Virginia Woolf depicted a similar tension between unity and fragmentation ten years earlier when Mrs. Dalloway looked at herself in the mirror:
According to Steele, much of the sculptural, breathtaking art of high fashion finds a way to dramatize the friction between the reserved personalities we offer the world and the fragmented, chaotic sense of life. We only look connected; chaos inside.
As the twentieth century progressed, Steele moved from Christian Dior's New Look, which brought back feminine opulence in the post-war period with decadent skirts and cinched waists, to the rise of punk as a style emphasizing humiliation, discomfort and aggression. (Vivienne Westwood called it “confrontational clothing.”) Surveying the Eighties, Steele examines the “hard-body fashion” of Thierry Mugler and Jean-Paul Gaultier (think Madonna's cone bra), which she examines alongside the concept of the “phallic woman.” She mentions that while working on her previous book, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power, she showed a group of analysts the famous photograph of Peter Lindbergh published in a 1985 issue of a French magazine. Fashiona woman dressed all in black, pushing a stroller and smoking a cigarette. As she recalls: “They immediately exclaimed: “Phallic mother!” »
Throughout, Steele draws on psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s concept of the “skin ego,” in which the skin is both a container (“the unifying shell of the Self”) and a communicator (in Steele’s words, “the interface between the self and the world”). This is a useful way to understand clothing—as something that is both seen and felt—especially when it comes to the familiar conflict between wearing something because it is comfortable (the envelope function) and wearing something because it looks good (the interface function). Think of the liminal moment when you step out of your work clothes or evening gown and slip into a pair of washed-softened flannel pajamas. Many Gen Zers have put an end to this conflict by creating a style that prioritizes comfort above all else: pajamas and acne spots that can be freely worn in public, promoting an aesthetic that celebrates comfort rather than hindering it. Steele finds an earlier example of this convergence in the French designer Sonia Rykiel, whose elegant knitted ensembles of the Seventies symbolized the transition from haute couture to ready-to-wear. “I go to Sonia Rykiel, as one goes to a woman, as one goes home,” Hélène Cixous wrote, “dressed as closely as possible to myself. Almost in myself.”
Elsa Schiaparelli's “Hall of Mirrors” evening jacket, late thirties. Although it has a structured silhouette, it is embroidered with shards of broken glass, evoking both the restraint we offer to the world and the fragmented sense of life.Photo by Katrina Lawson Johnston / © Francesca Galloway
A look from Alexander McQueen's spring/summer 1996 “Hunger” collection featuring a molded corset full of worms. McQueen's work encourages us to confront the ways in which awe of beauty can be mixed with disgust.Photo by Dan Leckie / © Condé Nast
Steele positions Rykiel as an alternative to what Lacan called the “Procrustean arbitrariness of fashion,” that is, fashion’s often antagonistic relationship to the body. (In ancient Greek myth, the robber Procrustes tortured his victims by forcing them to lie on a bed that fit no one, and stretched them or amputated parts of them accordingly.) Of course, fashion, whether in the form of high fashion or in the form of standardized ready-to-wear sizes, often seems like it's made for impossible bodies. Steele contrasts two designers of the 1990s and 2000s, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, looking at their different attitudes towards the female form. She writes that Galliano's fashion, especially his “delightful bias-cut evening dresses,” sought to “position the woman who wears them as an object of desire.” McQueen, however, wanted his designs to “invoke fear” and allow the woman to become a figure of terrifying power. His collections, with titles like Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims and Mountain Rape, not-so-subtly allude to the violence often associated with the creation or possession of beauty. His 1996 Hunger collection featured a custom-made silver jacket worn over a molded plastic corset that held writhing masses of mud-covered worms. McQueen's work calls us to confront the ways in which our reverence for beauty can be mixed with disgust. The Worm Corset—a conceptual work of art that was at the same time stubbornly and terrifyingly physical—was a kind of vanity the skull is a reminder that the body is vulnerable flesh, even as it becomes a site of surreal artificiality.
