Their eyes meet. She thinks the woman is smiling, but she can’t quite tell. The woman’s face is covered by a mask, and so is her own. They pass each other, like they often do in the hour before curfew. She continues her walk. A latex glove lies by the roadside. The index and middle fingers are crossed, as if for luck or hiding a lie. She passes another person on the street, moving away to keep the required distance.

It makes her think of an occasion, months earlier, when she had come jogging down a mountain, sweaty, tired and slow. Two girls were coming the other way; they smiled as she approached. As they passed each other, the girl closest to her stretched out a hand for a high-five. Now, high-fiving a stranger seems unthinkable. It makes her feel a little wistful. The distance, the masks, the gloves, this strangest of times. Everyone hiding in their homes. She continues walking back to her apartment. She unlocks the door, and steps inside. Safe, perhaps, and lonely.

She takes off her shoes, and the facemask. She sheds her gym clothes in a pile on the floor and gets into her pyjamas. It’s virtually all she wears these days. She likes the simplicity and the comfort. The limited number of combinations of trousers, tops, and robes. She’s gotten used to seeing her plain face in the mirror, make-up free. Nothing to dress for.

There is a knock on the door. Unexpectedly, her neighbour. He has trouble with the shared internet, and asks for help. They’ve only greeted each other in the stairwell before, yet she invites him in. Something to alleviate the boredom. He takes off his facemask, seeing that she’s not wearing one. He clearly hasn’t shaved in weeks. He is the first person in days she’s spoken to face-to-face without a mask.

They have a drink on her balcony. She pretends they’re sitting on the terrace of a bar, like they might have in virus-free times. Instead they’re alone, inside her home. Two strangers in soft clothes and plain faces. The sun sets. The conversation stumbles, accelerates. They talk of fears, politics, childhoods, their intimacy growing in the darkness. The street is quiet. The buzz of cicadas and their own voices the only sounds cutting the air. Until they run out of things to say, and the cicadas alone save them from silence. Yet they refill their glasses, and move inside. She puts on music.

The night swirls around them, music filling the room. Or perhaps it’s them swirling, with the wine, the lockdown. Dancing, badly on her part, well on his. She has her arms wrapped around his neck. After weeks of restricted movements, working from home, sunset curfews. She’s longed for human touch.

He kisses her. Or perhaps they kiss each other. He pulls back, says, ‘I’m with someone.’ ‘No comment,’ she says. He smiles a little, and looks at her. Gets closer again. They keep dancing.

He untangles himself, decides to leave.

Days pass. She sees him in the courtyard. They greet each other, stay metres apart. Social distancing. They both pause, but don’t stop. She continues up the stairs to her apartment. Tired and slow.

Yet another day passes. She sees him outside again. This time they stop. They talk of virus numbers and the extended lockdown, then of music. She invites him in. Again they sit on her balcony, watching the light shift and sink. The conversation fills the air, occasionally stumbling. They finish a bottle of wine, swirling the last dregs in their glasses. He stands up, rests a hand on her shoulder. He steps away. She stands up too, walks him to the door. He leaves.

The weekend comes around. He knocks on her door, asks if she’s busy. She invites him in. He steps inside, eyes on the floor. He lingers in the hallway. She goes to fetch a bottle of wine and two glasses, prompts him to go out onto the balcony. She smiles slightly at his awkwardness, both pleased and puzzled by his presence. They drink, talk. She’s wearing a printed green robe. He says he likes the way it catches the colours of the trees around them.

Later on they get hungry, cook a simple meal together. Spaghetti carbonara. They are both in the kitchen, navigating the small space as if one of them might carry the virus. They finish the cooking and, with relief, carry their loaded plates back out. They sit down to eat, talking about art, ideas, and aspirations. Trying to find common ground, failing. Night falls and the cicadas come out.

She wants to reach out a limb and feel his skin but doesn’t. Instead she looks at him through the darkness, trying to meet his eyes. He holds her gaze, briefly, then looks away. He talks, she listens. They stay out on the balcony until the cicadas have gone quiet too. Eventually he says he should go home, go to bed. They stand up, she walks him to the door. He kisses her cheek, she hugs him briefly. She touches his wrist. They look at each other, a little too long. He leaves.

