Wednesday, September 5, 2012

This month's uncool quote

I'll repeat it first because it will be gone next month from the side of the page and this post would no longer make sense:
There is no fashion without panties. Christian Dior
I think some context is necessary here. Dior died the year before I was born. When I found the reference to what he had said, at the Chantelle website, my first thought was that maybe I am he reincarnated. An insane thought since I don't believe in reincarnation.  I felt a real sense of kindred spirit.

More important than my vanities, however, is this: Dior said it at a time when panties were an intimate secret. No one knew what a woman had chosen. Her panties did not show through her clothes or above the waistband of her skirt or pants. And the women whom Dior designed clothes for dressed in separate rooms so that their husbands would not know which panties their wife chose to wear most days. (That said, then as now, men do a lot of detective work to try and figure these things out and sometimes succeed far beyond what women realize. There was a time just recently when ....)

To come back to the point, and there is one, we could easily make a mistake and think that Christian Dior meant that women should pick their panties with an eye to pleasing others; that every woman should dress as if she was going to have sex later that day and that some man would undress her and see her lingerie choice.

He didn't mean that. He meant that fashion consists of what is seen and unseen. Fashion runs all the way down.

We might dismiss that as narcissism but it is the exact opposite of narcissism. The narcissist is motivated by shame and shame only comes from what is seen. The narcissist having no guilt worries not if her panties are ugly or boring so long as what can be seen passes muster. She may anticipate shame if she has a wardrobe malfunction but that isn't guilt but is only anticipatory shame.

The non-narcissist, on the other hand, feels guilty because, while her outward appearance passes muster, she knows it is just for show. For her the problem is not that today's unseen items disappoint a man she might have sex with but that they reveal, if only to her who chose them, that the outward dress is just vanity. She feels guilt because her actions prove that she is vain and concerned only with the public impression she might make even if no one else ever finds out.

There are, of course, two directions out of this. One is to stop caring about even the outward appearance and choose her clothes with only the three Cs in mind: Comfort, Convenience and Conformity. And it's a free country, any woman can do that if she so wishes. An awful lot of women do although they are rarely noticed, another consequence of living in a free country.

But, and this is Dior's rather profound point, if a woman chooses to be beautiful, she has to do it all the way to the very center of her being for the sort of fashion the greats like Dior sought is a way of being, it is about becoming something and not just about doing something. The kind of fashion Dior cared about—which has almost nothing to do with the crass thing fashion is today—was about virtue.





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