With: Bridge Markland, Lina Berg, Anne Tismer and Caine Panik

Costume by Timon Imfeld

Video by Lukas Ishar

Hosted by Armen Avanessian and the Berliner Volksbühne, March 15 2019.

Welcome to an Evening Dedicated to Authenticity

What does a Michael Jackson impersonator, a drag king, a conceptual clothing company, an improv actor, a smell artist and a robot have in common with socks crafted in a DIY Off-White workshop? Well that’s for us to know and you to find out.

Collaborators: London College of Fashion, Sissel Tolaas, MJLIL, Jésus la Vidange, BLESS, Georgian Badal, Guillaume Sorge, Maxime Robert, Esteban Perroy.

Photographs by Ayka Lux

Thank you to Vittoria Mattarese, Manon Klein and Alice Guidicenti.

Welcome to an Evening Dedicated to Masculinities

Simone de Beauvoir once said that ‘one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,’ and many would argue that the same could be said about being a man. Today, it seems more apt to talk about ‘masculinities’ in the plural, to underscore the many ways in which one can be a man, or become one.

Collaborators: London College of Fashion, Pauline Simon, Sissel Tolaas, Topper Harley, Moullinex Feat. Ghetto.

Photographs by Ayka Lux

Thank you to Vittoria Mattarese, Manon Klein and Alice Guidicenti.

Welcome to an Evening Dedicated to Failure

In a society that venerates success, few things are as alarming as the prospect of failure. To fail is to expose yourself to the judgment of others, and to judge yourself according to those same standards. It is also an opportunity to learn how to remain humble. In the fashion industry, failure is common. Recently experts have argued that fashion as a system has failed altogether, since creativity often has to make way for profit. But fashion can also fail in small ways: the story is full of trends that failed to take off and dresses suddenly splitting at the side. During one evening, failure will be celebrated. As Samuel Beckett wrote in Worstward Ho: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

The Chorus of Complaints

Taking inspiration from a community arts project initiated in 2005 by Finnish artists Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, this Chorus of Complaints was all about what’s wrong with the fashion industry. The carolled objections are just some of those voiced by industry insiders in interviews given for Vestoj’s issue ‘On Failure.’

Lyrics: Anja Aronowsky Cronberg
Music: Jerome Violent
Choir: La Chorale Sauvage et Clandestine de Paris

The Makeup Malfunctions

When makeup goes awry on the famous, the paparazzi are quick to take note. Has your fake tan melted? Or your contouring gone to hell? Or perhaps your face powder is playing havoc on your chin? Well, here is your chance to feel like a beleaguered Hollywood star for an evening. Take your pick: are you a Kylie, an Angelina or a Nicki Minaj?

Thanks to MAC Cosmetics

Collaborators: London College of Fashion, Etienne Blanchot, Corneliu Dragomirescu, Romain Sanderre, Sissel Tolaas, and La Chorale Sauvage et Clandestine de Paris.

Photographs by Ayka Lux

Thank you to Vittoria Mattarese, Manon Klein and Alice Guidicenti.

BUYING IS MUCH MORE American than thinking and I’m as American as they come. In Europe and the Orient people like to trade – buy and sell, sell and buy – they’re basically merchants. Americans are not so interested in selling – in fact, they’d rather throw out than sell. What they really like to do is buy – people, money, countries.

Saturday is the big buying – or ‘shopping’ – day in America and I look forward to it as much as the next guy.

My favorite thing to buy is underwear. I think buying underwear is the most personal thing you can do, and if you could watch a person buying underwear you would really get to know them. I mean, I would rather watch somebody buy their underwear than read a book they wrote. I think the strangest people are the ones who send someone else to buy their underwear for them. I also wonder about people who don’t buy underwear. I can understand not wearing it, but not buying it?

Anyway, one Saturday morning I called a B who knows me pretty well and asked him if he would like to go underwear-shopping with me at Macy’s.

“Macy’s?” he grumbled. I guess I woke him up but think of all the buying time he was losing. “Why Macy’s?”

“Because that’s where I get my underwear,” I told him. I used to go to Woolworth’s but now I can afford Macy’s. Periodically I stop in at Brooks Brothers to look at their fancy old-fashioned boxer shorts but I just can’t bring myself to give up Jockeys.

“I wouldn’t mind buying some underwear,” B said, “but I buy mine at Bloomingdale’s. They have pure cotton. Pima cotton.” This B is like that. He finds something he likes, Pima cotton for example, and he acts like he discovered it. He gets completely attached to it. He won’t buy anything else. He has extremely definite taste. Which I think is bad because it limits his buying power.

“No, let’s go to Macy’s.”

“Saks is nice,” he whimpered.

“Macy’s,” I insisted. “I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

I need about an hour to glue myself together, but when I make an appointment I always forget about the phone call interruptions so I always show up a little late, and a little unglued. B was waiting for me on his corner.

“You’re fifteen minutes late,” he said, climbing into the taxi.

“Herald Square,” I said to the driver.

“It’s going to be hell on Saturday,” said B.

“I was on the phone,” I said. “Paul Morrissey called. Ingrid Superstar called. Jackie Curtis called. Franco Rossel-lini called. Oh look, who’s that? Is that someone we know?” A four-foot-two old lady was crossing Park Avenue at 65th Street. She had frizzy red hair and was wearing black gloves, a pink sweater, a black dress, red shoes, and she was carrying a red bag. She was hunchbacked. I don’t know why, but she seemed like someone we would know. But B didn’t recognize her so I didn’t bother to roll down the window and wave.

I asked B once and for all if he was going to buy any underwear and he said no, not at Macy’s because he only liked Bloomingdale’s Pima cotton or Saks Fifth Avenue’s own brand. This B is really stubborn.

“Do you think Howard Hughes wears underwear?” I asked B. “Do you think he washes it or throws it away after he wears it once?” He probably throws new suits away. What I’ve always really wished I’d invented was paper underwear, even knowing that the idea never took off when they did come out with it. I still think it’s a good idea, and I don’t know why people resist it when they’ve accepted paper napkins and paper plates and paper curtains and paper towels – it would make more sense not to have to wash out underwear than not to have to wash out towels.

B said he might consider buying a couple of pairs of socks, because “socks just disappear.” He doesn’t wash his own, of course, he sends them to a very fancy East Side French dry cleaner’s and they still come back with one missing. It really is a law – the diminishing return of socks.

The reason I hate regular underwear – and socks, too – is that if you send twenty pairs of shorts and twenty pairs of socks to the laundromat, you always only get nineteen back. Even when I wash them myself, I get nineteen back. The more I think about it, the more I can’t believe the diminishing returns on underwear. It’s unbelievable. I WASH MY OWN AND I STILL GET NINETEEN BACK!

