Beautiful Things
Schiaparelli, Luhrmann's Elvis, and a light at the end of the tunnel...
Last week, I flipped through Schiaparelli’s Fall 2022 couture show. There was gold, there were gowns, the gold held up the gowns, the gold swooped downward until it became the gown, and heels with little gold toes held up the big gold gowns. Schiaparelli is a world you can disappear into, a logic of black velvet and sun hats, of overflowing bouquets and feverish Greco-Roman obsession. It is a vision of a modernly sexier, more diverse, yet no less opulent European past.
Schiaparelli does not create accessible clothing. You may see them draped over stylish celebrities, but rarely does the concept of a multi-thousand dollar toga-gown feel feasible for the subway or dinner date. Schiaparelli creates a product that meets the expectations of its imagined glamor without any fussing with logos or what people wear or what is modern. Its draw is the glamour of a far-back fantasy, a nostalgia for turn-of-the-century fashion shows/dress that persisted as an ideal for centuries. Amidst a cast of European legacy brands feverishly adjusting their image to one of accessibility, shifting and diversifying and modernizing the individual fantasies each illicit, Schiaparelli solidly remains in a past that can be rich, alluring, and seemingly modern.
However, the legacy of Schiaparelli is in its ability to play with serious couture and to deconstruct. What do playfulness and subversion of high fashion mean in a culture that has been deconstructing it for decades, especially when the modern sell of Schiaparelli becomes its connection to the couture it subverts? In 2022, the position of Schiaparelli is an odd one, anxious to “break down“ the world of fashion while retaining glamour via inaccessible price points that ensure their products are rarely seen. Creative director Daniel Rosebury fittingly responds to these issues by proclaiming “Walmart never made him dream”, a refrain that draws out the inherent classism of his couture fantasy. It isn’t so much that Schiaparelli is the only brand using glamour and high price points to build an image, it’s that Schiaparelli’s mode of doing so is so unabashedly old-fashioned and blatantly classist.
In Rosebury’s world, fashion - particularly couture - becomes self-justified through the question embedded in his show notes: “What’s wrong with wanting to make beautiful things?” Can beautiful things exist just to be beautiful? Must everything drip with purpose and function? What about good old-fashioned glam. Schiaparelli’s things are beautiful, sure, but shouldn’t a beautiful thing exist in context? Can the associations of certain beautiful things be interrogated? More broadly, can the beauty of a garment exist outside of its substance?
The same day I saw Schiaparelli’s show, I dragged my parents to see Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. It was July 4th in New Jersey, in a mall, replete with sixteen dollar parking, a bucket of popcorn, and gallons of soda. I put my feet up and cried as Nicole Kidman explained that heartbreak feels better here. And then, for the next two hours and forty odd minutes, Luhrmann immersed that strange AMC in a world of druggy vegas fantasy, Americana glitz, and carnival tricks. Elvis is a film that cannot mask its length, its ending is inelegant and slow, much like the end of Elvis’ life. Emerging from this world and back into the mall, there is the memory of the film’s many varied pieces, its change, and the reality inside of that Newark mall. Love it or hate it, Elvis stinks of the present, it reeks of the America Elvis inadvertently built.
The oddest thing about Elvis is that unlike superstar portraits of recent that rely on a more literal reproduction of time, place, and costume cloaked in myth, message, and clean images (see Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman ), Luhrmann’s retelling decenters plot, pacing, and taste. Elvis isn’t really ever about Elvis; it’s a treatise to the culture he emerged from, the culture he spurned, and the culture that suffocated him. This is a film advertised and narrated retrospectively, framing the pink 50s suits and southern baroness with Vegas neon and cheap gold and jewels. If there is a narrative here it is of a trapped man, an artist who buys into the American dream and suffers endlessly for that choice. Even in his happiest moments, on Beale Street, immersed in the culture that he adores and pilfers, he is never truly accepted. Some dislike Elvis for its narrative flatness. To me, Elvis is repetitive because his life is repetitive, it is empty glamour because his life is empty glamour.
Thus, Austin Butler’s Elvis is all image. He creates reproductions of black music that are only noticed because they are created by a white man, something manager Colonel Tom Parker can’t discern on the radio. Image makes Elvis marketable. Then, the manipulation of sex makes him marketable until the vice squad captures his provocative sexuality via photographs. What moves and distresses Elvis? The “new” tuxedo Elvis. Christmas Elvis. House band Elvis grounded in the U.S. Elvis sabotages Parker’s Christmas special with a black leather jumpsuit. When Elvis is trapped in Los Vegas, his only freedom is through his varied jumpsuits, each more extravagant than the next. This is where Elvis’ poster gains its influence: a luxury that can grant freedom; a style that can perfume the drugs and anger and slow the decay.
While it may be a stretch to call Elvis beautiful in the same way a Schiaparelli ensemble is, there is a similar sense of nostalgia that pervades the work, alongside a fascination with the style-over-substance world that Elvis inhabited. Elvis does not believe, as Daniel Rosebury does, that empty glamour is self-explanatory. Glamour always has context, beauty always connotes. That being said, the draw of Elvis is not its critique - it is unequivocally the film’s glamorous surfaces and craft that cause people to see it. Elvis may provide a message alongside it, but this too is something easily lost in the fray of the glittering lights. Ultimately, both exude nostalgic glitz, a concept of glamour that proposes freedom through beauty, Fashion as king, and the old world’s glitz as the staying epitome of modern success. Both ask the viewer not to think too hard. Don’t challenge the world of couture, don’t question the cost of the bejeweled jumpsuit.
The same day I saw Elvis and Schiaparelli’s show, I also happened upon Jil Sander’s newest show. Look five was an artfully shot model in teal pleated trousers and a brilliant blue zip up turtleneck. The knit was diagonal, the sleeves were just a bit long, and even on a humid summer afternoon, I wanted it to envelop me. On the chest of the knit was a string of pearls secured by a safety pin and another pin in the shape of wings or petals.
It was a slice of glitz, a brief punctuation within the garment that signaled a curious beauty. It changed an already gorgeous thing into one that could be extravagant, but it was not just beautiful, nor was the knit covered in the adornments. It was beautiful because it was simple. It was something that could be everyday, elevated by a perfect color, a perfect cut, a perfect knit, and then a perfect slice of the glamorous. This was a beautiful object that could comfortably exist in the context of the world, that could be worn, that could be both an artistic garment and a functional object.
Glamour is not stuck in the past. Beautiful objects are more beautiful in context, laden with meaning and power, nestled between fantasy and reality.