On Masculinities – Vestoj

Losing Control

Dr Sean Trainor — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 10:06:53 +0000

MODERN AMERICAN MASCULINITY IS about mastery and control: control over one’s destiny and that of ‘lesser’ men and women. The late Notorious B.I.G. summarised this vision of manhood succinctly when he rapped ‘never lose, never choose to,’ but the same sentiment is manifest in a variety of pop cultural forms. Never mind that the imperative for mastery seems to emerge from outside of masculine men and women – that pop culture protagonists are impelled by a force that they themselves do not control. Unencumbered by this contradiction, John McClane and his kindred spirits seize control of Nakatomi Plazas all across the pages, screens, and stages of American cultural life.

This obsession with masculine control is nothing new. When thirteen of Britain’s North American colonies waged war against the British monarchy, General George Washington based his claim to authority in part on his self-mastery. Seemingly unflappable, and blessed with an unfailingly rigid mouth (a trait he carefully cultivated), Washington was believed to possess the discretion necessary to command men’s fates in war. After American independence, men like U.S. Senator Henry Clay (who coined the phrase ‘self-made man’) and U.S. president Abraham Lincoln were celebrated for willing their way to wealth and power, despite lowly origins. And, from slaveholding aristocrats to humble dirt farmers, early American men measured their manhood according to mastery. To be a fully-fledged adult white man in this age was to control ‘dependents:’ to own the resources that women, non-whites, and children needed to survive.¹

Masculine mastery and control were, at some level, patent fictions. Slaveholders would have gone bankrupt and poorer men starved without the labour of enslaved people, free women, and countless other ‘dependents.’ But, as is often the case, various forms of physical, legal and economic violence allowed men to avoid this basic reality – or, perhaps more accurately, to create the reality they desired. The lash, the law and the promise of inherited lands thus made real a degree of control that was otherwise perilously tenuous.

All this, by contrast, is why the nineteenth-century history of American and European men’s grooming is so interesting: because, in this realm, the reality of interdependence between men and their ‘dependents’ was so poorly disguised. Here, European and American men glimpsed the fateful possibility that they might not be in control of their bodies; that they might, in fact, owe more to the men who shaved their stubborn whiskers than those men owed to them. In response, they inaugurated a dramatic half-century of beard wearing – and endowed their newly-grown beards with the symbolic trappings of mastery. But try as its proponents might to disguise the beard’s origins, the style remained a child of fear: an implicit recognition of the very interdependence that masculinity seeks to deny.

Viewed from a distance of more than a century, the nineteenth-century beard fashion looks like a basic historical fact. For many observers, the succession of bearded and otherwise unremarkable U.S. presidents during the decades preceding 1900 is no more surprising than the fact that there are mountains in Switzerland. And yet the arrival of this fashion came as a great shock for those who lived through it. Sweeping much of Europe, North America, and Latin America after roughly two centuries of clean-shavenness, the beard movement was almost certainly the most dramatic development in nineteenth-century men’s fashion – every bit as shocking as if knee breeches and ruffled shirts were to once more become the dominant mode of men’s dress throughout the so-called ‘Western’ world.

The apogee of this trend, according to one scholar, arrived between 1870 and 1900. After carefully analysing more than a century’s worth of men’s images from the Illustrated London News, sociologist Dwight E. Robinson, writing in 1976, placed the twin peaks of the beard fashion – with roughly forty-five percent of all men’s images featuring a full beard – at roughly 1875 and 1895. Facial hair more generally, Robinson added, peaked around 1890, with approximately ninety percent of all men depicted in the News wearing a beard, moustache, or sideburns.²

While Robinson’s analysis remains the most exhaustive quantitative study of the nineteenth-century facial hair fashion, there is reason to doubt its accuracy. This is especially true for areas outside of Britain, which arrived at the facial fashion at different times and for different reasons. My own research, for instance, indicates that as early as 1865, roughly half of all general officers serving in the American Civil War sported a beard of some description, while only ten percent were clean-shaved.³

The precise trajectory of this trend, however, need not detain us here. Instead, what should concern us are the reasons for the beard’s popularity. These reasons, as is typical for nearly any fashion, are both varied and mysterious. To date, scholars of the nineteenth-century beard movement – including Christopher Oldstone-Moore, whose 2015 Of Beards and Men is the first rigorously-researched, book-length analysis of grooming trends from antiquity to present – have emphasised the way in which facial hair embodied and reflected larger ideals of the age.

For European Romantics and their American counterparts, according to Oldstone-Moore and others, facial hair reflected a larger fascination with both medieval aesthetics and the concept of nature. (Beards, notably, were a central feature of men’s grooming in the Middle Ages, and the bushy beard was presumed to be more ‘natural’ than the shaved face.) European and American imperialists, meanwhile, cherished the beard as emblematic of their own ostensible superiority to those with a limited capacity – real or imagined – for facial hair growth (usually Asians, Africans, and indigenous Americans). And radicals of various stripes – including socialists, nationalists, abolitionists, religious extremists, and health reformers – adopted the beard to symbolise their rejection of the status quo. Health reformers, in particular, proved influential in this realm – arguing convincingly, though inaccurately, that the beard protected its wearers against tuberculosis and prevented men from inhaling particulate matter (no small thing for those living in the period’s coal-red cities or working in its dark satanic mills).⁴ All of these assessments of the beard fashion’s origins and meaning have much to recommend them. When nineteenth-century men, in both Europe and America, articulated why they chose to adopt the beard, they did so in precisely these terms – generating hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pro-beard polemics repeating the foregoing claims. But these assessments of the facial hair fashion’s origins also ignore what may be its most interesting feature: the fact that, in important and fundamental ways, men throughout the Atlantic basin did not choose to adopt the beard. It was not, in other words, a style over which they exercised that quintessential masculine virtue: control.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the relationship between barber and patron throughout much of Europe and North America was not fundamentally different from many other service relationships. Patrons sought out barbers for a good shave – a task many men found too difficult or too unpleasant to perform for themselves in the era of the straight razor. Barbers sought out customers for their incomes. And, by a variety of means, customers pretended that they controlled the relationship from beginning to end. They were the ones who sought the barber’s patronage, after all. And, in any event, most barbers were low-status figures – poor whites in Europe, men of colour in America – over whom patrons exercised control outside the shop as well as in it.

Beginning in the 1840s and 1850s, however, the relationship between barbers and patrons took a deleterious turn. Barbers, once seen at worst as mischievous schemers (like Beaumarchais’ Figaro) and more frequently as harmless, vapid chatterers, assumed a menacing cast. Indeed, during these years, patrons awakened en masse to the fact that barbers held deadly blades to their throats, and almost immediately began fantasising about the murderous possibilities of the barber shop. In the process, they grappled with the very real possibility that it was barbers, and not themselves, who controlled the act of grooming.

The most obvious example of these murderous fantasies was the story of Sweeney Todd. First told in the novel The String of Pearls, published serially between 1846 and 1847, the story of Sweeney Todd centers on a London barber who slashes unlucky customers’ throats, dispatches their bodies to a dungeon-like basement by means of a trap-door barber chair, and, with the help his co-conspirator Mrs. Lovett, transforms their lifeless corpses into delicious meat pies.⁵

Despite its patent ridiculousness, The String of Pearls proved immensely popular, inspiring a blockbuster theatrical adaptation and a raft of literary imitations. In the U.S., these imitations ranged from pulp drivel like ‘A Narrow Escape,’ a widely circulated tale in which an alcoholic enslaved barber murders a customer, to Herman Melville’s masterful ‘Benito Cereno,’ in which an enslaved mutineer named Babo quietly menaces his captor using a straight razor.⁶

Robert L. Mack, the leading scholar of Sweeney Todd, compellingly argues that these tales proved popular in the 1840s and 1850s because they spoke to larger fears about urban anonymity. In this light, The String of Pearls and its imitators are best understood, not as stories about a murderous barber, but as tales of a murderous stranger who claims the lives of unattached urban dwellers.⁷

Undoubtedly, there is much to recommend a broadly social interpretation of Sweeney Todd’s popularity and that of its imitators. Fears of urban anonymity were rampant throughout Europe and North America during this period, as individuals grappled with the rapid growth of vast, impersonal cities. In the U.S., meanwhile, where the Sweeney Todd character was, as suggested above, frequently replaced by a barber of colour, the story spoke to widespread white fears of black violence and dissimulation.

And yet Mack’s interpretation fails to take seriously the setting of these stories. While tales of tonsorial violence were important vehicles for exploring larger social anxieties, they were also, plainly and specifically, about the latent menace of the barbershop. How else can we explain the fact that, in the many tales inspired by Sweeney Todd, the murderous barber is rarely, if ever, replaced by another kind of blade-wielding tradesperson: a rampaging butcher, for instance, or an unhinged fish-monger?

Whether fears of gullet aggression inspired the story of Sweeney Todd or vice versa remains unclear. Most likely, the two were intimately intertwined. What is clear, however, is that Sweeney Todd, and the fears it embodied or inspired, had a dramatic effect on the history of men’s grooming. Across Europe and North America, a growing number of men abandoned the barbershop and took up shaving themselves. This was reflected, not just in the demographics of several major American cities, where the number of barbers shrank relative to the populations they served – a figure that indicated decreased demand for barbers’ services. It was also apparent in the comments of numerous commentators.⁸

In an 1860 article for the British publication The Albion, for instance, an anonymous writer reflects not only on the disappearance of barbers – their red and white poles ‘as scarce as good Madiera’ – but also on the menace of the shop. ‘I don’t mind … admitting honestly,’ the writer notes, ‘that I’m afraid of the barber … It is the hints, and inuendos [sic], and covert violence to which you are subjected that set my nerves in a utter. I wouldn’t mind if they’d assault you unmistakably and openly; you’d know what course to pursue under those circumstances.’ Instead, the barber, ‘by a gentle pressure of the thumb, forces your head into the most eligible position for being guillotined’ and ‘[beats you] with a couple of hard brushes about the head, ears, nose, and eyes till your head burns, your ears redden, your eyes smart, and your nose very nearly bleeds.’⁹

For men like the anonymous Albion author, the appropriate response to the terrors of the barber shop was clear: ‘I shave myself,’ the writer proclaimed. And so too, for the first time, did countless other men throughout Europe and North America during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Soon they discovered, however, that shaving was no simple task – that, despite unkindly estimates of barbers’ intelligence, the operation of shaving was, in fact, a difficult one. As a result of these first-time shavers’ incompetence, the act of shaving became a source of torment. Over the course of the early nineteenth century, in fact, complaints of pain became a constant refrain in articles on shaving – with roughly half of all American articles on the subject referencing pain or discomfort by 1850.¹⁰ These complaints, moreover, were exacerbated, not only by the primitive conditions in which many men shaved – without access, for instance, to warm water, decent shaving soap, large mirrors, or light – but also by the indifferent quality of the tools at their disposal. Thanks to a high American tariff, passed by a nationalistic U.S. Congress in 1842, top-notch continental razors suddenly jumped in price for American consumers. British and continental consumers, meanwhile, had to contend with lower-quality blades, as European manufactures compromised on quality to keep their wares competitive in U.S. markets.¹¹

The result of all this was that, by the late 1840s, a growing number of men were giving up on shaving altogether and letting their beards grow freely. As early as 1853, roughly one-in-eight New Yorkers, according to an informal survey by Scientific American, had adopted the style. And by the mid-1860s, as suggested previously, nearly half of European and American men had followed suit.¹²

During these years, and in the decades to follow, many men did their best to make the beard, and facial hair more broadly, symbols of masculine virtues. And, in many respects, they succeeded. Following a lengthy public relations campaign waged in newspapers, magazines and books, European and American proponents of the beard seemed to convince significant portions of their respective societies that the beard symbolised everything from patriarchal firmness and racial mastery to healthfulness and beauty. In the eyes of the public, then, facial hair appeared to be a style that men had freely chosen, and that reflected mastery and control: both of themselves and their bodies, and of the ‘lesser’ men and women whom they were charged with governing.

In point of fact, however, the beard was anything but. Instead, its deep history speaks to a fundamental loss of control: a fearful recognition of dependence on the part of European and American men; and a grim realisation that the body is, ever and always, the work of many hands.

Sean Trainor is a historian specialised in men’s fashion and grooming in nineteenth-century America. His book, Groomed for Power, is about the antebellum American beard movement.

This article was originally published in Vestoj ‘On Masculinities.’

