IT’S FEBRUARY 18 1960. Jean Cocteau has just released his film ‘The Testament of Orpheus’. Mme Francine Weisweiller is in it, just a small part, but important nevertheless. Mme is not an actress but the aging poet’s best friend and she plays ‘la dame qui s’est trompée d’époque’ or, in translation, and I fear less smoothly, ‘the woman who found herself in the wrong decade’. Janine Janet, the creator of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s surreal window displays, is the costume designer, but Mme wears a trailing white dress by Balenciaga himself, which she paid for. Instructed by Cocteau to take his inspiration from Claude Monet and Sarah Bernhardt, Balenciaga produces exactly what suits Mme best and into the bargain doesn’t sully his reputation. Cocteau describes Mme’s appearance as a ‘live phantom of flesh and bone’.

Mme Weisweiller (née Worms, born in Brazil to a French Jewish family) is the daughter of money, and the wife of Alec Weisweiller, who keeps racehorses. Cocteau has been living at Santo Sospir, Mme’s Mediterranean holiday villa in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, since 1950 when they first met. She invited him to stay for a few days and he has been there for a decade. His serpentine doodles cover every wall in the house, like snail tracks. Cocteau has three years to live. He will leave in 1963, after a terrific row, and die before they have time to make up.

It’s 1960. Mme is making plans for her daughter Carole’s eighteenth birthday party. Janine Janet is to create magical unicorns decorated with silk rose petals and artificial flowers (which later pop up in the royal box at London’s Covent Garden – an early case of recycling). Mme has to decide what to wear. The dress she orders from Balenciaga, who dresses both, as is the wont in a France rich with sartorial heritage in a time and class when daughters still wanted to look like their mothers. It is as delicate as a shell; beribboned, chaste, and takes some liberties with historical dress.

Given that I have never met Mme, it would be presumptuous to guess what she thought when she commissioned it. The milkmaid fichu and slender skirt has a touch of the Marie Antoinette about it, with its tiny pink ribbon work roses, cream lace florets, delicate beadwork and matching buttons wrought by Lesage. In documentary evidence¹ I can see the fichu wraps snugly across Mme’s torso, like a shawl, and stands proud of her neck at the back. I can see that her fair hair is beautifully coiffed and that she wears a string of pearls as big as marbles, with a jewelled pendant that makes her neck seem very frail. The skirt poufs out a little around the waist, a trademark Balenciaga touch to conceal any slight swelling of the stomach. Her daughter hovers closely by her side, in a fuzz of white organza.

‘C’est Carole Weisweiller qui a eu le plus beau bal de la saison. Elle a fêté ses 18 ans dans un décor echanté, inspiré des thèmes de Jean Cocteau, sphinx, licornes, personnages magiques…’ writes Vogue.

It’s 2010. I observe Mme’s very dress, sprawled flat on a table before me. Let me make this as objective as I can. Its pale pink organza is still crisp, its delicate embroidery still fresh, its ribbon roses still pert but… It’s ruined. We have ways of knowing when a dress is worn – a little smoothness here, a few crinkles under the arms, a little stain or two. But never has a garment been so disfigured by a stain in my many years of searching for meaning in the name of fashion.

It seems unholy to dissect the dress without a surgeon present, but let me perform this autopsy alone. Undo the tiny hooks, the fused poppers, and lift to each side the fleshy flaps of the fichu. Here’s the heart of the dress – it’s a place only meant to be seen by Balenciaga’s finishers, and Mme’s maids. Its organs are pale and boneless. The interior is formed in limp pink silk, visible through the organza, and gives the dress its overall colour, like a cooked shrimp. The inner dress has tendril-like shoulder straps and is fastened with hooks and eyes at the bodice front – making my fingers fumble – and then with a waist belt of pink silk, also fastened with hooks and eyes. There are eight suspender attachments connected to the waistband, like squid.

Let us place the following in context – Mme is wealthy, always fashionably dressed, but not a slave to fashion. She dresses on her own terms. But what on earth was Balenciaga thinking of? He sculpted moulds for dresses and chiselled many a matronly form, he chose firm colours, not delicate floral patterns and darling buttons (although if you want to get technical, the same little embroidered motif turns up in the collection dresses of 1960). This is a Dioresque dress, for a spring fête. But Mme is such an important client that Balenciaga will do anything for her, even take instructions from Cocteau and even make a birthday dress.

I forget myself – this is an essay about magic, about stains, not a commentary on power. And that great dark stain didn’t just appear by itself, it arrived, from a height, and at an angle and with the speed of a stabbing (the dress still shrieks with disdain). If I were a forensic scientist I could mark exactly where the coffee cup (I jump to conclusions) was poised, exactly the tilt at which, once jogged, Mme’s hand lost control, for let’s solve the mystery of the stain with logic. The obvious explanation is that on June 24, 1960, someone at the birthday party walked backwards, alarmed by the unicorns, and knocked the porcelain coffee cup from her hand soaking the fine organza and sullying the perfection of the dress, the epitome of haute couture, forever.

Whatever happened, it was ruined, but not thrown away – perhaps for sentimental reasons. It was 1960, the year of the glorious Testament of Orpheus, its mysterious landscape peopled with fantastic bestiaries and magical persons, and it was the year of the birthday party. Later, after the row, but not because of it, the family gradually lost everything, the house, the collections of art. Forty-six years go by. The dress goes into an auction in London – we spotted it across the room – it wasn’t expensive – it was ruined.

