Extraordinary Theory of Objects

by Stephanie LaCava

  * How did a half-pullover, half-button-down knit become synonymous with both grandfather dressing and grungy insouciance? The sweater was first invented in the nineteenth century, owing to the vanity of James T. Brudenell, the seventh Earl of Cardigan. He was tired of having to disturb his hairstyle when changing his look and so decided to create a collarless jacket, which unbuttoned from the front. Fast-forward to actor Steve McQueen, who was among the famous men to adopt this style. Most iconic, however, was the trend in the nineties when kids hit vintage stores to seek out old, ratty cardigans for sale, to emulate the pilling sage one Kurt Cobain wore onstage for his unplugged performance in New York in 1993.

  * In 1881, the Marchesa Luisa Casati was born in Milan. The shy, plain heiress, fascinated by dramatic figures like Sarah Bernhardt, grew up to establish herself as an auburn-haired, green-eyed, live-snake-wearing eccentric who walked her big cats through the streets of Venice and arrived at the Ritz with her boas and cheetahs in tow. She drove a blue Rolls-Royce often accompanied by a towering manservant. Among her houses was the Palais Rose, where Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Cecil Beaton were all occasional guests. Countless artists painted Casati, and she was muse to many as well as the lover of Gabriele d’Annunzio, who called her Kore, another name for Persephone. Despite creating a legacy destined for immortality, Casati died in 1957, destitute, skinny, and scavenging for objects to adorn her frail body.

  * The violet is one of the few flowers that flourishes in the winter. It can be found in dark, cold months, its resilient buds pale purple with a dust of frost. In the thirteenth century, apothecaries sold crystallized violets—roses and lilies, as well—steeped in hot water and sugar as a cure for all ailments. It was in the nineteenth century that the violet trade flourished north of Toulouse, France, where there grew a renowned variety with twice the amount of petals in comparison to the standard bloom. During this time, violet-flavored sugar crystals and candies were popular delicacies sold in decorative tins and used on pastries. Further back in time, the Romans would soak violet petals in casks of wine to create the celebratory drink, Violatum. Violet was always a favorite scent among royalty, including Napoléon, who was given the name Corporal Violet when he promised to return from exile in Elba with the tiny flowers, which he did in 1815. It was then that he left a bouquet on the grave of Empress Joséphine before being exiled again to Saint Helena. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was rumored that the empress of Russia Alexandra Feodorovna used an eau de toilette made exclusively from violets that were picked between the evening hours of five and seven o’clock in Grasse. The allure of the violet lies not only in its perfume but also in its beauty without ostentation.

  * The opal is not one color; rather, it’s every color. Even covered in dirt, an opal may shine red or blue, sparkling in its dusty raw state. Pliny the Elder spoke of the opal’s magic in Historia Naturalis (“Some opali carry such a play within them that they equal the deepest and richest colors of painters”), where he also mentions that sugar acid may be used to make a virgin stone black, as jet and fiery red opals were more dramatic than their pure white counterparts. Like the tapirage method used to dye the feathers of common canaries, this chemical trick created the illusion of more desirable specimens.

  Just as mummy powder was thought to be a cure-all, ground opal was also thought to be a remedy for endless maladies. The stone was also believed to bring good luck, impart prophetic powers, cure depression, and even help blond hair retain its shine or detect poison by paling in its presence. Napoléon gave Empress Joséphine a 700-carat black opal, while Queen Victoria was known to favor the stone as a present on special occasions. Sarah Bernhardt increased the renown of the gem, her birthstone, as she commissioned art deco jewelers like René Lalique and Georges Fouquet to create unique pieces such as the snake-shaped gold bracelet with attached ring, which she wore for her role as Cleopatra at the world premiere in 1890.

  Yet there has always existed a darker, more foreboding side to the opal. Many feared its mystic powers, a phobia said to have started with a scene from Sir Walter Scott’s Anne of Geierstein, in which a princess dissolves into ash when the opal in her hair is splashed with water. It was a fear somewhat grounded in reality, since, owing to their porous nature, opals may self-destruct with too much moisture or heat. In the late nineteenth century, Alfonso XII of Spain received an opal ring as a present from his spurned lover, the Comtesse de Castiglione, which he in turn gave to his wife, who soon died. It was then given to his grandmother, Queen Christina, and passed down through generations who succumbed to similar fates. In the end, the only solution was to hang the ring from a chain that dangled around the neck of the Virgin of Almudena of Madrid.

