My idea of a CA wannabe skank who lunches is epitomized by a large-ish female behind ensconsed in velour and emblazoned with the sparkling gothic script JUICY. Today, to my glee, comes the news that the company that absconded with a word that should connote natural bounty to transfer its properties onto lazy and be-dimpled behinds is no more. The bane of airports everywhere is dead. YEI!
Take back the juice ladies, and rejoice.
Here is the no less gleefull recap from NYMag. If there is one who deserved all your schadenfreude, ladies, this is it:
RIP, Juicy Tracksuits, Famewhore Uniform of the 2000s
Last week, Juicy Couture announced its plans to close all of its U.S. stores, causing a faint tremor of nostalgia to ripple through anyone who recalls the popular T-shirt from middle school "Juicy Is Forever."
In the early 2000s, comfort was cool. Celebrities went about their glossy lifestyle of international bottle service in velvet hoodies and fleece-lined Uggs, and one brand seemed to encapsulate that ethos perfectly. The rise of the Juicy tracksuit coincided with the emergence of a particular kind of tabloid coverage; Us went from monthly to weekly in 2000, InToucharrived in 2002, and Life & Style came out in 2004. With the help of blogs like Perez Hilton(2001), the invention of YouTube (2005), and the birth of TMZ (2005), fans could easily see the rich and famous looking their absolute laziest.
Immortalizing this high point in American leisurewear, celebutantesand "It" girls starred in a number of reality TV shows that involved a lot of lounging, such as The Simple Life, Newlyweds, The Gastineau Girls, the Real Housewives franchise, Laguna Beach, and The Hills. From the start, life (in sweats) imitated art. Eva Longoria’s character on Desperate Housewives wore Juicy sweats, but so did real Eva Longoria at the grocery store. Paris Hilton wore the cotton-candy look pretty much everywhere. They signified bitchy-cool-girl status, with Summer Roberts on The O.C. (2004), Mean Girls(2004), and every female in middle school (2001–2004) all sporting that tiny little J on their zippers.
Sporting a tracksuit meant you were too good to do actual work. Paris and Nicole’s The Simple Life marked a limp attempt at pursing employment, as the duo traveled around the U.S. taking on a number of internships. The running gag was basically: We’re so rich we’ll never really have to do this stuff. Oddly, it was Kim Kardashianand the whole Kollective who shepherded us away from the celeb-as-pampered-princess and into the era of super-hardworking — but famous — people. Kim Kardashian, a childhood friend of the Hilton sisters, got her start as Paris’s personal assistant and closet organizer, eventually working as LiLo’s stylist before finding major fame after her sex tape was leaked.
The first season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians aired in October 2007, the same month that the stock market peaked. Post-recession celebrities now work really hard to demonstrate how hard they work. While the show — and its many spin-offs — has revolved around the Kardashians' crazy antics and well-funded adventures, their businesses have always played a major part. They’ve got theirDASH stores, the clothing lines (QVC and Sears), beauty collaborations, Kardashian Glamour Tan, theKardashian Konfidential book series, ad infinitum. Instead of aggressively relaxing, many post-recession reality shows of the famous detail the often-grueling lifestyle of maintaining celebrity, which brings into sharper focus why Juicy sweats are so appealing in the first place.
By 2008, even Gossip Girl's Blair Waldorf was too hip for Juicy sweats, though she did wear a Juicy bracelet in one episode and some of the show's other stars attended the opening of the New York flagship. These days, the only people on reality TV wearing much Juicy are a few members of the Real Housewives franchise, but no one would ever mistake them for cool. Besides, many of them are moving beyond the traditional-housewife role to start their own fashion lines, gyms, and beauty brands, and they’re often doing it in form-fitting yoga pants.
The Kardashians, Kim in particular, have banished their terry-cloth tracksuits for Lululemons (being famous is a real workout!) andembraced the more polished look of actual couture. But, just like Paris Hilton, Juicy Couture isn't really going away. Though a search for “sweatpants” on the JC website yields bold text that reads “sorry, we couldn’t find any items that matched your search," they’veinked a deal with Kohl’s. The discount store will begin selling Juicy-branded products this fall. Just in time for the early 2000s trend revival that's right around the corner.