I wash my own, and I put them in myself, and I take them out myself, and I put them in the dryer myself, and then I go through the dryer feeling around all the holes and ridges looking for the missing sock, and I never find it! I go up and down the stairs looking for it. thinking it fell, but I never find it! It’s like a law of physics…

I told B I needed some socks too and at least thirty pairs of Jockey shorts. He suggested I switch to Italian-style briefs, the ones with the t-shaped crotch that tends to build you up. I told him I’d tried them once, in Rome, the day I was walking through a Liz Taylor movie – and I didn’t like them because they made me too self-aware, It gave me the feeling girls must have when they wear uplift bras.

Suddenly B said, “There’s your first Superstar.”

“Who? Ingrid?”

“The Empire State Building.” We had just turned into 34th Street. He laughed at his own joke while I fished around my boot for a couple of singles to pay the taxi.

At Herald Square people were pouring into Macy’s from all over the world. At least they looked like they came from all over the world. But they were ail Americans and though they had lots of different color skins they all had buying in their blood and minds and eyes. People look so determined entering a department store. B, naturally, turned his upturned nose up and began to go straight to the men’s department.

I was getting annoyed. I don’t come to Macy’s that often and I wanted to take my time shopping through it. “Don’t rush me, B.” I wanted to check out the price tags on the plastic bags and see if they had gone up much since last time. I hear all this talk about ‘inflation’ and I wanted to see for myself if it was true.

“It’s so mobbed,” B whined.

It was crowded, especially for a Saturday in summer. “Shouldn’t all these people be away?” I asked.

“These kind of people don’t go away,” B said, very snottily I thought.

I stopped and watched a Japanese lady in a kimono make up an American lady in a jumpsuit. They were starring in ‘Shiseido Presents Exotic Makeup Artist for Free.’ Then we walked past the big Charlie promotion, past the Famous Maker Ties, past the candy department – which took a lot of willpower on my part. I walked past the Raspberry-Cherry Mix-Max, the Licorice All-Kinds, the Jelly Beans, the Rock Candy, the Chocolate Pretzels, the TV Munch, the Petit Fours, the Mon Cherry, the Lollipops, the Nonpareils, I even walked past the Whitman Samplers. The smell of chocolate was driving me nuts but I didn’t say a word. I didn’t even sigh or moan. I just thought of my pimples and gall bladder and kept on walking.

“Where is the men’s department, B?” I finally asked. We were entering Cigars.

“This is the World’s Largest Store,” B said, as If I didn’t know. “We have to walk all the way from Sixth Avenue to Seventh Avenue. But we’re getting closer – here’s Men’s Sunglasses.”

Men’s Sunglasses led to Men’s Scarves which led to Men’s Pajamas and then – then! – Men’s Underwear. I quickly found the brand I usually use, Jockey Classic Briefs. They were three for five dollars which didn’t seem too inflationary. I read the label on the plastic bag they came in, just to make sure they hadn’t changed any of their famous ‘Comfort Features’ – ‘Exclusive Tailoring for Proper Fit to Support a Man’s Needs; Contoured Designed Arch Gives Added Comfort No Gaps; Support Waistband is Smoother Fitted Heat Resistant; Stronger Longer Lasting ‘V No Chafe Leg Openings; Soft Rubber at Either Thigh Only; Highly Absorbent 100 Per Cent Highly Combed Cotton.’ So far so good, I thought. I checked the ‘Washing Instructions’ – ‘Machine Wash Tumble Dry’. Everything was fine, the same as always. I hate it when you find a product you like that fits a particular need of yours, and then they change it. ‘Improve’ it. I hate ‘new, improved’ anything. I think they should just make a completely new product instead and leave the old one alone. That way there would be two products to choose from, instead of half an old one. At least the Jockey Classic Briefs were still Classic, but before I committed myself to buying them I decided to ask the saleslady to show me what else was available on the underwear market. This saleslady was pleasantly plump in her neat navy-blue shirtwaist dress with a red-and-white scarf tied around her double chin. She had a nice smile and eyeglasses with rhinestones sprayed around the frames. She looked like the type you could feel comfortable talking about underwear with.

“Do you have BVDs?” I asked.

She pushed her eyeglasses further up her nose, right up to the ridge, and she said, “No, we don’t carry BVDs.”

“Does Macy’s make its own brand, like Saks?” B piped up. Who was he trying to impress? The saleslady?

“Certainly. We have Macy’s Supremacy right here.” She lifted a package to show me. “They’re two for five dollars.”

“Two for five dollars! These are three for five dollars,” I exclaimed. I had some Jockeys in my hand.

“Well, Supremacy is the better line. They fit better. We also have Macy’s Kenton. They’re three for four-fifty.”

She handed me a package of Kentons. “This is all cotton too,” I said.

“There are different grades of cotton, you know,” she said.

I was confused. I looked at the Supremacy package more closely. “What’s this? ‘Swiss Rib Side Panels?’ Does that make it better?”

“That,” said the saleslady, “and the quality of the cotton.”

“But what are ‘Swiss Rib Side Panels’?”

“How do I know? It makes them fit better,” she said grimly. “What brand do you generally use? BVD?”

“Jockey.”

“Jockey!” There was a note of triumph in her voice now. “Supremacy is cut longer than Jockey. It’s a longer brief. But if you like the Jockey cut I would suggest you stick to it.”

“How many pairs should I get?” I mumbled to B. There was no point asking the saleslady to show me anything else. She had made up my mind when she made up hers. “I need about twenty-eight.”

“You can’t get twenty-eight if there are three in a package,” B explained. “You can get twenty-seven or thirty but not twenty-eight.”

“Okay then, I’ll take fifteen.”

“Cash or charge?” said the saleslady.

“Cash,” I said. I don’t like charging. It feels more like buying if you pay with money. The saleslady went off to ring the sale up. Another saleslady, who looked a lot like her, came up to us and asked, “Are you together?”

“Are we together?” I asked B.

“Yes,” B said, a bit annoyed. The second saleslady walked away. “Look at these Jockey Thoroughbred Nylon Briefs.” B pointed to an adjacent rack.

“Are they better?”

“You can use them as a bathing suit,” B said. The saleslady returned with my change. “We have one over here,” she said, “that’s supposed to be used as a bathing suit. Let me show it to you.”

We followed her down a narrow aisle lined with more kinds of underwear than I knew existed.

“Here,” she said, handing B a package of Pucci-looking bikini underwear.

“Are they Jockey?” I asked.

“JockeyLife.”

