles or motifs of eyes and such. Is there a reason for this?

Kenneth: Well, yes. Like in Lucifer Rising, the triangle is a symbol of the pyramids in Egypt. The triangle shape is an occult symbol for fire. That’s an upward pointed triangle. A downward pointed triangle is a symbol for water. These are ancient symbols and they are very simple. When you combine the two you make a Star of David. Many people don’t know that.

Aaron: What was the personal significance to you in using the triangular patterns?

Kenneth: I am a member of the OTO, which is like an honorary organization that means Ordo Templi Orientis. I’ve been a member for years. It was founded by Aleister Crowley back around 1910. It’s a little bit like the Freemasons or something like that. But I don’t go to meetings. In other words, I’m an honorary member, but I don’t have to really do anything. I know a few of the other people involved and I’ll speak to them when I run into them, but I’m not a club type of person. I’m a loner. I am definitely on the occult wavelength, but I prefer to work alone.

Aaron: But you’ve most certainly pulled references from the occult into your films…

Kenneth: I hope so! I do that for my own pleasure and whether they are understood by the general audience I don’t care! They are there, and I think they have a power and an invocation. Whether you see or you understand the power of an eye in a triangle, that still has a whole occult background. Like the Seeing Eye, that symbol goes back hundreds, maybe thousands of years! So maybe I’ll just flash it at you for a few frames, you know, very quickly.

Aaron: I’m curious why, if you describe yourself as a loner, you belong to this club and reference uniforms and organizations so much in your work?

Kenneth: Well, with regard to the OTO, as I said, I don’t go to their meetings, but I’ve never been expelled. In other words, I haven’t given away any of their secrets. They sometimes will say to someone, “Well you know you haven’t paid your dues, or you’ve told someone something you weren’t supposed to.” But I haven’t done that. On the other hand, I’ve studied Aleister Crowley my whole life, and it’s no secret that he involved actual lovemaking as part of his magic. So that could be interpreted as being some kind of sex scandal, if you want to look at it that way. You know, his idea that making love can be part of magic or ceremony? That doesn’t mean it happened all the time, though. It was occasional…like when the moon was right or something.

Aaron: Were those ideas something that you have tried to communicate aesthetically?

Kenneth: Well, yes, in my own personal way. But I’ve never filmed a ritual. I’ve always filmed a kind of a vision…like as if you were looking into a crystal ball. Not using dialogue or speech. I always use music. That’s my own personal style of interpreting these things.

Aaron: That’s one reason why I love your style. You’ve never had to show actual sex to make it sexy.

Kenneth: That’s right. I think it’s better. Suggest rather than show. Pornography is boring! I mean, so what? It’s in, then it’s out, then it’s in again. When you’re actually performing in a sexual way with someone that you’re attracted to, you forget that it’s sort of just “in and out and in and out.” That doesn’t matter! It becomes like a symphony…and it should be! Hopefully! There’s supposed to be an art to lovemaking.

Aaron: Are there ways that you can specifically speak of where you’ve referenced that symbolically in your costumes?

Kenneth: Well, I think costumes and clothing in general are more interesting than the naked skin. That’s just my own interpretation. The motifs that I have recurring over and over again in my films are not about striptease. It’s the opposite. It’s about dress up. I always show people dressing. They are putting clothes on rather than taking them off. So it’s the opposite of striptease. It’s playing dress-up. To me that is how people really express themselves. Through clothes or costumes. I particularly like the motorcycle fellows in Scorpio Rising. Those are not actors. They are genuine working class fellows that love their motorcycles.

Aaron: Yes…and nobody is getting undressed in that film. They are all putting on their gear…

Kenneth: That’s right. That’s the Kenneth Anger touch.

Aaron: Is that symbolism related to a way you live life spiritually? I’d like to go back to this idea of chance, or rather the lack of chance in life. The idea of pre-determination. It seems like everything in your life and work fits together like pieces of a puzzle…

Kenneth: Well, it’s nice to believe that you have a favourable guardian angel or something, but it’s all a fairytale. In other words, I don’t really believe that. But I have had fortunate happenstances in my life where things seem to fall into place. Either I have a situation where the people I work with are ideal, like the poetess Anaïs Nin, who I knew when I made Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, and she agreed to appear in it. Also, Marjorie Cameron, who in real life has bright red hair, became my scarlet woman in the film. So those things just kind of fell into place.

Aaron: Are there any other aesthetic choices that you’ve made that were driven by coincidence?

Kenneth: Well, I just go with the flow. For instance, when I was living in England in the 1960s, it just so happened that I was friends with Marianne Faithfull. She was recovering from drug addiction at the time, and I cast her as a devil in my film Lucifer Rising. She played Lilith. Lilith is a powerful female demon from the Babylonian times. But working in my film, when she was recovering from her heroin addiction, was kind of a therapy for her. I told her at the time that she was playing Lilith, but the real idea of the character was to get the demon out of her system.