I had a wedding to go to. A cousin of the husband's. Outdoors, in Boston. Weather here never cooperates as much as you want, and so while it didn't rain, the nighttime was cooler than usual and the presence of my orange shantung coat was much desired. But - the only evening dress I own is purple, no friend to my little coat. So I set out to hunt for a dress that in color and spirit would work under a 50s style orange dress coat. I visited Neiman's and Nordstrom's - and the dreary boredom in both was overwhelming. I was willing to spend, and yet there was not a single dress I wanted. Marching to the car I was lured into Zara by the SALE sign, and saw the dress above.
The material is cottony yet rich but what makes the dress is the cut - the square arm holes, the shift, and the pockets(!) - it fits perfectly. I accessorized it with a ring, earrings, and a gunmetal bracelet
:
End result was pretty darn pleasing, even if I say so myself.
And so Zara's reign of glory continues. The sale is still on, by the by.
I liked Leonard Cohen before meeting the super talented Anna Hacco, the designer responsible for the look of this blog, in a little Jerusalem boutique where she worked while we were both university students. But after meeting her, Cohen's music became a kind of shared obsession, something to analyze and over-analyze in the university cafeteria over coffee, or be angsty to back in our rooms. Fastforward a few years and one of Cohen's songs - yes, "Dance me to the end of love - was the 'first song' at my wedding.
The funny thing about Leonard Cohen is that I don't feel any different about his music now than I did back then - the love and the flavor kept their sweetness.
So much so that in the crashing mess of my last year in P, when everything I thought my life was about was turning out to be terrible, the one incident that possibly made me unhappiest was forgetting that I pre-bought tickets to his show in Boston. And remembering only when it was too late. Given how old the man is it was likely my last chance, and I blew it. AH saw him in Berlin. And loved it.
As I think now what song of his to post I have a hard time choosing - so many are beloved, so many seem special.
How about this one, just because I'm still unsure what it means:
And here is an interview with Leonard Cohen's new biographer (AH, thinking of you, and can't wait to see you in a week!)
Our scene opens on the teenage Leonard Cohen attempting to hypnotize the family maid. Here’s Cohen, growing tall and lanky, losing the puppy fat, smiling, precocious, inquisitive, intense, with a zest for life.
Cohen has bought and studied 25 Lessons in Hypnotism How to Become an Expert Operator, a book that promises much—mind reading, animal magnetism and clairvoyant hypnosis—which the youngster hopes will deliver. As Sylvie Simmons explains in her biography on the singer I’m Your Man, the enthusiastic and earnest Cohen worked hard to master these powerful arts, and soon discovered he was a natural mesmerist.
Finding instant success with domestic animals, he moved on to the domestic staff, recruiting as his first human subject the family maid. At his direction, the young woman sat on the chesterfield sofa. Leonard drew a chair alongside and, as the book instructed, told her in a slow gentle voice to relax her muscles and look into his eyes. Picking up a pencil, he moved it slowly back and forth, and succeeded in putting her into a trance. Disregarding (or depending on one’s interpretation, following) the author’s directive that his teachings [on hypnotism] should be used only for educational purposes, Leonard instructed the maid to undress.
Simmons goes on to describe how Cohen must have felt at this “successful fusion of arcane wisdom and sexual longing.”
To sit beside a naked woman, in his own home, convinced that hemade this happen, simply by talent, study, mastery of an art and imposition of his will. When he found it difficult to awaken her, Leonard started to panic.
Let’s freeze the frame on this “young man’s fantasy,” as there’s something not quite right, as neither Simmons or the young Cohen, appear to have considered the possibility that the maid was only feigning her trance, and had willingly taken off her clothes. This would turn everything on its head.
Cohen will later fictionalize the incident in his novel The Favorite Game, where the maid is also a ukulele player (the instrument Cohen first taught himself to play before the guitar), which his alter ego mistakes for a lute, and the maid for an angel. As Simmons puts it “naked angels possess portals to the divine.”
Simmons suggests this slim book on hypnotism had a greater affect on Leonard Cohen than just convincing the maid to take-off her clothes. The book was possibly a primer for Cohen:
Chapter 2 of the hypnotism manual might have been written as career advice to the singer and performer Leonard would become. It cautioned against any appearance of levity and instructed, ‘Your features should be set, firm and stern. Be quiet in all your actions. Let your voice grow lower, lower, till just above a whisper. Pause a moment or two. You will if you try to hurry.’