See, for ex. S McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. ↩
D E Robinson, “Fashions in Shaving and Trimming of the Beard: The Men of the Illustrated London News, 1842-1872,’ The American Journal of Sociology 81 (Mar., 1975), pp.1,133-1,141. ↩
See S Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power: A Cultural Economy of the Male Body in Nineteenth-Century America’ (Ph.D. diss., The Pennsylvania State University, 2015), p.2. ↩
C Oldstone-Moore, Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2015; C. R. Oldstone-Moore, ‘The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain,’ Victorian Studies 48 (Fall 2005), pp.7-34; Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power,’ esp. Ch. 4. ↩
The String of Pearls has been republished as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Ed. R L Mack, New York, Oxford University Press, 2007. ↩
For one of several versions of this tale, see ‘A Narrow Escape,’ Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), May 15, 1847; see also H Melville, ‘Benito Cereno,’ The Piazza Tales, New York, Dix & Edwards, 1856. ↩
R L Mack, The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend, London, Continuum, 2007. ↩
S Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power,’ p.69. ↩
‘Barbers,’ The Albion 38 (Jun. 30, 1860), p.303. ↩
S Trainor, ‘Groomed for Power,’ esp. Ch. 1. ↩
Ibid., esp. Ch. 2. ↩
‘Bearded Civilizaton,’ Scientific American III (Jul. 9, 1853), p.342. ↩

Beggars And Choosers

Johannes Lenhard — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 09:09:32 +0000

THE STREET IS A place of force, competition, power games and violence. The most aggressive and strong among the men who live here ultimately win the struggle for the street’s scarce resources – money, food, a sleeping space. They are forced to compete, to fight – often violently, often against the law. This is what we see when we walk down the street, trying not to make eye contact with the man begging on the steps of the Metro.

As one of Europe’s main urban centres, Paris is rife with homelessness. Because sleeping rough and begging is not illegal here, the way the gendarmerie patrol homelessness differs significantly from cities like New York and London; the policy here is laissez-faire as long as the people on the street are not violent or aggressive. As a result, homelessness is more visible, and when the temperature rises in summer, it’s not uncommon to see people living in tents along the Seine or on street corners.¹ The areas around Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est are crowded with SDF,² as well as with the security forces impeding them. At times, up to twelve different types of police and security – from army soldiers and national police to the SNCF and RATP armed forces,³ to walkie-talkie bearing security guards – patrol the stations on the outlook for aggressive beggars, drug dealing or using. A first source of conflict is therefore often with these official forces. At the same time, safe sleeping spaces on the street, housing in shelters and money (from the public) are in short supply and therefore contested within groups of homeless people themselves. Violence, and knowing when and how to use it, is an important skill. Acting ‘like a man’ – as someone who is able to defend himself at all times – becomes a necessary outer shell in this context.

Stereotypes about violent and ragged men on the street might be hackneyed, but as classifications used by all from academics to daily news sources, they have entered the public consciousness and stayed there.⁴ However, despite their often slip-shod outward appearance there is a more complex, nuanced portrait of the average homeless man that the typical passerby often isn’t able to see. For instance, Erik, a man from Hungary in his late thirties, struggles with addiction and lets me observe its affect on him; Pascal and Lauri have become friends on the street and joke about each other’s daydreams and small luxuries; Francois has re-developed a certain taste as well as idiosyncrasies when it comes to his choice of clothes.

But you would never get this impression by walking through Gare du Nord. With the stories that follow I’m hoping to deconstruct the tough, violent masculinity so often linked to men in the street. I would like to paint a subtler portrait through a handful of stories revolving around the first thing we notice about the homeless: their clothes. By looking at five different pieces of attire – a T-shirt, a bag, a pair of boxer shorts, a coat and some shoes – as well as the men who wear them, I will unfold some of the ambiguities surrounding the sartorial choices of the homeless. Each of these garments are entry points into different parts of these men’s lives; they symbolise friendship, violence, drugs, relationships, sex, money and, in particular, home.

Skid Row, Los Angeles, Camilo José Vergara, 2003.

THE T-SHIRT

Oh yes, I was in hospital yesterday. I was in a fight and the guy knocked me out. He was massive; he’d just come out of prison. We call him Terminator. He wanted money from me. I don’t really know what happened after I got knocked out, but somebody must have called the Pompiers⁵ because I woke up in hospital – like this.

As I approach a small group of homeless men I know quite well, I’m struck by what I see. Aron, Small Dariusz and Tall Dariusz are sitting on a bench in the middle of Place Franz Liszt, surrounded by humming traffic. I cross the street, darting between cars circling Gare du Nord, as Small Dariusz stands up. His T-shirt and coat almost fall off him; they are cut right through. His upper body is barely covered by the two garments that hang from his shoulders in bold strips. I can see his bare back from behind as I move toward the bench.

It’s not the first time I see somebody who has been beaten up: fights happen all the time on the street. Almost every week one of my key informants tells me about conflicts and their usually violent resolution. Mostly these fights are about marginalities: stealing a can of beer, sitting on the wrong bench, looking at someone in the wrong way. Small Dariusz can’t remember what started this particular conflict, but he remembers that it was in the hospital that doctors cut his clothes to shreds. ‘I wasn’t in a good state and they just wanted to get me out of these clothes,’ he tells me. ‘I think they just cut through them with their scissors. They didn’t give me different clothes this morning.’

Small Dariusz spent the night in hospital but in the morning he immediately wanted to leave; he doesn’t like institutions. And he doesn’t like to stay in hospital after a fight; it’s something only weaklings do. Only a five-minute walk separates the hospital and Place Franz Liszt. Here he is welcomed back by his friends, all other Polish men, all of whom sleep in the area. They share tents, try and get into emergency housing for the night or sleep under the closest and most comfortable roof they can find. They look after each other.

Small Dariusz is just about to change his clothes; for a brief moment he stands topless while quietly continuing the conversation with me. Aron has just given him a new T-shirt. He throws his ruined shirt in the bin and we make our way to Leaderprice to stock up on beer.

THE BAG

It’s the first thing I search for when I wake up in the morning. Sometimes when I can’t sleep at night, I hold it in my hand so nobody can open it. It’s precious.

Originally from Hungary, Erik is explaining the importance of the little black bag he always carries. He has been on the streets of Paris for almost five years, having worked in Spain for a decade before that. Now, he opens the small, square-shaped pouch while we talk. As he unpacks, a world unfolds in front of me somewhere in a parking lot corner underneath La Defense, where I’m visiting him at his sleeping place.

A white box immediately stands out; it’s called Le Kit +. Its shell is full of writing: a warning message from the ministry of health, several helpline numbers, instructions of how to use the equipment, a detailed list of its contents. Inside, on top of everything else is a condom (‘Most people just throw that away.’). Underneath there are two syringes, already equipped with short, fixed needles, the type often used by patients with diabetes. Two small containers of distilled water, two sterile mini-metal cups and alcohol pads accompany the syringes. Erik opens the small front pocket of the pouch and takes out a small bottle: twenty ml of methadone in a brown glass container. The methadone is not supposed to be injected, but is given out freely to registered clients by various risk-reduction associations by the train station as a heroin substitute. Most people don’t like to just drink it: shooting up produces a nicer, more immediate feeling.

Erik unscrews the bottle; it opens with a click. With several surprisingly quick and precise movements of his hand, he unwraps the cup, fills it with water and methadone and prepares the syringe. He rolls up his sweater, looks at the smattering of perforations he has made across his arm over the past few days, and decides on the one to use this time. He is shaking.

The needle is still in Erik’s hand as he remembers something else left in his bag: a little plastic box containing a glass tube, two metal filters and a plastic bag with a small, thumb-nail sized white rock. ‘I was lucky and a guy gave me some crack just before I left the station yesterday,’ he tells me. He melts the crack into the metal filter of his pipe, lights up and inhales. He smiles at me: ‘This will help me keep going. Keeps me awake. I didn’t sleep for three days last week. I had enough money.’

Ten minutes later, Erik puts the black bag around his neck again. He collects all the utensils, puts them back into the two little boxes, and closes each one carefully. Then he hides them in the little black pouch. Like so many other homeless drug users with similar little black pouches around their necks, Erik will replicate this exact routine throughout his day: beg for money, score drugs, shoot up, smoke, take a short break – repeat.

Skid Row, Los Angeles, Camilo José Vergara.

THE BOXER SHORTS

Today, I called him Prince. Usually, he tells me how arrogant I am to not want to beg anymore or because I wear certain clothes and go to the hairdresser rather than just shave my head. But today he was the prince. He got up at six thirty and made a big deal out of spraying deodorant all over himself. And then he was really keen to go to the people who give out fresh underwear. He told me about his rendez-vous with Marie, his social worker. ‘You never know what might happen,’ he said.

Pascal is getting excited telling me about Lauri’s special day. Pascal and Lauri are friends; they share a sleeping camp located in a train somewhere in the south of Paris. Pascal tells me that Lauri doesn’t usually change his underwear every day. This is common among homeless men; sometimes they wear their boxers several days in a row before throwing them away. Nobody wants to carry their boxers around and wait for the weekly wash at a homeless shelter in the centre. They start to smell too quickly – just like socks. And they are easily available. So on the day of Lauri’s appointment, the pair walked to Amitié, a day centre for homeless people in the west of Paris, where they knew they could get clean underwear. It opened early.

I saw them later that day at another day centre, this one close to Gare du Nord, where I volunteer regularly. This is where Lauri has his rendez-vous; he seems tense and excited. I know Pascal is half-joking; the likelihood of Lauri hooking up with his social worker is small. But it happens. Pascal, in fact, has seen his own social worker outside office hours several times; she once paid for a hotel. He assured me that nothing ‘really sexual’ happened (‘No way, she is still a virgin. Muslim and stuff.’).

Underwear, this most intimate of garments, is as important to the homeless as they are to the rest of us. As Pascal explains, ‘You want to be normal, or as normal as possible. I’m not in a good state to have a relationship or anything now. I already feel bad seeing [my social worker] – she could lose her job. But at least I can try to feel as normal as possible.’

THE COAT

What you wear is important. If you look broken you can’t expect too much help. If you’re dirty, people keep a distance. You don’t have to look like an SDF.

Carlo is an experienced beggar; he’d already been in this line of work for two years when I met him last summer. ‘I prefer working [i.e. asking people for money] in big and open spaces like in front of Gare Saint Lazare. People need to see me first; I need to have eye contact with them for a couple of seconds so they can see that I’m not aggressive or disgusting or weird or anything.’

Carlo is concerned about his looks; it’s important to him how his ‘outer shell’ – his coat – appears. Decent clothes make it easier to earn money, easier to approach people on a more or less equal level. A clean and undamaged coat turns Carlo – at least at first sight – into one of ‘them.’ Ultimately, it is a sign of normalcy, of fitting in. It makes him appear as if in an emergency situation, at least for the snap-second it takes for us to make the decision so important to him: to give or not to give.⁶

But the coat also comes with a second purpose: it’s the smallest possible of homes, a sleeping bag and a comforter when sleeping rough. Carlo goes on, ‘It’s such a weird feeling when you’re trying to sleep outside for the first time. I mean without even a sleeping bag. Since childhood we’re used to feeling something on top of us when we’re sleeping, something heavy. Turning a coat into a duvet is better than wearing it, somehow. It feels more secure and warm.’

THE SHOES

What’s the most important piece of clothing for you? Shoes. Definitely shoes. I’m running around all day long. I need good shoes. They need to fit.

As Francois and I walk to the Vestiboutique⁷ of the Croix-Rouge, he explains what he is looking for in shoes: comfort and sturdiness.

‘Sometimes, when I walk around the whole day in the same shoes and it starts raining, it’s really disgusting. The wetness soaks everything through, and when I take my shoes off in the evening they’re glued to my foot. It’s repulsive.’

We are greeted warmly by the people at the clothing bank, and immediately taken to the back room where clothes reserved for people in need are kept. It’s Francois’ first time and he’s surprised by the amount of clothes on offer. He gets a new T-shirt, a belt, a pair of jeans, underwear and socks in minutes. And then we get to the shoes. This is where the unexpected complications start.

‘I don’t like these at all. They’re not strong enough. These don’t fit. They’re too big. Do you have something that goes up a little, like above my ankles? These already have a hole.’ Francois is incredibly picky when it comes to this last, and, according to him, most important item of clothing. It takes us a while to settle on a pair of sneakers with a thick rubber sole that fit him almost perfectly. By that time, the patience of the Vestiboutique volunteer is stretched thin, as is mine.

***

How can somebody be so fussy about something offered for free? This was my first thought during this interaction with Francois. Beggars can’t be choosers. Talking to him about it afterwards, however, made me aware of my error: being on the street doesn’t mean we give up our desire to feel in control of our own lives, or that we’re ready to forfeit our ability to make choices. Perhaps most importantly, there are moments on the street that are not about force, violence or pressure, nor about displaying manliness according to the tired tropes of this outmoded attitude – these are the moments that leave room for vulnerability, for dependency and affection.

Skid Row, Los Angeles, Camilo José Vergara.

My experience with Francois is perhaps the most explicit demonstration of this, but Lauri’s daydream – and the sartorial preparations that went with it – are similarly telling. Competition – not for money or space but for attention, sensuality, love, comes to the fore here. Lauri dares to imagine a different future for himself, and his choice of clothing reflects his dreams. Erik’s little black bag symbolises his dependency – the suffering he tries to forget and the pain induced by the drugs – but it also allows him to put all of these emotions, the ‘mixed bag’ of feelings, away. He can, so to speak, contain both them and it and – when needed – transform into the strong defender of his territory, the money-maker and fighter he also needs to be. Francois’ shoes are a means of transportation, but also of comfort and protection, and the care with which he selects them proves the importance of choosing right on every count.