“Do they come in any other colors?”

“They come in a print called Balloons,” she said, handing me a package of blue-and-green JockeyLife bikinis.

“Don’t they come in white?”

“No they don’t but we have these others over here by Jockey – Jockey Skins. Now they come in white, but they are not as brief.”

I examined the package, trying to Imagine myself in Jockey Skins instead of Jockey Classic Briefs. But I just couldn’t, so I handed the package back to her and thanked her for her help.

As we walked through the further reaches of the Men’s Underwear department, it hit me that B and I were the only men in the whole department. And it wasn’t empty. There were women everywhere. At first I wondered if women now were buying men’s underwear just like they buy men’s jeans and men’s sweaters but then I saw that these were all middle-aged married-looking women shopping for their husbands. I guess that’s what marriage boils down to – your wife buys your underwear for you.

B had detoured into the exotic underwear aisle – the mesh g-string aisle – and was having a good time reading the labels.

“Look at this one,” he said. “It says ‘Horizontal fly for easy access’.”

“Strange,” I said. “Why do they have a pocket in the pouch?”

“That’s the horizontal fly for easy access.” B chuckled. “Here’s one that says ‘Exclusive for easy convenience.'”

“Come on, let’s go, I have to buy some socks,” I said.

[…]

All images of spreads from Alfred Gingold’s mock shopping catalogue, Items From Our Catalog, released in 1982, and More Items From Our Catalog, from 1983, which parodied America’s L.L. Bean Shopping Catalogs.

Excerpt from chapter 15, ‘Underwear Power’ from Andy Warhol’s The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), published in 1975.

An excerpt of the lecture by Morris is paired with the graphite drawings by artist Robert Otto Epstein. Epstein’s works are realised through a process of drawing on to hand gridded paper and marked square, filling in the pattern with a pencil, square by square.

***

The subject I have to speak on is a sufficiently wide one, and I can do little more than hint at points of interest in it for your further thought and consideration; all the more as I think I shall be right in supposing that, except for anyone actually engaged in the manufacture of textiles who may be present, you, in common with most educated people at the present day, have very little idea as to how a piece of cloth is made, and not much as to the characteristic differences between the manufactures of diverse periods. However, one limitation to my subject I will at once state: I am going to treat it as an artist and archaeologist, not as a manufacturer, as we call it; that is, I shall be considering the wares in question from the point of view of their usefulness (using the work in its widest sense) to the consumer, and not as marketable articles, as subject-matter for exchange. I must assume that the goods I am speaking of were made primarily for use, and only secondarily for sale; that, you see, will limit me to a historical discourse on textile fabrics, since at present those wares, like all other wares of civilized countries, are made primarily for sale, and only secondarily for use.

As to the kinds of weaving: first there is plain weaving in its simplest form, where the weft crosses the warp regularly and alternately. Of that I need say no more, because I have to speak mostly of the characteristic ornament of the different periods, and this plain weaving is not susceptible of ornament, woven ornament I mean. To obtain that the weft must cross the warp at regular intervals, but not alternately; on the surface either warp or weft must predominate to make a pattern.

Sometimes, as a subdivision of this common figure-weaving, the warp comes chiefly to the surface, which makes a satin; and also sometimes these warp threads are caught up over wires with a sharp edge, which are pulled out as the work goes on, leaving a surface with a raised pile, that is velvet. In the next kind of weaving the weft crosses the warp alternately indeed, as in plain unpatterned weaving, but instead of being carried in one stroke all across the web, ends or returns wherever the colour changes, so forming a kind of mosaic of coloured patches; this is tapestry, using the word in its narrowest sense. As a detail of this work I ought to mention that in tapestry-weaving the weft is put in so loosely, driven home so carefully, that the warp is entirely hidden by the weft. That work may be considered as a sub-division of this kind of weaving, where thrums of wool, hair, or silk are knotted into a plain canvas as the work proceeds, so as to form a pile with their cut ends; this is carpet-weaving. Lastly comes a kind of ornamental web, in which the ornament is not produced by weaving, but by painting by hand or printing combined in various ways with dyeing in the piece; we call these printed goods chintzes and so on. Needle-worked embroidery is another way of ornamenting a cloth; but I shall not deal with this form of ornamented cloth.

Let us consider briefly the practical history of these three arts; and first the mechanical or common weaving. With wares so perishable as woven cloth, it is not wonderful that we have little read record of the stuffs of antiquity; because the descriptions of the poets and writers of the time cannot be depended on for accuracy, as they of course assumed a general knowledge in their audience of the articles described. The vase-painting and sculpture of the central Greek period give us at all events some idea of the quality of the stuffs worn at the period, and in so doing fully confirm the beautiful and simple description of the fine garment in the Odyssey, which is likened to the inner skin of an onion: a figure of speech which, taken with the representations of delicate cloth in the figure-work of the time of Pericles, and earlier and later, gives one an idea of something like those mixed fabrics of silk and cotton which are still made in Greece and Anatolia. Only you must remember that the early classical peoples at least did not know of either silk or cotton, so that flax was probably the material of these fine garments; and we know by the evidence of the Egyptian tombs that linen was woven there of the utmost delicacy and fineness. I don’t suppose we need doubt that mechanical pattern-weaving was practised by the Greeks in their earlier and palmy days, but only, I fancy, for the simpler kinds of patterns in piece goods, diapers, and so forth. I conclude the running borders to have been needle-work, or maybe dye-painting. We have a few representations of looms to help us in looking into this matter, which however do not prove much; they are all vertical, and at first sight look nearly like the looms used throughout the Middle Ages, and to-day at the Gobelins, for tapestry-weaving. In one which is figured on a tomb at Beni Hassan in Egypt, the details of an ordinary high-warp tapestry loom are all given accurately; but the weavers seem to be weaving nothing but plain cloth; in this loom the cloth is being worked downwards, as in the ordinary tapestry loom. In another representation, taken from a Greek vase of about 400 B.C., Penelope is seated before her famous web, which is being worked in an upright loom; there is only one beam to it, the cloth-beam, and the work is woven upward; the warps are kept at the stretch at the bottom by weights looking too small to be effective; the web is figured, [it] has a border of the ordinary subsidiary patterns of classical art, and a stripe of monsters and winged human figures. It seems to have been concluded that this represents actual tapestry-weaving, but too hastily perhaps, as the high-warp loom only means a certain amount of inconvenience in forgoing the mechanical advantages of the spring-staves worked by treadles. Also this Greek loom of 400 B.C. is in all respects like the looms in use in Iceland and the Faroes within the last sixty years for weaving ordinary cloth, plain or chequered.