Aaron: Looking back on all these films you’ve made, and specifically in relation to the costumes, is there anything that you wish you had done differently?

Kenneth: Well, it isn’t that I wished anything was different, it’s just that there were ideas that I had that were beyond my means. So with the films that I’ve realised, I’ve just managed to do them and get through them, but there are other ideas that I’ve had that I wished could have been different. For instance, my film Rabbit’s Moon. I made all those costumes myself. That was Pierrot, you know the sad clown, he is basically just in a large white T-shirt. It’s silk, and it’s very loose…like white pyjamas. But he’s always shown in a kind of sloppy white suit with buttons on the front and then a white skull-cap and white paint on his face. He’s dedicated to the moon. That’s why he’s in all white. His rival is Harlequin, and Harlequin has quadrangles on his costume…

Aaron: And you made all of those costumes?

Kenneth: I made them, but I also had some help. I had somebody to work on the sewing machine for me. Then as for Columbine, she’s the girl who teases and torments Pierrot, and then he falls hopelessly in love with her. Yet she is the actual demoness of Harlequin. Harlequin is actually Lucifer. In other words, he is the devil. In the film he is shown as a playful devil, in other words, playing pranks. I show, in Rabbit’s Moon, that Columbine is just a projection out of the magic lantern of Harlequin.

Aaron: What about in your later films? Did you continue to have a big say in the costumes or were there other people making those decisions for you?

Kenneth: Well, when I was living in England I had Jann Haworth. At the time she was married to the artist Peter Blake. I met her at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London, and I asked her if she would like to work on some costumes for me. However, for the most part, I designed them. For instance, the coloured satin Lucifer jacket with the rainbow spectrum on the back, and then the letters in gold leather that spell out Lucifer, those were personally made for me by Jann. It was a good collaboration. That jacket that she made, I donated to the British Film Institute. They never displayed it, but they have it.

Aaron: What about the motorcycle jacket from Scorpio Rising? Who has that now?

Kenneth: Well, I actually made that one. In other words, I did the lettering on it. I used those chrome studs. So I did all that, which is basically pretty easy. You just draw it on the leather and then stick these chrome disks on it. I actually gave that jacket away. One of the motorcycle guys that worked on my film and used to ride me around on the back of his Harley asked for it, and I said, “Ok, take it,” and he just rode off in it on his motorcycle. That was the last I saw of it.

Aaron: You know fashion is something that is so flighty. It’s a transient medium. Yet films for the most part aren’t created that way…

Kenneth: The diabolical thing about fashion is that they are supposed to come up with new ideas for every season, but the seasons, especially as you get older, seem to come faster and faster. Suddenly you have to come up with new ideas, all of a sudden it’s a new season, and what they have discovered is that they can pick up ideas that have gone before and simply retread them. So I think it’s amusing to see some of these ideas come back. You know, in the 1940s when I was growing up it was wartime. It was also the time of Joan Crawford, who was very beautiful then. They began to dress in a mannish fashion, with padded shoulders. Because there was a war going on, they had a more military look, even though they were not in the military…and they’ve brought that back a couple of times. Then there were clogged shoes…

Aaron: This seems like a good segue to speak about the Valentino show that you did recently in Paris…

Kenneth: There are two young designers, who I believe are both Italians, who did this latest Valentino show. Valentino himself is the producer, but he’s not directly involved in the design anymore. Anyway, they approached me to do the light show behind this year’s runway presentation in Paris. It was done outside of the city in what’s normally an industrial space. It’s a big warehouse. It’s longer than a football field. Everything was white. There were white benches for the people to sit on, and white walls, white seats and white cushions. So three walls are white and on these they projected images from my films that I personally chose. They were mostly images from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. They are quite Baroque images with a lot of oranges and hot colours.

Aaron: Were you cited as an influence for the collection itself?

Kenneth: The colours from my images were only occasionally echoed in the clothes on the runway. It wasn’t like they copied images off of the screen or anything. But anyway, so these images from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome were projected on the walls during that half hour before the show while people are being seated. Then, when the runway was happening, they used only images from my Tivoli Fountain film, which were in blue. So there were all these water images that made a wonderful background for the runway show.

Aaron: Did you love it?

Kenneth: Yeah! As a matter of fact, I may try to do something like this again in America. They used nine projectors pointed from the ceiling. Everywhere were these abstract water effects of these splashing fountains. It worked really well. Because of all the water, there was this kind of exuberance going on.

Aaron: How did it feel to sit there and watch that?

Kenneth: It was delightful because I’ve never seen my films shown on nine projectors at once! It was great. I was very happy with it. The Valentino people were very nice to me.