In all these instances, clothing becomes a tool, a way of approximating normalcy for those whose lives are anything but. Being out of control, fighting, struggling and causing scenes is perhaps what we associate with the men who live on the margins of society. I don’t want to deny that this is part of their daily routine: anthropologists like Dennis Webster⁸ and Jennifer Rowe and Stacy Wolche⁹ have given a clear explanation for the frequency of competition and fighting: short-term needs, such as procuring food and shelter and drugs, are preeminent and not easy to obtain. But being a man on the street also entails being dependent on support, help, others. In fact, already in the early twentieth century the sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel defined being poor as exactly that: ‘The poor person, sociologically speaking, is the individual who receives assistance because of this lack of means.’¹⁰ Assistance is often about money and materiality – Carlo chooses a certain coat to make people give to him; but it can also be about social interaction, closeness, love and affection. Ultimately life on the street as a man is first and foremost about finding normalcy both as a tactic and a deep desire and dream. Socially, this is expressed in bonds of friendship and love which very often do not go back into the past, to old friends and family as the social scientist Christopher Jencks found while studying a group of homeless people in Chicago in the 1990s: ‘A third said they had no contact with their relatives, even though they almost all had kin in the Chicago area.’¹¹ Support instead comes from the street and from interactions with other people in similar situations. It comes in the form of a T-shirt given to Small Dariusz by his friend and in the joking relationship between Lauri and Pascal. It often comes in the form of the immaterial gift, in the form of ‘giving […] time: listening to people, making visits.’¹² Without these practices of daily happiness, life on the street would indeed be unbearable.¹³ They introduce a certain sense of hope and wellbeing and, in philosopher Lauren Berlant’s words, are necessary to ‘keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.’¹⁴

Ultimately, the garments belonging to the people I have met on the street do not always scream ‘poverty’ or ‘violence.’ They might at times be messy but for those who care to look beyond their shambolic appearance, they are also the belongings of men who need what men need everywhere: each other.

Dr Johannes Lenhard is a social anthropologist and research associate at Cambridge University in England.

These photographs are from a series taken on Los Angeles’ Skid Row by Camilo José Vergara. Vergara trained as a sociologist specialised in urbanism at Columbia University before becoming a photographer in the late 1970s.

This article was originally published in Vestoj ‘On Masculinities.’

Since 1994, homelessness – in the form of activities such as rough sleeping and begging – is not illegal or policeable in Paris in the same way as it is in the U.K. (Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003, Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill 2013-14). As a result, homelessness is much more visible – in the form of temporary dwellings along the Canal St Martin or on pavements, most obviously so through the red, green or black tents which were first introduced by the association Les Enfants de Don Quichotte in 2006. ↩
Sans Domicile Fixe, transl. without fixed abode ↩
SNCF – Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais, the public railway company in France; RATP – Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens, the public company behind the Parisian metro system. ↩
See for example: L Smith, ‘Sexual exploitation, violence and drugs: The reality of being a homeless woman in Britain,’ Telegraph, 21/09/2015, accessible: www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-health/11879403/Sexual-exploitation-violence-and-drugs-A-homeless-woman-in-Britain.html. J L Jasinski, J K Wesely, Hard Lives, Mean Streets, Boston: Northeastern, 2015. R Anderson, ‘Homeless violence and the informal rules of street life,’ Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 1996, 5(4):369-380. J Barragan, ‘Shining a light on a vulnerable population,’ Statesman, 13/11/2015, accessible: projects.statesman.com/news/homeless-deaths/ France soir, Paris: Une touriste Girondine violemment poignardée par un SDF a Montparnasse, 28/06/2016, accessible: www.francesoir.fr/societe-faits-divers/paris-une-touriste-girondine-violemment-poignardee-par-un-sdf-montparnasse ↩
In France, the Pompiers fulfill the function of both the fire brigade and the ambulance. In this instance, they would have come from hospital Lariboisière, about five minutes from Place Franz Liszt. ↩
While this is a common tactic to convince people to give it is not the only one; in fact the opposite idea – looking needy, really run down, dirty – might work in different situations. E Summerson Carr (Scripting Addiction — The Politics of Therapeturic Talk and American Sobriety, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2011) describes this behaviour of adapting to the circumstances for alcohol users very vividly. ↩
The Vestiboutique is the clothing bank of the Croix-Rouge, or French Red Cross, close to Gare du Nord. It functions both as a charity shop for paying customers and a way for people in need to obtain clothes for free. ↩
D Webster, The Park of Street Life and Community in Pretoria, South Africa, Open Anthropology Cooperative Press Working Paper 16, 2013. ↩
J R Wolch, S Rowe, On the Streets: Mobility Paths of the Urban Homeless, City and Society, 1996, 6(4), pp.115–140. ↩
G Simmel, ‘The Poor,’ In D. N. Levine, ed. On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings of Georg Simmel. London, University of Chicago Press, 1908, pp. 150–179. ↩
C Jencks, The Homeless, Cambridge (MA), London, Harvard University Press, 1995. ↩
J Godbout, A Caille, The World of the Gift, London, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008, p. 78. ↩
H Walker, I Kavedzija, ‘Values of Happiness,’ HAU, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2015, 5(3): pp. 1-23. ↩
L Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2011, p. 77. ↩

A Love Letter to My Father

Thomas Chatterton Williams — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 12:01:58 +0000

In the three simple and, in retrospect, very carefree years I was married without children, I would often, without meaning to, draw comparisons between myself and my father, which – as I constructed them – I could not live up to. Pappy is old enough to be my grandfather. Born black in the segregated South in the 1930s, he did not know his own father, and as I realise now, he got his ideas of masculinity freestyle, from the books he read and the movies he sat through, from the uncles who showed him from an early age how to box and throw a football, and from his own highly particularised code of honour. No one showed him, though, and he did not try to learn, many of the things my friends and I spend a lot of our time doing: talking about our feelings, changing diapers, fixing the family supper. Nor would any of us have wanted him to. He was a serious and busy man, busier than I think I have ever been and somewhat frightening – and he was a provider. Never a rich man, I have only come to see in adulthood some of the small pleasures Pappy withheld from himself so that we might take them for granted.

Pappy kept one of those nylon shoe racks hanging on the back of his bedroom door. Most of the surface area, and then some, of the single story house we lived in was occupied by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that stored the thousands of volumes of literature and philosophy and management strategy he’d used to climb up out of Texas, but here, in my eyes, was the real treasure. When he was out running errands or working in his study, bent over a book or teaching the students who filed into our house to sit with him and fix their test scores, I’d slip into his bedroom and rifle through his belongings: fingering his penknives and leather-strapped watches, feeling the soft silk and woven wool of his neckties, inhaling the funky, wonderful smell of his aged leather belts – which I handled with a mix of awe and fear, the two or three times I behaved very badly, these doubled as instruments of punishment – and studying that weathered, bizarre source of power, his wallet.

But on the back of his door, in front of that nylon shoe rack, is where I always found myself standing, pulling down the enormous neon yellow and gray Air Maxes (shoes roomy enough I could stick my own sneakers into them), the perfect ecru Reeboks, styles which have come and gone many times, as well as the oxblood Alden lace-ups, the mahogany Cole Haans and the sleek black Ferragamos (the only Italian shoes he could countenance), designs that have never been outmoded. These latter pairs are the ones that, on early Friday and Saturday evenings, the times he was not working, usually after showering and shaving and putting on whatever it was he had that smelled so amazing, I would find my father in his bedroom with his grease and his brush and his rags steadily polishing, the football game or the tennis match flashing in the background. I’d come in the room and he’d greet me warmly but without stopping. He polished and cleaned all of his real shoes carefully, just as he folded and hung his slacks and his blazers as soon as he undressed, never leaving them to pile up on a chair and get wrinkled. Pappy didn’t ever speak about fashion, but I could tell even then how much care he put into the few things that he was wearing. What I couldn’t realise, not at that time, was how old these items were, that my father had stopped buying things for himself, almost entirely, as long as I’d been living.

“Father and Son Christian Bikers, Arizona,” Mary Ellen Mark, 1988. Copyright Mary Ellen Mark.

My brother is five years older that I am. For as long as I’ve been conscious of it, whenever his feet grew I too would receive a new pair of shoes. Maybe it started when I was in fourth or fifth grade. I’d noticed a new pair of blue-and-white Air Flights on his feet, box fresh, with the orange-and-gray Nike Air tag still affixed at the lace hole, as was the style where we grew up in the early Nineties. I must have thrown a jealous tantrum, but Pappy, a well-groomed man who cared – but not overly – about how he looked and probably, now that I think of it, might have enjoyed a vacation, remained impassive. He didn’t scold me. My brother and I were sitting in the backseat and when we reached our house he kept driving. Pappy drove us all the way to Foot Locker, where he bought me an equivalent pair of Nike Air sneakers. I’m certain he couldn’t afford them. I’m ashamed of the amount of Air Jordans he has since bought me. Yet from that day on, whenever either of our feet grew, he took both my brother and me shopping.

I think I was afraid to become a father myself because I could not imagine I could make similar sacrifices. The memory of, on warm summer evenings, coming back home from the basketball courts to find my father hunched over his shoes, working them to a brilliant polish, is one of my fondest. This is how a man is: a man works; a man uses what he’s got and improves it; a man knows and understands the value of a thing, and he knows its price is not always synonymous; a man also spends a real sum from time to time – as was the case with those Aldens – but with discretion, only when it’s worth it.

It has been a long time since my feet grew several sizes larger than Pappy’s, and I couldn’t even pretend to squeeze into his Air Maxes. I’ve developed my own tastes, too, having grown fond of the kind of Italian loafers he detested. I’m slimmer; I almost never have use for a belt. In many respects, I think it’s too late for me to learn to move through the world the way my father did, and I think, on a certain level, that is what he worked so hard for. But I’m a father, too, now. I cook and I clean, I change diapers and my wife and split the expenses. My close male friends and I get together over glasses of Pauillac and tell each other about our fears and ambitions. I need this. I know I could never be the kind of solitary rock that my father was, but we are not entirely dissimilar, either. For one thing, over the years I’ve bought a lot of my own shoes, and some are expensive: glistening black A. Testonis for my wedding; Dior Homme patent leather lace-ups; suede Fratelli Rossetti loafers I found on sale in Naples; burgundy desert chukkas from Church’s; many, many pairs of Nike Air Maxes; now I laugh when my almost three-year-old daughter attempts to wear them. What she doesn’t realise – and it’s fine by me if she never does – is that, some time ago, I also stopped buying new ones.

“Father and his first baby, Israel,” Chim (David Seymour), 1951. Ben Shneiderman Collection.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White, and has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books.

All images courtesy of the International Center of Photography (www.icp.org).

A Conversation With Rick Owens

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 00:35:47 +0000

HE SPEAKS TO ME through the ether. He’s a fashion designer known for his love of the colour black. He’s in Italy, he tells me, starting to think about his next men’s collection. When he speaks, he’s gentle, attentive. I get the feeling that I could ask him about his collection or about the most intimate quirk of his character and he would answer me with the same forthright earnestness.

Illustration by Nello Alfonso Marotta

I’m a Los Angeles cliché. I had a conservative, controlled childhood, then became as uncontrolled as I could, then realised that I liked control after all. This is the story of my generation: kids that were too controlled and then became drug addicts and alcoholics before finding spirituality and Zen. It’s so common. I’m totally common.

I was pretty effeminate and sensitive as a boy. It’s that same old story: sensitive boy in a small town, trying to fit in. I felt threatened pretty much all the time. Growing up, there was a certain set of rules or expectations about how to behave. That angered me, and later on I felt vengeful. I tried to conform, but I never managed to do it very successfully. I was forced to bend, to act in a way that I was uncomfortable with. Their rules didn’t seem fair. They were limiting and uptight and didn’t make sense. I had to become more masculine. I couldn’t be flamboyant; I had to butch it up. It was humiliating. In a way I suppose it helped me form a sense of defiance and rebellion and when I left to go to art school in the big city, I became as flamboyant as I possibly could.

I lived in a warehouse by the railroad tracks in L.A. You had to climb in from a set of stairs. I had this great car with fins on it. I wore platform boots and capes and full make-up. I wore gloves to bed. But when I went back home to Porterville to see my parents, I’d take off all the make-up and nail polish and put on normal clothes. What would be the point of going to their house and provoking them? If I wanted to have a relationship with them, I had to compromise. That isn’t a bad thing. And in the later years, when I was completely honest with them and allowed them into my life, they had to make some compromises too. That was lovely. In a way, it was the money that made them change their minds about me. (Laughs.) My parents figured, well as long as he’s successful he must be okay. It was kind of bittersweet because obviously it was a false context, but then life isn’t perfect.

I’ve always wanted to participate in the world, to be involved. When I was younger I was timid and had a problem fitting in so I drank to give myself courage, but I’ve always found a way to communicate with the world. The world that I propose to people is not meant to impose or insist. It’s not a manifesto, it’s a proposal. It’s meant to be gentle. Although it was born out of my reaction to the rules imposed on me, I want it to be an alternative, not the only option. That’s really important to me.

