The great thing about playing hookie in New York City is there is always amazing stuff you can do while skipping out on work: Yesterday, I opted out of the cubicle to sit on the front steps of The Met, basking in the spring sun with an ice-cream until my friend Misha showed up so we could catch the Alexander McQueen exhibit sans weekend crowds. It was easily my favorite art show of the year thus far, although Maira Kalman at the Jewish Museum is a close second.
Everyone has seen McQueen’s famous armadillo heels (cut to Lada Gaga “Bad Romance” music video), but I had no idea about the actual *breadth* of his oeuvre—he works with everything from fur to bone, using unexpected materials including human hair, duck feathers, sculpted wood, taxidermied crocodile heads, vulture beaks and eye sockets, worms, fresh flowers, oyster and clam shells, gazelle horns… *everything*. Ridiculous detail and quality was in every cut, every shape, every play on style, every medium method from exquisite lace, ruffles, tulle, sequins, beads, palliates, feather and silk and leatherwork--I mean, it was indescribable and truly challenged every notion I may have once had about clothing and beauty. I walked through the whole show with my jaw dropped, speechless (and I'm not saying that just to be dramatic--the experience really is like that, and the way they have curated the show with haunted house music, clips of his theatrical collection shows, and apropos Lord Byron-esque room settings only heightens the emotion). It's equal parts awe-inspiring and oftentimes highly disturbing. You walk away with a new-formed realization of women’s clothing—a woman’s body—as a living canvas, a clearinghouse or central billboard of wherever society is at the moment.
I think about how women’s clothing and bodies are used as symbols a lot because of my background. My grandmother lived through a time in Iranian history when the veil was actually banned (like they are doing in France now)—and she was beaten for accidentally wearing it when she forgot to take it off. Then she lived through another time when wearing veils became the law—and she watched other women beaten for not fully covering themselves. In both cases, politics was affirmed by declaring what women should wear. It was a symbol of the general government, and women bore that political burden. It’s a strange phenomena and definitely not confined to the Middle East.
There’s this awful scene in the most recent Sex and the City movie where a group of veiled women leads Sarah Jessica Parker into a back room of a store where she reveals that underneath her veil, she is wearing designer clothing—*just like everyone else*. It’s supposed to be this moment of celebration, but it comes across mostly as really crass and trivializing. Okay, so the message is that women are bonded across ethnic backgrounds by their lust for luxury consumerism?! Whether it’s the veil or a thousand dollar dress, the fundamental is the same: What we wear matters far beyond our person, and our agency is rarely part of this (although we can be deceived that it is, via clever marketing). It was, after all, Eve who ruined the human race by realizing she was naked in the first place, requiring us to wear clothing forever. And I—like many women, I guess—do love my clothes, despite their trappings. When Lady Gaga stomps onto the screen wearing McQueen’s famed heels, I’m first struck by the ridiculousness of such a sculpture posing as a something as utilitarian as a shoe. But I believe her message (and McQueen’s) is not so much the Ends, but the Means whereby she simply makes a choice, ridiculous as it is. I respect anyone who has the balls to wear a veil (trust me, you get *stared* at if you wear one in the U.S., so that has to take guts), but ultimately if that statement is going to come from the woman who wears it, it obviously (to me, at least) has to be a choice. I once had the opportunity to meet the Taureg tribes in Mali who set up camp in the Sahara. Instead of veiling their women, they veil their men. It’s a symbol of status: The men who are most covered up are higher up on the pecking order. The men who are bare are left ashamed.
Some ridiculous pictures from "hijab" fashion shows that attempt to find ways around the rule of covering one's head:
And of course:
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