Aaron: At times you’ve mentioned that you saw the cinema as an evil force. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Kenneth: Well, I happen to be a prankster in a sense. A trickster or a prankster. Lucifer tends to be a sort of prankster figure in my imagination. So when I say it’s evil, I mean evil on my terms. I don’t mean evil like, let’s say, the Nazis or something. My conception of evil is something that becomes an obsession. Cinema has become my obsession. In a way I’d like to move away from it and just be free for the last period of my life. I’d love for this period to be one of meditation or contemplation, but it’s not going to happen because I still have ideas for films I want to do. It never lets me go.

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Magic.

Aaron Rose is a director, artist and curator based in Los Angeles.

Transparent begins with Maura’s failed attempt to come out to her children as a transgender woman. Disguised as her old self Mort in an oversized men’s shirt and shorts, her hair gathered in a small, perfunctory bun, Maura is unable to be honest with Sarah, Ali and Josh because she’s overwhelmed by their self-centeredness and selfishness. The viewer, much like Maura’s children, is still unaware of what is really happening. It isn’t until the end of the first episode that we see Maura as herself rather than as Mort. After the unsuccessful coming-out dinner is over, Maura’s real self is revealed with her hair worn loose and a flowing, 1970s-inspired kaftan. These two elements will develop as a mainstay in her signature style throughout the series. As costume designer Marie Schley stated, kaftans convey a certain gender ambiguity and eccentricity, while also evoking broad cultural references:

‘Jeffrey [Tambor] and I discussed which women Maura would be looking to and feel a kinship to. We talked about Joni Mitchell and Mama Cass. Also, Maura’s not just a transgender person. She has many other elements to her life. She comes from a liberal, intellectual background. She’s a professor. We always thought she’d be well travelled, and she probably went on sabbatical and gathered items from around the world.’¹

In the first half of the first season, Maura’s style blossoms and becomes more elaborate as she eases into the feelings of liberation, discovery and regeneration following her coming out. For the first time in her life, as she resolves to her daughter Sarah, she is no longer ‘dressing up as a man.’ A key moment is Maura’s sartorial transition is the friendship with Davina, a trans woman who works at the LGBT Centre in L.A. Davina introduces Maura to hair extensions, gives her makeup tips and baptises her style as ‘California earth mama,’ which perfectly captures Maura’s love of kaftans and hippie culture, which she had only partially experienced as Mort before.

But Maura’s look wasn’t always inspired by the likes of Joni Mitchell. The episodes feature flashbacks to the late 1980s and early 1990s that reveal Mort’s friendship with another trans woman, Marcy, who becomes a companion along his process of experimentation and self-discovery. When Mort and Marcy bravely decide to meet in a hotel and introduce themselves as their female selves for the first time, Mort is wearing a mid-length, blond wig, a sequinned top and officially introduces herself to Marcy as ‘Daphne Sparkles.’ The name and the exaggerated femininity of the clothing are symbolic of Mort’s anticipation to wear women’s clothes, but the effect is borderline parodic: Daphne Sparkles looks more like a drag queen than a transgender woman. In fact, Marcy tells Mort that he needs a less ‘stripper-y’ name for her feminine self and baptises her as Maura. It is only in later flashbacks that we see Maura’s style evolving from sparkling, over-the-top 1980s references, towards flowing silhouettes and natural fabrics. One of the most successful looks created by Schley is the outfit worn by Maura to a Shabbat dinner, the first time we see Maura in the role of the family ‘matriarch.’ For the occasion she wears a rainbow kaftan made in Israel and a necklace of mah-jongg tiles. The clothing references Maura’s identity as a Jewish woman, while the tiles, according to the costume designer, evoke a traditional scene of old ladies playing mah-jongg together.² The entire ensemble conveys much more than just her gender identity; rather, it embraces her as a complex, multifaceted person, and her dress is an extension of this inner identity.

The flashbacks also show the stark contrast between Maura’s earthy, hippie-inflected style and that of Shelly’s, Mort’s ex-wife. The difference is rooted in their personality and ambiguous gender roles in the family. Shelly sums up her dissatisfaction with the role swap during a family emergency with the line ‘I want you to be a man. Save the goddamn day.’ Shelly’s paired-down, masculine style is symbolic of the fact that she was forced to wear the trousers in the family as Mort unconsciously took on more of a motherly role. Later on in season two, when they attend Sarah’s wedding, the contrast could not be more evident: Maura is wearing a summery, breezy dress while Shelly is in a trouser suit. As season two progresses, however, and Shelly finds a new partner, her clothing becomes more colourful, the silhouettes less angular.

While Shelly’s clothes become more relaxed as the series goes on, the style of Josh, her and Maura’s son, becomes more serious and curated. At the beginning of Transparent we meet Josh as a musical producer who is going through a mid-life crisis, however, during season two we see him try to take responsibility for his life choices. This transition is manifested through a slow move from unbuttoned shirts and a casual style to a more muted colour palette and button-ups, which don him a more corporate, controlled look.