I like artifice. I don’t mean lipstick and Botox – I’m talking exaggeration and enhancing ideas, rather than trying to look young. Think of Kabuki or the artifice of a room with a scroll on the wall and one flower arrangement. A tea ceremony: artifice as formalised ritual. Well, maybe it’s not that different from Botox and lipstick after all. Maybe it’s wrong of me to think that one is more sophisticated than the other – I don’t want to be the kind of person who claims to know what the rules really are. I hate sounding opinionated even though I probably am. The artifice I like is always exaggerated and borderline ridiculous. It’s challenging the codes of good taste and notions of conservative beauty in a good-humoured way. Humour is one of the most elegant things in the entire universe, you know.

I’m a fifty-five-year-old man with grey curly hair that has been chemically altered to be black, straight and long. I’m a fifty-five-year-old man who has gone to the gym for twenty years: I’ve altered my body in a very calculated way through steroids and working out. I started going because I was drinking so much that I had to balance that out, but also because I wanted to change my body. I just wasn’t happy with it as it was. My wife was always going to the gym, and she pushed me to go too. Today it’s as regular as brushing my teeth, just something I do to feel right. A grooming habit. I’m not saying my body is perfect, but it’s as perfect as I can make it. I don’t need to rely on clothes to hide flaws or make it look better than it actually is. I’m also very comfortable with my feminine side now. I’m definitely an old queen.

I wouldn’t say my clothes are radical, but for somebody my age I suppose they’re a little bit ridiculous. What I wear is a logical answer to the way I live and what I need to do. I don’t really have anything I want to say every day with my clothes so they’ve become a sort of uniform. I have twenty copies of the same outfit. I wear sneakers of my own design. I’ve become very known for sneakers which is ironic considering that when I first started doing them it was almost a parody. I thought sneakers were the most boring things on the planet. They represented complete banality to me. But I was going to the gym and I needed some so I started doing my own exaggerated version, and they’ve become a signature of mine. It’s one of the things I sell the most of now. The ones I wear are on a stretch leather sock: they’re kind of a sneaker combined with an opera leather glove. I wear those, and baggy shorts that end below my knees. The sneaker-socks cover my knees because I think it’s a bit rude to show bare, hairy knees everywhere. It’s more discreet to cover up. I also wear a silk jersey tank top and a black cashmere turtleneck. When I go to the gym, I just take my sweater off and push my socks down and I have my gym outfit. I don’t really do anything that cardio vascular, just weights and stretching so I don’t get sweaty. It’s all very practical. My shorts obviously reference skateboarders or Mexican gangs in L.A. from the Eighties, or they can reference a sort of Buddhist monk situation. The black turtleneck could be read as a reference to the Beats in Saint-Germain in the 1960s: it’s architectural, formal and severe. Over that I always wear a black bomber in nylon, partly because Montana always wore one in the Eighties, and partly because leather has become too heavy for me. The tank top doesn’t represent anything. In short, I’m a fifty-five-year-old man wearing evening glove running shoes with shorts – probably not every fifty-five-year-old man’s dream look. (Laughs.) But for better or worse I’ve established myself as a fashion designer in Paris, and as such you’re expected to uphold some kind of aesthetic eccentricity. If I showed up in a suit, people would be disappointed.

I’m not really interested in clothes, for me personally I mean. I never buy them. You know, the interior designer Jean-Michel Frank had forty identical grey flannel suits in his closet: I always thought that was the height of modesty and extravagance at the same time. I love that. I don’t remember when I decided to start wearing this uniform but I’ve been doing it for a long time. In the Nineties I wore tight black jeans, black platforms, a black T-shirt and a leather jacket. That was my uniform then. After that I wore army surplus shorts over sweatpants with a T-shirt and a leather coat for a long time, probably until I came to Paris. In Paris I replaced the leather coat with a sable-lined one, but I still wore army surplus pants. Eventually that morphed into what I wear today. I have a set look for a couple of years and then I make a change. When I see people changing styles all the time, it makes me wonder: don’t you know who you are? I don’t mean to be critical, but I question their sincerity.

In my uniform I can go anywhere – to the opera or to a rave. There are rare occasions when I alter it, out of respect for the situation. I went to a state dinner at the White House this year, and I wore my shorts and sneakers but with a long black silk duchesse blazer and a black silk turtleneck. I didn’t want to be rude. I want to live the life I want to live, but when I go to somebody’s house I respect their vibe. Being polite is more important than being defiant. I don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable. I’ve shown nudity and bizarre stuff at my shows but a fashion show is a sophisticated aesthetic arena where people expect a certain element of surprise and challenge. I wouldn’t do those runway shows for my mother’s church group. That would not be polite.

The most successful men’s fashion is conservative with just a hint of rebellion. Imagine something classic, but with a ripped lining or a hidden strap that implies S&M. That’s the stuff that sells the most in stores. I do clothes like that myself. It’s a funny period for menswear. It’s so popular and yet so restrained. We’re so prudish today. I don’t know why the catwalk isn’t more exaggerated – I guess flamboyance ran its course. One of the inspirations for my men’s clothes is Neil Young. He doesn’t care about dressing up. He’s a poet and he’s masculine but he’s sensitive too. He seems honest, with a sense of honour. I don’t think honour tops the list of women’s attributes but it’s one of the appealing things about a man. We expect men to build the house, and women to make it a home. In a very primal way we still want men to be providers and women to add grace.

Fashion is popular because it’s a mystery. It’s the ebb and flow of the subtle things we propose as designers, and that people respond to like flocks of birds turning all of a sudden in the middle of the sky. That’s what makes it fascinating. It’s all about instincts and subtle references that certain people can grasp in a very vague way. It’s a pattern or code that is understood by a group of people at the same time. To be a designer you have to change enough to maintain interest, but not change so much that you come off as insincere. It’s a tricky balancing act. I wonder when the day will come when I no longer understand what is relevant in the world, and I continue refining a vision that’s no longer significant. We’ve seen that happen, and I dread the day it happens to me.

My father died not long ago so I’ve been thinking a lot about mortality. He was a very confrontational man, very analytical. He liked putting people into a corner intellectually – it was a form of bullying. He could be so critical of the way people live their lives and in the end he became very bitter. I never had the chance to ask him why he, after all those years of thinking, couldn’t find serenity. He wasn’t able to negotiate the ending of his life in a graceful way. He was so observant, and he believed in being a resolved human being – someone who thinks correctly – and still he never managed to make peace with the fact that he was dying. It made me think about the world and about how to find graceful ways to deal with threats. That’s what I would like to do. I’d like to end up in a garden with a wall around it, reading and playing with kittens. That’s probably the best I can hope for. I’m not going to have grandchildren. Well, I guess in a way I will because I surround myself with people, and some are having children. I love seeing babies around. So I suppose I will have the comfort of being in a garden and playing with kittens and babies. I don’t know what could possibly be better than that.

This interview was originally published in Vestoj ‘On Masculinities.’

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s Editor-in-Chief and Founder.

The Suit

Thomas Page McBee — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 17:41:15 +0000

WHAT IS A WORSE insult for the American man than being called a ‘suit’?

The etymology of the word is itself a sad-sack Mad Men meme: sute, from 1300, both ‘a band of followers’ and a ‘set of matching garments;’ suite and sieute, from Old French, ‘assembly; act of following;’ evolving to suit, which means to ‘be agreeable or convenient,’ from 1570 (to be ‘unsuited,’ in contrast, is to be ‘unfit’).

A suit is a tortured Don Draper in New York greys, not yet aware of the liberated fruit the bohemians in Los Angeles have found, tie knotted to brutal perfection. Just as with our bafflingly stubborn sartorial romance with the great American cautionary tale The Great Gatsby, Mad Men’s depressing suits became a defining aesthetic of the downtrodden near-Depression of the late-2000s. It is as if Americans, in flaunting our willful misunderstanding of the failure of the American Dream, believe we can somehow always get it back.

A suit is a man defined by work, which is to say by the rituals attached to the acquisition of things so as to attain more things: he is a rule-follower and the worst kind of boss; primed for a Cheever-like midlife crisis, tied to the capitalist ritual of adulthood like he is to the commuter train schedule or the e-mail alerts on his phone. Sometimes, a suit doesn’t even care if the suit fits. That’s the saddest kind of suit of all. And yet!

A suit isn’t merely a uniform, traditionally made of one fabric. It is, if one is a believer in the power of style, a sly opportunity to play with notions of passing while also signaling dissent.

Witness: The gentleman my girlfriend and I saw sitting on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan one Sunday this summer. I clocked him as at least sixty-five, and possessing the cool confidence and flamboyance of an Italian on holiday. He wore a fitted, elegantly deconstructed jacket and matching trousers in a light grey that matched his neatly groomed salt-and-pepper beard; a crisp, unbuttoned white shirt; Persol sunglasses; and beat-up white high-top Vans. His style was a kind of riff: a love letter and a middle finger to a bygone masculinity.

Because what is more symbolic of the performance of being a man than a suit? Most rites of passage still require one. The suit I wore to my mother’s memorial service was a light grey Ludlow from J. Crew, the same suit I’d worn to my brother’s wedding a few months earlier. It was the first one I ever bought off-the-rack, in a pinch back when I lived in Boston and did a brief contract gig writing copy about regional parks for the state website, a time I mostly remember as an endless search for adjectives.

I began injecting testosterone at thirty. When I slipped on the jacket in front of the mall mirror at thirty-two, I beamed. Tattooed, with a little hard-won stubble, I could see my contrasts cleanly, my aesthetics an armour telegraphing a history beyond words. A prison for some men was, for me, a church: the rare and precise glory of an integrated self.

All summer, I experimented with being a suit. (I admit that my tolerance for uniforms may be higher than most. I once spent four months wearing only black T-shirts, an exercise that exhausted and enlivened me.) It was a perfect storm: my boss, an actual Suit, was a bad-breathed tyrant who seemed to have modeled himself off the villain in Office Space. He slumped by regularly to check my work, his black Brooks Brothers jacket boxy and always a little greasy, as if he used it as a napkin in a pinch. The cubicles required us to sit with our backs-out, like a bureaucratic panopticon, and my co-workers, many of them near-retirement, spent most of their days finding creative ways to torture The Suit, who reminded us often that he came from IBM. It was into this concrete fortress of bad vibes that I’d arrive on Mondays with a steaming cup of Dunkin’ Donuts. I was early in my transition and had a glow of boyishness I lost when I grew a beard, but it was hard to wear the suit with the kind of authority that I’ve since learned makes a suit more than a uniform, but a statement.

But I learned to walk differently that summer. I went to a barbershop in Back Bay every two weeks, and discovered the small joy of a pocket square, and the many nuances of a tie. When I moved to New York that autumn, I hung up my suit for a string of jobs in digital media, where a new uniform had cropped up, a casual response to the buttoned-up worlds most journalists have left behind. In the age of the Zuckerberg hoodie, a suit at work now feels more truly reserved for Suits, those among us still working for companies without flex-time and paternity leave and ping-pong tables in the lobby.

Recently, I showed up to work in a bright blue summer suit with a white shirt, no tie, and new brown brogues. I was attending a mayoral gala that night, and didn’t have time to go home and change. The effect was tremendous: co-workers kindly complimented me, but also treated me differently, like an elegant artefact, an object of celebration, a mysterious animal deserving of a gentle respect. My hand tattoos popped beneath the cuffs of the jacket: a lion on my right hand, a lamb on my left. I felt handsome, and like a ghost of myself, and like myself.

I’d bought this latest suit the same weekend this summer that I saw that Italian guy on the cathedral steps. As I took the train to meet my girlfriend, I remembered her pointing to him, and the sense of recognition that passed through me as I glanced his way.

‘That’s you in thirty years,’ she said, and I grinned. I’d never felt more seen.

Thomas Page McBee was born in North Carolina and, according to his birth certificate, became a man at age thirty-one. His memoir Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming A Man was published in 2014, and he’s now working on his second book, Amateur.

Karen Knorr is known for her architectural scenography, a style she codified in the 1980s: typically she creates fictionalised spaces to reflect on Western cultural traditions. In Gentlemen, a book published by Stanley/Barker in collaboration with Eric Franck Fine Art and from where these images are taken, she investigated the values of the London upper class by juxtaposing images of an exclusive 1980s gentlemen’s club with text from parliament speeches and news from the same era.

This article was originally published in Vestoj’s latest issue ‘On Masculinities,’ available on www.vestoj.com and in select bookstores now.

A Conversation With Kenneth Goldsmith

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 15:26:38 +0000

HE LIVES WITH HIS artist wife and children in an eclectic Manhattan apartment. He recently went through a tumultuous time, after a poem of his was severely criticised in the press and on social media. He gives a sophisticated and self-aware impression, but is obviously still smarting from the episode.

Illustration by Nello Alfonso Marotta

For the past eight summers I’ve worn the same thing every day: all white linen. I buy them en masse at H&M – ten pairs of white linen pants and fifteen pairs of shirts, and at the end of summer I throw them all out and then the next year I buy them all over again. They’re durable, they breathe and they’re disposable. I think shorts are an embarrassment for men. As far as I can tell nobody has really thought about shorts, at least here in America. Most of them are hideous cargo shorts, Bermuda shorts, athletic shorts – they’re disgusting. I’ve decided against T-shirts also, I find them embarrassing as well and I don’t wear jeans because they’re too common. I wear button-down long-sleeve shirts in summer, because they breathe and you can roll the sleeves up or down, which is important here in America because of the air conditioning. I wear completely boring shoes: everyday soft suede loafers. They breathe well, they’re comfortable and they’re so unchic. I roll my pant legs up, wear round glasses and don a Panama hat, made in Japan. It’s a Twenties look, very colonialist. Being a Jew, all that waspy stuff is attractive, and when I put it on it’s completely wrong which makes it great.