The museum has it now, it’s been given an identity number to add to the terse labels lodged inside like calling cards (Balenciaga, 10 Avenue George V, Paris. ‘72814’ hand written on a tape secreted behind). What more can I tell you? It’s hung in a white metal cupboard, swathed, motionless, flattened and hemmed in by other Balenciaga dresses that abhor it. It’s in an airless and windowless room, at the heart of the museum, without flesh and bone to fill its body. Every time it moves location, it will be tracked like a criminal. It is a little lost, and the snail tracks of the stain get darker every day. Was it Cocteau that dirtied that dress?

Claire Wilcox is the Senior Curator of Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and a Professor in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion.

This article was originally published in Vestoj Issue Two, On Fashion and Magic.

1. By which I mean photographs by Robert Doisneau, Vogue Paris, October, 1960, pp. 142-5. ↩

‘All disgust is in origin disgust at touch,’ philosopher Walter Benjamin aphorised under the theme of ‘Gloves,’ locating the point our repellence towards animals begins.¹ Disgust of something is, first and foremost, a visceral response to the possibility of touching it. The sight of discarded gloves has become familiar to me during my walks in London, so too the guarded look of an oncoming runner nearing a corner at speed. Methods of demarcating bodies, like gloves, masks, and clothing, have gripped our collective attention in the world around us.

Being in physical contact reminds us where our selves and the other begin – the by-product is an experience of estrangement. If I am disgusted by an image, I am ‘touching’ whatever it is lodging in my psyche. Disgust, especially now, seems to be channelled through our hesitance in physical touch, but also in alienation against the status quo of the present. It moves beyond its use as an emotional reaction to tell us what kind of future we do or do not want.

For many of us, Covid-19 has wordlessly twisted the boundary of what can be touched or not, so much so that touch itself has turned into a vaguely clandestine act. Who or what we touch becomes political and the ramifications heightened – and therefore pleasure and disgust too. Worldwide cancellations of fashion weeks, catwalk shows, and the projection of an immense recession threatens to swallow a whole swathe of the fashion industry. But you know this.

Turning Benjamin’s aphorism on its head, it could be said that all pleasure is, in origin, the pleasure of touch. This twin drive emerges when we think about all the things it is possible to touch and the fact that all of us have been driven to this virtual space as the physical spaces we are accustomed to are no longer within reach. The disjuncture that has emerged in lockdowns worldwide between our physical realities and other realities – streams, in-game, video chat, and elsewhere – has meant that we have also spent an increasing amount of time simultaneously avoiding touch but being touching in other ways.

During the all-virtual Shanghai Cloud Fashion Week, the first fashion week to adapt to new prohibitions on mass gatherings, Angel Chen presented her A/W 2020 show via livestream.² The physical models still walked, but the environments varied: from pale pink snow fields to red neon text illuminations redolent of sci-fi movie aesthetics by making use of a green screen. The wait to physically handle the clothing was abbreviated: since it was hosted on an Alibaba-owned platform, users could immediately order looks they liked. Whereas in the current climate, going to a store to buy clothing is loaded, suddenly, digital catwalk shows are no longer a facsimile of the present.

The digitisation of the catwalk has been foretold many times over. Yet, in the last year or so, a new category, digital fashion, has been heralded as one means of transfiguring the present into the future. Clothes are created in 3D modelling software that allows the result to be rendered and distributed online. A purchaser turns their body into a green-screen, allowing the proportioned 3D models to be swapped on and off, giving the illusion of being dressed in the garment. Minimal waste is produced. It is in the vernacular of a new demographic who spends most of its time online. A certain magic emerges in the way that clothing is conjured from the immaterial and our attention cannot help but turn towards it.

Naturally, countless media outlets have documented the immense hype of the application of 3D technology to clothes. The physical limitations of a show, catwalk, model, or audience no longer applies; the physics of the real world are merely a point of reference. The cultural implications, however, are still grounded in the present moment. In 2019, The Fabricant, the ‘first digital fashion house’ sold a digital dress for $9,500 on the blockchain meaning the purchaser had exclusive rights to have the dress digitally fitted to her photographs.³ Digital clothes, then, are asynchronous. It is only possible to wear the clothing by seeing yourself wear them. Last year, iD magazine produced a documentary highlighting influencers who are excited by the inclusivity of digital clothes to fit body types usually excluded from the mainstream, but also stimulate more engagement more quickly from followers.⁴ For all the prowess that this powerful technology presents, it seems for now the actual use of it is limited to creating photographic representation to be circulated in search of social and cultural value.

It could be easy to dismiss digital clothing as a poor replication of physical clothing or, more strongly, as part of the alienating aspects of disgust. A future in which we must circulate primarily online, led principally by the caprices of corporate-owned platforms, would provoke a reaction of disgust in many of us. As our attention has already been commoditised on platforms, self-representation would too. If digital fashion is an industry predicated on technological determinism, alienation from voices who suggest an alternative outside the bounds of this world is nearly inevitable.

This potential for alienation is particularly visible when witnessing the formal constriction of clothing, only visible on a 2D plane in social networks in which influence is already commoditised. Does this originate in the elimination of the tactile qualities of cloth, of fabric, and the sensuous pleasure of seeing clothes move in time and over time? Digital clothes can remain new forever, but by bypassing the wear and tear of physical clothes, do digital ones elide something fundamental? By being unable to touch, to feel, to smell, to apprehend, digital clothes are largely a visual experience above all else, affixed to still photographs. If pleasure is no longer found, does disgust naturally enter? Perhaps not, but disgust may play a role not just in the apprehension of a garment but in the systems and assumptions it represents.