Similarly, Josh’s sister Ali, the younger of the Pfeffermans, goes through a radical sartorial transformation during the two seasons, perhaps the most significant one after Maura’s. What the two share is a sense of discomfort with their own body as well as struggles with their gender identity. While Maura’s is mostly shown through the flashbacks, Ali’s is explored in the present. The two of them strongly resemble one another; in fact, in the pilot Maura tells Ali: ‘you know, out of all my children you’re the one. You can see me most clearly.’ Ali’s issues with her body and gender identity parallel Maura’s in the series. Since episode one she is depicted as a typical tomboy who struggles with her femininity and has body image issues. After Maura’s coming out she becomes more keen to explore gender and decides to enroll in a women’s and gender studies program. There she meets Dale, a transgender man, whom she is deeply attracted to. During their first conversation he mentions his love of hyper-feminine women, or ‘high femme’ in his words, and observes that Ali on the other hand ‘gives off a dyke vibe.’ This prompts her to attempt to achieve a femme look that matches Dale’s cowboy getup: a leather fringe jacket, a dress that would not look out of place in a saloon, heeled boots and bright, red lipstick.

While the high femme look is short-lived, it offers Ali room to experiment with gender via clothing choices. The two extremes are reconciled in her appearance at the end of season two, where Ali seems to have come to terms with her homosexuality. Her clothes are genderless but more fitted and colourful in comparison to her earlier casual garb, her makeup becomes subtle and her hairstyle more disciplined. Her newly found confidence is thus accompanied by the creation of a stylised tomboy look. In this sense, Ali’s sartorial transition is as significant as Maura’s in terms of gender expression, in that it explores the hyper-masculine, the hyper-feminine and settles somewhere in the spectrum between the two.

By exploring a variety of ‘transitional’ wardrobes, Transparent succeeds in bringing to the fore not only a nuanced depiction of different gender identities and expressions, but also the temporary, sometimes playful experiments that remain often overlooked in our struggle to create a stable identity, to find the red thread, if you will, that brings together our fragmented selves.

Alex Esculapio is a writer and PhD student at the University of Brighton, UK.

1. http://www.mtv.com/news/1962385/tranparent-wardrobe-interview/ ↩

2. Ibid. ↩

Inspired by the experience of writer Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, who was a producer on the hit franchise The Bachelor, the first season of the series follows Rachel, an assistant producer, as she returns to the set of Everlasting after an on-camera nervous breakdown on the previous season’s finale. Under the wing of executive producer and ruthless mentor Quinn, Rachel has to prove to everyone that she is now mentally stable as well as the most talented producer on set. Rachel’s character is central to the series: fickle and manipulative, but also vulnerable and sensitive, she embodies the ethical contradictions underlying the conditions of reality TV. By extension, her wardrobe offers a way into the parallels between sartorial and moral dilemmas in UnREAL.

Indeed, the first scene in which Rachel appears sets the tone of the entire series. Rachel is in a limousine with some contestants on the way to the bachelor mansion where show is filmed. The girls are dressed in glitzy gowns and the luxurious car interior sets the stage with clichéd tropes of wealth and old-fashioned romance sold by the show. By contrast Rachel is dressed in casual, utilitarian garb: jeans, military green jacket and a grey T-shirt. Her style signals that she’s not participating in the fantasy, but rather that she works behind-the-scenes. The dissonance is amplified by the slogan on her T-shirt, which says, rather cynically: ‘This Is What A Feminist Looks Like.’ Rachel’s look clearly sends a message in stark contrast to her surroundings. In fact, the T-shirt was based off of Shapiro’s real life choice of clothing on the set of The Bachelor, where she reportedly wore ‘a “George Bush, Out of My Uterus” T-shirt, and jeans that exposed her butt crack’ to protest the fetishised beauty promoted by the program.² As Shapiro once was, Rachel seems to be stuck in a job that promotes gender ideals that she supposedly opposes in real life.

As the show progresses, however, the viewer begins to wonder about Rachel’s actual motive for returning to work. Her ‘This Is What A Feminist Looks Like’ T-shirt is ditched in favour of a plain one as she proceeds to use an alleged feminist position to gain the trust of contestants in order to manipulate them. In season one Rachel calls on set a contestant’s abusive ex-partner because a confrontation between the two, in her words, ‘is going to be crazy empowering for the millions of women out there who are letting their husbands knock them around.’ Similarly, in season two she convinces a young African-American activist to drop out of college to be cast on the show, which according to Rachel will give her a broader platform to address gender equality and race issues. Behind the veneer of female empowerment, however, lies the desire to generate good ratings. Rachel, Quinn and the other producers are willing to do almost anything to make the girls conform to the scripted identities required to gain ratings for the show, forming the girls into typecast identities like, ‘the wifey,’ ‘the villain’ and ‘the desperate MILF.’ Their manipulations often entail style tips: when girls act too demure they are told to wear more revealing clothes, but when their clothing is too revealing they are shamed into thinking that they cannot be ‘wife material.’ Some contestants are turned into veritable caricatures: in one early episode a black girl is pushed by the producers into the ‘angry black woman’ stereotype, which leads her to pick a short, tight, leopard print dress in orange to appear more aggressive. Similarly, in season two, a white, conservative girl from the South is convinced to wear a confederate flag bikini upon meeting the new suitor, an African-American football player. As the season progresses Rachel starts to show a darker side, and her talent for manipulating the contestants emerges, as such, her wardrobe begins to take on a more curated look.

