fashion

Hat : woman :: machine : machine

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Le Corbusier inscribed those words in the second (1928) edition of his Toward an Architecture. The first sentence is one of the axioms of modernism. A century later, you are running your fingers over it on page 151 of John Goodman’s translation (Getty Research Institute, 2007), where it is shelved under the subtitle “Liners.”

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Liners such as, en route shortly after the launch of Toward an Architecture:

This one was shaped by the modernist aesthetic of Art Deco. Its three sleeked funnels were unequal in height from bow to stern: first tall, then medium, then short (and the short one was a decorative dummy). Viewed from the side, the pattern communicated a knowingly accepted illusion of streamlined speed. Viewed from the bow, the tall funnel allotted the ship’s proportions the way a hat allots a head’s proportions.

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Allotting, the hat inscribed below guides the eye to see a face as a petitesse. Petitesse is a curve and the hat is its generatrix.

Also the hat’s crown rakes back in the illusion of speed while the passive woman within the hat remains still. Also the hat’s ribbon, wrapped halfway up around the domed cylinder of the crown, teaches the senses to imagine ribbon and crown as body parts harmonizing at knowingly accepted cross purposes . . .

Jacques-Henri Lartigue, stereo autochrome Bibi au Restaurant d’Eden Roc, Cap d’Antibes, May 1920.

An eye made use of an apparatus to create this image of a woman designed and curated. She’s more than a century old now but as good as new. You accept the illusion knowingly. You are a member of its comic audience. Defined by the aesthetic of Euclid, a woman is a machine for wearing a hat.

Foolish fashion with foolish virgin

At arm’s length, she looked like this

Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002697733/. Contrast and detail adjusted. Date of record: May 28, 1910.

because of this.

New York Tribune, page 11

On the same day she stood in a studio to be recorded as what she was, the economic engine that had powered printing press and camera published these instructions for interpreting her image with its text. At the heart of their grammar was a doom. One of its authorities was the New Testament and two of its kernel sentences were “She must possess if she hopes” and “None can achieve.”

And off the record, her throat was beginning to grow corded. If she had been able to take off the deathcap for an instant and let her readers see her hands begin to unclench and her hair flow and the studio’s light reverberate in her eyes, the text about her would have been unreadable then but knowable now. What we might have experienced was a general beauty, not fashioned to be read but created to be seen: Eve-naked, antipodal to the dark side of time.

But the lamps in the engine room had not been trimmed. In the studio log’s archival black and white, the foolish virgin’s face communicates nothing about the color that might have shone from her eyes. But it does confirm that the devils who fashioned her mode were blue.

 

Body language at the end of the long nineteenth century

Buttolph collection of menus, New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-5e11-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. Color and detail restored.

This cover opens to reveal the dinner menu for Friday, March 1, 1901, on board the world’s first purpose-built cruise ship, the German yacht Prinzessin Victoria Luise. The generic lithograph on the cover doesn’t depict the princess, but she was a pretty boat indeed. Here is the way Michael Zeno Diemer, the Oberammergau portraitist of ships and zeppelins, imagined her as those who bought their passages in her must have felt she deserved to be imagined. When we are on board, of course, imagination is the only way we have of seeing the vessel that bears us.

Michael Zeno Diemer - Sailing regatta,
http://www.paintgallery.net/sailing_regatta_k081383.jpg

But in the physical, outside the realm of imagination, we at least can see what is physical of ourselves, and try to make those images approximate themselves to the beautifully comprehended images that we imagine. Our dinner on March 1, 1901, would have included turtle ragout and strawberry ice cream, followed by music of Wagner, Bizet, and John Philip Sousa. So perhaps, after that experiment on the senses, we might have gone sightseeing on deck, in the dark.

You see how we have posed ourselves there. One of us is languidly reclined in spotless spats. Another has painted himself into an icon of energetic masculinity with cap and cape and mustache wax. A third has contracted to something feminine, hugging herself deep inside a shawl. Our bodies and their impelling forces differ, but when they’re on deck together they communicate in a mutually understood body language. Behind us, a huge machinery emitting smoke and green light propels its boatload of bodies, signaling to all destinations that we haven’t yet arrived. We won’t shut down at sunrise, because the sense of sunrise has been postponed. We’ll still be talking when the day dawns on March 2. Silently, without any need for words, our clothes and their bodies will have promised us, that night on deck, that we’ll never die.

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Launched in 1900, Prinzessin Victoria Luise was wrecked in the Caribbean just six years afterward, a casualty of navigation error. Her captain saw all his passengers safely off, then killed himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prinzessin_Victoria_Luise

But for these voyagers transported by the princess through 1901, 1901 is visibly forever. You see that in the remaining record before you. In their lithographer’s presence, the voyagers within the princess became a smiling history of confidence in the everlastingness of dark.