Unfortunately, as I’ve gotten older, my nose has gotten bigger. I look a lot more Jewish now than I did in my twenties or thirties. Back then I was dressing like an artist, in jeans, T-shirts and sneakers. I looked like any other artist. As my features began to get more and more prominent I began to have to navigate my relationship to clothing. It’s hard to navigate heavily Semitic features with fashion. You fall into all sorts of odd relational situations with even basic clothes. I’ve got a giant nose; I’m just the most Jewish-looking guy in the world. I used to have this long beard which prohibited me from wearing little hats and long black cloaks because everybody thought me to be Hasidic. So during that period I wore great colours. Now I don’t have the beard anymore so I can go back to wearing dark clothes.

I’m very conscious of what I’m wearing. I live in New York, so the minute I step out the door I’m on a big stage. You have to be conscious of your costume. In New York I do not leave the house without thinking about what I’m wearing, never, ever. I think about what I wear to my shrink. My wife and I often go out together and she will be wearing something outrageous and I will be wearing something outrageous, but she will get no comments on her outfit and I’ll get thousands on mine. Everybody has something to say. ‘Wow, I really like your suit,’ or ‘Wow, that’s wild.’ When I was in France recently I was wearing head-to-toe Comme des Garçons because they’d just had a big sample sale. I had this insane deconstructed green plaid suit on, that’s, like, falling apart and held together by buckles. I had a white shirt with stars on, a deconstructed tie and my Panama hat, and people just freaked out. Then I looked at the women there and they were wearing things that were much more outrageous than I was. Then I looked at all the men and they were wearing properly French things: understated Oxford shirts, chinos, and I felt like a freak in France. I felt really Jewish – like Abbie Hoffman. Like, ‘look at the Jew in his costume.’

What happened to me was, I was a visual artist and I was making money. I was pretty successful at selling things. Then in the early Nineties I decided I wanted to be a poet which cut off all sorts of income so I had to go and get a day job. So from 1991 to 2001 I worked in the dotcom industry as a creative director. I had a regular nine-to-five job. It was fun and it was easy. I realised that everybody was dressed so casually, just the way I used to dress as an artist, and I didn’t want to dress that way anymore. I thought that it would be really fun to start getting overdressed for work. I became the only guy in the office in a suit. That’s when I really began to get into the idea of costume. I wanted to wear suits that weren’t regular business suits because that would mean I would be buying into the businessman myth. I began seeking out really brightly coloured things. I remember really liking the way Michael Caine was dressed in Austin Powers, in this really brash British dandy style, thick wide ties and thick lapels. I tried to swing a British dandy thing for a while and, again, being a Jew doing the British dandy is completely wrong. If I would wear that in London, people would look at me like I was absolutely out of my mind, it was so wrong. Then I got into furs, I was all Superfly. I got full-length fox fur coats at the flea market, and I’d wear them with cowboy boots and crazy Seventies glasses. At that time, my greatest fashion inspiration was the former basketball player Walt Frazier. He wears outrageous Superfly suits, which he can do because he’s a beautiful black man. When I wore those suits I looked like a Borscht Belt comedian in the Catskills. I’m not an English dandy and I’m not a beautiful black guy. I’m a Jew who looks weird and cheap in those outfits. That’s interesting to me.

When I was MoMA poet laureate I asked Thom Browne to dress me. I would have loved to have worn his stuff but he never responded. When I was invited to the White House in 2011 I got a Thom Browne Brooks Brothers Black Fleece suit in the sale for five or six hundred dollars that was normally two thousand. It was a paisley suit with giant paisleys. I decided to wear it because Obama is a black preppy guy and I figured that he would understand the language of the suit. I had to have a photograph taken with the President and he looked at me and said, ‘You know, I’d love to wear a suit like that but my people would never allow it.’ I looked at him and said, ‘Well Mr President, that’s one way being an artist is better than being a President of the United States.’ Later I showed Thom Browne the photograph; we used to eat breakfast at the same place so I would see him there every day. When I showed him the picture, he looked horrified. He really looked horrified that a Jew, this weird, ugly Jew with a big beard was in his waspy clothes. I think that’s why he decided not to dress me – it was just too fucked up for him. Had I had a chiselled face with blonde hair and blue eyes, I bet he would have done it.

It’s interesting how much ethnicity is coming up. I’ve honestly never said these things before; I’ve never positioned Judaism in relationship to fashion. My family always denied Judaism and were interested in assimilating. Growing up, we wanted to play our Judaism down a little bit instead of playing it up. But today I sometimes think to myself that I really want to grow payot as a fashion statement. You know, the curls that the Orthodox Jews have? It wouldn’t be cultural appropriation, because I’m Jewish so I could do it without offending anybody. These days one must be sensitive about issues of cultural appropriation. I have to tell you, three years ago I was on a plane to Israel. I was wearing all white and I had this giant beard. At the back of the plane all the Jews were in morning prayer. I was coming out of the bathroom and one of the guys stopped me and said, ‘Brother, would you like to pray with us?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not Hasidim, I’m hipster.’

I went to Serbia some time ago and saw the Orthodox priests there and they are gorgeous. Really very right wing politically and probably awful but their look is phenomenal. So I thought wow, I want to start wearing some skirts. I’ve always wanted to wear to skirts, it seemed so easy and breezy and free in the summer, but when I was younger I never had the courage. You know, I didn’t put a skirt on until I was older than fifty; it takes a certain amount of confidence for a man to wear a skirt. The first skirt I wore was a hakama, which I wore when I was doing martial arts. I began wearing hakamas when I was just out doing everyday things: I loved the way it flowed when I moved. Then I realised there was a whole array of people like Comme des Garçons making skirts for men, so I bought a bunch of skirts from them. In America many women are so big these days that I fit into women’s clothes. For many years I would shop the thrift store racks for women’s sweaters and things because they were much more interesting than men’s, which were brown and grey and boring. I have a beautiful Yohji skirt that’s a woman’s skirt, the waist is actually a little big on me. But I stay away from things that are too short: I wear long priest-like skirts, billowing and bell-shaped. It’s funny, I’ve never had somebody yell ‘faggot’ out a car window, never. I’ve worn skirts on book tours in the middle of America, places like Salt Lake City and nobody has ever said, ‘You fucking faggot.’ I think it’s different for a gay guy to wear a skirt than it is for a straight guy. Many of my gay friends prefer to dress in a way that is about fitting in. Dressing as a gay man is a whole different semeiotic system. I mean, nobody ever mistakes me for gay, probably because I carry myself as an extremely straight man. When I put a skirt on, I actually feel much closer to punk rock.

I do love getting comments about how I look, I adore it. It’s special. It makes me feel special. It makes me feel noticed. It’s an identity, a persona, and I’ve built my poetic persona on these types of outfits. Sometimes it’s derided by people; particularly poets hate the fact that I have a persona because poets aren’t supposed to have one. You’re supposed to be yourself, authentic, natural in T-shirts and jeans. To me it’s all show business. Poets traditionally had great personas: look at Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde or even Allen Ginsberg. The male poet has always been a peacock, but then something changed and now they’re a glum and authentic bunch. My whole poetic oeuvre is made up of falseness, inauthenticity, appropriation and plagiarism, so if I was trying to pass that off as an authentic persona, it would be contradictory. So I’m playing my role as a poet as much as they are playing their role as poets. My role is ‘inauthenticity’ and theirs is ‘authenticity.’ It’s all a construction.

I’m always being made to feel uncomfortable by the literary community by the way I dress. Much of the criticism of my poetry is criticism of my apparel as opposed to what I do. Last year, I read a slightly altered autopsy report of Michael Brown, the teenager who was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. I read it as an epic poem, and called it ‘The Body of Michael Brown.’ It took about thirty minutes to read, and I stood on a very darkly lit stage with a picture of Michael Brown projected above my head. At the time, I had a big beard and I was wearing a Paul Smith broken pinstripe jacket, a Comme des Garçons beautiful bell skirt, black leggings and Dr Martens boots. When I was later criticised for the piece, people said that I was dressed in Hasidic garb – which was completely untrue – and that as a result I was performing some sort of religious exorcism on Michael Brown’s body. Nobody understood what I was doing with the tools of fashion, and the whole thing was a misread. It was like, ‘You fucking Jew, you’re taking over the black guy’s body.’ On stage I rock rhythmically back and forth in a way that is very reminiscent of Hasidic prayer, it’s called ‘davening.’ People thought that this Hasid was performing a spell or something on the body of Michael Brown – again, completely untrue. It was all so badly misread. In the poetry community I’m often referred to as ‘a clown’ because of the way I dress; I wear clown suits, so obviously the whole thing must be a big joke. ‘The clown is trying to fool us.’ Much of the criticism around the Brown piece extended into anti-Semitism: ‘Here’s the Hasid who’s getting paid a lot of money to exhibit the body of a poor black man.’ A lot of the criticism was related to Jews, money, power, greed. Like, ‘Maybe he’s manipulating us?’ It all came from dress. If I had been a blonde-haired, blue-eyed guy doing that same thing, the whole critique of the piece would have been in a different tone.

I get so much flak from what I do and wear, mostly because people don’t like the way I write. I remember appearing on The Colbert Report on TV in 2013, in a Pepto-Bismol pink Paul Smith suit, a bowtie, a straw hat and saddle shoes worn with one red and one green sock which I took from David Hockney. Oh my god. The criticism I got… It didn’t matter what I said – I was a clown appearing on TV. Bear in mind, these are things nobody would ever say to my face. People don’t engage with me or with what I write directly. That way they don’t have to read anything, they don’t have to think, they just have to go, ‘Look at that freak.’ It’s easier than having to do actual literary criticism. Of the thousands that criticised the Michael Brown piece, nobody ever read it; I never published it, no one saw it. The critique was based on an image on the Internet that looked like a Hasid raping the body of a dead black man.

There is this odd play of ethnicity and identity going on. A lot of poets say we’re ‘identitarian’ poets, we’re black poets, we’re gay poets. I don’t write poetry about being Jewish but I’m performing Judaism in the entire oeuvre of what I do and that includes sartorial matters. My poetry is called conceptual poetry which means not writing anything of your own. It’s an appropriated practice that goes back to Marcel Duchamp where you take something from someone else, reframe it and call it your own. A lot of the critique of my work has been colluded with typical anti-Semitic notions of labour: ‘He’s just moving things from one place to another.’ I’m bringing art world strategies into poetry and I’m not from the poetry world, so to many I’m an outsider, manipulating the strings from the inside. That’s another critique of Jews: pulling strings from the inside to get yourself an Ivy League job, to get yourself rich, to get yourself on TV, to get yourself to the White House without even writing anything. This shit is right out of a Nazi Germany playbook. I have had anti-Semitic cartoons drawn of me, people have had no problem calling me a ‘kike’ on Twitter. All anonymous of course: nobody can actually call it out for what it is. I wish they would, I wish they would call me a dirty Jew instead of having to whisper it. I think it would be more honest.

After the Michael Brown piece I got death threats; people were so angry and there was such outrage at me that I kind of just wanted to fade and be another persona. I wanted to be less conspicuous so I shaved my beard and changed my style. Now I’m doing this Twenties style and I started wearing motorcycle boots. My wife likes to say that I’m doing Bob Dylan in his ‘Desire’ phase. I wear big scarves and long coats. I’m kind of invisible now. After the scandal and the death threats, I’m not invited anywhere in America, nor will I accept any invitations to appear in public in America.

My current signature style is my white Panama hat in summer and a brown broad- brimmed felt hat in winter. My winter hat is chestnut brown, not black – black would be too Hasidic. I like playing into the idea of a cowboy sometimes, an all-American cowboy. They ain’t Jewish either. I’m stuck with my Jewishness, no matter what direction I turn I’ve got to confront it. There is no American, or even European iconography based in Judaism. All the iconic styles that I’m attracted to: the cowboy, the British dandy, the deconstructed Japanese stuff, black culture – none of them are connected to Judaism. Ralph Lauren is a Jew but his style has assimilated into waspiness – that’s what American Jews do, they try to assimilate. Ralph Lauren doesn’t look Jewish – he’s probably had plastic surgery. Certainly his name was not Lauren. There are no Jewish style icons, it’s always false in some way. When you’re trying on an iconic style as a Jew, it’s always as if the clothes don’t fit you right. You’re swimming in them in some way. There’s a part of me that wishes that I could just be a blonde-haired, blue-eyed wasp. I’d love to fit into one of those stereotypes and wear the clothes authentically as opposed to as costume. To me fashion is all play, all fantasy, but a part of me longs for being able to wear it for real.

This interview was originally published in Vestoj’s latest issue ‘On Masculinities,’ available on www.vestoj.com and in select bookstores now.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s Editor-in-Chief and Founder.

From Style Icon to Fashion Victim

Pamela Church Gibson — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 19:00:53 +0000

A set by production designer Ken Adam for the first James Bond film, 1962’s Dr. No.

