Charles Baudelaire

Thus I am led to regard adornment as one of the signs of the primitive nobility of the human soul.

                              Photo: Felix Nadar, Baudelaire

Review, analyse everything that is natural, all the actions and desires of absolutely natural man:  you will find nothing that is not horrible.  Everything that is beautiful, and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

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Contrary to what a lot of thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance.  For the perfect dandy, delight in these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of mind...What then can this passion be, which has crystalized into a doctrine, and has formed a number of outstanding devotees, this unwritten code that has moulded so proud a brotherhood?  It is, above all, the burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions.  

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"Fashion must therefore be thought of as a symptom of the taste for the ideal that floats on the surface in the human brain, above all the coarse, earthy and disgusting things that life according to nature accumulates, as a sublime distortion of nature, or rather as a permanent and constantly renewed effort to reform nature." Charles Baudelaire,”The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists.

All citations are taken from "The Painter of Modern Life." Beauty, as Baudelaire puts it so well, is composed, not always natural. His comments complement Nevelson's statements perfectly: Baudelaire is more philosphical, Nevelson more direct and personal.  Both emphasize the thought and depth which accompany the construction of a beautiful sartorial surface.

Louise Nevelson, pt.1

I’m what you call a real collage. 

I never underestimate one’s appearance because you project something.  

                                         

I always had a flair for clothes and liked them because I have a whole feeling about appearance.  Because I think you very carefully can identify a person by their appearance.  It's important.  It's not skin deep.  It's much deeper.  And consequently in youth I had this kind of flamboyance and wore good clothes and wore attractive things.  So I think it was taken for granted that a woman of that sort couldn't be totally dedicated.  So I think that because of their, not mine, their preconceived ideas that an artist had to look -- that the older and the uglier they looked, the more they were convinced that there was a dedication.  Well, that again is preconceived clichés.  That's what I've been trying to break down all my life.  And I still am. 

Because, you see, again what probably has given me my vision is that I have not been caught in clichés.  When I was growing up, it was fashionable if you were pretty to say, "Well, beauty is skin deep."  Well, beauty is not skin deep.  Beauty is beauty.  In other words, I would like to say that the whole thing that we're talking about has one note in my life, as you can see.  And that is the important thing to me.  Now, another thing.  Let us take Beethoven, just because everyone knows Beethoven.  And we're talking about his time and in the Occidental world.  Now in music we have octaves and there are eight notes and then some half notes.  And out of eight notes he built a world of sound.  All the things that he created are really out of eight notes.  Now those eight notes go higher, an octave higher, an octave lower.  But there are only eight notes in an octave.  Now I need only one note.  And that is my note of consciousness.  And that is what I want more of: my own consciousness. Louise Nevelson, Archives of American Art.

Could there be a more forceful statement than this about the relationship between mind and beauty? I was aware of Nevelson's striking appearance and had seen many of her sculptures, but knew nothing about her bold statements about dress. She espouses an unabashed credo lambasting all those who think that an interest dress is superficial. I love the top photo by Richard Avedon: it embodies perfectly her statement about being a "real visual collage" with her elaborate hat, bold sculptural necklaces and intricate pieces of clothing.   

George Gordon, Lord Byron

If you had seen Lord Byron, you could scarcely disbelieve him—so beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw—his teeth so many stationary smiles—his eyes the open portals of the sun – things of light, and for light – and his forehead so ample, and yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness into a hundred wreathes and lines and dimples correspondent to the feelings and sentiments he is uttering. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk.

                                                                                                                      

I have some very "magnifique" Albanian dresses, the only expensive articles in this country. They cost 50 guineas each and have so much gold they would cost in England two hundred. Byron, Letter to his Mother, 12 November 1809. 

Of all his fancy dress uniforms, Byron took special delight in this costume;  thus turbaned and brocaded, he sat for his famous portrait by the painter Thomas Phillips...In his fantasy, Byron now became what he beheld:  an Oriental potentate, powerful and free, to whom nothing was forbidden.”  Benita Eisler, Byron.

                                                                    

Coleridge's paean is nothing short of a rhapsody.  Bryon's beauty was legendary: women apparently fainted upon seeing him. Top portrait is by Richard Westall; Thomas Phillips portrait of 1835 is entitled Lord Byron in Albanian Dress.  

Jean Cocteau

Beauty cannot be recognized by a cursory glance. 

                                               Photo: Irving Penn, Jean Cocteau

Each thread of Cocteau’s tie, vest, and suit is etched in light and shadow; the patterns and the texture pop out in vivid, tactile detail.  The drape of his coat over an extended arm adds drama and balance to the composition. Cocteau is dressed in the sartorial attire of a dandy, which, by all accounts, he was.  There is an air of flamboyance about him, until you look at his face.  His dead-serious expression registers the fierce intelligence of a keen observer, as if he is taking our measure while deigning to allow us to take his. Philip Gefter, "Irving Penn, RIP." 

Beauty is always the result of an accident. Of a violent lapse between acquired habits and those yet to be acquired. It baffles and disgusts. It may even horrify. Once the new habit has been acquired, the accident ceases to be an accident. It becomes classical and loses its shock value.

Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images. 

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

 

Cocteau's statements are far more elliptical than those made by Dalí or Oscar Wilde. Cocteau espouses a much more introspective notion of dress and beauty. His quotes stress the ephemerality of fashion and beauty's relation to notions of ugliness.