I feel more estranged from physical touch than ever before and yet, by slowly discerning its outline, I am compelled by my encounters in the nascent world of digital fashion. The anthropologist Michael Taussig explores the question of touch in his 1991 essay, ‘Tactility and Distraction’, by way of Walter Benjamin’s concept of optical tactility.⁵ In Benjamin’s eyes, Dada architecture ‘hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality.’⁶ Similarly, film was able to dissuade itself from replaying reality as it began to manipulate itself with new meaning-making techniques. Through extreme details, close ups, or juxtaposed cuts as its visual language, it transformed what it represented. What emerges is a certain way of touching; a visceral response to an image rather than a purely ocular one.

Though most offerings of digital fashion currently are worn via still photographs, the ultimate goal of most technologies purporting to recreate reality online is through motion and embodiment. Though virtual models may walk or pose as if on the catwalk, other endeavours attempt to remove physical references as a starting point altogether. Selfridges 2019 campaign with artist network, DIGI-GXL, embeds digital clothes within a custom 3D world on an enigmatic and faceless avatar.⁷ However, the full expression of the self is truncated. Animations rely on rigging models to predefined movements which work well for replicating the catwalk or advertising films. Improvisation of movement, of the kind that is possible when wearing physical clothing, eludes us for now. What can I make of this? I am removed from the texture of the garment but there is a feeling that I can apprehend the garment in other ways: the individual garment is part of a larger world that, unlike digital catwalk shows, is built without referent to the physical world.

For Taussig, the concept of ‘optical tactility’ is revelatory and explains exactly what kind of magic is being performed. By ‘rewiring seeing as tactility, and hence as habitual knowledge, a sort of technological or secular magic was brought into being and sustained.’⁸ Instead of the critic’s individual eye analysing a scene, we see together as a collective public whose everyday lives are increasingly constituted visually. During my walks in the past few weeks, I notice details less and contrast more often, reading my field of vision primarily by texture.

To our collective eye, digital fashion amplifies, shifts, distorts, and transfigures the physical cues of clothing. 3D artistry and animation creates a technological magic that is potent and discernible only at the surface. This magic operates on us as we go through the day, especially nowadays, distracted and hungry for touch. And what happens if seeing-as-touching induces both pleasure and disgust? Turning to the artist Frederik Heyman’s imagery, I see the enchanting aspects of technology and its propensity to overwhelm our sense of optical tactility.⁹ His work shows strikingly posed bodies, rendered in uncanny human flesh, against a backdrop of speculative machinery or animals. Heyman, who has collaborated with Y/Project, Gentle Monster, and most recently Arca, takes as a starting point our natural disposition towards simultaneous pleasure and disgust. Gazing on Heyman’s digital bodies, repulsion and curiosity immediately flood in and begin to synchronize. Soon it is clear that there is a technological mesmerism at play, rendering scenes that are uncanny somehow familiar. Here, it feels technological mesmerism is doing its work in transforming my eye into something that, above all, touches.

Optical tactility gives us the potential of both pleasure and disgust when considering digital fashion. In the current moment, touch seems to signify our own alienation as well as a hope in the future of new forms of sensory engagement borne out of necessity. The enchanting technologies behind all this give us the prospect of disgust and pleasure, but is only actualised in the everyday space that we find ourselves in online. It will be critical to understand and critique the shape the future takes in these spaces, allowing for both dislocation and accord. The absence and presence of touch is felt more strongly right now and, for digital fashion, it will continue to be at the centre of it.

Riana Patel trained as an anthropologist in Oxford, focusing on the political and cultural aspects of technology. She now works as a digital producer and researcher.

1. W Benjamin, One-way street. Harvard University Press, 2016. ↩

2. KALTBLUT Magazine. ‘ANGEL CHEN AW20: REALITY CHECK’ Youtube. April 29, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA7Sb5QS09A ↩

3. https://www.thefabricant.com/iridescence ↩

4. i-D. ‘Will You Be Wearing Digital Fashion In The Near Future?’ Youtube. May 31, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44p44FnOKE8 ↩

5. M Taussig, ‘Tactility and distraction,’ Cultural Anthropology 6.2 (1991): pp 147-153. ↩

6. Ibid. p.150. ↩

7. https://www.selfridges.com/GB/en/features/articles/the-new-order/meet-the-artist-digi-gal/ ↩

8. M Taussig, ‘Tactility and distraction,’ Cultural Anthropology 6.2 (1991): p. 151. ↩

9. https://frederikheyman.com/ ↩

GREAT BRITAIN IS STILL a haven of magic. It is resting in the forests as well as in the suburbs, in the inner city centres and in village squares. You may not know it, but the man reading the paper over there next to you on the tube could very well be a druid, that woman in front of you in the queue at the bank a Wicca witch. British folklore has a long and momentous history and the worlds of the Abbots Bromley Horndancers, The Burryman of Queensferry, Greenmen, Morris dancers, Pearly Kings and Queens, Witches, Druids, Punch and Judy, Street Sweeping processions, Straw Bears, Hoodening Horses and Bonfire Societies are as full of mystery and enchantment as they are of joy and community. Simon Costin, distinguished artistic director, set designer and moreover also the director of the Museum of British Folklore, has been taking his small museum around ye olde Albion in an ornately decorated caravan, both documenting and partaking in this fascinating world of fantastical tales and peculiar characters. Here he helps us figure a couple of things out about what magical practitioners wear.

When you’re about to partake in an event or festival/ritual, what steps do you take to shake off your ‘everyday persona’ in order to become your ‘special’ one?