If initially Rachel is told by Adam, the show’s suitor in season one, that she looks like ‘a homeless person,’ and by Quinn that she needs to take time off because she ‘looks like crap,’ she slowly appears to take more care in her appearance. By episode four she is wearing a black leather jacket and eyeliner, which causes the response from Adam: ‘Wow, what’s the occasion? You ditched the bird’s nest look.’ Indeed, Rachel’s style appears to imitate her mentor, and the show’s villain, Quinn whenever she attempts to exert more control over her life. Josh, Rachel’s ex boyfriend who also works behind-the-scenes on the set of the show, immediately picks up on the change at the beginning of season two, asking Rachel if she has raided Quinn’s wardrobe. Her monochromatic, model-off-duty power look – a white silk blouse, a fitted, black Helmut Lang blazer, skinny jeans and heeled boots – is inspired by Quinn’s body-conscious dresses, structured blazers and high heels. The style conveys the executive producer’s ruthlessness, ‘Tell them that if they don’t take my call, I’m gonna come over there and shove my Manolos up every one of their slimy asses.’

When Rachel is not able to live up to Quinn’s expectations or begins to question the moral implications of her actions on Everlasting, her wardrobe reflexively becomes more casual. Rachel’s unstable style matches with her waves of insecurity and mood swings; according to Cynthia Summers, ‘The messier her mind, the messier her look.’³ The contrast is particularly striking against Quinn’s fashionable and expensive wardrobe. Unlike Rachel, Quinn does not have any conflict or qualms about manipulating the cast of the show, her moral distance and calculating attitude is mirrored in her consistently sleek, armour-like clothes. In many ways her style is not personal at all, but rather embodies Hollywood’s sartorial ideal of female empowerment: a mix between brand obsession à la Sex and the City and the sensible, minimalist simplicity of traditional American fashion.

What Quinn’s and Rachel’s wardrobes have in common is that they both reflect the antihero qualities of the two characters. As female producers in an industry where men are constantly given more credit and paid better, their dysfunctional, sometimes competitive relationship also provides a sense of comfort. The culmination of their mutual respect is perhaps best represented by the matching ‘Money. Dick. Power.’ tattoos the two women get at the beginning of the second season, the tone of which ironically sounds less like a feminist motto and more like the macho banter of their male counter-parts. As writer and critic D.T. Max observed, ‘You can watch UnREAL for the same destructive women-on-women behaviour you see on The Bachelor or as a witty commentary on it.’⁴

At a time when terminology around feminism and female empowerment is increasingly co-opted by corporate slogans and branding strategies, UnREAL offers a nuanced, but controversial depiction of self-proclaimed feminist characters, whose often unspoken moral stance is gradually revealed to us through the language of clothes.

Alex Esculapio is a writer and PhD student at the University of Brighton, UK.

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/on-lifetimes-unreal-clothes-matter-even-behind-the-cameras_us_575afb70e4b0e39a28ad798d ↩

2. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/sarah-gertrude-shapiro-the-savagely-clever-feminist-behind-unreal ↩

3. http://observer.com/2016/06/unreals-costume-designer-discusses-the-beyond-bonkers-second-season/ ↩

4. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/sarah-gertrude-shapiro-the-savagely-clever-feminist-behind-unreal ↩

Radical intervention in sartorial appearance was a core part of Kibbo Kift’s project, and the group developed an original and idiosyncratic aesthetic across all aspects of their art, craft and design. Taking inspiration from the author and artist Ernest Thompson Seton’s theory of ‘woodcraft,’ as a form of outdoor living and naturalist educational training, Kibbo Kift’s leader believed in ‘picturesqueness in everything.’² What the Kindred looked like mattered. This focus was not simply a surface issue; the group’s ambitions and vision were underpinned by an interest in aesthetic beauty and physical culture, which intersected with post-war concerns with fitness and reconstruction. From the outset, the group’s wide-ranging ambitions for world reform and peace were addressed in terms of reverence for the body, while group costume ranged from the practical to the dramatic. Flowing green hooded cloaks were worn for camping and hiking; skimpy exercise garments comprised brass brassiere tops for women and Native American-style breechcloths or ‘gee-strings’ for men. Each outfit had to be handmade by individual Kinsfolk to an original Hargrave design. This was a demonstration of practical self-reliance in craft as well as symbolic commitment to the cause.