She goes to bed too. Wakes up, picks out a robe, puts it on, makes coffee. The dirty plates sit by the sink, reminding her of yesterday. She finishes her coffee, wants some air. She swaps her robe for a jacket, dons her facemask, leaves the building, and goes for a walk. She smiles when she passes the spot where the latex glove lies, now half-buried in the ground, its fingers still crossed as if for luck or for hiding a lie.

Alexandra Cronberg is a Nairobi based survey methodologist and occasional writer.

I REMEMBER A SONG, so worthless and silly that it seems hardly proper to quote from it in a work which has some pretensions to seriousness, but which nevertheless expresses very well, in its vaudeville manner, the aesthetic creed of people who do not think. ‘Nature embellishes Beauty,’ it runs. It is of course to be presumed that, had he known how to write in French, the poet would rather have said ‘Simplicity embellishes Beauty,’ which is equivalent to the following startling new truism: ‘Nothing embellishes something.’

The majority of errors in the field of aesthetics spring from the eighteenth century’s false premiss in the field of ethics. At that time Nature was taken as ground, source and type of all possible Good and Beauty. The negation of original sin played no small part in the general blindness of that period. But if we are prepared to refer simply to the facts, which are manifest to the experience of all ages no less than to the readers of the Law Reports, we shall see that Nature teaches us nothing, or practically nothing. I admit that she compels man to sleep, to eat, to drink and to arm himself as well as he may against the inclemencies of the weather: but it is she too who incites man to murder his brother, to eat him, to lock him up and to torture him; for no sooner do we take leave of the domain of needs and necessities to enter that of pleasures and luxury than we see that Nature can counsel nothing but crime. It is this infallible Mother Nature who has created patricide and cannibalism, and a thousand other abominations that both shame and modesty prevent us from naming. On the other hand it is philosophy (I speak of good philosophy) and religion which command us to look after our parents when they are poor and infirm. Nature, being none other than the voice of our own self-interest, would have us slaughter them. I ask you to review and scrutinize whatever is natural — all the actions and desires of the purely natural man: you will find nothing but frightfulness. Everything beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation. Crime, of which the human animal has learned the taste in his mother’s womb, is natural by origin. Virtue, on the other hand, is artificial, supernatural, since at all times and in all places gods and prophets have been needed to teach it to animalized humanity, man being powerless to discover it by himself. Evil happens without effort, naturally, fatally; Good is always the product of some art. All that I am saying about Nature as a bad counsellor in moral matters, and about Reason as true redeemer and reformer, can be applied to the realm of Beauty. I am thus led to regard external finery as one of the signs of the primitive nobility of the human soul. Those races which our confused and perverted civilization is pleased to treat as savage, with an altogether ludicrous pride and complacency, understand, just as the child understands, the lofty spiritual significance of the toilet. In their naif adoration of what is brilliant – many-coloured feathers, iridescent fabrics, the incomparable majesty of artificial forms – the baby and the savage bear witness to their disgust of the real, and thus give proof, without knowing it, of the immateriality of their soul. Woe to him who, like Louis XV (the product not of a true civilization but of a recrudescence of barbarism), carries his degeneracy to the point of no longer having a taste for anything but nature unadorned.¹

Fashion should thus be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-a-brac that the natural life accumulates in the human brain: as a sublime deformation of Nature, or rather a permanent and repeated attempt at her reformation. And so it has been sensibly pointed out (though the reason has not been discovered) that every fashion is charming, relatively speaking, each one being a new and more or less happy effort in the direction of Beauty, some kind of approximation to an ideal for which the restless human mind feels a constant, titillating hunger. But if one wants to appreciate them properly, fashions should never be considered as dead things; you might just as well admire the tattered old rags hung up, as slack and lifeless as the skin of St. Bartholomew, in an old-clothes dealer’s cupboard. Rather they should be thought of as vitalized and animated by the beautiful women who wore them. Only in this way can their sense and meaning be understood. If therefore the aphorism ‘All fashions are charming’ upsets you as being too absolute, say, if you prefer, ‘All were once justifiably charming.’ You can be sure of being right.

Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accomplishing a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. Thus she has to lay all the arts under contribution for the means of lifting herself above Nature, the better to conquer hearts and rivet attention. It matters but little that the artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible. By reflecting in this way the philosopher-artist will find it easy to justify all the practices adopted by women at all times to consolidate and as it were to make divine their fragile beauty. To enumerate them would be an endless task: but to confine ourselves to what today is vulgarly called ‘maquillage,’ anyone can see that the use of rice-powder, so stupidly anathematized by our Arcadian philosophers, is successfully designed to rid the complexion of those blemishes that Nature has outrageously strewn there, and thus to create an abstract unity in the colour and texture of the skin, a unity, which, like that produced by the tights of a dancer, immediately approximates the human being to the statue, that is to something superior and divine. As for the artificial black with which the eye is outlined, and the rouge with which the upper part of the cheek is painted, although their use derives from the same principle, the need to surpass Nature, the result is calculated to satisfy an absolutely opposite need. Red and black represent life, a supernatural and excessive life: its black frame renders the glance more penetrating and individual, and gives the eye a more decisive appearance of a window open upon the infinite; and the rouge which sets fire to the cheek bone only goes to increase the brightness of the pupil and adds to the face of a beautiful woman the mysterious passion of the priestess.

Thus, if you will understand me aright, face-painting should not be used with the vulgar, unavowable object of imitating fair Nature and of entering into competition with youth. It has moreover been remarked that artifice cannot lend charm to ugliness and can only serve beauty. Who would dare to assign to art the sterile function of imitating Nature? Maquillage has no need to hide itself or to shrink from being suspected; on the contrary, let it display itself, at least if it does so with frankness and honesty.

I am perfectly happy for those whose owlish gravity prevents them from seeking Beauty in its most minute manifestations to laugh at these reflections of mine and to accuse them of a childish self-importance; their austere verdict leaves me quite unmoved; I content myself with appealing to true artists as well as to those women themselves who, having received at birth a spark of that sacred flame, would tend it so that their whole beings were on fire with it.

This essay and the collection to which it belongs were originally published in 1863, in Le Figaro newspaper.

As the only female member of Italy’s postwar Arte Povera movement, Marisa Merz frequently used non-traditional, quotidian materials in her paintings and sculptures. In 2017, the Met Breuer presented the first major US retrospective of Merz’s work.

1. We know that when she wished to avoid receiving the king, Mme Dubarry made a point of putting on rouge. It was quite enough; it was her way of closing the door. It was in fact by beautifying herself that she used to frighten away her royal disciple of nature (C.B.)  ↩

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself aloud.

Coco Chanel

THE BODY IS A realm of political, social and cultural negotiation; and as such, dress and adornment powerfully represent characteristics within these categories. Artist Barbara Kruger summarises this function eloquently on her 1989 poster, ‘Your body is a battleground’. As the body is crucial to our whole understanding of dress and fashion, it is both vulnerable and powerful as it is symbolically manipulated with clothing. In the third instalment in the collaborative series between Vestoj and Another Africa, we explore the lengths we go to in building meaning onto the body.

When Nelson Mandela wore a bathrobe and neckpiece to represent the traditional costume of his Thembu tribe to his trial after evading authorities as the ‘Black Pimpernel’, he was communicating a distinct message with the body, one of resilience and protest in the wake of his political persecution. Similarly to Mandela the politically symbolic Miriam Makeba often wore her hair in the traditional Fulani style, a sartorial presentation that was inextricably linked to her political identity and context. Considering examples such as these, Coco Chanel’s words, ‘The most courageous act is still to think for yourself aloud’ might speak of the act of externalisation, and of the materialisation of ideas and intent on the body. The politics of the body are also at play when we look at the reappropriation of menswear for women, and notions of androgyny, from Marlene Dietrich’s seminal presentation in tuxedo trousers in the 1930 film ‘Morocco’ that influenced the iconic Helmut Newton image of Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Le Smoking’, invoking the historical narrative of women wearing pants.

