The dressed and styled human body is irresistible to analyse. Framed by the idea that people’s dress and engagement with Fashion is a fundamental component of how we all conceive, create and convey personal and shared histories, the following ‘mini-essays’ are my attempt to unpick the cultural threads that hold our wardrobes together. Aide-mémoires, tongue-in-cheek, discursive, works-in-progress, I began writing them in 2013 in the spirit of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyper Reality, although rarely with the same perspicacity, precision and pace.
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16. The Pen
It is a truth universally acknowledged, or at least a cliché often repeated, that clothes make the man. Over the past half-century, clothing commentators have developed various theories to explain this sociological fact. Paraphrasing a ‘political sage’, Thorstein Veblen, who considered the spending habits of America’s elite, observed that ‘a cheap coat makes a cheap…
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15. The Hat
Hat-clad men are now ubiquitous and their choice of headwear is commensurately conspicuous, as if there were a sartorial safety in numbers. At this year’s fashion shows in London, Milan and New York, flat caps, fedoras, baseball caps, bowlers, homburgs, stove pipes, Stetsons and variants of the sombrero, have been modelled on and off…
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14. Tweed
Who’d have thought it; tweed, trendy and ubiquitous? No longer the preserve of humanities professors and grandparents, tweed now appeals to a diverse cross-section of consumers, as the dizzying array of tweed-clad products reveals: clocks, cufflinks, headphones, hip-flasks, Dr Martens and Eames-style furniture have all been given the tweed treatment.[i] Harris Tweed, in particular, is…
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13. The Problem of Gold (1)
There is something compulsive about gold. The legend of King Midas is cautionary, but the expression ‘Midas Touch’ is usually offered as a complement, rather than a condemnation. Throughout history, golden objects have been prized above others. Think of the death mask of Tutankhamun, England’s Gold State Coach or the jewellery of Van Cleef &…
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12. The Past
There is a scene in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis where the stretched limo of cyber capitalist Eric Packer is pelted with rocks and smeared with paint and human excrement as it meanders conspicuously through a crowd of anti-capitalist protesters at Times Square. Safe within the limo, Packer and his chief of theory Vija Kinski reflect coolly…
Dr Benjamin Wild 