Scientific research has pointed out that some women are attracted to men with deep, low voices. While a touch of “breathiness” suggests a “lower level of aggression.”
Cohen’s voice is instantly recognizable. He is aware of its power to mesmerize an audience: when he played at Napa State mental hospital in 1970, he jumped down from the stage and sang amongst the inmates, where anyone who could move “followed him around the room and back and forward and over the stage.” At the Isle of Wight concert, he was the only act not to have bottles thrown at him. Kris Kristofferson was booed off during his set, while a flare was thrown onto the stage during Jimi Hendrix’s performance, setting it on fire. Cohen was unfazed by such antics, he was mellowed out on Mandrax, and before he began:
...Leonard sang to the hundreds of thousands of people he could not see as if they were sitting together in a small, dark room. He told them—slowly, calmly—a story that sounded like a parable, worked like hypnotism, and at the same time tested the temperature of the crowd. He described how his father would take him to the circus as a child. Leonard didn’t like circuses much, but he enjoyed it when a man stood up and asked everyone to light a match so they could locate each other. “Can I ask each of you to light a match,” said Cohen, “so I can see where you all are?” There were a few at the beginning, but as the show went on he could see flames flickering through the misty rain.
As Simmons recounts the episode, Cohen “mesmerized” the audience, with just the power of his voice. Or, as Cohen described his talent himself in “Tower Of Song”:
I was born like this
I had no choice
I was born with the gift
of a golden voice.
Sylvie Simmons was a little girl who loved The Beatles, when she first heard Leonard Cohen sing. He was one of several artists, along with Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Moby Grape and Spiirt, included on the compilation album, The Rock Machine Turns You On.
Sylvie Simmons: I heard him sing “Sisters of Mercy” and it just picked me up and throttled me. I loved his music and I bought all of his albums, until I became a Rock journalist in 1977, when I started getting them for free.
I interviewed him over time and found him fascinating and mysterious, and he was never quite captured in the books I read on him, so, I just thought I’d give it a go.
Simmons has produced an excellent, near-definitive biography on the singer, which reads like a page-turner, in-as-much as Cohen’s life has been filled with incident, adventure and romance, and like all heroes in such tales he comes across as likable and ever-charming.
Sylvie Simmons: Leonard is very charming. Every journalist who’s interviewed him in person, male and female, comes out with a little blush in their cheeks, smoking an imaginary cigarette. He is a total charmer. He is the kind of man who stands-up when you come into a room. He gives you a chair to sit down on, he makes sure you’re comfortable. All of these things
He’s not a Rock Star celebrity person. He has that kind of old world manners. He is a real gentleman. But mostly he has this very clever way of focussing on whoever is in the room, so in a way takes the pressure off of him—you’re so charmed you forget to ask any leading sort of questions or realize you’ve had the wool pulled over your eyes when he’s answered something. But I also think it’s just innate to him.
When Sylvie Simmons was given the blessing to write Cohen’s biography, the singer only had two stipulations: the book must not be hagiography, and the biographer must not starve to death. Everything else was fair game.
Sylvie Simmons: He just trusted me to do a diligent job. I wanted to write a biography on him with diligence and heart, that had some of his voice going through it, as I felt I hadn’t found that in other books.
Simmons spent three years immersed in Cohen’s life, working on the biography right-up to its publication. It took over her life to such an extent that Simmons was able to second guess how Cohen would respond to the various events in he encountered.
Sylvie Simmons: It was more a sense of understanding, like almost imagining as I was writing the book I was thinking: “Of course this would happen. Of course this would go on.” It was almost like I would anticipate what was going to happen next and it happened. Everything started making sense in that way it only can if you’re almost on the inside of the story rather than on the outside.”
Simmons tells Cohen’s life from birth (21st September 1934, in Montreal, Quebec); through his privileged upbringing in a respected and well-to-do family (his father owned a successful clothing store); to his father’s early death (which left Cohen to be raised in a household of women); to the people, events and influences that have made Cohen one of the greatest singer-songwriter poets of the last half-century.
Simmons approach to such a mammoth undertaking was part detective, and part complete immersion in Cohen’s life.
Sylvie Simmons: It seemed to me when I started the book I better start my research in Montreal because that’s where he started his life. I thought I better go in winter because I want to feel exactly how hideous and ghastly it is to be in Montreal-winter, because that’s what he had for most of his life.