Notions of gender also come into play here: a realm in which the fluidity of dress becomes particularly powerful. In one image, a Woodabe man prepares for the Gerewol festival in Tahoua, Niger with extreme care; preening, dressing and applying make-up to impress members of the opposite sex in the ceremony, an age-old tradition of the region. In more contemporary phenomena, similar lengths might be taken by followers of high fashion, or the act of dressing to transgress gender.

Dressing the body is an act of covering nakedness – the fashioned figure’s opposition. In this sense, nakedness is a blank canvas, with no signifiers of social and cultural context, and from which the process of concealing (and sometimes revealing) occurs. In the words of Yves Saint Laurent, ‘Le plus beau vêtement qui puisse habiller une femme, ce sont les bras de l’homme qu’elle aime.’ or ‘The most beautiful clothes that can dress a woman are the arms of the man she loves.’ Suggesting that the purest expression of the body is one without fashion, and its symbolic trappings, this expression sits in contrast to Newton’s image of ‘Le Smoking’.

A decade earlier, the sexually emancipated image of Grace Jones whose presentation of power balances masculine and feminine aesthetics with commercial success, has some strong visual and symbolic parallels with YSL’s ‘Le Smoking’. To the right, Samuel Fosso’s black and white photograph ‘Angela Davis’, from the 2008 series ‘African Spirits’, is an image that is straightforwardly ambiguous. In the tradition of self-portraiture of photographers like Cindy Sherman, Fosso dressed himself as key African and Black American political figures and images for the series. The styling of the portrait of himself as the Black Panther figure, political activist, intellectual and feminist Angela Davis, engages with notions of ownership – of an image and one’s appearance, and its political and gender-based signifiers and historical narratives of resistance.

Across all of these images, each presenting varying manipulations of dress and its manifestation on the body with differing connotations; the notion of the body, the surface upon which identity is formed, still holds true. Through this process of presentation, the intent of an individual is externalised on the surface of the body; but also we are able to take ownership and claim our body through these lengths.

 

1. Woodabe man of the Fulani ethnicity preparing for the Gerewol festival, Tahoua, Niger, photograph by Jean-Christophe Huet
2. Athi-Patra Ruga, ‘UnoZuko’, 2013. Courtesy of Whatiftheworld Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
3. Miriam Makeba wearing a Fulani hairstyle c.1970s
4. ‘Rien n’est plus beau qu’un corps nu. Le plus beau vêtement qui puisse habiller une femme, ce sont les bras de l’homme qu’elle aime. Mais pour celles qui n’ont pas eu la chance de trouver ce bonheur, je suis là.’ Yves Saint Laurent, 1983, translated as ‘Nothing is more beautiful than a naked body. The most beautiful clothes that can dress a woman are the arms of the man she loves. But for those who have not had the chance to find happiness, I am there.’
5. Fashion designer Gabrielle Coco Chanel with Duke Laurino of Rome on the beach at the Lido, 1930, photographed by Gjon Mili
6. ‘Le Smoking’ by Yves Saint Laurent, photograph by Helmut Newton for Vogue Paris in 1975.
7. ‘Rive Gauche et Libre’ editorial for Vogue Paris, September 2010 featuring Josh Parkinson, photograph by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggot, with styling by Carine Roitfeld
8. Grace Jones in her ‘One Man Show’ in 1982, photograph by Adrian Boot
9. Nelson Mandela portrait wearing traditional beads and a bed spread, in hiding from authorities as the ‘black pimpernel’, 1961. Photograph by Eli Weinberg
10. Barbara Kruger, ‘Untitled (Your body is a battleground)’, 1989
11. Samuel Fosso, ‘Angela Davis’ from the series ‘African Spirits’, 2008
12. Nástio Mosquito’s ‘Mulher Fósforo’, 2006. Courtesy of Sindika Dokolo Foundation
13. Edith Bouvier Beale in ‘Grey Gardens’, 1975

Missla Libsekal is the founding editor of Another Africa.