Cocteau embodies the idea of "intellectual beauty" in the Penn portrait. I love the play of pattern in his attire--glen plaid suit, houndstooth sweater, and striped tie.  His face radiates a fierce intelligence. The angularity of his body adds to the beautiful line created by staged pose. His hands are carefully posed in all the photos, adding drama in some, composure in another.

Charles and Ray Eames

The Eameses were very precise about their clothes, commissioning them from Dorothy Jenkins, an Oscar-winning designer who did costumes for many films, including South Pacific, Night of the Iguana, and The Sound of Music. The effect of the Eameses’ costume was the  professional couple as a matching set, carefully positioned like any other object in the layout. The uniform clothes transformed the couple into a designer object that could be moved around the frame or from picture to picture.  It was always the layout that was the statement, not the objects.  And the layout was constantly reworked, rearranged.”  Beatriz Colomina, “Reflections on the Eames House,” The Work of Charles and Ray Eames:  A Legacy of Invention.

Ray Eames favored crisp white blouses, trim square-necked jumpers, waist-cropped jackets and dirndl skirts, a way of dressing which suited her and reflected her Austrian roots. 

Charles Eames preferred to dress himself in similar clothes every day as a uniform – something he believed saved his energy for decision making at the office. The uniform: flat front khaki pants, thin belt, buckled on the side, bow tie. From August 1959 Vogue: "He likes to wear yellow-beiges, yellowish-greens, shirts of wonderful subtleties, roughly textured jackets, often with silver Navaho buttons which his wife, Ray, sews on a with special curved needle. These buttons are a partial clue to both the Eameses. They see the beauty in small oddities that others may miss. They are intensely practical. They work as partners, both designers, both filmmakers, both at ease in their life.”

Much has been written about the couple's many design collaborations such as the Eames lounge chair, the molded plywood chairs, and their house in the Pacific Palisades. Their clothing choices were no less distinctive. A PBS documentary in the American Masters series, Charles and Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter, provides information on their clothing preferences. Talk about the 'layout as statement': the couple's arms and legs mirror one another in the two top photos. Charles Eames and Oscar Wilde have a thing about buttons!

Frida Kahlo

My skirts with their lace flounces

and the antique blouse I always

wore xxxxxxxxx paint

the absent portrait of only one person.

Frida Kahlo, “Letter to Jacqueline Lamba,” The Diary of Frida Kahlo.

Frida’s Tehuana costume became so much a part of her persona that sometimes she painted it devoid of owner...Frida knew this magic power of clothes to substitute for their owner;  in her diary she wrote that Tehuana costume made ‘the absent portrait of only one person’—her absent self.” Hayden Herrera, Frida:  A Biography. 

The clothes of Frida Kahlo were, nevertheless, more than a second skin.  She said it herself:  The were a manner of dressing for paradise, of preparing for death...Her luxurious dresses hid her broken body;  they also permitted her to act in a ceremony of ceremonies, a dressing and undressing of herself as laborious, regal, and ritualistic as those of the Emperor Montezuma, who was helped by several dozen handmaidens. Carlos Fuentes, Introduction, The Diary of Frida Kahlo.

Many of the most captivating photos of Frida Kahlo were taken by Nicholas Muray. A native of Hungary, Muray was a famous portrait photographer at the turn of the century. I love the way the two have collaborated to make Kahlo a flower in the top portrait: the floral design of the wallpaper, flowers in her hair and on her dress form a stunning combination. Kahlo's Tehuana dresses are one of the hallmarks of herstyle.Tehuantepec is a region in southern Mexico. The Tehuana dresses consisted of a blouse (called "Huipil") and a long skirt. Kahlo also paid close attention to her accessories, often wearing elaborately crafted jewelry, and to arrangement of her hair, here beautifully adorned with flowers or ribbons. The Casa Azul, her home in Mexico, has some of her of clothing on display. An exhibition last year in Baden-Baden featured Kahlo's paintings and Tehuana dresses.

Yukio Mishima

The River of Body

This is a young River that suddenly began flowing at the midpoint of my life.  I had been dissatisfied for quite some time by the fact that my invisible spirit alone could create tangible visions of beauty.  Why could not I myself be something visibly beautiful and worthy of being looked at?  For this purpose I had to make my body beautiful.

            When at last I came to own such a body, I wanted to display it to everyone, to show it off and to let it move in front of every eye, just like a child with a new toy.  My body became for me like a fashionable sports car for its proud owner.  In it I drove on many highways to new places.  Views I had never seen before opened up for me and enriched my experience.

            But the body is doomed to decay, just like the complicated motor of a car.  I for one do not, will not, accept such a doom.  This means that I do not accept the course of Nature.  I know I am going against Nature;  I know I have forced my body onto the most destructive path of all. Henry Scott-Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima, Catalogue to the Tobu Exhibition

“Muscles, I found, were strength as well as form, and each complex of muscles was subtly responsible for the direction in which its own strength was exerted, much as though they were rays of light given the form of flesh.  Nothing  could have accorded better with the definition of a work of art that I had long cherished than this concept of form enfolding strength, coupled with the idea that a work should be organic, radiating rays of light in all directions.  The muscles that I thus created were at one and the same time simple existence and works of art.”  Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel.

 Self-styling is not always about clothes.  I love the way Mishima flaunts his buffness like a fashionable sports car.  He devoted himself to body building long before it became a trend. That he did so in a society with little tradition in this arena is all the more remarkable.