Coolness
November 30, 2009
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 18th 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 20th 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.