[Cohen] breezed through the early years of childhood, doing all that was required—clean hands, good manners, getting dressed for dinner, good school reports, making the hockey team, keeping his shoes polished and lined up tidily under his bed at night—without showing any worrying signs of sainthood or genius. Nor of melancholy.
Sylvie Simmons: Everywhere I went, something else would come up, “Oh no, I’ve got to the Chelsea Hotel,” or “I’ve got to go here,” or “I’ve got to go there.” It was a wonderful part of it, and I think it was very essential. It gave the people I was speaking to a kind of element of trust that I was willing to go to them and track them down, and speak to them that way, rather than just do it on the phone.
On the phone is how I interviewed Simmons. Her voice is young, infectious, bright, London, with no California. The problem with phone interviews—with no face to respond to—they lose out on the look, the gesture, the smile or shrug, that can often give meaning and color to what is being said.
Reading your biography, it struck me that Cohen has always been on the move, going off in search of something, is all this movement part of his creative process?
Sylvie Simmons: I think what it’s more about is that he came out of the egg as a very restless man, it was one of the things that he was cursed with rather than blessed with, and he certainly was blessed with a lot of things. He was blessed with a huge talent, and a supportive family, and coming from a very good background and everything. There were so many things he had going, but he had this restlessness and that related to so many things. He was always leaving somewhere, the first songs on the first album, like “The Stranger’s Song”—he was always the stranger running-off: when he got the grant to go to England, he moved to Greece, when he was in Greece he moved to Montreal, it went on-and-on.
He has this restlessness, and I think that goes right through his life. He changes geography a lot, he changes his spiritual path a lot, although he is consistently Jewish through the whole thing, and he insists on being called a Jew. And he has also been restless around women. I think he needs to live in this state of (almost) longing and yearning and emptiness. It is not much an excitement as this feeling of having to fill himself with something that goes deep in him. He is a very deep man.
Is this restlessness expressed in his songs?
Sylvie Simmons: I managed to get hold of the Artist’s Cards from Columbia Studios. There was a song that was on there called “Come On Marianne,” and it kept being called “Come On Marianne,” and about half-way through the recording process it became “So Long Marianne.” I thought it could have been a spelling mistake, so I called up Mary-Anne Ilhen, who is the Mary-Anne of the song, with whom Leonard had lived on-and-off for seven years, mostly on the island Hydra. I asked her and she said, with a kind of sob in her voice, “I always thought it was ‘Come On Marianne, Let’s keep this ship afloat,’ but I guess in the end we couldn’t.”
Leonard said that some writers had a kind of valedictory way about them, and I think that’s it. His things is, “Hey, that’s not a good way to say goodbye,” it was a goodbye put in the position of emptiness, which he was always looking for, so he could long for something to fill it.
If you could give three examples, what would you say were the three key moments of Leonard’s life?
Sylvie Simmons: This is so journalistic, why should it only be three?
I’m duly chastened, but I persist.
Sylvie Simmons: I should say that with a caveat because he’s had a very long life and he’s probably got at least nine of those moments. He’s had various different religious epiphanies and he’s also had careers as a writer and a musician. But I would saysome of the key moments are:
The day that his father died, Leonard was nine years old and he buried his first piece of creative writing, he folded it into a minute, little knot, and put it inside one of his Dad’s bow-tie’s, and buried it in the garden, making a rite of his writing. He really does have this kind of ritual feeling towards his work.
Simmons adds in her book:
Leonard has since described this [piece of writing] as the first thing he ever wrote. He has also said he has no recollection of what it was and that he had been “digging in the garden for years, looking for it. Maybe that’s all I’m doing, looking for the note.”
Sylvie Simmons: That also led to the fact he was brought-up in a house of women, by his doting mother and sisters, so he was given much more freedom. The death of his father was a very, very key moment, even though Leonard himself as said it didn’t really have much impact on him, but I believe it did.
Leonard did not cry at the death of his father; he wept more when his dog Tinkie died a few years later.
The ‘Big Bang’ moment for Cohen (‘the moment when poetry, music, sex and spiritual longing collided and fused together in him for the first time’) came when he fifteen years old, when he chanced upon a book of poetry by the Spanish Civil War poet, Frederico Garcia Lorca, in a bookshop in Montreal.