Martibogie (Jack in the Green Bogie): For me this begins with the anticipation and planning of the ritual – basically pre-empting the mind-set and purpose of the ritual. I don’t particularly place any heavy emphasis on what I’m wearing. I don’t believe that within traditional craft the adoption of specific ritual dress was necessary, although I imagine people would have worn something practical. Instead the moment I start assembling objects and working tools; setting up the altar, I start to ‘become’ magical.

Mol (Jack in the Green Bogie): It’s a question of volume; my ‘everyday persona’ is my ‘special’ one. That is, I try to live my life in a ‘holistic’ manner, but tone it down for most ‘everyday’ situations.

Raven (High Priestess of the Craft): I believe it is important to shake off the ‘everyday persona.’ In circle we are standing between the worlds so there is no place for everyday concerns. These would detract from the purpose and intent of the ritual. For me it is stilling the mind, usually through meditation. It doesn’t have to be long, it’s about switching focus.

Piri (High Priestess of the Craft): Very few, other than having a shower and getting changed, in the same way that I prepare to visit a friend.

Silver Eagle Spirit (High Priest of the Craft): I prepare by turning my mind into an altered state with the use of meditation or mantra and then into the energy we are going to use, according to the type of ritual. The use of robes helps one alter one’s mood.

Ray Lindfield (High Priest of the Craft): Writing the ritual is the art, then preparing everything needed for the ritual. This can include making incense, making cakes, deciding which equipment to use (i.e. indoors or outside) and making sure everything is clean and in good order. We also have robes and certain jewellery that we keep for ritual occasions. Just prior to starting a ritual we usually have time for a guided meditation/pathworking or a time of stillness to prepare our minds.

Simon Costin (Magical Practitioner): It all depends on the event and as to whether it is a public or private affair. If a public one, such as Jack in the Green, there is usually a weekend of build-up which includes dancing at the céilí, the gathering of leaves for the headdress and finally getting dressed into the costume on the morning of the event. All these things help to put you in a different mindset. If the event is a private ritual, a lot depends on where the ritual is taking place. If at home, I often have a bath and take a moment to sit quietly to concentrate on the task to be performed. If outdoors, the act of changing into robes always helps to get me in the right frame of mind.

Do you ever begin the ritual or event with any form of cleansing, be it drinking, eating or anything else?

Mar: In my own practice I place more emphasis on the physical act of cleansing the circle through sweeping or ‘smudging,’ rather than using salt to purify in the more ceremonial way. These are symbolic acts, which focus and dramatise the intention of purification, speaking directly to the subconscious mind through symbolic language.

Mol: Usually it’s a ten-second mind exercise, once a year it’s seventeen communal hip flasks. Just occasionally my mind refuses to play and I fail to get ‘into the swing.’

Rav: Before a ritual I take a bath to which some salt has been added. This is not the only cleansing that takes place. Before our circle is cast, the area is cleansed by the High Priestess. First by sweeping with a besom widdershins (anti-clockwise) to remove negativity. The bristles do not touch the ground. The negative energy is then cast out of the area to the east. Next, everyone attending is admitted and the four elements of earth, air, fire and water are blessed and consecrated. These are represented by salt, incense, a candle and a bowl of water. The ritual space and all those within are then cleansed and purified with each of the elements. It is only after this that the circle is cast.

Piri: I usually add clary sage oil to my water.

SES: With a ritual bath with herbs for the type of energy we are going to rise. We sometimes fast with no food for up to forty-eight hours or twelwe hours, more or less; once again it is entirely dependent on the type of ritual we are doing at the time.

RL: Cleansing often means a shower or bath just before the ritual, especially if it involves an initiation or elevation to a higher level. We often sweep the Circle at the opening of the ritual. The process of creating a sacred space involves the use of consecrated salt and water, sprinkled around the circle and over everyone in the circle which we believe is part of the cleansing process, together with incense which is wafted over everyone and a candle to represent fire, another purifying element.

SC: Again it depends on the event. If a daytime public one, such as Jack in the Green, most of the day revolves around stopping at pubs along the processional route. If a private ritual, I rarely eat or drink before as it helps to do that afterwards as a form of grounding.

How do the clothes and other accoutrements help to get you into an altered mindset?

Mar: The ambiance of the magic circle and the resulting mindset can be created through incense, music and various objects and ritual tools, much more so for me than what I’m wearing. For me certain objects that I find inspiring and magical play a big part in creating the atmosphere in the circle. It is this atmosphere that helps alter my mindset.

Mol: When doing Jack in the Green things, the smell of the body makeup (Kryolan) enforces my ‘Green Man’ persona.

Rav: Ritual clothing and other accoutrements do help to get into an altered mindset. The clothing we wear is usually a robe and it’s only worn in ritual. This also helps to put on the ‘magical persona’ needed to work between the worlds. It takes us out of the everyday world with all that world’s associations. However, the robe is not the only adornment we use. There is also jewellery worn only in circle such as a circlet or head-dress, a necklace and bracelet. Never a watch because we are outside time so it has no place in circle.

Piri: I use dress and colour according to the wheel of the year, or according to what feels right. After all, even in everyday life I wouldn’t feel right wearing a Christmas outfit and mistletoe earrings in the summer.

SES: The robes which we use are just for ritual. Normally we use the same robes all the time. It puts us in the right frame of mind. The tools that we use in the ritual help us to focus and to cut astral energy, for example with the athame, which is a ritual knife.