The seventh issue of Vestoj, ‘On Masculinities,’ is in stores this month. In conjunction, Vestoj Online is publishing a series of articles on the same theme.

THE FIGURE OF ‘JAMES Bond,’ created in 1953 by novelist Ian Fleming and translated to the screen ten years later, has lost none of its potency. The spy with expensive, sophisticated tastes – and the income needed to satisfy them – still appeals strongly to the popular imagination. The ‘Bond’ films are noted for their overall stylishness – the award-winning sets, the credit titles with their New Bauhaus input in the early years and, of course, the suits. In 2012 the Barbican Centre in London commissioned a substantial and successful exhibition ‘Designing 007: Fifty Years of Bond Style;’ it has been touring the world ever since. In 1987, however, media sociologists Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott had speculated about the possible future of the franchise.¹ But as the same decade brought about both a revolution in menswear and the creation of a market for male ‘grooming products,’ the well-dressed spy survived. The following two decades prolonged his life much further, through the growth of ‘brand recognition’ and the worldwide marketing of European luxury goods; both now accompany, and in part finance, these films.

There is nothing on ‘Bond style’ within fashion scholarship, despite the innumerable academic interventions over the last thirty or more years. But Bond has been saluted as icon of taste within the pages of men’s magazines since his inception; in the run-up to the release of the latest film, Sam Mendes’ Spectre, GQ published a series of special issues. However, this essay will suggest that in recent years there has been an undermining of Bonds’ style – and even the actual cinematic narratives themselves – as product placement and commercial partnerships threaten the autonomy of both costume designer and director.

Bond was very much a creation of the 1950s – a decade marked at first by austerity but which saw economic expansion, full employment, and new patterns of spending. Fleming directly appealed to his male readers’ fantasies and gave them guidance as to how they might use their new disposable income by describing in careful detail Bond’s every change of dress: the shirts, the ties, the shoes, the casual outfits, the expensive fabrics and muted colours. He also offered them the hero’s endless womanising and his successful bedding of desirable, equally well-dressed women – which continued on screen, though there the women were by contrast scantily-clad, and which has interestingly been rather restrained during Daniel Craig’s current stewardship. All this helped to foster the relationship between Fleming, Bond and Playboy magazine, first published in the very year of Bond’s debut. As film scholars Pam Cook and Claire Hines argue, its admiration for both Fleming and his hero was not only a part of ‘the consumerist, sexualised and liberated lifestyle that it promoted;’ it was also because the magazine took men’s fashion very seriously.²

The meticulous but understated style which Fleming portrayed so successfully was carefully recreated when the first film was made in 1962. Cultural historian Christopher Breward addresses Bond’s cinematic incarnation and sees Sean Connery’s Savile Row suit as a ‘vessel for aspirational promise.’ Connery, he argues, had an ‘everyman’ appeal, while his ‘reticent machismo offered the ideal mannequin around which Fleming’s discreet indications of flawless style could be dressed.’ He notes, significantly, that his suits were notable for ‘resisting the flamboyance of fashion.’ Connery’s suits, as Breward tells us, ‘adhered to the pared-down rules of the guardsman and changed little over the course of the six Bond films he made before 1971.’³

In the 1960s, decade of social change, actors, musicians, writers and cultural entrepreneurs from traditional working-class backgrounds enjoyed unprecedented success; this led to media claims that the country’s rigid class barriers were coming down. Connery himself was a Glaswegian bodybuilder, a former milkman, model, lifeguard, and lorry driver. Fleming in fact wanted the more patrician David Niven, while the producers favoured the ever-elegant Cary Grant; initially worried about Connery, he gradually came to accept him. The film’s director, Terence Young, took Connery to his own tailor for Bond’s screen wardrobe. This was part of a Pygmalion-like process: ‘he took him to dinner, showed him how to walk, how to talk, even how to eat.’⁴ There is an apocryphal suggestion that when the suits were finished, he told Connery to wear them all the time and even suggested that he should sleep in them, so that he might cease to be aware of their presence.

A set by production designer Ken Adam for 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever.

The ultra-conventional dress of this hero is very much at variance with the popular image of the 1960s, favoured in the mythologising of the era, which tends to emphasise youth, stylish subcultures, new music and changing fashions, in a way that as revisionist historian Dominic Sandbrook has shown, is not entirely accurate.⁵ Nevertheless, there were undeniably new and radically different models of masculinity which emerged during this contested decade. Marcello Mastroianni’s memorable portrayal of a cynical journalist in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita arguably inspired the ‘mods,’ with their sharp Italian tailoring, to wear black shirts under white suits. The Beatles favoured suits that were very different from those of Bond, and boys copied their long, floppy fringes, and the dancer Rudolf Nureyev and the Rolling Stones created newly androgynous modes of masculine dress. Mick Jagger famously wore a Grenadier Guards jacket to perform on television in 1966, thus sending large numbers of young men off to the shop I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet in Carnaby Street where he had purchased his own.

Bond, a staunch defender of Armed Forces and Empire, and Connery himself were both antithetical to and horrified by these developments. In Guy Hamilton’s Goldfinger from 1965, Bond tells the villain’s secretary, Jill Masterson, ‘My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done…’ such as ‘listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.’ Connery stated in an interview for Playboy that he himself did not like the Beatles and so approved of the line. He had in fact kept very quiet about the fact that he had modelled for the mail-order catalogues produced by the gay men’s boutique Vince while looking for acting jobs in London; author Fleming would have been appalled. Both writer and actor were probably horrified by the ruffled lace cravat worn by Connery’s successor, George Lazenby, in a nod to contemporary fashion. It was this, perhaps, that tempted Connery back for another appearance.

Roger Moore, who then took over for twelve years, imbued the role with overdeveloped humour and playboy behaviour. He eschewed Savile Row classicism and followed fashions: wide ties, flared trousers, conspicuous lapels. His interpretation of the part – and the films themselves – have an element of pastiche; he began his Bond career in 1973 by jumping lightly from crocodile to crocodile in Live and Let Die. His films showed no awareness of the shifts in gendered behaviour that characterised the next two decades. His replacement, Timothy Dalton, did seem to acknowledge change; he was far more serious – and soberly dressed. He was the first to embrace Italian tailoring as did Pierce Brosnan, who took over from him in 1995 and whose interpretation of Bond involved a good deal of deliberate, studied charm. Judi Dench, who took over as M, was unimpressed, telling him in one scene, ‘You’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, 007.’

Daniel Craig, Bond since 2006, perhaps listened and certainly provides a Bond who in many ways is quite different. He gives the first convincing, complex portrayal of the conflicted masculinity of a hired killer who must do his job, but who is not lacking in sensibility; he is even capable of falling in love, of feeling loss and betrayal. It seems the Vatican itself has noted these changes; their newspaper L’Ossera Romano praised 2012’s Skyfall for its new, introspective Bond, ‘less attracted to the pleasures of life, darker and more human… even able to cry – in a word, more real.’⁶ This new reality is combined with a physical strength and muscularity which make him seem – like Connery – worrying capable of carrying out the killings which his rank in the service demands.

The posters for Craig’s very first Bond film showed his dinner jacket hanging open, his black tie undone and flapping, while the black-and-white pre-credit sequence was a mix of cinema verité and film noir, partly shot in a shabby public lavatory. The credits of Spectre are a lavish and dramatic contrast; against a backdrop of molten gold, a line of dancers part to reveal the gilded, perfectly-proportioned and splendidly-muscled torso of Craig, posed as classical hero. A girl stands on either side; when his shoulders are stroked, small flames erupt. Craig’s body-as-spectacle, waxed and buffed, is an integral part of the reinvention of Bond and provides an interesting contrast with the extravagantly hairy body of Sean Connery. In Casino Royale, Craig’s first outing as Bond, it is the splendid body of the hero – and not that of a Bond girl – which rises Venus-like from the waves, a deliberate reference to Ursula Andress’ famous emergence from the sea in Dr. No. Now, it is the body of Bond at which we should ‘look’⁷ – while on a more mundane note, the La Perla swimming trunks he wears here were located instantly by fans and London stockists swiftly sold out.

If the figure of Bond is now openly the object of a homospectorial gaze, Craig and the scriptwriters also acknowledge the homoerotic potential of the series. Skyfall introduces Bond – and audiences – to a new, young Q, with rumpled hair and fashionable parka. He is played by openly gay actor Ben Whishaw, and wears sweaters by Missoni, Dries van Noten and Prada. In the same film, Craig himself responds almost flirtatiously to villain Javier Bardem’s stroking of his chest and thighs; when he says, ’What makes you so sure this is my first time?’ he seems almost to shock the bleached-blonde uber-terrorist, who moves back to the safety of his laptop.

By some terrible irony, it is this complicated and sometimes sombre hero whose style is compromised by commercial imperatives and the vagaries of fashion. In Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, protagonist Cary Grant had shown how classic Savile Row tailoring could survive even a chase through the dusty fields of the Midwest while under aerial attack. Connery always managed similar feats, in the suits created for him by Antony Sinclair, whose name did not actually appear in the cinematic credits. And so too did Craig on his very first excursion, when he was immaculately attired by Italian tailor Brioni. However, in the last two films he has been dressed in the ultra-fashionable suits of Tom Ford, now one of the four major sponsors of the franchise; Jany Termime, the costume designer, works alongside him. At the time of Skyfall, Ford’s jackets were a generous hip-length, and Craig tended to unbutton them so that he might maintain his dignity while in pursuit of his adversaries. But by the making of Spectre, fashions had changed and his suits with them; the jackets were now shorter and much narrower in cut. So sadly, in the action sequences the agile Craig looks as if he might burst out of the same skimpy suits at any moment; audiences fear for him, but it is a sartorial mishap, a split side seam, that they worry about, rather than a properly-aimed bullet from one of his adversaries. Nevertheless, Ford’s later designs have featured heavily on the many blogs and websites that now exist solely to describe and display the latest clothes and accessories seen in the films.

A set by production designer Dennis Gassner for 2015’s Spectre. Photographed by Anderson & Low as part of their series, “On the Set of James Bond’s Spectre.” Courtesy www.andersonandlow.com

Despite their appeal to audiences, these particular, high-fashion suits arguably disrupt the proper operation of the narrative. In 1998, film scholar Stella Bruzzi famously argued that with costume on screen, there is always one vital question – do we look at or through the clothes?⁸ If we look at the clothes, the cinematic flow is disrupted – not desirable in an action film. But here, we cannot help but be distracted and are forced to look at the too-tight suits and the obtrusive details: the noticeable sunglasses, the shoes with their fashionable ‘monkstraps,’ the tight white dinner jacket Craig wears in Spectre which is far less flattering to him than the discreet black Brioni one he wears in Casino Royale.

In a new millennium, Bond is faced with many difficult tasks; these have included parachuting into the London Olympics beside the Queen as well as taking on multinational crime syndicates headed by shadowy constantly-morphing villains. Now it seems he may have to fight battles and companies much nearer to home, if he is to preserve his own stylish image. There are other threats to the franchise. Spectre was filmed in Mexico, and a government anxious to improve its own public image offered generous tax cuts; this lent a whole new dimension to the notion of ‘product placement.’ Most disturbingly, there is the threat of a new, bland Bond. Craig, the first actor who has imbued the part with the complexities of fraught modern masculinity, has announced that he may retire from the role. The candidate suggested as his most likely successor definitely lacks the depth of the current incumbent; Bond could become a mere clotheshorse, the films a parade of suits and sunglasses.

Pamela Church Gibson is Reader in Cultural and Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.

T Bennett and J Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: the Political Career of a Popular Hero, Macmillan Education, London, 1987, p.295 ↩
P Cook and C Hines, ‘Sean Connery is James Bond: Re-fashioning British Masculinity in the 1960s,‘ in R. Moseley (ed.) Fashioning Film Stars: Dress, Culture, Identity, BFI Publishing, London, 2005, pp.147-160 ↩
C Breward, The Suit: Form, Function and Style, Reaktion Books, London, 2016, p.197 ↩
B Macintyre, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, London, Bloomsbury, 2008, p.205 ↩
D Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, London, Little, Brown, 2006 ↩
L’Osservatore Romano, Wednesday October 31st, 2012 ↩
See L Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ in Visual and Other Pleasures, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 ↩
S Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies, London, Routledge, 1997 ↩

To Cap It All

Professor Carol Tulloch — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 22:09:05 +0000

Unidentified Boy in Cap and Tie, Mike Disfarmer, 1940.

The seventh issue of Vestoj, ‘On Masculinities,’ is in stores this month. In conjunction, Vestoj Online is publishing a series of articles on the same theme.

IN 1977 I BOUGHT my first flat cloth cap – in navy cotton twill with leather detailing on each of the crown sections and a striped lining. It was a souvenir from a family trip to Jamaica, bought from a Rastafarian man selling his own designs at a stall in Kingston. At the time I saw the purchase as a defiant act: the feat of a post-colonial religious activist. Rastafari religion emerged in Jamaica in the early 1930s and gave allegiance to the Emperor Haile Selassie I, formerly Ras Tafari. His followers advocated ‘Africa for the Africans.’ In Jamaica during the 1970s, Rastas, as they are also known, were seen by conservative sections of Jamaica as being on the margins of society – hence my defiant act. Internationally Rastafari was gaining ground as a religious, musical and style force, notably in Britain. Back home my cap was admired by Rastas and non-Rastas of Jamaican heritage who longed for authentic objects from ‘back home.’ I wore it extensively until the 1980s – so much so that the seam of the cap’s peak wore away into a frayed edge.