However, it is now time for us to leave this somewhat barren desert of vague poetical descriptions, hasty and generalized drawings on vases or tombs, and very rare scraps of the woven good themselves, and march into the more fruitful country of the early Middle Ages, which give us quite direct evidence of the arts of weaving of the days of the Byzantine Empire. Now you must remember that whatever share the city of New Rome took in actually producing works of the industrial arts under her emperors, she was at least the foster-mother of those arts for all medieval Europe, and from her came that influence which brought about the new art of Europe, whose origins are obscure enough till they meet and are fused at Constantinople into a style which for centuries after was world-wide; this was natural enough. Looked upon as an European city, Byzantium was for long the only great city of Europe that was really alive and dominant in peace and war; as a mistress of an enemy she dealt with all the great birth-countries of art and letters, nay, of human life. India, Mesopotamia, Syria, Persia, Asia Minor, Egypt; the ideas and arts of all these countries touched her, and mingled with the remains of the older art of Greece, from which the academicism of the long Romano-Greek period had not crushed all the life, sorely as it had weighed upon it. Byzantium then, the Byzantium of Justinian and onwards, we must look upon as the capital of the industrial arts, from the sixth to the thirteenth century, and in none of them was her influence more obvious than in that of weaving. One event alone which took place there revolutionized this art in Europe, the introduction of the silkworm in the sixth century; which event has also made it more possible to judge of what was done in early times, because the material having the advantage of not being liable to be moth-eaten, some specimens of early date have been left to us.

The fifteenth century brings us to Florence and Venice, where the splendid cloths were wrought which were used so profusely in the magnificent stateliness of the later Middle Ages. This is a part of the subject that wants treating clinically, so to say; that is, we should be alongside some of the fine specimens in the best museums in order to make you understand it properly. Nothing can exceed the splendour of some of these Florentine and Venetian webs, whose speciality was a particular kind of rich velvet and gold, often with one pile raised on the top of another. In these cloths the vellum-twisted gold gives place to gold thread as we know it, but gilded so thickly that it is not uncommon to find specimens where the gold is very little, it at all, tarnished.

Rich and splendid as these cloths are, they have, to a certain extent, lost some of the imaginative interest of the earlier designs; it would not be true to say that they depend on their material for the pleasure they give, because in these great patterns, founded on vegetation of the thistle and artichoke kind, there is a vigour and freedom that is most delightful and captivating; but they are more architectural and less picture-like than the Sicilian stuffs; the strange monsters, the fairy woods and island shores, the damsel-peopled castles, palm-trees and shells, the lions drinking at the woodland fountain, hawk, swan, mallard, and dove, the swallow and his nestlings, and the hot sun breaking through the clouds – all these wonders and many another have given place to skilfully and beautifully arranged leaves and tendrils. As we shall see, later on, picture-weaving had reached its height by this time, and there was something of a division of labour between the two kinds of weaving-design; at the same time the design was absolutely pure and suitable to its purpose; no atom of corruption had crept in.

In the times of the degradation of the art, with the history of which I have not thought it worth while to trouble you, people by exaggerating this fault fell into another which seems at first sight almost the opposite one; they gradually forgot that the material had anything to do with the design at all, in fact they often spent time and pains to make, for instance, woven silk look like printed paper and so forth. Moreover in the fine time of art what the designer thought of was always in some way to appeal to the imagination; in other words, to tell some story, however imperfectly; he had not time, therefore, for the petty ingenuities of the later days, he was determined to let us know what he had in his mind, and he, unconsciously maybe, well understood that he was to use fair colour and beautiful form in the simplest and most direct way in order to carry out his purpose. So treated, the design of even a scrap of cloth becomes elevated by human intelligence, and has in its humble way distinct intellectual value; it becomes a thing which no intelligent unprejudiced man has any right to pass by with contempt, as a piece of mere frivolity; and I must say point blank, that unless we can elevate our design into this region of fancy and imagination, we were better to have no ornament at all; for to my mind as a mere commercial necessity, a bit of trade finish, it is unspeakably contemptible. You may easily imagine that I have not time to give you any hints as to the way of elevating our ornament on wares, nor perhaps would this be quite the best place in which to treat the subject, which it seems to me if properly treated would lead us into very serious matters indeed.

One hint, however, I should like to give you; I am myself an ornamentalist, a maker of would-be pretty things. Yet I will not try to press on you the fact that there is nothing like leather; rather, I would say, be cautious of over-ornamenting your houses and your lives with cheap unenduring prettiness; have as few things as you can, for you may be sure that simplicity is the foundation of all worthy art; be sure that whatever ornament you have is proper and reasonable for the sort of life you want to lead, and don’t be led by the nose by fashion into having things you don’t want. In looking forward towards any utopia of the arts, I do not conceive to myself of there being a very great quantity of art of any kind, certainly not of ornament, apart from the purely intellectual arts; and even those must not swallow up too much of life. As to ornamental art (so called), I can, under our present conditions, looking forward from out of the farrago of rubbish with which we are now surrounded, chiefly see possible negative virtues in the externals of our household goods; can see them never shabby, pretentious, or ungenerous, natural and reasonable always; beautiful also, but more because they are natural and reasonable than because we have set about to make them beautiful. We need not think that this will be an easy matter to bring about, but when it is brought about, I do believe that some sort of genuine art and ornament will accompany it, it may be in rather a Spartan way at first; from that time onward we shall have art enough, and shall have become so decent and reasonable, that every household will have become a quiet, daily, unadvertised Health Exhibition.

‘Textile Fabrics’ was delivered by William Morris on July 11, 1884 at the International Health Exhibition at the South Kensington Museum, London, and published that year as a pamphlet Textile Fabrics: A Lecture Delivered in the Lecture Room of the Exhibition, London: William Clowes, full text available here.

Robert Otto Epstein is an artist based in New Jersey, USA, his drawings and paintings explore pattern and repetition.

V

TO BERNICE THE NEXT week was a revelation. With the feeling that people really enjoyed looking at her and listening to her came the foundation of self-confidence. Of course there were numerous mistakes at first. She did not know, for instance, that Draycott Deyo was studying for the ministry; she was unaware that he had cut in on her because he thought she was a quiet, reserved girl. Had she known these things she would not have treated him to the line which began “Hello, Shell Shock!” and continued with the bathtub story – “It takes a frightful lot of energy to fix my hair in the summer – there’s so much of it – so I always fix it first and powder my face and put on my hat; then I get into the bathtub, and dress afterward. Don’t you think that’s the best plan?”

Though Draycott Deyo was in the throes of difficulties concerning baptism by immersion and might possibly have seen a connection, it must be admitted that he did not. He considered feminine bathing an immoral subject, and gave her some of his ideas on the depravity of modern society.