RL: A change of clothes is important, especially into robes. Incense is also a very powerful agent to trigger an altered consciousness as the sense of smell has a deep and dire link to a primal part of the brain.

SC: Masks can help greatly to alter your persona within a magical/ritual context and are a fascinating tool to use. Personally, I find that the objects used within a ritual help far more to produce any kind of altered mindset than the clothes do.

What importance do the clothes play in the rituals or events?

Mar: I work skyclad indoors, and wear something that fulfils the purpose of feeling comfortable outdoors. Usually I wear something black because it minimizes my attention towards what I’m wearing.

Mol: Public perception is altered, and I can get away with lots more!

Rav: Because the robe is loose it allows greater freedom of movement than tighter garments would. Since it is only worn in ritual it contains our own energy and it is energy we raise in circle for whatever the purpose of the ritual is. If we are celebrating a Sabbatt such as Lammas (grain harvest) we might act out a piece of mythology. The clothing is chosen appropriate to the role a person is playing. The colours used will often be chosen for their symbolic meaning. Again this will not be everyday clothing. This helps to get into the part in the same way an actor does.

Piri: It’s simple – they just help you to focus on what you are about to do. However, personally, I don’t think they play any significant importance. It is the intent that matters.

SES: None at all, except in a place where you cannot be without them, i.e. being covered up in public.

RL: The clothes only have specific importance if they are reserved for ritual or designed for a specific ritual, to aid taking on an alternative identity.

SC: Within the context of a public event, the clothes help to endow the wearer with a greater sense of themselves. You find yourself behaving differently when wearing a costume and you are often less inhibited. The costume helps to give you a new persona to project yourself from. With a ritual, a simple black robe does the opposite and is often worn as a form of anonymity. I find elaborate robes project ego and when working in a ritual context the will needs to be focused on the job in hand.

Have you ever been naked or skyclad for a ritual and how does it differ from being clothed?

Mar: Many times, but this is entirely dependent on how warm it is. I usually feel more distracted by my body when I’m naked than I do if I’m dressed. I do not subscribe to the belief that energy is impinged through the wearing of clothes when working magic. However if it is comfortable for me to wear nothing then that is fine. I do not believe I feel hugely different whether dressed or undressed.

Mol: Yes, and it’s colder. I usually prefer clothed, being a creature of comfort.

Rav: Skyclad, or ritual nudity, is so often misunderstood. It is not about a sex orgy. I have been skyclad in rituals. I feel it differs from being clothed in that the energy raised is direct from the body and not hampered by robes. For me there is another aspect to being skyclad. To quote from Doreen Valiente’s Charge of the Goddess, ‘And ye shall be free from slavery; and as a sign that ye be really free, ye shall be naked in your rites.’ I have certainly experienced this freedom. To be in a ritual where nobody is wearing any clothes is both freeing and validating. Nobody judges what you look like, whether young, old, fat or thin. Nobody particularly notices. This has been my experience. For me it also has to do with bonding because you are all there together, exactly as you are. As children of the Goddess and God, we are all connected.

Piri: From a personal point of view I think it is more ‘magical’ to be skyclad. It gives a greater feeling of belonging to a like-minded group of people that you trust implicitly.

SES: Yes many times. Rituals done skyclad are mostly in temples or private woods or groves. Being skyclad allows the energy from the body to be released in an easier manner, and for energy to be taken into the body.

RL: Yes, and it is different, it induces a sense of freedom. You don’t have to worry about catching robes on candles! It’s not for the self-conscious though, if you’re more worried about how you look you will not give the ritual your full attention. Whether skyclad or robed, it’s about freeing the mind from the everyday and what works best for you.

SC: I have been skyclad many times but only as a solitary practitioner, both indoors and out. A lot depends on the weather to be honest. It can be nice both at home and outside with a roaring fire going. Although quite liberating the first few times, in the end being skyclad is not essential for me – I would rather feel comfortable and able to concentrate.

How do you return to your everyday selves after a magical ritual or event?

Mar: This is a shift in thought for me, usually dramatised by the striking of a bell. This represents the end of a ritual and the circle being dissolved.

Mol: Normally through sleeping, as I like to be there till the bitter end. Sometimes a good long shower, but then I feel cheated if I have missed something. I am not a very ‘clothes conscious’ person, as you have probably observed, so I am probably less ‘altered’ than most performers.

Rav: When the ritual has ended we ground ourselves. This may be done through meditation and placing our hands on the earth to discharge any excess energy. The circle is opened, everything is packed away and the robes are exchanged for everyday clothing. We often go to the pub and socialise and in this way come back to our everyday selves.

Piri: Once you have shared something to eat and drink and the circle has closed, it is the natural progression of things to return – it just happens.

SES: Eat and drink cake and wine. Close down the seven main chakra’s, (except the Crown and Base which are already partly closed). Then ground any excess energy.

RL: Towards the end of a ritual we usually share cakes and wine and eating is the quickest way to ‘ground’ yourself. We also use an ‘earthing out’ gesture and literally touch the ground, whilst visualising all unused energies sinking into the ground.

SC: If a public event, there’s usually a chance to calm down in a pub and a discussion as to how the day went. Then finally taking a bath and scrubbing off any make-up completes the act. With a ritual there’s usually a period of closing down the area or circle used and giving time for the energy raised to dissipate having been directed. Food and drink help to complete the grounding.

Simon Costin is an artist, set designer and the founder of the Museum of British Folklore. In 2013, he became director of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall.

Henry Bourne is a British photographer. His book portraying participants in this  country’s folk festivals, Arcadia Britannica: A Modern British Folklore, was published in 2015.