The flat cloth cap emerged in the complex landscape of Victorian society, representing a form of revolution. As an accessory worn by all classes, the cloth cap became an axis around which each of the classes revolved. The middle-class man’s adoption of the cap, for example, mirrored his place in the gradual evolution of industralisation and social strata. In tandem, its espousal by a large number of working class men helped to establish their identity within the new mechanised society and to assert their existence and class against the domination of the middle- and upper classes. The basic design of the cap and its usage as part of ‘civilian dress,’ i.e. casualwear, makes it one of the few nineteenth-century fashion garments to retain its original values.

The term ‘flat cloth cap’ does not refer to a specific design, rather it is a vinculum – a generic term which refers to the basic form of a soft flat fabric crown with a stiffened peak. The cap has a diversity of designs and associated names – ‘golf,’ ‘bicycle,’ ‘The Handicap’, ‘Baker Boy’ and ‘Newsboy’ cap being but a few – nomenclatures given to the accessory to identify it with its represented activity, though for many it’s just a ‘cloth cap.’ The segmented flat cloth cap was developed in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century for the upper classes as sportswear, notably golf and its associated leisurewear. London and Manchester were the two main areas of cap and cloth cap manufacture at the time, but the cap proved so popular that consumers were encouraged to get their own made, and in 1895 a pattern for the ‘New Golf or Bicycle Cap’ featured in the menswear magazine Tailor and Cutter, produced for the first time by the journal in response to a reader’s request for such a pattern ‘so that any tailor who makes a suit for golfing or bicycling can make the cap to go with it of the same material as the suit.’¹

“Mr. Bennett, Vermont,” Paul Strand, 1940.

The use of the flat cloth cap quickly spread to the middle- and working class for leisure and work wear to the point where it became a ubiquitous feature of everyday life. Within the working class the cap represented genres of work, respectability, subcultures and politics. The historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that it was ‘the badge of class membership of the British proletarian when not at work.’² There is extensive photographic evidence that the flat cloth cap was used by working class men to define both their work and leisure time, while the politics connection was partly due to it being worn by the Scottish Labour Member of Parliament Keir Hardie on his initial entry into British parliament in 1892, making the cap a symbol of the Socialist Labour Party. It was a conscious political stance as the cap went against the dress code conventions of the Top Hat customarily worn within the Houses of Parliament. During this period, Britain was also instrumental in exporting the style to different parts of the world, with an especially healthy trade to British colonies like Australia, New Zealand and Trinidad as well as the United States, where the cap became popular thanks to English and Irish immigrants.³

In the twentieth century the flat cloth cap continued to have various social and cultural meanings. During the 1930s, for example, it simultaneously represented the economic struggles that marked the Great Depression, worn as it was by both criminals, as in Brassai’s famous 1930s night portrait of ‘Albert’s Gang,’ and royalty like Edward, the Prince of Wales. In more recent times, the flat cloth cap has been worn by a catalogue of pop cultural icons from The Beatles to Rihanna to David Bowie, and its popularity has been rebooted even more recently due to the success of the current BBC drama ‘Peaky Blinders,’ which apparently has ‘sparked an eighty-three percent rise in sales of flat caps.’⁴

In 1990 anthropologist David D. Gilmore summarised masculinity in a way that remains worryingly true: ‘male gender identity [is] a problematic, a puzzle, an unresolved cryptogram.’⁵ And if masculinity is a cryptogram, then the ‘components of dress,’⁶ as a system to assess the possible definitions and meanings of masculinity, is just one cipher of the cryptogram that is, as cultural studies scholar Jonathan Rutherford says, ‘doing and being a man,’⁷ for masculinity is a ‘cultural construct, open to change’ and thereby a ‘practice.’⁸

The flat cloth cap is one cipher in the cryptogram that is masculinity.

Miles Davis, The Musings of Miles album sleeve, New York, 1955. Courtesy of Concord Music Group, Inc.

Carol Tulloch is a professor of dress, diaspora and transnationalism at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Art.

All images courtesy of the International Center of Photography (www.icp.org) unless otherwise noted.

New Golf or Bicycle Cap’ in Tailor and Cutter, 28 November 1895, p. 481 ↩
E Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914 (263-307) in E Hobsbawm and T Ranger The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, 1983. p.287 ↩
N Braithwaite, ‘Flat Cap’ (pp. 123-124) in A Lynch and M D. Strauss, (eds.) Ethnic Dress in the United States: A Cultural Encyclopedia, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Boulder, New York, London, 2015, p.123 ↩
A Starkey http://metro.co.uk/2016/05/30/peaky-blinders-has-sparked-an-83-rise-in-sales-of-flat-caps-5912641/. 30 May 2016. First accessed 28th July 2016 ↩
D D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity, Yale University Press, New Haven, London,1990, pp.5-6 ↩
J Ash and L Wright, Components of Dress: Design, Manufacturing, and image-making in the fashion industry, Comedia/Routledge, London, New York, 1988 ↩
J Rutherford, ‘Preface’ in Bethan Benwell Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, Malden, 2003, p.1 ↩
Ibid p.1-5 ↩

Putting On a Zoot Suit

Clarissa M. Esguerra — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 03:57:13 +0000

A pattern for a zoot suit dating from 1940 to 1942, created as part of LACMA’s Pattern Project, in which the museum’s costume and textile department hand-draws patterns based on historical clothing in its collections and exhibitions.

The seventh issue of Vestoj, ‘On Masculinities,’ will be in stores this month. In introduction, Vestoj Online is publishing a series of articles on the theme.

THE ZOOT SUIT WAS an icon of its time, born from the bespoke draped silhouettes of London’s Savile Row in the mid-1930s then adopted and exaggerated by young jazz-obsessed men and women across America. Amid a period of social and political turbulence just before World War II, the style was not only a means of dandyism, but also a badge of cultural identity for many African American and first-generation immigrant youths. Its exaggerated shape and distinctive details are familiar to many by way of classic images of performers Cab Calloway, Tin Tan and other jazz greats, as well as from the numerous tributes that have since been made to the zoot suit and its original wearers, such as Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit from 1978 and popular songs from L. Wolfe Gilbert and Bob O’Brien’s 1942, ‘Zoot suit for my Sunday Gal,’ to Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’ 1997 big band revival hit, ‘Zoot Suit Riot.’

Beyond our pop cultural knowledge of the zoot suit are numerous scholarly articles on the subject. Strong social, political, cultural and dress research have enumerated the significance of the zoot suit against its cultural backdrop of racial tensions during the interwar years. And indeed, the so-called ‘zoot suit riots’ of 1943 were a cultural obsession that headlined newspapers across the country, and masked what was essentially race warfare between whites and Chicanos and blacks with the military dress of servicemen and unpatriotic dress of zoot-suiters.

Yet for all of this breadth and depth of information and various descriptions of this extraordinary suit style, research on an existing example is scarce because so few have survived. Reasons for this vary. As zoot suits required much more fabric to create than a typical suit, its rarity may be partly due to WWII-era restrictions imposed by the War Production Board in March of 1942 to reduce the amount of fabric used in garment construction, effectively limiting the production. Examples of the voluminous zoot suit may have also been remade into other garments, or the suits simply may not have survived use, whether from day-to-day wear or nighttime dances of the fashionable jitterbug or Lindy Hop. Further, during the zoot suit riots that first began in Los Angeles before spreading to other urban areas of the country, servicemen actively sought out Chicano and black zoot-suiters, sometimes even using ‘zootbeaters’ – a wooden two-by-four with nails – to physically tear the suits off of the zooter in a deplorable act of public humiliation.

Despite the turbulent past of this garment, remarkably, one extant zoot suit survives in the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. LACMA’s zoot suit is not only one of the only known suits of its kind held within a museum collection, but it is an extreme example of an already overstated style at that. The jacket of the zoot suit has a strong, overtly broad shoulder line, a fitted waist, a long jacket hem that falls below the fingertips and wide, pegged sleeves. To further exaggerate its fullness, the sleeves of this rare multi-striped suit are inset with gores in a contrasting striped fabric. The bag pockets of the jacket only attach at the top flap, allowing them to fly out from the body when the wearer spun. The matching pegged trousers are worn high on the waist and closed with a seventeen-inch zipper fly. For maximum fullness at the knee, the waist of the trousers is deeply pleated; this example has a two and a half-inch knife pleat at both sides of the center front which allows for the pant leg to billow out into a forty-seven-inch circumference knee before it tapers in with curved darts into a narrow cuff, measuring a mere seventeen and a half inches.

Joaquin Porras, a zoot suit youth, was held as a robbery suspect on Friday, November 6, 1942. Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.

Other construction details, such as the quality of the wool fabric, the stitch length at the seams and how details such as the collar and armscyes are tailored, suggest that the suit was made by a seasoned professional tailor. However, the textile is not of the finest quality and the sartorial hand was not typical of high-end suits. For a young man who wanted to don the uniform of hipsters or hepcats, but could not afford a costly bespoke model, this example – made to the tall size of its original owner – may have been semi-custom made, a common method of purchasing zoot suits. In this process, a retailer took the customer’s measurements and sent them to a wholesale manufacturer that constructed the suit to specification. Although these semi-custom suits were more affordable than custom tailoring, the cost was still expensive for most working-class youths who often purchased a suit on credit.¹ The sheer extravagance in the draped shape of this suit suggests that it may have not only been semi-custom made, but also worn for performance, as the wearer would have generated such movement and presence in the pegged ensemble.

Through thorough analysis of materials in the suit, the suit is likely authentic to this turbulent early 1940s period.² The presence of lead in some of the original trouser buttons suggests that they pre-date recent times. Though buttons could be removed and replaced, the use of both belt loops and suspender buttons in the construction of the trousers supports this date, as men were still transitioning from suspenders to belts to hold up their trousers; it was typical in the 1940s to have both options available. Also, the rayon lining of the jacket ends half-way up the interior top back with exposed seams finished and bound with fabric bias tape, tailoring details typical of men’s suits of the 1930s and 40s.

Upon examination, there is also physical evidence throughout the suit that it was worn and likely danced in. Aside from remnant tobacco found in the pockets when it first arrived, or slight signs of wear throughout, such as loose threads and warping, there are patches at the back cuff of the right pant leg from considerable wear. In the jitterbug, it is common to actively kick your dominant leg – the force of spinning into a kick may have caused the bottom cuff of the pant leg to slip past the ankle and catch on the heel of the shoe. If this is the source for this wear, we might conclude that our original zoot-suiter was right handed. Incidentally, the aforementioned tobacco was also found in the right jacket pocket.

The piece itself was originally found by a collector and jazz enthusiast who discovered the suit in an estate sale of a house that he described as a ‘time capsule’ in Montclair, New Jersey, just twenty minutes by car outside of Harlem, likely where the suit was worn. Harlem was the home of the Savoy Ballroom, a public dance space considered ‘The Heartbeat of Harlem’ by poet Langston Hughes. The venue played jazz music and – unlike the Cotton Club – it always had a no-discrimination policy. Thus, the general styling of accessories for the zoot suit for display was based on research done from photographs of young men and jazz musicians primarily from the New York area.

The deep-seated meaning of this exaggerated style to those who wore them from Harlem to Los Angeles was of self-assertion. Not only did zoot-suiters form a community around this suit, but the pleasure of assuming this bold draped look spoke to young African American and first-generation American men who were systematically underprivileged. But for many white Americans, the zoot suit was symbolic of gang activity or subversion, especially as racial tensions continued to rise, particularly in southern California against Mexican-American pachucos. In 1942, the Los Angeles press began to report on the Sleepy Lagoon Trial against a Chicano zoot-suiter accused for the murder of another Chicano youth; the negative press fostered intense prejudice towards the Mexican-American community. Accounts of pachuco gangs assaulting visiting white servicemen stationed in Los Angeles for deployment overseas abounded, as were rumours of these servicemen seeking out young Chicano women for sexual pleasure.

In June 1943, fights broke out between pachuco zoot-suiters and navy service men, with hundreds of Chicano and African-American youths beaten and arrested. Some accounts even described ‘prowl cars’ which cruised through Mexican neighbourhoods to intimidate the community. Some press sensationalised these ‘zoot suit riots’ with articles entitled ‘Zoot-Suit War,’ and ‘Zoot-Suiters Learn Lesson in Fight with Servicemen.’ The race-related zoot suit riots spread to other cities, such as Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond and Harlem. In June 11, 1943, The Nation voiced dissent towards the press’ unbalanced reporting of the riots in an article under the headline, ‘Hearst Press Incited Campaign Against Mexicans, Promoted Police Raids, Whipped Up Race Clashes.’ In the article, the columnist called out the press for its ‘great smear campaign against Mexicans.’³ This historically left-leaning periodical continues with the bold observation, laden with suggestive comparisons with the war overseas, that, ‘There is a deadly parallel between the pictures of naked Mexican boys lying on the streets of Los Angeles in pools of blood – with grinning mobs standing around – and the pictures one began to see a few years ago of Jews being made to clean the streets of Vienna.’⁴

As difficult as this period was for pachuco young men, it was similarly challenging for their female counterparts, the pachucas. Like the pachucos, pachucas also received negative press amid the riots, with various reports of these young Chicano women battling servicemen amid the riots alongside their brothers, boyfriends, or friends, or attacking white women with knives that were allegedly hidden in their hair. These so-called ‘zoot suit gangsterettes,’ ‘cholitas,’ or ‘zooterinas’ were also said to be part of gangs called the ‘Slick Chicks’ or ‘Black Widows.’