In the group’s elaborate cultural activities, which included spiritual ritual as well as original theatre and song, ceremonial surcoats featured occult insignia and dramatic robotic silhouettes; performance costumes updated medieval jesters’ outfits with avant-garde elements. In these elements of Kibbo Kift’s wardrobe, the group’s spiritual and aesthetic influences, from hermetic religion to cutting-edge advertising, were made clear. The outfits had to be uncompromising because radical sartorial action was required for total cultural transformation. Hargrave described conventional dress, such as the bowler hat, as ‘pathetic – a tragi-comedy – the headgear of purposeless routine. It is the symbol of frustration – physical, psychological, and religious. It is an inane thing. Similarly,’ he pronounced, ‘the waistcoat, coat and trousers are the livery of a particular form of slavery.’³ Kibbo Kift’s outlandish and sometimes self-consciously ridiculous costuming communicated the group’s radical distinctiveness and their wholesale rejection of ‘civilised’ culture. Through dress that liberated the body and that adopted elements from the past as well as the future, Kibbo Kift aimed to show the redundancy of the present day and its finery, in order to enact the next stage of cultural evolution.

The Kindred were not alone in their ambition to reform dress practices in the period. The Men’s Dress Reform Party, established in 1929, featured several prominent Kibbo Kift members who were active in its ambitions for more colour and comfort in dress for the modern male. Although this endeavour generated some public ridicule, the MDRP sought to do away with neckties and stiff collars, adopting scouting-style shorts for everyday wear to improve ‘hygiene’ in clothing and to reflect increasing informality of behaviour.⁴ The restrictions and impracticalities of women’s clothes had also long been subject to critique by health campaigners and dress reformers and Kibbo Kift members also added to these debates throughout the 1920s. While Kibbo Kift cultivated drama in dress, comfort and practicality were always emphasised over fashionable silhouettes and frivolous fabrics. As part of Hargrave’s ambitions to correct what he saw as an increasingly unnatural existence, he placed significant emphasis on the natural human form as a foundation for a healthy society, unfavourably comparing the constrained gait of a ‘civilised’ woman with the physical perfection of animal movement, for example. These ideas about the apparently inherent superiority of the natural world drew on biologist Herbert Spencer’s assertion that ‘to be a nation of good animals is the first condition of national prosperity.’ This phrase was a familiar one within experimental health and physical culture circles in the interwar period, for Kibbo Kift was not alone in its interest in cultural and physical regeneration in Britain. Bodily beauty and fitness were widely perceived in moral terms as an index of the state of the nation.⁵

The role of beauty in the Kibbo Kift was linked not only to their ideals for dress reform but also to their particular approach to gender and sexuality. Advice given to girls and women – always by Kibbo Kift men, even if the subject was menstruation or contraception – was that they ‘should do their utmost to be attractive, well dressed, and graceful.’⁶ Kinswomen were expected to hike long distances, carry heavy packs, wear stout shoes and suffer the same improving hardships as men, but they needed to do so in a dress and stockings (a motion that Kinswomen should be permitted to wear green, brown or grey ‘rational dress,’ that is, trousers, was passed at the 1924 annual gathering but was never enacted). Despite the group’s radical approach to dressing, they had conformist attitudes to sex roles and relationships. Heterosexual, monogamous partnerships were strongly encouraged alongside early marriage and childbearing. Women and men were expected to inhabit their assigned roles as active and passive sexual ‘polarities.’ These gendered ideas played out in the leadership roles in the organisation and consequently affected directions about appearance, where Kinswomen were instructed to appear ‘free, natural, unconventional,’ but never ‘mannish.’⁷

Although the group was open to all ages, like many outdoor movements and societies across Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, Kibbo Kift promoted the virility and vitality of youth. From 1929, two specially designed Kibbo Kift leather belts were commissioned from Liberty’s of London, where two of the central Kin members were employed. These featured ornate Celtic-styled buckles in silver, embedded with K symbols and semi-precious jewels. Each was engraved with the archaic message, ‘Wes Hael! Be thou whole in body-fastness.’ As a celebration of physical health and spiritual wholeness, these were presented annually to the fittest young man and woman of the Kin.⁸ Images of the recipients were published in Broadsheet, the Kibbo Kift magazine. Nietzschean ideas about human perfectibility, with Kinsfolk as the embodiment of the superman ideal, were sometimes denied in Kin literature, but they undoubtedly underpinned much of Kibbo Kift’s thinking about bodily beauty and sexual behaviour.⁹

Kibbo Kift’s concerns with physical fitness, the cultivation of natural beauty and the propagation of a new, healthy generation echo some aspects of the eugenic ideal in the early decades of the twentieth century, which circulated among a wide range of reformers across the political spectrum in search of social betterment.¹⁰ There is a tendency to read such ideals retrospectively through their later development in the hands of national fascist regimes but it is important to view the ideas in their localised cultural contexts. Like many of their peers in the 1920s, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift were concerned about physical degeneration in the wake of the First World War but they aimed to solve the problems themselves through positive interventions at the level of their own bodies. Kibbo Kift’s dance and drama, hikes and handicrafts were intended to foster physical strength and clarity of mind as qualities that would be required by those who wished to survive the expected cultural collapse. In designing a new world from the bottom up, Kinsfolk’s bodies and dress provided privileged sites onto which dramatic new dreams and retro-futurist fantasies could be projected.