But to offset that unfortunate occurrence Bernice had several signal successes to her credit. Little Otis Ormonde pleaded off from a trip East and elected instead to follow her with a puppy-like devotion, to the amusement of his crowd and to the irritation of G. Reece Stoddard, several of whose afternoon calls Otis completely ruined by the disgusting tenderness of the glances he bent on Bernice. He even told her the story of the two-by-four and the dressing-room to show her how frightfully mistaken he and every one else had been in their first judgment of her. Bernice laughed off that incident with a slight sinking sensation.

Of all Bernice’s conversation perhaps the best known and most universally approved was the line about the bobbing of her hair.

“Oh, Bernice, when you goin’ to get the hair bobbed?”

“Day after to-morrow maybe,” she would reply, laughing. “Will you come and see me? Because I’m counting on you, you know.”

“Will we? You know! But you better hurry up.”

Bernice, whose tonsorial intentions were strictly dishonorable, would laugh again.

“Pretty soon now. You’d be surprised.”

But perhaps the most significant symbol of her success was the gray car of the hypercritical Warren McIntyre, parked daily in front of the Harvey house. At first the parlor-maid was distinctly startled when he asked for Bernice instead of Marjorie; after a week of it she told the cook that Miss Bernice had gotta hold a Miss Marjorie’s best fella.

And Miss Bernice had. Perhaps it began with Warren’s desire to rouse jealousy in Marjorie; perhaps it was the familiar though unrecognized strain of Marjorie in Bernice’s conversation; perhaps it was both of these and something of sincere attraction besides. But somehow the collective mind of the younger set knew within a week that Marjorie’s most reliable beau had made an amazing face-about and was giving an indisputable rush to Marjorie’s guest. The question of the moment was how Marjorie would take it. Warren called Bernice on the ‘phone twice a day, sent her notes, and they were frequently seen together in his roadster, obviously engrossed in one of those tense, significant conversations as to whether or not he was sincere.

Marjorie on being twitted only laughed. She said she was mighty glad that Warren had at last found some one who appreciated him. So the younger set laughed, too, and guessed that Marjorie didn’t care and let it go at that.

One afternoon when there were only three days left of her visit Bernice was waiting in the hall for Warren, with whom she was going to a bridge party. She was in rather a blissful mood, and when Marjorie – also bound for the party – appeared beside her and began casually to adjust her hat in the mirror, Bernice was utterly unprepared for anything in the nature of a clash. Marjorie did her work very coldly and succinctly in three sentences.

“You may as well get Warren out of your head,” she said coldly.

“What?” Bernice was utterly astounded.

“You may as well stop making a fool of yourself over Warren McIntyre. He doesn’t care a snap of his fingers about you.”

For a tense moment they regarded each other – Marjorie scornful, aloof; Bernice astounded, half-angry, half-afraid. Then two cars drove up in front of the house and there was a riotous honking. Both of them gasped faintly, turned, and side by side hurried out.
All through the bridge party Bernice strove in vain to master a rising uneasiness. She had offended Marjorie, the sphinx of sphinxes. With the most wholesome and innocent intentions in the world she had stolen Marjorie’s property. She felt suddenly and horribly guilty. After the bridge game, when they sat in an informal circle and the conversation became general, the storm gradually broke. Little Otis Ormonde inadvertently precipitated it.

“When you going back to kindergarten, Otis?” some one had asked.

“Me? Day Bernice gets her hair bobbed.”

“Then your education’s over,” said Marjorie quickly. “That’s only a bluff of hers. I should think you’d have realized.”

“That a fact?” demanded Otis, giving Bernice a reproachful glance.
Bernice’s ears burned as she tried to think up an effectual come-back. In the face of this direct attack her imagination was paralyzed.

“There’s a lot of bluffs in the world,” continued Marjorie quite pleasantly. “I should think you’d be young enough to know that, Otis.”

“Well,” said Otis, “maybe so. But gee! With a line like Bernice’s–”

“Really?” yawned Marjorie. “What’s her latest bon mot?”

No one seemed to know. In fact, Bernice, having trifled with her muse’s beau, had said nothing memorable of late.

“Was that really all a line?” asked Roberta curiously. Bernice hesitated. She felt that wit in some form was demanded of her, but under her cousin’s suddenly frigid eyes she was completely incapacitated.

“I don’t know,” she stalled. “Splush!” said Marjorie. “Admit it!”
Bernice saw that Warren’s eyes had left a ukulele he had been tinkering with and were fixed on her questioningly. “Oh, I don’t know!” she repeated steadily. Her cheeks were glowing.

“Splush!” remarked Marjorie again.

“Come through, Bernice,” urged Otis. “Tell her where to get off.”

Bernice looked round again – she seemed unable to get away from Warren’s eyes.

“I like bobbed hair,” she said hurriedly, as if he had asked her a question, “and I intend to bob mine.”

“When?” demanded Marjorie.

“Any time.”

“No time like the present,” suggested Roberta.

Otis jumped to his feet.

“Good stuff!” he cried. “We’ll have a summer bobbing party. Sevier Hotel barber-shop, I think you said.”

In an instant all were on their feet. Bernice’s heart throbbed violently. “What?” she gasped.

Out of the group came Marjorie’s voice, very clear and contemptuous.

“Don’t worry – she’ll back out!”

“Come on, Bernice!” cried Otis, starting toward the door.

Four eyes – Warren’s and Marjorie’s – stared at her, challenged her, defied her. For another second she wavered wildly.

An eternity of minutes later, riding down-town through the late afternoon beside Warren, the others following in Roberta’s car close behind, Bernice had all the sensations of Marie Antoinette bound for the guillotine in a tumbrel. Vaguely she wondered why she did not cry out that it was all a mistake. It was all she could do to keep from clutching her hair with both hands to protect it from the suddenly hostile world. Yet she did neither. Even the thought of her mother was no deterrent now. This was the test supreme of her sportsmanship; her right to walk unchallenged in the starry heaven of popular girls.

Warren was moodily silent, and when they came to the hotel he drew up at the curb and nodded to Bernice to precede him out. Roberta’s car emptied a laughing crowd into the shop, which presented two bold plate-glass windows to the street.

Bernice stood on the curb and looked at the sign, Sevier Barber-Shop. It was a guillotine indeed, and the hangman was the first barber, who, attired in a white coat and smoking a cigarette, leaned nonchalantly against the first chair. He must have heard of her; he must have been waiting all week, smoking eternal cigarettes beside that portentous, too-often mentioned first chair. Would they blindfold her? No, but they would tie a white cloth round her neck lest any of her blood – nonsense – hair – should get on her clothes.