  * How did a fat, ugly bird descended from the common pigeon become one of the most mysterious and romantic creatures of the natural world? Perhaps this fascination is largely because of all the extraordinary circumstances surrounding its life and discovery. It was around the turn of the seventeenth century that the birds were identified, only to become extinct sixty years later because of humans settling the dodos’ habitat. The dodos lived on the south coast of the island Mauritius in a swampy land known as Mare aux Songes, nearby the Indian Ocean. Without natural predators—that is, until men arrived—the birds flocked inland, where food was plentiful. They had no need to fly, so their large wings soon became useless, purely ornamental. Modern imagery of the dodo bird comes from an obscure painting by the Dutchman Roelant Savery, who died in an insane asylum in 1639 in Utrecht. Most mythology surrounding the bird began with the drawing of John Tenniel and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  As chronicled in Errol Fuller’s Dodo: From Extinction to Icon, in 1865 schoolmaster George Clark found there were dodo bird bones beneath the marshy ground of a nearby sugar plantation, which he ended up selling to anatomist Richard Owen, much to the displeasure of his rival, Alfred Newton. It is believed that until 1755 the Ashmolean Museum had the last remaining specimen of the long-extinct dodo. After a meeting of trustees, it was decided that the piece had rotted beyond repair, but fortunately they salvaged the head and a single foot. In 2007, scientists found the most complete dodo skeletons to date in a cave in Mauritius. Undoubtedly the dodo’s short life and scientific speculation about the extinct bird’s actual appearance contributed to its allure as one of nature’s most controversial creatures. That and they have become an early example of humanity’s ability to sabotage the natural world.

  * Writer Françoise Sagan was born in 1935 in Cajarc, France, where she would be buried sixty-nine years later. She reached unprecedented literary success at the age of nineteen with the publication of the seminal Bonjour Tristesse, for which she won the Prix des Critiques. Great celebrity followed, elevating Sagan to mythic status. A fan of fast cars, she nearly died in an accident when driving her Aston Martin in 1957. Over time, her fame began to fade, not unlike the young bright light that was Jean Seberg, the star of the 1958 film version of Bonjour Tristesse.

  * With white bells sheathed in green leaves, the lily of the valley is lovely, but deadly. The flower is so poisonous that those who handle its blooms are cautioned to wash their hands after. Despite this warning, the plant still signifies purity and the coming of happiness. Oscar Wilde and couturier Christian Dior both favored the flower. The blossom was also the namesake for Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, perhaps a symbol for a desire for poisonous perfection and exhibitionism. The title of Honoré de Balzac’s 1835 novel of society and romance translates in English to The Lily of the Valley. Muguet, as lilies of the valley are known in France, are sold by the roadside for loved ones on May 1, based on the legend that the flower loved a nightingale who would only return to her when she bloomed in the late spring. According to other lore, lilies of the valley sprang from the blood of Saint Leonard of Noblac when, having grown disenchanted with royal life, he battled with a dragon in the woodland he wished to inhabit. Further back in history, Eve is believed to have cried tears t
hat turned into tiny bells as they fell when she was exiled from the Garden of Eden, just as the Virgin Mary’s tears turned into the same flower at Jesus’s crucifixion.

  * Found within the mouths of oysters, these tiny iridescent balls have come to signify rare beauty. When Aphrodite rose from the sea within an enormous shell, she cried tears of pearls. Pliny the Elder tells the story of Cleopatra’s wit and cheek, which involved wearing earrings created from the largest pearls ever discovered. She summoned Mark Antony for the most expensive dinner of all time in which she dissolved one of the pearls into her glass and proceeded to drink its contents, leaving him dumbstruck. Cleopatra often wore pearls wrapped twice around her neck, or in her hair, or a shorter piece to accompany a dress embroidered with the tiny white orbs.

  The gems were rare in Egyptian jewelry, and it is said that Julius Caesar tried to create sumptuary laws that restricted the wearing of pearls to only Rome. Later in history, the second wife of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, also known for her intelligence, wore a signature pearl necklace hung with a gold B pendant and three teardrops. Sara Murphy, owner of Villa America and the inspiration for Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, was often seen wearing pearls down her back.

