Coolness

Banastre Tarleton 1782

The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand held their annual conference in Canberra on the 27th and 28th November. I chaired a fashion theory session on the topic of ’coolness’ . 

The rationale for this session was that in my own thesis I had looked at images of the military in the 18^th century, in particular Banastre Tarleton and the original dandy Beau Brummell. Although there are very few images of Brummell and Tarleton, waht they do show is that of coolness and detached nonchalance. For Banastre, he confidently leans on his knee in the foreground of tumult of war, wearing a green jacket, tight white breeches and a beaver skin hat with black plumes sweeping across. What I was interested in from a fashion theory perspective was Marcel Mauss’s notion of techniques of the body, the way the body performs and where the psychological, the biological and the sociological fuse in dress.

It seems that concept of coolness has been around for a while. Norbert Elias charts a historical perspective of transformations toward impulse control through advice manuals and courtesy book. He noted that Baldesar Castiglione’s 1528 Il Cortegiano focused on the practice of sprezzatura or nonchalance and this was related to inner graces that appeared to be ‘natural’ to the upper classes. Gabrielle Mentges in describing coolness as a body technique gives a comparative look at the German language to help us. The catchword in the 1950s was lässigkeit meaning casualness. Although in the Middle Ages this word had a negative connotation and meant sluggish or indifferent, by the beginning of the 20^th century it became positive, lässig rather casual it was more like cool in English. But I would argue that there is still that air indifference within the concept of coolness.

It is very hard to pinpoint coolness and over the session we heard a wide range of the meanings. A number of writers alerted us to what the meaning of coolness could be from Japanese, Spanish, Maori through to Hollywood French. Some of the highlights are noted here.  Professor Jennifer Craik investigated how the notion of coolness was negotiated for female politicians in a paper titled “From Female Pit bull to Lipstick Icons”. As a politcial scientist and cultural theorist with intimate knowledge of the Australian political scene she led us through the whole gamut of early female politician who used traditional dress such as Indira Gandhi to an Italian porn star turned politician.

Stella North explored the paradox of fur as a vehicle of female coolness. She used images that explored charaters such as Cruella de Ville. It was an excellnet paper- a times very dense  and no doubt will make fascinating reading when it is published.

Dr Jo Diamond from New Zealand presented a paper “Maori Dress Sense: Cool or What”. she explored how objects can move from being ‘heavy’ (apologies I can’t remember the Maori word) to ‘cool’. She used heavy in a similar manner as Annette Wiener meaning culturally dense.  And she did show some great images of recent dress by Maori designers who take aspects and details of customary dress and transform them to contemporary fashion on the catwalk.

Carina Nandlal presented a paper “¡Que Guay! Spanish 18th Century Cool and its 20th Century Legacy in Art and Music”. This was a fascinating paper on how dress filters upward from a subulture to aristocratic dress. She then explore the way Picasso used these images in the curtain of a Ballet Russe production.

The underlying thread of the papers was on restraint and control of the body. Cool is definitely not about being clumsy or inarticulate. It appears to be a state that has already been reached rather than a work in progress as many cosider the body to be.

For one who is cool the key task is to school emotions and attitudes and to cultivate patterns of thinking that will promote appropriate dispositions that seem ‘natural’ and associated with the identity of that person. We may call it idiosyncratic style.

 