Annebella Pollen is Principal Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. She is the author of The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians, published by Donlon Books, and the co-curator, with Nayia Yiakoumaki, of the exhibition ‘Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred’, which runs at Whitechapel Gallery, London until 13 March 2016.

1. For a full discussion of Kibbo Kift’s purpose and philosophy, from founding to decline, see A Pollen, The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians, Donlon Books, London, 2015. ↩

2. Seton first set out his nine woodcraft principles in 1910; this quote is taken from his summary of thirty years of woodcraft training: E Thompson Seton, Woodcraft and Indian Lore, Doubleday, Doran and Company, London, 1930, p. 7. ↩

3. J Hargrave. The Confession of the Kibbo Kift, William Maclellan, Glasgow, 1979 [1^st ed. 1927], p. 99. ↩

4. For more on men’s dress reform, see J Bourke, ‘The Great Male Renunciation: Men’s Dress Reform in Inter-War Britain’, Journal of Design History, 9.1, 1996, pp. 23–33; also I Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010. ↩

5. I Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Raising a Nation of “Good Animals”: The New Health Society and Health Education Campaigns in Interwar Britain’, Social History of Medicine, 20.1, 2007, pp. 73–89. ↩

6. J Hargrave. ‘The Women of the Kindred’, Broadsheet [Kibbo Kift magazine], 28, November 1927, p. 3. ↩

7. ‘An Outline of Kibbo Kift Training: The Woman’, Nomad [Kibbo Kift magazine], 1:11, April 1924, pp. 128–129. ↩

8. The belts can be seen in the exhibition, Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred, Whitechapel Gallery, London, until March 2016. ↩

9. F W Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Penguin Books, London, 2003. ↩

10. For contextual literature on eugenic concerns, see L Bland and L A Hall, ‘Eugenics in Britain: The View from the Metropole’, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, edited by A Bashford and P Levine, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010; also R Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919-1939, Penguin, London, 2009. ↩

Choreography: Merce Cunningham

Costume Design: Rei Kawakubo

Set Design: Takao Kawasaki and Masao Nihei

Composer: Takehisa Kosugi

CONTINUING OUR SERIES ON collaboration, we look at some of the most important collaborations that have taken place between fashion designers and figures in the art and design world, in order to examine how fashion can be expanded beyond its traditional system. Collaboration is a term that is used (and sometimes misused) heavily in the art and design world in linking different entities together to achieve a new finished product or project. Today the term is often used as a marketing buzzword for brands within the fashion system: Maison Martin Margiela’s collaboration with retail giant H&M is a recent notable example. Looking at how fashion designers work when collaborating with those outside the fashion system not only furthers our understanding of what clothing can be capable of functionally, but also encourages us to look at a garment or a designer from a new perspective.

In 1997 choreographer Merce Cunningham invited fashion designer Rei Kawakubo to work with him on a dance piece, the result was ‘Scenario’ which premiered in October of that year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. Both parties brought their own distinctive style in the working process; in collaborations such as this it’s precisely the disparity between each artist’s practice that is integral in creating the new aesthetic. Cunningham, going against the traditional notion that dance should be elegant and harmonious, juxtaposes and layers the bodies on the stage; in much the same way it could be said that Rei Kawakubo breaks from traditional notions of fashion, or womanhood, with her conceptual and often disruptive designs. At the time of the collaboration Kawakubo had just released her now-seminal spring/summer 1997 collection ‘Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress and They Are One’, which she adapted for the new medium by adjusting the seams and fabric to allow the dancers on stage to move as freely as possible. Cunningham’s artistic approach often uses chance systems to generate choreography, and ‘Scenario’ was no exception. Cunningham and Kawakubo worked independent of each other, meaning that the design and functionality of the costumes were not inherent to the movements of the dance, allowing chance to become an important aspect of the finished production.

