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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41. The Berliner
Berlin. The novelist and playwright Honoré Balzac thought it boring. The Marxist leader Rosa Luxemburg considered it ‘cold’ and ‘tasteless’.[i] Adolf Hitler welcomed the Allied bombing of the city in the 1940s because its destruction would facilitate the construction of Albert Speer’s gargantuan structures for Germania, the new capital of Große Deutschland.[ii] In the nineteenth…
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40. The Everyman
If they were privileged enough to behold the imposing portrait of Philip II of Spain painted by an unknown artist around 1580, contemporaries would have been mightily impressed. The king-emperor (for Philip inherited the title of Holy Roman Emperor from his father, Charles V) looked every bit the sixteenth-century general. His cuirassier-style armour, distinguishable by…
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38. The Great Masculine Revival
At the end of the eighteenth century ‘there occurred one of the most remarkable events in the whole history of dress, one under the influence of which we are still living, one, moreover, which has attracted far less attention than it deserves: men gave up their right to all the brighter, gayer, more elaborate, and…
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37. The Cartoon Caper
In (UK) Esquire’s latest Black Book, Johnny Davis claims ‘menswear is at the tail end of its love affair with dandyism.’[i] It is therefore apposite, he suggests, that his interviewee, the sartorial minimalist Carlo Brandelli whose tailoring champions opulent asceticism, is returning to Savile Row. Naturally, Brandelli agrees. He believes the uncertainty that men felt…
Dr Benjamin Wild 