Sylvie Simmons: As Leonard read it, he said that the hairs stood-up on his arm like hearing the music from the synagogue. There was almost this kind of synesthesia reaction to reading poetry that moved him in that way. Lorca was a musicologist, a collector of Folk Music, and he loved Spanish guitar, so, that got Leonard into buying a Spanish guitar and learning to play it. So, these two are very key moments
Another one, but quite a long way down-the-line in the 1990s, would be when he had been studying Buddhism and living at the Buddhist Monastery on Mount Baldy for five years, where he was ordained a priest. I had no idea how awful the Mount Baldy Monastery was until I went and stayed there. I actually emailed Leonard and said, “I’ve been here two days and I’m stealing a spoon and digging an escape tunnel. How did you last five years? You’re a greater man than I.”
A fourth, would be the betrayal by his former manager [Kelley Lynch], who to some degree or another managed to wipe out all of his money, and he had to go back on the road, where he learned to love touring.
The tour not only restored Leonard’s funds, it improved on them considerably. But it also brought Leonard something more important: vindication as an artist….
All the heavy labor, the crawling across carpets, the highs, the depths he had plummeted, and all the women and deities, loving and wrathful, he had examined and worshipped, loved and abandoned, but never really lost, had been in the service of his. And here he was, seventy-six years old, still ship-shape, still sharp at the edges, a working man, ladies’ man, wise old monk, showman and trouper, once again offering up himself and his songs:
Here I stand, I’m your man.
What have you learned from writing the biography?
Sylvie Simmons: Persistence, probably, was the main thing, because obviously in the beginning some people, especially the women, were a bit reluctant to speak, because this is so personal. But they came to realize I was not after them for details of what went on behind the bedroom door—though a few of them actually offered to tell me. I wanted to speak to them because nobody had bothered to speak to these women and women are so important to his life, and they had an awful lot of insights to give me. So, persistence is one thing I learned.
Also, I think what I learned was that so many Rock biographies they are like in the beginning they have this huge rush and this brilliant life, and it all goes downhill, then they die, in the kind of way the best Rock stories are tragedies. But this one was almost like a story of redemption, keep the faith and it will come true. He got the kind of attention he wasn’t getting in the U.S. and Canada, at the end of his life, he got this amazing tsunami of love coming at him, and it continues, and he loves it, he’s learned to love the road. .
Otherwise, the usual things a biographer who gets into something deeply will learn, everything from the sublime to the ridiculous. Things like, finding out he was a ukulele-player before he was a guitar-player delighted me, because I’m a ukulele-player, an obsessive uke-player. There is something strange about uke-players, as they say, “One is too many and one-hundred is not enough.”
I got Leonard to out himself as a ukulele-player, and he was very keenly talking about meeting Roy Smeck, The Wizard of the Strings, when he was 10 years old and getting his instructions from a manual and teaching himself to play the uke, much as he taught himself to hypnotize and getting the maid to take her kit off. He is a very good student is our Leonard.
Ladies,
I apologize. I have a yet another cold, and it is bad. On top of that I am in the midst of moving my office from P to MA - movers that I hired are screwing up in a major way. It is giving me anxiety.
Sandals are a can of worms. Hands down, it is the shoe with most problems attached to it.
You think I'm exaggerating?
Ha.
Let me count the ways:
* because you wear them on your bare feet, with no buffering sock to offer succor, they need to be pain-free.
* because their construction needs to allow for ventilation they hold on to your skin with straps, multiplying potentially painful points of contact: they can hurt in the back of your heel / on your insole / / on the big bone before your toes begin / on the tender skin of your baby toe... And this is discounting for cullouses, warts, and other feet ailments.
* because all feet are different and sandals have - what else? - open toes - your feet need to be held firmly within the boundaries of the shoe, not sliding out if too narrow, not stuffed if too wide.
* because all of us look better with some elevation, a heel is highly desireable, but a heel that needs to be walkable and pain free (see reasons above).
* because all of us look better with longer legs, an ankle strap that visually cuts off your leg is better avoided.
Ah - and this is where we run into problems.
Even a cursory glance over store offerings will reveal that the overwhelming majority of designs feature a high ankle strap. Here, if you don't believe me, is the shape that rules most stores (this one happens to be from ASOS):
Nothing can be worse if you have anything but model-perfect stems. This, ladies, is a leg killer for those of us who have short/er legs. If this is an affliction you don't suffer from - stop reading now. You are in luck and will look good in anything.