“All right, Bernice,” said Warren quickly.

With her chin in the air she crossed the sidewalk, pushed open the swinging screen-door, and giving not a glance to the uproarious, riotous row that occupied the waiting bench, went up to the first barber.

“I want you to bob my hair.”

The first barber’s mouth slid somewhat open. His cigarette dropped to the floor.

“Huh?”

“My hair – bob it!”

Refusing further preliminaries, Bernice took her seat on high. A man in the chair next to her turned on his side and gave her a glance, half lather, half amazement. One barber started and spoiled little Willy Schuneman’s monthly haircut. Mr. O’Reilly in the last chair grunted and swore musically in ancient Gaelic as a razor bit into his cheek. Two bootblacks became wide-eyed and rushed for her feet. No, Bernice didn’t care for a shine.

Outside a passer-by stopped and stared; a couple joined him; half a dozen small boys’ noses sprang into life, flattened against the glass; and snatches of conversation borne on the summer breeze drifted in through the screen-door.

“Lookada long hair on a kid!”

“Where’d yuh get ‘at stuff? ‘At’s a bearded lady he just finished shavin’.”

“All right,” she said swiftly, “I don’t care if I do.”

But Bernice saw nothing, heard nothing. Her only living sense told her that this man in the white coat had removed one tortoise-shell comb and then another; that his fingers were fumbling clumsily with unfamiliar hairpins; that this hair, this wonderful hair of hers, was going – she would never again feel its long voluptuous pull as it hung in a dark-brown glory down her back. For a second she was near breaking down, and then the picture before her swam mechanically into her vision – Marjorie’s mouth curling in a faint ironic smile as if to say:

“Give up and get down! You tried to buck me and I called your bluff. You see you haven’t got a prayer.”

And some last energy rose up in Bernice, for she clinched her hands under the white cloth, and there was a curious narrowing of her eyes that Marjorie remarked on to some one long afterward.

Twenty minutes later the barber swung her round to face the mirror, and she flinched at the full extent of the damage that had been wrought. Her hair was not curly, and now it lay in lank lifeless blocks on both sides of her suddenly pale face. It was ugly as sin – she had known it would be ugly as sin. Her face’s chief charm had been a Madonna-like simplicity. Now that was gone and she was – well, frightfully mediocre – not stagy; only ridiculous, like a Greenwich Villager who had left her spectacles at home.

As she climbed down from the chair she tried to smile – failed miserably. She saw two of the girls exchange glances; noticed Marjorie’s mouth curved in attenuated mockery – and that Warren’s eyes were suddenly very cold.

“You see” – her words fell into an awkward pause – “I’ve done it.”
“Yes, you’ve – done it,” admitted Warren. “Do you like it?”

There was a half-hearted “Sure” from two or three voices, another awkward pause, and then Marjorie turned swiftly and with serpent-like intensity to Warren.

“Would you mind running me down to the cleaners?” she asked. “I’ve simply got to get a dress there before supper. Roberta’s driving right home and she can take the others.”

Warren stared abstractedly at some infinite speck out the window. Then for an instant his eyes rested coldly on Bernice before they turned to Marjorie.

“Be glad to,” he said slowly.

VI

Bernice did not fully realize the outrageous trap that had been set for her until she met her aunt’s amazed glance just before dinner.

“Why, Bernice!”

“I’ve bobbed it, Aunt Josephine.” “Why, child!”

“Do you like it?”

“Why, Ber-nice!”

“I suppose I’ve shocked you.”

“No, but what’ll Mrs. Deyo think tomorrow night? Bernice, you should have waited until after the Deyos’ dance – you should have waited if you wanted to do that.”

“It was sudden, Aunt Josephine. Anyway, why does it matter to Mrs. Deyo particularly?”

“Why, child,” cried Mrs. Harvey, “in her paper on `The Foibles of the Younger Generation’ that she read at the last meeting of the Thursday Club she devoted fifteen minutes to bobbed hair. It’s her pet abomination. And the dance is for you and Marjorie!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Bernice, what’ll your mother say? She’ll think I let you do it.”

“I’m sorry.”

Dinner was an agony. She had made a hasty attempt with a curling-iron, and burned her finger and much hair. She could see that her aunt was both worried and grieved, and her uncle kept saying, “Well, I’ll be darned!” over and over in a hurt and faintly hostile tone. And Marjorie sat very quietly, intrenched behind a faint smile, a faintly mocking smile.

Somehow she got through the evening. Three boys called; Marjorie disappeared with one of them, and Bernice made a listless unsuccessful attempt to entertain the two others – sighed thankfully as she climbed the stairs to her room at half past ten. What a day!
When she had undressed for the night the door opened and Marjorie came in. “Bernice,” she said, “I’m awfully sorry about the Deyo dance. I’ll give you my word of honor I’d forgotten all about it.”

“‘Sall right,” said Bernice shortly. Standing before the mirror she passed her comb slowly through her short hair.

“I’ll take you down-town to-morrow,” continued Marjorie, “and the hairdresser’ll fix it so you’ll look slick. I didn’t imagine you’d go through with it. I’m really mighty sorry.”

“Oh, ‘sall right!” 

“Still it’s your last night, so I suppose it won’t matter much.”

Then Bernice winced as Marjorie tossed her own hair over her shoulders and began to twist it slowly into two long blond braids until in her cream-colored negligée she looked like a delicate painting of some Saxon princess. Fascinated, Bernice watched the braids grow. Heavy and luxurious they were, moving under the supple fingers like restive snakes – and to Bernice remained this relic and the curling-iron and a to-morrow full of eyes. She could see G. Reece Stoddard, who liked her, assuming his Harvard manner and telling his dinner partner that Bernice shouldn’t have been allowed to go to the movies so much; she could see Draycott Deyo exchanging glances with his mother and then being conscientiously charitable to her. But then perhaps by to-morrow Mrs. Deyo would have heard the news; would send round an icy little note requesting that she fail to appear – and behind her back they would all laugh and know that Marjorie had made a fool of her; that her chance at beauty had been sacrificed to the jealous whim of a selfish girl. She sat down suddenly before the mirror, biting the inside of her cheek.

“I like it,” she said with an effort. “I think it’ll be becoming.” Marjorie smiled.

“It looks all right. For heaven’s sake, don’t let it worry you!” “I won’t.”

“Good night, Bernice.”