Dressing for dinner

What are we supposed to wear? Was the question I posed to my sister for a fund raising dinner at Estonia House to be held in Sydney. (She and some of her children travelled from Melbourne and our family were traveling from Canberra together.) Dressing the body is often about manners. To pay compliments to a host of a dinner or party, we dress to please the host. The occasion, the time and location also are enmeshed with fitting in and distinguishing our personal identity. Dressing is a very complex social process. When I guest lecture students in fashion theory, I use the example of what I wear to lecture in. I don’t turn up in what I wear to bed. They would be embarrassed that I hadn’t understood the situation correctly (the time and location) or mentally unwell, or I did not respect them. We like to indicate that we can ‘read’ the occasion – it reflects we are socially adept. So our conversation of what we were to wear, even though both had pack bags ready for the trip north, continued. Well, we were paying $75 per head, it was an evening dinner in the city and the Estonians always like to dress up. The weather did not come into it (and we were catching a train). For women, evening wear, despite the evening being the cooler part of the day, always means very light clothing. Sheer and reflective fabrics and bare shoulders usually prevail. Jewelry is very important in the evening. The heels on shoes are higher and finer, and strappy, despite the possibility of dancing. (Training in meant a ten minute walk: down to the river, crossing a foot bridge and along a path next to the railway line.) For most of us out-of-towners in the group, we could also wear what would be ‘new’ to our hosts. They wouldn’t have seen my expensive French shirt that most of my friends have already seen. I had not seen my sisters ‘new’ sleeveless dress. Dress, or more particularly fashion, is also about indicating you understand that in the fashion cycle wearing something new is a high priority in ‘dress practice’. Dress practices that are correct within the social milieu also show you have control. (My daughter just this moment texted me on this, but in relation to another dress practice, tattoos.) You have the economic ability not only to attend the function but to buy the clothes and accoutrements suitable for the occasion. It also shows you have the time to attend to your body, the hair and the makeup. We all were complaining there was only one waist up mirror in the house where we were all staying, but we also checked with each other – which earrings, which shawl – these shoes? Offspring traipsing back to the bedroom. Humans are so acutely aware of the presence of others. Adam and Eve go from a state of nakedness to one an awareness of others looking at their bodies. Ruth Barcan in her book “Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy’, writes on the ‘unnatural nature’ of dressing the body and of how we react to how we perceive others view of us. By the time we arrived at Estonia House we all felt we looked wonderful, everyone else thought they looked wonderful and we fitted in, but balanced with distinction.

Illness and dress

The last few days I have had a cold/flu – just waiting to see how it develops to give it a tag. I have had trouble sleeping the last few nights and felt dreadful in the mornings. Yesterday I had to go to a meeting which I thought was going to affect my academic position. I took some drugs to ease the thick head and dressed smartly and pretended not to have a cold. This morning, again I felt dreadful, but lazed around reading and embroidering. Once I got dressed around lunch time, things picked up. I turned on the computer, checked emails and I was away for the afternoon. My cold and thick headedness is still there but I had tricked my body into thinking things were not too bad.

As you can see in Recent Writings of this blog, dress is powerful. It is used as an indicator of mental health. When people are depressed their dress habits are often monitored. Their dress is used as an indicator of their function in society. If for example they wear the same clothes day after day, it is an indicator that all is not well.

For me, wandering around in my old pajamas was actually comforting. Pajamas also as worn when we are unwinding and going to bed. They can relax our bodies. The clothes I wore to my meeting the day before were quite firm and made the body stand up straight.

The photographer (whose name escapes me) of the  exhibition of Princess Diana held in London in 2007 and in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney in 2008, stated that he began photographing Diana all dress up, but once he asked he to take her shoes off, her body took on a relaxed state and she began to smile with a sense of freedom. He attributed the success of the photos to the lack of shoes.

My own artwork on red shoes explored the stories people told me of their associations with red shoes. Although I have not made work on this theme for a long time, I still explore the body’s interaction with dress.

Digital natives

One of the first research tasks in my position of looking after students who do internships in museums and galleries was to write up about online learning. A paper that has been much quoted and just as often refuted threw up the term ‘digital natives’. These are the generation that have grown up with computers and web-based technologies. The ‘digital migrants’ are the older generation that still have one foot in the old country and the other in the new. For example they print off everything to read and write – rather than just leaving it on the screen. I no longer agree and research shows that the older generation are leaping along with Web 2.0 tools. Research has shown that the older generation are more than willing if given the chance to pace things at their leisure. The uptake of new technologies in tertiary education is not necessarily just young graduates but what they term early career academics. It was noted in a recent class in our new learning management system that it was not full of young people but staff that were willing to have a go and flexible thinkers.

One of my projects has been to make a series of podcasts for students who are new to our city, Canberra, Australia. It was a tour of our cultural institutions, that many will end up either doing an internship at or be used as case studies in coursework. I have been teaching students how to make podcasts. I got a few hints how to do it from colleagues, but basically taught myself from websites. Making podcasts on a mac computer is easy through the program Garageband. I would roll around laughing at my podcasts about my mosaics as I was engrossed by making them at the time. So for a supposed ‘digital migrant’ I think I did well.

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