This article was originally published in Vestoj: On Magic.

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.

IN HER AUTOBIOGRAPHY, ELSA Schiaparelli describes how she came to start out as a dress designer. One day an American friend visited her, wearing a sweater that was ‘different from any I had yet seen’. She describes it as follows: ‘The sweater my friend was wearing intrigued me. It was hand knitted and had what I might call a steady look […] This sweater […] was definitely ugly in colour and in shape and though it was a bit elastic it did not stretch like other sweaters.’¹ With her friend, Schiaparelli visited the Armenian couple who had made the garment and they knitted one to Schiaparelli’s own design. This was to become her famous trompe l’oeil sweater, with a large white ‘bow’ knitted into the front.

Schiaparelli makes no attempt to analyse the appeal of a sweater that she describes as ugly, yet we can read into her remarks an implication that its ugliness was precisely the secret of its mysterious appeal. What this brief anecdote also hints at is the quality of mystery attached to clothing, a mystery that neither academic nor journalistic discourse on dress usually acknowledges: not surprisingly, since the purpose of theoretical work on dress is to analyse and that of journalism and related discourses largely to describe, or possibly to incite the reader to a desire for the garments on offer. Designers and artists, on the other hand, have occasionally hinted at the mystery of clothes, at what it is that makes a garment powerful, magical, transformative. Individual men and women, however, all know that one or two garments that come into their life have this quality, and will be worn and treasured until they are literally worn out.

A part of the mystery seems to have to do with the intimate relationship between garment and body. A number of nineteenth century writers refer to fashion’s mystery and in particular the paradoxical profundity of the relationship found within it between the eternal and the ephemeral. It was Baudelaire who most famously pronounced that the eternal of modernity is best expressed in the ephemeral.

Yohji Yamamoto makes a rather different observation in Wim Wender’s 1993 film, ‘A Notebook on Cities and Clothes’, although it is still within the context of the search for the true meaning of clothes. Yamamoto’s comments in a sense constitute a plea for functionalism from an anti-consumerist point of view, but they also go beyond functionalism. He is preoccupied with finding the ‘essence’ of the shirt, the shoulder, the jacket – as if there is some Platonic idea of these things. He then goes on to describe his ideal garment. This would be, for example, a thick coat for a person who really needs it in the depth of winter: in this way you wear the reality, “the coat is so beautiful because […] you cannot make a life without this coat, it looks like your friend or your family […] [and, even beyond that] when the clothes themselves are on the floor or hung on the wall you can recognise – this is John, or Tom, this is yourself.”² Thus do one’s most ‘successful’ clothes become part of individual identity.

I once wrote of the way in which the absence of bodies from garments displayed in exhibitions made them somehow rather creepy, ghostly,³ and recently Joanne Entwistle⁴ and Paul Sweetman⁵ have explored the implications of the idea that garments are incomplete without the body they adorn. Schiaparelli made this point too: ‘A dress,’ she writes, ‘cannot just hang like a painting on the wall or like a book remain intact and live a long and sheltered life. A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn, and as soon as this happens another personality takes over from you [i.e. the designer] and animates it, or tries to, glorifies or destroys it, or makes it into a song of beauty. More often it becomes an indifferent object, or even a painful caricature of what you wanted it to be – a dream, an expression.’⁶

The idea that garment and body are intimately related constitutes part of the attempt to explore the inner meaning of clothes (often described as the cultural studies or culturalist tradition), an approach concerned with meanings and representations. Christopher Breward gives an account of this in his overview of methodology debates.⁷ This approach has sometimes been interpreted as a critique of the slightly different scholarly tradition, the costume historian’s ‘garment as object’ approach, however I should prefer to see these approaches as complementary and mutually supportive rather than as being in competition. Yet each of these approaches and all their variations still leave some unexplained residue about the fascination of fashion, and the following notes attempt to use the idea of fetish in relation to this mystery at which Schiaparelli hinted, an enduring mystery of the meaning of clothes.

The idea of the fetish has at least three distinct meanings, from three different traditions: anthropology, psychoanalysis and Marxism, concerned respectively with religious and cultural, sexual and commodity fetishisms. I am here interested primarily in anthropological fetishism.

In a series of articles William Pietz has excavated the origin and meanings of the term fetish. The idea of the fetish arose in what he describes as ‘a mercantile intercultural space created by the […] trade between cultures so radically different as to be mutually incomprehensible. It is proper to neither West African nor Christian European culture.’⁸ The term originates from the Portuguese and from the period when Portuguese Catholic traders were active on the West African coast. These brought notions both of witchcraft, superstition and idolatry to the objects and practices they encountered, although it also seems likely, or at least possible, that Africans incorporated certain aspects of Christian cult objects into their fetish objects, for example nails driven into wooden figures may have been imported from the crucifixion.

