Oh hello
While feeling slightly like the watermelon in that internet trend i first saw in an art gallery of a watermelon being slowly covered in elastic bands until it explodes, im dreaming of a home with an exterior of brutalist geometry, bricks turning in on themselves, overlapping in a maze like shape that leaves me inside, hidden from the outside, in a room of sheepskin, spoon shaped walls, dimmer switches, a bird bath of retinol, lana del rey on repeat and a couch that sinks down into the floor below.
Yet, I remember that the other times of my life when I have sought a door to close behind, those are times that I do not want again, so im trying to push against that instinct to retreat and instead to seek more outside of myself: more people, more art to excite and inspire.
And in that world, that world that I am dragging myself out of my room to be in, everything - both art and our engagement with it - seems to take place on a flat plane of description. We are hungry to categorise, group, and reference at times unthinkingly historical moments, greek mythology, 1970s cinema. This is, we will say so 60s by way of 90s, or goth girl at disney land, or ballroom meets the God Apollo meets late 80s Japanese noise. We get it from the critic trying to understand what is going on and the artist layering references with more references. The descriptive impulse is understandable given the swirling chaos of contemporary culture. It makes sense to want to describe as a way to cling to something, to stop it from being all just noise. Yet, still, i want more. I’d like more normative enquiry into why things are happening, into why it is interesting or subversive or generative to be referencing 11 different things at the same time; i want more judgement. I think this makes me sound like a history teacher with chalk board dust on the sleeves of her cardigan so i will stop.
in this email i explore two worlds that offer fantasy and escape. The first is a non-fiction book on Weimar fashion in which the author writes about women as being both liberated and imprisoned by modernity. The second is a Czech new wave film about a sister trying to kill her sister in order to get what she wants (a boy 🙄). They are both about women struggling to escape from their position and the difficulties they face in doing so.
Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933 (2008) by Mila Ganeva
Thinking about history as less of a stultifying study of progress from bad to good and more as an enquiry into constantly flickering pockets of liberation and regression, i was drawn to Mila Ganeva’s work of non-fiction because it situates an exploration of women’s fashion within the experiences of women in the 20s in Berlin, a moment, we are often told, of queer and women’s liberation. Ganeva’s central claim is that women’s engagement with fashion in that time reflected their broader relationship to modernity: which was that they were both freed and captured by it.
Ganeva writes about fashion journalists. In Weimar Berlin, women, as fashion journalists, identified the latest trends and participated in them as fashion icons. They occupied a dual role of being an observer of fashion and a subject of observation. In that way, Ganeva says they were both like a flaneur (observer) and a dandy (observed) - two dominant male archetypes of that period. But unlike those kinds of men, these Weimar women were more practical, more democratic, offering tips and patterns to their readers on how to get the look and make the clothes they wrote about.
Another chapter is on mannequins: women who modelled clothes in shop windows and on the shop floor, who found “temporary escape nowhere else but in the display window, where her job was to act precisely as a lifeless body”. There, unlike as a shopgirl, a woman was given more freedom to move and dress and play but also remained tightly bound by the limits of her role.
More generally, the book explores the development of 20s fashion in which pants were worn more, corsets were removed, and dresses were shortened, shapeless and flat, a move that was exciting because it was motivated by practicality and a disregard for male conceptions of beauty but lost its gleam as it was devoured by and then entrenched a different conception of beauty: one that preferred a smaller body, waist, shoulders, breasts.
This is a book you will love if you, like me, like to think about fashion as a way to think about other aspects of culture and life. It’s also inspiring reading about the Berlin women that Ganeva writes about: industrious, scrappy, stunning women who forced a life for themselves in magazines, in movies, and in shop front windows.
Morgiana (1972) by Juraj Herz
Morgiana is a Czech film from the 1970s set in the Victorian era, and full of the kind of big billowing outfits that our Weimar women were trying to free themselves from. The film stars Iva Janzurová who plays two sisters, Klara and Viktoria. Viktoria, dressed in black, is angered when Klara, dressed in white, inherits more than her and seems to be winning over a man that Viktoria loves. Viktoria, then, sets out to poison her sister. Despite successfully administering what she thinks is a slow acting poison, Viktoria’s life begins to spiral. The poisonmaker tries to blackmail her for more money. Viktoria fears she has poisoned her cat (Morgiana). Predictably, she becomes consumed by both guilt at what she has done and anger that it has not yet worked.
Apparently an inspiration for Black Swan, the film is gorgeously styled. There are fish eye zooms, camera shots from the angle of what turns out to be the cat, dresses with floral appliqués as if the wearer, in their madness has ran past their pet swans and stumbled into a rose bush. Water recurs as a bringer of death, whether in a glass holding Viktoria’s poison or as the ocean above which Viktoria and the poisonmaker fight.
Morgiana, ultimately, is about the dangers of jealousy and the need to accept the limits of the life that we have. Viktoria represents the perils of focussing too closely too bitterly too concentratedly on personal success; instead, Morgiana suggests we ought to drift away from clamouring for these ephemeral hopes and instead find meaning in areas that are more stable, more reliable, more capable of offering us something that lasts.
Love
Anne
"a move that was exciting because it was motivated by practicality and a disregard for male conceptions of beauty but lost its gleam as it was devoured by and then entrenched a different conception of beauty," SO WELL SAID - always a pleasure, ever a treasure, thank you Anne