Costumes
By Adam Aitken
Published 1 January 2021
Where to start - with Theory, with a reading list?
When I was 3 Dad dressed me in Lederhosen
and a Greek pompom.
When I was 15 I once wore oranges for breasts
and devoured Kafka's Metamorphosis.
Muffs and Morals? Or Belted Heroes and Bound Women?
I like overdressing, which explains:
A testimony against perriwigs and perriwig-making, and playing on instruments of musick among Christians, or any other in the days of the gospel. Being several reasons against those things, by one who, for good conscience sake, hath deny'd and forsaken them.
The Myth of the Homeric Warrior-King.
La beauté pour quoi faire? Essai sur l'histoire de la beauté feminine
: a title of beauty, it's French accents are cute feathers).
Easily outgunned by the Russians:
Drevnerusskoe shit'e v sobranii Novgorodskogo myzeia
= Old Russian: Embroidery from the Collection of the Novgorod Museum.
More male titles could appeal to the cricket team,
You Are What You Wear: The Key to Business Success, Sex and Suits.
For a more back to basics on the lost male impulse:
Man Made Mobile: Early Saddles of Western North America
tho. my favourite in drum beating is
The Wild Bull and the Sacred Forest: Form, Meaning, and Change
in Senegambian Initiation Masks
For Sapphic friends: The Cowboy Hat Book, and
Women in Pants: Manly Maidens, Cowgirls, and Other Rrenegades (sic).
and for anyone: Beneath It All: A Century of French Lingerie.
From Black Beauty to the Beauty Trap, and we're still in the Bs.
On to C: Civil War Gentlemen: 1860s Apparel Arts & Uniforms
or the minutiae of US Military Buttons of the Land Services, 1787-1902:
A Guide and Classificatory System.
Hell's dress code? Most abstract, most rational,
fascist four-square and modern: Uniform: Order and Disorder.
Without clothes there're no confessions like the following:
Stripp'd and "guilty", trouserless, skirtless,
accus'd in a prisonhouse of bad dreams, wired to a car battery.
I wore the golden mask of grief
but under that there was no grief at all, for the enemy
had rendered me to nothing.
As a soldier I wore the Ace of Spades in my helmet.
And a necklace of ears.
Where then the bookmark to pleasure?
My innocent, my baby, begin with no clothes at all,
swimming in the tropics a thousand miles from here,
be "a devil forced to wear
Read The Anatomy of Nakedness.
Read Physical Attractiveness: A Cultural Imperative.
Gwen Harwood, 'The Wasps', Selected Poems, ETT Imprint, (1975) 140/