In the seventeenth century the Portuguese were ousted by the protestant Dutch, and for these the fetish and related phenomena represented a chaotic irrationalism that distorted developing mercantile ideas concerning rational behaviour as enlightened self interest and notions of value. (For the Dutch traders, the fetishes were also close to what they regarded as the Popish and idolatrous practices of Roman Catholicism.) To summarise Pietz’s very scholarly articles rather crudely, this complex cultural encounter eventually led to the Enlightenment view of the fetish as an example of false values and superstitious delusions, which blocked natural reason and misunderstood the causal origin of events of a material nature. And significantly, of course, as Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen have pointed out, the fetish emerges in the same period as the commodity form.⁹

The fetish was different from an idol in that it was a material object often worn on an individual’s body; in it was condensed some magical or religious power arising from the – possibly chance – circumstances in which it was first acquired. Pietz defines it as follows: Its ‘untranscended materiality is viewed as the locus of religious or psychic investment […] it arises in a singular event, fixing together otherwise heterogenous elements; the identity and power of the fetish consist in its enduring capacity to repeat the singular process of fixation and it has an active relation to the living body of an individual.’¹⁰

In the nineteenth century the idea of the fetish came to play a theoretical role in the widely divergent discourses of political economy and psychoanalysis. Karl Marx developed the concept of commodity fetishism to describe and explain the way in which, as in a religion, a human product acquires a life of its own. However, as Gamman and Makinen again point out, whereas in anthropological fetishism the fetish bestows power on the owner or wearer, in Marx the fetishisation of the commodity involves the disempowerment and alienation of the human actors.

Gamman and Makinen go on to argue that Thorstein Veblen took the concept of fetishism further in relating it not to production, as did Marx, but to consumption. Objects of consumption, including of course garments, take on a meaning far beyond their use value. For Gamman and Makinen articles of dress and designer labels are metonymic or make use of synechdoche, a form of substitution, but above all, they say, ‘what the different types of fetishism have in common [and they include its psycho-sexual dimension] is the process of disavowal […] objects in our culture take on meanings that connect them to, or stand in for, other meanings and associations: but the connection is lost or partially denied as a consequence of the fetishism. Through the use of the fetish the practitioner is able to contrive to believe the false while also knowing that it cannot be true.’¹¹ For all these writers therefore, with the possible exception of Pietz, fetishism is a form of false consciousness: inanimate objects are endowed with a power they cannot objectively have.

Rather than merely condemning consumer fetishism, however, we might more profitably raise the question of why such forms of fetishism persist in a consumer society that is avowedly secular. A further question might be why garments specifically play such a central role.

At this point I need briefly to consider the strange role of religion within this Western consumer society. In this supposedly secular society, the major religions remain privileged, claiming respect from all for their core beliefs. Since the beliefs of the major religions are mutually incompatible, they presumably cannot all be true, but a process of disavowal occludes this. The very fact of belief seems virtuous and must not be challenged. Conversely it is popularly assumed that secularism and atheism signify nothingness, a vacuum, pure non belief, or else simple materialism in the sense of consumerism (i.e. not in Marx’s sense of materialism). The Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century were by no means necessarily atheists or even deists; there was an optimistic alliance for many between Christianity and nature’s laws. Their over-valuation of Reason and the degradation of emotion and mysticism, ‘enthusiasm’ as it was named, to simple unreason was challenged by the Romantic movement and in a sense by psychoanalysis, but no clear alternative to religion emerged out of the turmoil of the industrial revolution as a vehicle for the expression of thoughts and feelings that go beyond rationalism. One possible criticism of organised religions might indeed be that they attempt to elevate or assimilate dogma to reason.

Rather then than living in a secular society we live simultaneously in parallel universes in which traditional beliefs coexist both with secularism and with a whole mass of less organised beliefs and superstitions. As someone once famously said, when people cease to believe in a single religion, it is not that they believe nothing, it is rather that they will believe anything. Indeed it is perfectly possible to adhere to a traditional organised religion and also to cling to other superstitions and beliefs. Indeed in the realm of belief, as everywhere else, consumerism reigns, of which this is an aspect. As does also disavowal, since people can, for example, read their horoscopes avidly while knowing somewhere in the recesses of their brains that there is no evidential basis for supposing that there is any accuracy in such forecasts.

Disavowal therefore is a common process and at a conscious level we go about our lives with our conscious minds resembling Sigmund Freud’s description of dreams and the unconscious, where mutually incompatible events and beliefs can co-exist in perfect harmony.

Freud and Marx were committed to an enlightenment view whereby reason was – rightly – to be preferred over unreason. On the other hand there is some force in Max Weber’s pessimistic description of modernity as involving a waning of the magical – i.e. a real loss is involved. The Surrealists, to whom Schiaparelli was close, incorporating some of their ideas in her creations, were unusual in viewing positively the idea of the fetish and more generally of the irrational. For the Enlightenment, the fetish ‘[signalled] error, excess, difference and deviation’, it was in the words of Dawn Ades ‘one of the key phantoms of the dream of reason’.¹² The Surrealists by contrast used fetishism ‘to intervene in the […] subversion of utilitarian and positivist values’ and to ‘change the hierarchies of the values of the real’.¹³ For them, the fetish and the fetishist escape the confines of the utilitarian everyday world into a poetic and different reality, and Surrealist art displayed a preoccupation with the human body and, though to a lesser extent, with clothing.

A contemporary example of clothes fetishism is the use by tennis players of items of clothing to bring them luck. The supreme woman star of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, Billie Jean King, had a lucky dress, which she continued to wear for big matches long after it went out of fashion. The Serbian tennis pro Jelena Dokic, active in the early 2000s, apparently had to wash the same set of clothes every evening so that they could be worn again the following day. But the most startling example is the former Wimbledon champion, Goran Ivanišević. On his way to the title Ivanišević marshalled a dog’s breakfast of superstitions; The Guardian journalist, Ros Coward, commented in 2001 on the paradox of Ivanišević’s behaviour. He gave an awesome display of masculine power in his actual game, yet ‘was a walking mass of superstition and emotional anxiety’, crying and praying during matches and directly addressing a dead friend. He was, ‘in fact the antithesis of what our culture still expects from masculinity […] He alternated between displays of “feminine” emotion and outbreaks of [uninhibitedly childish] behaviour’. At the same time, in interviews off court the player took up an ironic stance to his own superstitions, talking of his split personality and the ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘emergency’ Gorans. Thus there was an acknowledged disavowal at the same time as a performance of total belief.