But as the door closed something snapped within Bernice. She sprang dynamically to her feet, clinching her hands, then swiftly and noiselessly crossed over to her bed and from underneath it dragged out her suitcase. Into it she tossed toilet articles and a change of clothing. Then she turned to her trunk and quickly dumped in two drawerfuls of lingerie and summer dresses. She moved quietly, but with deadly efficiency, and in three-quarters of an hour her trunk was locked and strapped and she was fully dressed in a becoming new travelling suit that Marjorie had helped her pick out.

Sitting down at her desk she wrote a short note to Mrs. Harvey, in which she briefly outlined her reasons for going. She sealed it, addressed it, and laid it on her pillow. She glanced at her watch. The train left at one, and she knew that if she walked down to the Marborough Hotel two blocks away she could easily get a taxicab.

Suddenly she drew in her breath sharply and an expression flashed into her eyes that a practised character reader might have connected vaguely with the set look she had worn in the barber’s chair –  somehow a development of it. It was quite a new look for Bernice and it carried consequences.

She went stealthily to the bureau, picked up an article that lay there, and turning out all the lights stood quietly until her eyes became accustomed to the darkness. Softly she pushed open the door to Marjorie’s room. She heard the quiet, even breathing of an untroubled conscience asleep.

She was by the bedside now, very deliberate and calm. She acted swiftly.

Bending over she found one of the braids of Marjorie’s hair, followed it up with her hand to the point nearest the head, and then holding it a little slack so that the sleeper would feel no pull, she reached down with the shears and severed it. With the pigtail in her hand she held her breath. Marjorie had muttered something in her sleep. Bernice deftly amputated the other braid, paused for an instant, and then flitted swiftly and silently back to her own room.
Down-stairs she opened the big front door, closed it carefully behind her, and feeling oddly happy and exuberant stepped off the porch into the moonlight, swinging her heavy grip like a shopping-bag. After a minute’s brisk walk she discovered that her left hand still held the two blond braids. She laughed unexpectedly – had to shut her mouth hard to keep from emitting an absolute peal. She was passing Warren’s house now, and on the impulse she set down her baggage, and swinging the braids like pieces of rope flung them at the wooden porch, where they landed with a slight thud. She laughed again, no longer restraining herself.

“Huh!” she giggled wildly. “Scalp the selfish thing!”

Then picking up her suitcase she set off at a half-run down the moonlit street.

Excerpt from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story published in Flappers and Philosophers in 1922.

Text accompanied by images of the characterful Edith Bouvier Beale, or Little Edie as she was known and featured in the documentary Grey Gardens from 1975, directed by Ellen Hovde, Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Muffie Meyer.

IN MILAN AND PARIS, she went from boutique to boutique, morning to night, like one possessed. They did no sightseeing at all. Instead of the Duomo or the Louvre, they saw Valentino, Missoni, Saint Laurent, Givenchy,  Ferragamo, Armani, Cerutti, Gianfranco Ferré. Mesmerised, she swept up everything she could get her hands on, and he followed behind her, paying the bills. He almost worried that the raised digits on his credit card might wear down.

Her fever did not abate after they returned to Japan. She continued to buy new clothes nearly every day. The number of articles of clothing in her possession skyrocketed. To store them, Tony had several large armoires custom made. He also had a cabinet built for her shoes. Even so, there was not enough space for everything. In the end, he had an entire room redesigned as a walk-in closet. They had rooms to spare in their large house,  and money was not a problem. Besides, she did such a marvellous job of wearing what she bought, and she looked so happy whenever she had new clothes, that Tony decided not to complain. Nobody’s perfect, he told himself. When the volume of her clothing became too great to fit into the special room, however, even Tony Takitani began to have some misgivings. Once, when she was out, he counted her dresses. He calculated that she could change outfits twice a day and still not repeat herself for almost two years.

She was so busy buying them that she had no time to wear them. He wondered if she might have a psychological problem. If so, he might need to apply the brakes to her habit at some point.

He took the plunge one night after dinner. ‘I wish you would consider cutting back a little on the way you buy clothes,’ he said. ‘It’s not a question of money. I’m not talking about that. I have no objection to your buying what you need, and it makes me happy to see you looking so pretty, but do you really need so many expensive dresses?’

His wife lowered her gaze and thought about this for a time. Then she looked at him and said, ‘You’re right, of course. I don’t need so many dresses. I know that. But, even though I know it, I can’t help myself. When I see a beautiful dress, I have to buy it. Whether I need it, or whether I have too many, is beside the point. I just can’t stop myself.’ She promised to try to hold back. ‘If I keep on going this way, the whole house is going to fill up with my clothes before too long.’

And so she locked herself inside for a week, and managed to stay away from clothing stores. This was a time of great suffering for her. She felt as if she were walking on the surface of a planet with little air. She spent every day in her room full of clothing, taking down one piece after another to gaze at it.

She would caress the material, inhale its fragrance, slip the clothes on, and look at herself in the mirror. But the more she looked the more she wanted something new. The desire for new clothing became unbearable. She simply couldn’t stand it.She did, however, love her husband deeply. And she respected him. She knew that he was right. She called one of her favourite boutiques and asked the proprietor if she might be allowed to return a coat and dress that she had bought ten days earlier but had never worn. ‘Certainly, Madam,’ she was told. She was one of the store’s best customers; they could do that much for her. She put the coat and dress in her blue Renault Cinque and drove to the fashionable Aoyama district. There she returned the clothes and received a credit. She hurried back to her car, trying not to look at anything else, then drove straight home. She had a certain feeling of lightness at having returned the clothes. Yes, she told herself, it was true: I did not need those things. I have enough coats and dresses to last the rest of my life. But, as she waited for a red light to change, the coat and dress were all she could think about. Colours, cut, and texture: she remembered them in vivid detail.

She could picture them as clearly as if they were in front of her. A film of sweat broke out on her forehead. With her forearms pressed against the steering wheel, she drew in a long, deep breath and closed her eyes. At the very moment that she opened them again, she saw the light change to green. Instinctively, she stepped down on the accelerator.

A large truck that was trying to make it across the intersection on a yellow light slammed into the side of her Renault at full speed. She never felt a thing.

Tony Takitani was left with a roomful of size-2 dresses and a hundred and twelve pairs of shoes. He had no idea what to do with them. He was not going to keep all his wife’s clothes for the rest of his life, so he called a dealer and agreed to sell the hats and accessories for the first price the man offered. Stockings and underthings he bunched together and burned in the garden incinerator. There were simply too many dresses and shoes to deal with, so he left them where they were. After the funeral, he shut himself in the walk-in closet, and spent the day staring at the rows of clothes.