“Two Women,” Max Yavno, 1946.

Their look was similar to zoot-suiters, and generally consisted of a broad-shouldered ‘finger-tip’ coat, a short knee-length skirt or pegged trousers, fishnet stockings or bobby socks, platform heels, saddle shoes, or huarache sandals, high pompadour hairstyles, and heavy make-up. Latino/a historian Elizabeth R. Escobedo notes that strong lipstick and eye make-up was a means for these young women to actively embellish the Mexicanness of their face.⁵ In some cases, pachucas assumed this look as an act of rebellion. As first-generation Mexican-Americans, they were redefining their place in society – not only as ethnic minorities, but also as women from a cultural heritage strongly dominated by traditional Catholic values. Assuming a more masculine look with the zoot suit allowed these young women to rebel against what was expected as a Mexican female, while also being a means of community for other like-minded Mexican-American women.

Like any curious young adult, some pachucas were confrontational and sexually provocative as reported in both English- and Spanish-language press; however, other pachucas donned the zoot style simply because they wanted to be fashionable and visually affiliated with the latest youth trends. According to oral histories of Chicano women who grew up in southern California in the 1940s conducted by Catherine S. Ramirez, some wearers of the style did not even self-identify as a pachucas.⁶ As the zoot suit grew to be more of a fashion fad, even white females – like white males – began to don the style. In fact, when zoot suits were depicted on white men and women, the emphasis of the style was more on youth, music and dance rather than gang violence. In 1942, the St. Louis Post Dispatch described wearers of the style as ‘usually excellent dancers, perfect gentlemen,’ and that their female counterparts call their zoot look ‘a “juke jacket,” because it’s worn when dancing to the juke box.’⁷ It is worth noting that all zoot-suiters photographed in this article were Caucasian.

This clear double standard of the race of the zoot-suiter was so notable to many in the Mexican-American community – both parents and young women alike – that they actively discouraged the style, especially on women. Some in the Mexican community even feared the pachucas. Over time, the concern grew that all young Chicano women would be generalised as delinquent and gang-affiliated. In an effort to prove false assumptions of their sexual promiscuity in particular, a group of thirty Mexican-American women from various neighbourhoods in Los Angeles came forward and offered to undergo medical examinations to prove their chastity. ⁸ Though self-identified as ‘zooters’ they wanted to demonstrate that their style of dress and sexual actions did not go hand-in-hand. Fortunately, leaders of the Mexican community deemed such extreme measures to be excessive and instead asked that they donate blood to the Red Cross. The Los Angeles-based Eastside Journal, published an article highlighting another group of Mexican-American girls, all of whom graduated with top honours and with brothers or boyfriends in the armed forces.⁹ None were pictured wearing a zoot suit, but this was clearly a way to use the press, which had vilified zoot-suiters, to counteract the hysteria around pachucas.

A young man wears his drapes, a variation on the zoot suit widely popular in the 1940s. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.

Although the zoot suit fell out of fashion for both men and women by the end of World War II, underlying social issues of race would continue to evolve. Despite being a short-lived fad, this draped shape is an icon of its time and considered the first truly American suit. It was an exaggeration of the ultimate male uniform, the suit, and in its heyday the zoot suit was adopted widely in various communities throughout the country. During its reign in fashion, it not only granted its wearers, both male and female, a sense of strength and bravado, it also put a spotlight on the true diversity of American citizenry.

Clarissa M. Esguerra is Associate Curator of the Costume and Textiles department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her curatorial contributions include ‘Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail 1700-1915’ and, most recently, ‘Reigning Men: Fashion in Menswear 1715-2015,’ where an early 1940s zoot suit was a prominent feature.

K Peiss. Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2011, p. 25. ↩
This analysis was carried out by LACMA textile conservator Laleña Vellanoweth and conservation scientist, Charlotte Eng. ↩
C McWilliams, ‘The Story Behind the Zoot War:’ Hearst Press Incited Campaign Against Mexicans, Promoted Police Raides, Whipped Up Race Clashes,’ The Nation, June 11, 1943, p.3. ↩
Ibid., p. 4. ↩
E R Escobedo, ‘The Pachuca Panic: Sexual and Cultural Battlegrounds in World War II Los Angeles,’ Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer, 2007, p.140. ↩
See C S Ramirez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2009 ↩
“The Government Frowns on the ‘Zoot Suit,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 27, 1942, p. 9. ↩
E R Escobedo, ‘The Pachuca Panic: Sexual and Cultural Battlegrounds in World War II Los Angeles,’ Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer, 2007, p.142. ↩
C S Ramirez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2009, p. 44. ↩

Self-Fashioning as Resistance

Alice Tallman — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 18:55:16 +0000

‘Youth on a Long-Tailed Turtle as Urashima Tarō,’ Suzuki Harunobu, 1767. Sir Edmund Walker Collection. Courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum.

YOUTH MARKS BOTH A period of transience and the promise for a future, existing within a state of becoming. What is the value of an identity that is defined by a period of becoming? The figure of the youth has historically been able to resist the categories of male, female, boy, girl through the process of self-fashioning. This resistance of gender categories is not simply a rejection of the control mechanisms of culture but also requires working within the existing cultural system of images. During the Edo period of Japan between 1603 and 1868, the distortion of gender categories was an encounter between the authority of a rigid society and the desire to subvert Edo society by cultivating the image of the self.

The gender ambiguities that existed within Edo Japan were visually codified in the eighteenth century with the emergence of the concept of nigao–e or ‘face-resembling pictures’: the imitation of an image, thereby constructing identities through images. This translation may seem awkward, but it suggests that images construct identities and that identities can only exist if there is an image to reinforce them. Our knowledge of what is male, female or in-between, comes to us through the images that are disseminated within our societies. In eighteenth century kabuki theatre, nigao-e was adopted in order to make the characters on stage more visually readable by the audience. Distinctive features were developed for specific roles, including the shape of the mouth, nose and eyebrows, creating a striking resemblance between the character and the subculture that they were representing. The likeness of the character to an existing image held greater importance than the psychology of the character that these actors were portraying. One of these characters in kabuki was the wakashu, traditionally played by teenage boys and representing a specific subculture within Edo Japan. Wakashu are described by kabuki scholar Imao Tetsuya as ‘floating between the polarities of male and female, synthesising the principle of both sexes.’¹ The wakashu, etymologically resisting gender identification, is translated into English most closely as ‘youth,’ constituting what many scholars consider a ‘third gender.’² Through the self-fashioning of their image, wakashu were able to resist gender identification, existing as a third gender within a state of becoming. By rejecting the imposed male identity, wakashu represented the possibility of an existence outside of Edo society along with the prospect of future transformation for Edo culture.

Although within language the definition of wakashu is extremely ambiguous, within visual culture and in kabuki theatre, the wakashu had a very distinct appearance so that spectators could identify this figure as existing outside of male and female identities. Wakashu are most easily recognised within visual culture by the small shaven patch on the top of their head (maegami), peeking behind their forelock which was pulled back over the head. This attribute allows viewers to distinguish wakashu from men, who shaved the top of their heads completely bald. The maegami also allows the viewer to distinguish wakashu from women. Wakashu are often dressed in almost identical clothing to those worn by young unmarried women: formal long-sleeved furisode robes, worn both in visual representations and on stage. In kabuki theatre, wakashu often played the role of the futanarihira, literally ‘the doubled body,’ referring to a state of becoming by moving between genders, also known as the ‘androgynous stunner.’³ Wakashu on stage are usually represented with a kerchief tied around their head covering the forelock and dressed in the female fursiode robes, making their gender even more ambiguous. While the civilian wakashu constituted another gender – a third gender – the professional wakashu of the kabuki theatre oscillated between male and female.⁴ The duality of the wakashu’s image was not a total rejection of male identity, but rather represented a state of becoming which followed the flow of their coming of age. The wakashu identity allowed male youths to represent not only a third gender but an alternative social class within Edo society.

‘Wakashu and Young Woman with Hawks,’ Bunrō , ca. 1803. Gift of Ramsay and Eleanor Cook. Courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum.

The youthfulness of the wakashu not only characterised their transition from boy to man but was also a way of existing outside the social hierarchy of Edo society. Wakashu flourished during a period in which male social mobility was strongly discouraged. Wakashu, especially those within kabuki theatre, were often prostitutes and were depicted by Edo artists such as Suzuki Harunobu in amorous situations with both men and women, making it difficult to differentiate between wakashu and wakashu-prostitutes. Wakashu are often represented as prostitutes in visual culture because of kabuki theatre’s long history as both a place for theatrical and sexual entertainment.⁵ Although restricted by social class and occupation, wakashu experienced a different kind of mobility through the act of moving between, and existing outside gender. After wakashu reached the age of nineteen or twenty and transitioned into adulthood, they assumed an unmovable place as adult males within society. With the radical Westernisation of Japan during the Meji era (1868–1912), and the adoption of Victorian norms of gender and sexuality, representations of masculinity became more rigid, and the image of the wakashu disappeared from visual culture outside of kabuki theatre.⁶ Wakashu represented a period of fantasy in which youths were able to modulate the male identity and the restrictions of the Japanese social hierarchy. The image of the wakashu was codified and constructed within Edo society while resisting gender categorisation, existing between identities in the state of becoming.

Self-fashioning is the action of taking existing images circulating within a culture and creating one’s own image through them. Historian Stephen Greenblatt has applied the notion to Renaissance culture, describing in Renaissance Self-Fashioning how the fashioning of the self was inseparable from the fashioning of society.⁷ For Greenblatt self-fashioning is the process of constructing one’s identity in accordance with existing social norms. Similarly, it could be argued that the wakashu was able to exist in-between genders through the process of self-fashioning within an existing economy of images. Comparable to face-resembling-pictures, self-fashioning is aligned with representation, thereby presenting an ideal state rather than a reality. This third gender still requires an image that is identifiable in order to fashion itself outside of their social existence.

The re-fashioning of one’s image, at the same time, has the power to rupture how we understand identity and its relationship to society. In philosopher Michel Foucault’s discussion of sexuality in the Western world, The History of Sexuality, he asserted that self-fashioning was a response to a crisis in culture, which was for him also a crisis of the subject.⁸ For Foucault, self‐constitution and cultivation were what stood against the normalising machine of modern technologies. Both self-constitution and cultivation are processes of becoming through self-fashioning.⁹ Within every cultural crisis the desire to reconstruct life anew is as much a reconstruction of the social body as it is a reconstitution of the physical body. The desire to become a wakashu – beyond sexual orientations – could then be seen as the wish to resist the social body through the fashioning of the self outside of its imposed construction – a yearning that appears not to abate with neither time, geography nor culture.

A woodblock print of actor Sanogawa Ichimatsu dressing as young man of fashion, or wakashu. Torii Kiyohiro, ca. 1751-1757. Courtesy of the British Museum.

Alice Tallman is an independent editor and writer based in New York. She assisted with the editing of the publication accompanying the recent exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, A Third Gender.

M Morinaga, ‘The Gender of Onnagata As the Imitating Imitated: Its Historicity, Performativity, and Involvement in the Circulation of Femininity’ in Positions: East Asia Cultures,10 (2), Fall 2002, p. 253, quoting Imao, Henshin no shisō, p.146. ↩
A Ikeda & J Mostow, A Third Gender, Toronto, Royal Ontario Museum Press, 2016 ↩
M Morinaga, ‘The Gender of Onnagata As the Imitating Imitated: Its Historicity, Performativity, and Involvement in the Circulation of Femininity’ in Positions: East Asia Cultures, 10 (2), Fall, 2002, p. 253 ↩
J Mostow, ‘Wakashu as a Third Gender and Gender Ambiguity Through the Edo Period,’ A Third Gender, Toronto, Royal Ontario Museum, 2016, p. 26 ↩
M Morinaga, ‘The Gender of Onnagata As the Imitating Imitated: Its Historicity, Performativity, and Involvement in the Circulation of Femininity’ in Positions: East Asia Cultures, 10 (2), Fall 2002, p. 253-254 ↩
A Ikeda, ‘Introduction’ in A Third Gender, Toronto, Royal Ontario Museum, 2016 p. 11 ↩
S Greenblatt. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980 ↩
M Foucault, ‘The Care of the Self’ in The History of Sexuality, 3, R Hurley (trans), New York, Pantheon Books, 1986. ↩
M Foucault, L’herméneutique du sujet, Cours au Collège de France, ed, Frédéric Gros, Paris, Gallimard/Seuil, 2001, p. 490-93. ↩