Ivanišević, did not so much have a lucky garment, it was rather that when he stripped off his shirt at the end of a match and flung it into the crowd, it would presumably become something of a fetish object for the lucky person who caught it. Other players do this too, but Ivanišević took the strip regime to unusual lengths, finally after his victory parade in Split in 2001 disrobing completely save for his underpants. The display of the triumphant body of the star had a kind of intense significance, almost amounting to a kind of fetishisation of his own body, for in displaying his muscular torso, Ivanišević did not merely acknowledge the applause of the crowd, instead his body seemed to become a symbol or totem of his power and triumph.

In his superstitious behaviour, Goran Ivanišević exposed a central feature of magical beliefs when focused on an object. The idea of ‘luck’ is intimately related to the idea of ‘chance’. A ‘lucky’ outcome imbues the object that is believed to have contributed to it with an element of fate, converting chance into its opposite. On the first occasion a particular tennis ball was struck to make a winning shot, or a garment worn in a match that was won, it had been chosen by chance, but retrospectively it is imbued with the fortunate outcome so that now the choice of that garment or tennis ball rather than any other seems to show the ‘hand of God’. It is in this way that a chance object becomes a fetish object – and fetish objects are, of course, highly magical.

Elizabeth Wilson is an author, researcher and pioneer of fashion academia.

Estelle Hanania is a photographer based in Paris, these images are from her series ‘Parking Lot Hydra’ from 2009.

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Magic.

1. E Schiaparelli, Shocking Life – the Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli, V&A Museum, London, 2007. ↩

2. W Wenders, ‘A Notebook on Cities and Clothes’, 79 minutes, Road Movies Filmproduktion Berlin, 1993. ↩

3. E Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, Virago, London, 1985, p.1. ↩

4. J Entwistle, ‘The Dressed Body’ in J Entwistle & E Wilson (eds), Body Dressing, Berg, Oxford, 2001. ↩

5. P Sweetman, ‘Shop-window
   Dummies? Fashion, the Body and Emergent Socialities’ in J Entwistle & E Wilson (eds), Body Dressing, Berg, Oxford, 2001, p. 59-77. ↩

6. E Schiaparelli, Shocking Life – the Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli, V&A Museum, London, 2007. ↩

7. C Breward, ‘Cultures, Identities, Histories: Fashioning a Cultural Approach to Dress’, Fashion Theory, vol. 2, issue 4 Special Issue on Methodology, Berg, Oxford, 1998. ↩

8. W Pietz, ‘The Problem of the Fetish’, Res, series of essays published 1985-88. ↩

9. L Gamman & M Makinen, Female Fetishism – A New Look, Lawrence & Wishart Ltd, London, 1994. ↩

10. W Pietz, ‘The Problem of the Fetish’, Res, series of essays published 1985-88. ↩

11. L Gamman & M Makinen, Female Fetishism – A New Look, Lawrence & Wishart Ltd, London, 1994. ↩

12. D Ades, ‘Surrealism, Male – Female’ in V Gille & J Mundy (eds), Surrealism – Desire Unbound, Princeton University Press, 2001, p.171. ↩

13. Ibid. ↩

***

The dress she would wear was laying out on the bed. Hazel and Etta had both been good about lending her their best clothes – considering that they weren’t supposed to come to the party. There was Etta’s long blue crêpe de chine evening dress and some white pumps and a rhinestone tiara for her hair. These clothes were really gorgeous. It was hard to imagine how she would look in them.

The late afternoon had come and the sun made long, yellow slants through the window. If she took two hours over dressing for the party it was time to begin now. When she thought about putting on the fine clothes she couldn’t just sit around and wait. Very slowly she went into the bathroom and shucked off her old shorts and shirt and turned on the water. She scrubbed the rough parts of her heels and her knees and especially her elbows. She made the bath take a long time.

She ran naked into the middle room and began to dress. Silk teddies she put on, and silk stockings. She even wore one of Etta’s brassières just for the heck of it. Then very carefully she put on the dress and stepped into the pumps. This was the first time she had ever worn an evening dress. She stood for a long time before the mirror. She was so tall that the dress came up two or three inches above her ankles – and the shoes were so short they hurt her. She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.

Six different ways she tried out her hair. The cowlicks were a little trouble, so she wet her bangs and made three spit curls. Last of all she stuck the rhinestones in her hair and put on plenty of lipstick and paint. When she finished she lifted up her chin and half-closed her eyes like a movie star. Slowly she turned her face from one side to the other. It was beautiful she looked – just beautiful.

She didn’t feel like herself at all. She was somebody different from Mick Kelly entirely. Two hours had to pass before the party would begin, and she was ashamed for any of the family to see her dressed so far ahead of time. She went into the bathroom again and locked the door. She couldn’t mess up her dress by sitting down, so she stood in the middle of the floor. The close walls around her seemed to press in all the excitement. She felt so different from the old Mick Kelly that she knew this would be better than anything else in her whole life – this party.

Excerpt from Carson McCullers’ novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, published in 1940, accompanied by David Armstrong’s images from the series ‘Notes on Intimacy and Dignity’, styled by Gudrun Willcocks which were originally published in Vestoj On Fashion and Magic.