Ten days later, Tony Takitani put an ad in the newspaper for a female assistant, dress size 2, height approximately five feet three, shoe size 6, good pay, favourable working conditions. Because the salary he quoted was abnormally high, thirteen women showed up at his studio in Minami-Aoyama to be interviewed. Five of them were obviously lying about their dress size.

From the remaining eight, he chose the one whose build was closest to his wife’s, a woman in her mid-twenties with an unremarkable face. She wore a plain white blouse and a tight blue skirt. Her clothes and shoes were neat and clean but worn.

Tony Takitani told the woman, ‘The work itself is not very difficult. You just come to the office every day from nine to five, answer the telephone, deliver illustrations, pick up materials for me, make copies – that sort of thing. There is only one condition attached. I’ve recently lost my wife, and I have a huge amount of her clothing at home. Most of what she left is new or almost new. I would like you to wear her things as a kind of uniform while you work here. I know this must sound strange to you but, believe me, I have no ulterior motive. It’s just to give me time to get used to the idea that my wife is gone. If you are nearby wearing her clothing, I’m pretty sure, it will finally come home to me that she is dead.’

Biting her lip, the young woman considered the proposal. It was, as he said, a strange request – so strange, in fact, that she could not fully comprehend it. She understood the part about his wife’s having died. And she understood the part about the wife’s having left behind a lot of clothing. But she could not quite grasp why she should have to work in the wife’s clothes. Normally,  she would have had to assume that there was more to it than met the eye.

But, she thought, this man did not seem to be a bad person. You had only to listen to the way he talked to know that. Maybe the loss of his wife had done something to his mind, but he didn’t look like the type of man who would let that kind of thing cause him to harm another person. And, in any case, she needed work. She had been looking for a job for a very long time, her unemployment insurance was about to run out, and she would probably never find a job that paid as well as this one did.

‘I think I understand,’ she said. ‘And I think I can do what you are asking me to do. But, first, I wonder if you can show me the clothes I will have to wear. I had better check to see if they really are my size.’

‘Of course,’ Tony Takitani said, and he took the woman to his house and showed her the room. She had never seen so many dresses gathered together in a single place except in a department store. Each dress was obviously expensive and of high quality. The taste, too, was flawless. The sight was almost blinding. The woman could hardly catch her breath. Her heart started pounding. It felt like sexual arousal, she realised.

Tony Takitani left the woman alone in the room. She pulled herself together and tried on a few of the dresses. She tried on some shoes as well.

Everything fit as though it had been made for her. She looked at one dress after another. She ran her fingertips over the material and breathed in the fragrance. Hundreds of beautiful dresses were hanging there in rows. Before long, tears welled up in her eyes and began to pour out of her. There was no way she could hold them back. Her body swathed in a dress of the woman who had died, she stood utterly still, sobbing, struggling to keep the sound from escaping her throat. Soon Tony Takitani came to see how she was doing.

‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’ve never seen so many beautiful dresses before. I think it must have upset me. I’m sorry.’ She dried her tears with a handkerchief.

‘If it’s all right with you, I’d like to have you start at the office tomorrow,’ Tony said in a businesslike manner. ‘Pick out a week’s worth of dresses and shoes and take them home with you.’

The woman devoted a lot of time to choosing six days’ worth of dresses. Then she chose shoes to match. She packed everything into a suitcase.

‘Take a coat, too,’ Tony Takitani said. ‘You don’t want to be cold.’

She chose a warm-looking grey cashmere coat. It was so light that it could have been made of feathers. She had never held such a lightweight coat in her life.

When the woman was gone, Tony Takitani went back into his wife’s closet,  shut the door, and let his eyes wander vacantly over her dresses. He could not understand why the woman had cried when she saw them. To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size-2 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.

These dresses had once clung to his wife’s body, which had endowed them with the warm breath of life and made them move. Now, however, what hung before him were mere scruffy shadows, cut off from the roots of life and steadily withering away, devoid of any meaning whatsoever. Their rich colours danced in space like pollen rising from flowers, lodging in his eyes and ears and nostrils. The frills and buttons and lace and epaulets and pockets and belts sucked greedily at the room’s air, thinning it out until he could hardly breathe. Liberal numbers of mothballs gave off a smell that might as well have been the sound of a million tiny winged insects.

He hated these dresses now, it suddenly occurred to him. Slumping against the wall, he folded his arms and closed his eyes. Loneliness seeped into him once again,  like a lukewarm broth. It’s all over now, he told himself. No matter what I do, it’s over.

He called the woman and told her to forget about the job. There was no longer any work for her to do, he said, apologising.

Yuki Kitazumi is an illustrator based in Tokyo.

‘Tony Takitani’ was originally published in The New Yorker on April 15, 2002.

Power Dressing examines how clothes emphasise certain roles in power structures, and what happens to our expectations of those roles when these signifiers are altered. With this in mind, we looked at the official and unofficial uniforms that the Palais de Tokyo staff wear, with particular emphasis on the guards’ uniforms. These uniforms specifically appear to both camouflage their wearers (by visitors largely ignoring their presence) but also to give the guards power to tell visitors what to do or not to do around the artworks. Through painting an exact replica of the guards’ uniform on an actor’s naked body, we investigated the exercise of power on the guard that the imposition of the uniform represents. The trompe l’oeil uniform aims to explore the both hidden and exposed status of guards at a major art institution, and how this in turn comments on their socioeconomic status. The uniform is a symbol of power (i.e. the guard’s power) but it’s also a reciprocal exercise of power over him. It puts us as museum visitors in our place but also holds him in his. He is a museum guard.

In collaboration with David Myron

Makeup by Anne Verhague, using M.A.C Cosmetics

Actor Noël Sorrente

Power Dressing was performed as part of Do Disturb at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, April 2015.

The Vestoj Storytelling Salon in New York brought together six people who have shaped the New York fashion scene over the past five decades.

Throughout the day each told a story directly affiliated with their life, all connected through their common narrative based on material memories, and woven around or linked to a garment. Taking care to avoid barriers between storyteller and audience, the response of the listeners influenced and informed the ebb and flow of the stories themselves, effectively turning the listeners into co-creators of each story as it was experienced.

The Vestoj Storytelling Salon in New York provided an opportunity to reflect on how grander social and cultural narratives impact on the lives of individuals and how objects of desire can be read as a map to our past, here momentarily resurrected as textile memento moris.

***

The Vestoj Storytelling Salon was produced by the Fondation Galeries Lafayette and MoMA PS1, and hosted at MoMA PS1 in New York, March 2015.

With Pat Cleveland, Patricia Field, Glenn O’Brien, Candy Pratts Price, Mary McFadden and Dapper Dan of Harlem

Set design by David Myron

Illustrations by Nina Twin