But for the rest of us a holy grail of a summer sandal needs to have the cute look and heel of the specimen above but without the offending strap. We want a sporty sandal (sporty is the look of the moment) with a manageable block heel, in good color, with a padded footbed, comfortable and soft straps (because the sandal of the moment is all about one or two thick straps) but without that ankle-cutting-band. We want a smart look but without the pain.
Does that wonderbeast exist?
I've looked and looked and here is what I found. Just for you ladies.
All who were "Little Women" fanatics as kids will recall the scene where Jo singes the back of her one good dress and then has to stand with her back firmly pressed against the wall so as not to embarrass herself by showing her backside. I always thought that the scene was designed by the author to highlight the bourgeois values of Civil War America, its materialism and rigid propriety. It never occurred to me that there was a historic fact lurking in the background - Jo's singed dress was a sign of its times when women burnt. Burnt - because the expanse of their crinolines made them unaware of their circumference and they came too close to the fire.
That and more I learned from the following story announcing a new exhibition at Toronto's Bata Shoe Museum entitled: Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of Dress in the 19th Century.
Fashion history makes for a fascinating read, and I am dying, pardon the pun, to see the exhibit itself. Canadians, you are lucky!:
Deadly Victorian fashions
The Victorians suffered for their brilliant arsenic gowns and flammable crinolines. We’re not much better.
The “arsenic” ball gown sits on a headless dressmaker’s form in the basement archives of Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum as senior curator Elizabeth Semmelhack, wearing cotton conservators’ gloves, expounds upon its vintage (late 1860s), its provenance (Australia), its exquisite construction—and, most relevantly, its ability to kill.
The green of the shimmering silk, now slightly faded, was one of the Victorian era’s most fashionable hues; people, mostly women, wore it even after it was widely known that the arsenic-based dye responsible for the colour could lead to horrible physical suffering and early death. When asked if the dress poses any danger still, Semmelhack pauses. “We’ve been counselled not to lick it,” she says, laughing.
The prime risk, Semmelhack explains, was for the wearer who would sweat and absorb it. But the dangers of the dye didn’t end there: They extended to a long chain of people, from factory workers to seamstresses to fellow ball-goers.
The once-deadly gown is one of more than 90 artifacts—clothing, shoes, hair accessories, advertisements, cartoons, staged tableaux—being readied for the museum’s upcoming exhibit, Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of Dress in the 19th Century. The show, which opens June 18 and runs through 2016, is co-curated by Semmelhack and Alison Matthew David, a professor at Ryerson University’s School of Fashion whose decade-long investigation into the relationship between clothing and health inspired it; her book on the topic will be published next year.
The exhibit’s title was carefully chosen, says Semmelhack: “There’s almost a Victorian excess of pleasures and perils to be explored.” Among the pleasures is how industrialization and the creation of department stores lead to a democratization of fashion, allowing more people to participate in the acquisition of luxury and exclusivity, if only peripherally: “Today, you may be able to afford Prada perfume but not a Prada ensemble,” says Semmelhack. “Then, you could buy your shoelaces at [Paris department store] Le Bon Marché.”
In the museum’s shoe archive, a footwear candy store, Semmelhack shows a pair of extravagantly hand-embroidered Jean-Louis François Pinet women’s boots next to a far more modestly embellished pair—akin to a pair of Roger Viviers next to Steve Maddens. “It’s an attempt at ornamentation but not as glorious,” she says. Economics mattered, with the introduction of cheaper materials often coming at a high cost, seen when celluloid hair combs replaced tortoise shell, Semmelhack says: “They were so explosive when exposed to fire that houses burned.”
Victorian women also routinely burned, a fact showcased by a dressmaker’s form displaying a boned corset cinching a tiny waist above a metal hoop crinoline form. “Crinoline fires” killed 3,000 women between the late 1850s and late 1860s in England. Women would lose sense of their circumference, step too close to a fire grate, then flames would be fanned by oxygen circulating under their skirts. Until electricity, ballerinas also routinely perished when the muslin of their tutus met gas lamps; the deaths were referred to at the time as the “holocaust of ballet girls.” (The remedy, flame-retardant fabrics, was seen by many as too ugly to wear.)