The collaboration and the resulting work was recently presented again in the exhibition ‘Dance Works III: Merce Cunningham/Rei Kawakubo’,¹) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In footage presented at the exhibition, several of the dancers describe the act of wearing the garments in the production; ‘one dancer says her Kawakubo costume was like a hot and bulky parka, and that her view of the other dancers was often obscured. Another enthuses about how invigorating and fun it was for her try to move her legs in the long, tight spandex dress: she simply couldn’t do Cunningham’s choreography and had to adapt.’²) The ‘lumps and bumps’ collection (as it’s often referred to) is conceptualised as a challenge to the ideal of the body and its boundaries with a garment, playing with notions of adding and detracting from the natural form to create ‘beauty’. In ’Scenario’ the collection becomes experiential, influencing the outcome of the dance itself as dancers adapt to the garments. From a visual perspective, the outward curvature of Kawakubo’s clothes strongly parallels with the exaggerated moves of Cunningham, and the costumes are as much performers in the piece as the dancers themselves. Following the premiere of the piece in 1997, Kawakubo told The New Yorker, ‘When I saw the rehearsal for the first time, I was fascinated by how the shapes changed and came alive.’³)

In dance, the role of the costume designer is integral to the performance, and in working with a fashion designer, new aspects are brought forward to the production. In the most successful collaborations each collaborator brings their individual approach to a project, and in the process both expand their own scope and practice, and similarly, our perception of their work. Functionally, dance challenges fashion, pulling it from the fashion system onto the stage, where a garment is able to stand alone and on its own practical and aesthetic merits. This can also be a powerful meeting of two worlds, whereby the conceptual ideology of each party is mingled together to have new meaning side by side. From the perspective of fashion, working with other realms might offer new ways of viewing a garment, and the role of a fashion designer, enabling us in some way to look at the fashion system with more flexibility, and with an open mind.

1. ‘Dance Works III: Merce Cunningham / Rei Kawakubo’ at the Walker Center in 2013, curated by Betsy Carpenter, (http://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2012/dance-works-iii-merce-cunningham-rei-kawakubo ↩

2. ‘Dress Meets Dancing Body’ by Camille LeFevre, for mnartists.org, 25 January, 2013 (http://www.mnartists.org/article.do?rid=328432# ↩

3. ‘Pret-A-Danser’ by Kevin Conley and Max Vadukul for The New Yorker, September 22, 1997,(http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1997/09/22/1997_09_22_096_TNY_CARDS_000379173#ixzz1A7S6soen ↩

AS A PLATFORM FOR performance, the stage lends itself ideally to the pushing of sartorial boundaries to entertain an audience, so its no surprise that most ‘fashion moments’ in have occurred in this medium. From Josephine Baker to David Bowie, fashion and the arts share these seminal and nostalgically symbolic images. With novelty and expression being foremost notions of the stage, to amaze and push boundaries for an audience is only the beginnings of successful entertainment. Moreover fashion actively engages with the stage, as Jean-Paul Goude did with Grace Jones’s ‘One Man Show’ in 1981,¹ and inversely fashion uses live music, sometimes dance and theatre on the stage’s linear derivative, the runway. From costume to fashion, there is a powerful partnership between clothing and entertainment.

Worn for the Talking Heads 1984 tour of their album ‘Speaking in Tongues’ lead singer David Byrne’s oversized grey suit has gradually been elevated from cult status to a fashion icon. Vestoj‘s On Material Memory, featured the suit, and we revisit this in a sort of symmetrical reflection on fashion and power. The amplification of this archetypal capitalist structure, is playful: with Byrne’s wobbling torso spotlit on the dark stage, moving to the upbeat electro-pop soundtrack. More than a lasting image, the performance is bodily and thoroughly engaging. Within the setting of the 1980s, financial boom and consumer excess, the image sharply reflects its cultural climate. Simultaneously Byrne’s performance parodies the post-punk era, and the over-intellectualised seriousness of rock music left over from the 1970s. As he told Ganda Suthivarakom in Vestoj: ‘Of course the people who complain about wearing a uniform the most are often the ones whose uniform of choice is a t-shirt and worn jeans. As if that isn’t a uniform as well! Conformism masquerading as non-conformity, if you ask me.’²

Fashion and subversion in music is certainly not new, but what the ‘big suit’ achieves is on stage embodiment. The quadrilateral men’s business suit, which typically strives to abandon the body by rendering itself as a pristine two-dimensional image, an untainted ideal, becomes active and playful in Byrne’s performance. Suit and body move in an unusual and surreal animation, which reinforces a sort of humour. As Byrne says, ‘A friend made a kind of quip, […] “well, you know what theatre is – everything has to be bigger.” And he didn’t mean the clothes had to be bigger, he meant that the gestures were larger, the music had to be more exaggerated, on stage than they would in real life. But I took it very literally and thought, ‘Oh, the clothes are bigger.’”³ So the suit acts as both a juxtaposition of traditional theatrical devices and also as sartorial commentary. Reflecting more broadly on the power for a performer to use fashion as a tool creatively, culturally and socially.

1. Grace Jones’ ‘One Man Show’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNNmwIYllEM, 1981 ↩

2. Ganda Suthivarakom ‘ David Byrne – On Uniforms and Non-uniforms’ Vestoj, Issue No.1 ‘On Material Memories’, 2009 ↩

3. Josh Stillman ‘Q&A: David Byrne on the future of music and his new book, How Music Works’, Entertainment Weekly, http://shelf-life.ew.com/2012/09/10/ew-qa-david-byrne/3/, September, 2012 ↩