In her office, Semmelhack runs through the exhibit’s floor plan, modelled after Paris’s famed shopping arcades. “My hope is visitors will be seduced by this beautiful space and beautiful colours and beautiful things; it’s only if you pause and read the text that what is embedded in the objects themselves becomes revealed.” At the outset of the four-year planning process, Semmelhack and Matthew David focused on obvious perils: constriction, sock poisonings, fire. They then observed the extent to which 19th-century dress was about gloss: “Women’s silk and satin dresses just glowed, as did men’s shiny top hats and shiny boots,” she says. “Then you’d think: How does a man navigate an urban 19th-century landscape and stay shiny? In part it’s through the little boys littering the landscape who shine shoes for a pittance.” They became intrigued with the invisible “fashion victims” who supported the fashionable image: the factory workers who grew in numbers (and the artisans whose ranks declined), child labourers, “mad hatters” exposed to mercury poisoning, slaves picking cotton, even silkworms sacrificed harvesting silk threads. This raises “modern age” questions, Semmelhack says: “Is the march of progress to the benefit of mankind? Is it to the benefit of the few? And how do the masses fit into this?”
The resulting show is layered with meaning as it explores the ways in which what we wear is driven by economic, political and social forces, not personal taste as we like to believe. Mania for arsenic green (also used in artificial flowers, wallpaper, paint, even medicine for morning sickness) offers the perfect example. Its popularity was abetted by ready supply as a mining by-product (William Morris’s family owned the biggest arsenic mine in England), as well as by the arrival of the electric light bulb, which shifted colour preferences. “It retained a luminous quality in daylight or evening,” says Semmelhack, who notes that it wasn’t until the light bulb that diamonds became important in fashion “because they really sparkled.”
Similarly, the fashionability of extremely narrow women’s shoes derived in part from industrial edict, Semmelhack says: “If shoemakers could make straights—no left or right foot—they only needed one last per size.” The return of women’s high heels in the late 1850s and early ’60s served a different social purpose: a form of censure for women at a time the sex was becoming outspoken in the abolitionist movement. The heel had been banned for most of the century due to its association with debauched French aristocracy. Its revival was intended to summon similar negative associations, says Semmelhack: “It was called the ‘Louis heel’ to make sure everyone knew it was a reclamation of the 18th century. It was intended to be highly destabilizing.”
Also telling is the gender divide in the way rich and poor dressed. In the shoe archive, Semmelhack compares a pair of high, narrow-toed, shiny men’s boots to rough-hewn round-toe men’s leather work boots. Variation in women’s footwear, on the other hand, is observable only in the quality of fabrication and construction. Thus, to the untrained eye, there is less distinction between the worth of a rich woman and that of a middle-class one.
The arrival of vivid, even garish, colours created by aniline dyes in the 1850s furthered the gender divide, Semmelhack notes: “Women and children were wearing these new colours created by industrialization, but upper-class men almost rigidly wore the colours of the factories that made them so wealthy.” A particularly tragic irony is seen in the popularity of bright red, associated with vigour, for children’s clothing: The dye used to create it caused rashes and ill health.
Semmelhack refuses to see fashion extremes and the risks people took to remain in vogue as ridiculous. Not following fashion was equally perilous, she says: “If idealized femininity is about women’s participation in fashion, and if femininity or beauty is the major thing you are judged and valued by, then, if you reject it, trust me, all hell breaks loose.”
It’s impossible to look at the exhibit and not draw contemporary analogies—narrow footwear replaced by vertiginous heels, corsets by sausage-casing Spanx, Dickensian factories by offshore sweatshops. Our forebears were willing to burn for fashion. We’re too evolved for that: We let others burn for us.
The social and health costs of fashion is a growing field of curatorial interest, also evident in the 2009 exhibit Eco Fashion: Going Green, at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, examining “fast fashion.” It revealed the United States consumes some 84 lb. of textiles per person per year, that the average garment purchased in the U.S. is worn only six times before being discarded, and that textile making uses more than 8,000 chemicals, many of them irreversibly damaging to people and the planet. We may look askance at British parliament ignoring demands to outlaw manufacture of arsenical products until the end of the 19th century, despite known toxicity, but we’re not that further advanced.
A more comic reminder of this was seen this year at Cannes, where director Atom Egoyan told the story of the actress Blake Lively not being able to fit in the car going to his film’s premiere because the skirt of her ball gown was too voluminous. We may think the narrative of fashion’s perils is historical, but as this provocative, important exhibit reminds us, it’s still being written.