  * An earth ravaged by rain is a universal myth, though details may differ. Before Noah’s ark there was the myth of Deucalion, which is similar to the Old Testament story of the great flood. Outraged by the insolence of his people, Zeus decided to flood his kingdom and rid the earth of humankind in its then state of disgrace. Deucalion’s father, the Titan Prometheus, learned of Zeus’s plan and helped save his son and his son’s wife, Pyrrha. Deucalion built an enormous boat-box similar to a chest that allowed him and Pyrrha to arrive safely to Mount Parnassos. By throwing the bones (rocks) of their mother Earth (Gaia) over their shoulders, they were told they could repopulate the earth, Pyrrha creating a race of women and Deucalion a race of men. There are no animals or ark in Deucalion’s story, but rain still stands as a symbol for rebirth and one of the only forces humans may be able to predict but can in no way control.

  * Oscar Wilde wore a green scarab ring on his left hand signifying happiness and one on his right hand to symbolize sadness. When asked why he didn’t remove the latter, he said the absence of happiness was necessary to understand the very nature of contentment. Long before Wilde, scarab amulets were popular as protective talismans. In ancient Egypt, the dung beetle was the model for the scarab as a symbol of rebirth. These beetles would roll balls of dung out of which came their next generation, just as the sun, or Ra, rolled through the sky with each new day. It was Aristotle who named the class of creatures coleoptera, from the Greek words koleos for “sheath” and pteron for “wing,” as the wings of the beetle are encased in two hard shells. During the Victorian era the allure of the scarab was revived with an interest in the romance and mystery of Egyptian tombs and the occult. Jewelers would use actual iridescent beetle shells and wings to create pieces. Charles Darwin was a devoted beetle collector. The natural history museum in Paris houses the greatest collection of specimens, many now extinct; however, still one in every three insects remains a beetle.

  * Lee Miller was born in April 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York. From a young age, she was entranced by the camera’s ability to distance her from reality, perhaps because of her own childhood trauma of being raped and contracting a venereal disease. A great beauty, Miller captivated men, including Condé Nast, who serendipitously saved her from an oncoming car in the street one day, which led to her start as a model for magazines like Vogue. She went on to become Man Ray’s lover, muse, and protégée, and then a talented photographer and war reporter in her own right. At the end of her life she is said to have grown depressed, perhaps owing to not only the time she spent photographing concentration camps but also the roving eye of her husband, Roland Penrose.

  * Perhaps the most indelible images of the nineties slip dress are those of Kate Moss in a loose, nude negligee either in a magazine editorial or out with friends. Or maybe it’s a singular moment, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in the simple white wedding dress her friend Narciso Rodriguez created for her wedding to John F. Kennedy Jr. The style itself was created anew in the nineties with the designs of Calvin Klein and Helmut Lang, who in the late eighties presented a seminal collection of simple silhouettes, rejecting the overwrought styles of the time. John Galliano’s take on the look, bias cut silk, often with tiny Victorian silk buttons, was another version of this iconic slip dress. During this time vintage became cool all over again, and thousands of girls channeled Moss in thrift store finds or versions from the mall.

  * In 1991, Nirvana released Nevermind in a square plastic case with the standard pull-out pamphlet, except this album had a controversial photo that would come to represent grunge for some. Under the art direction of Robert Fisher, Nirvana’s team wanted an image akin to water birth, which Cobain had witnessed on a television program. Critics have said he chose this image as a means to hold on to innocence, but others believed it was a statement on selling out, whether it be as a band or leaving behind the yuppies of the eighties. The irony of the whole grunge movement and Nirvana’s rise to fame was in Cobain’s rejection of being the voice of a fringe generation. It’s said no one expected Nirvana to explode out of Seattle as the face of grunge, a movement made during days of darkness and boredom. It was the grunge band Mother Love Bone that was poised for stardom until its lead singer died of an overdose in 1990. And then, somehow being alienated and isolated became mainstream.

  * In antiquity, chairs were not commonplace; rather, they were seats of power. Stools were used as everyday furniture, whereas thrones were reserved for high society, like those found in Tutankhamen’s tomb, and were carved of precious materials with animal legs. In ancient Egyptian reliefs, pharaohs are always depicted sitting upright to signify their status. Akhenaton, father of Tutankhamen and husband of Nefertiti, was portrayed, however, as reclining, perhaps in satire, as he was an early supporter of monotheism, which was contrary to the nation’s longtime polytheistic devotion. In ancient Greece, the klismos chair was created with its curved back and tapered legs and was later adopted by French Directoire, English Regency, and American Empire styles and even by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Saint Peter’s Chair, which is in Saint Peter’s Basilica, is not merely a piece of furniture but is also a relic as famed as the Dagobert chair now in the Louvre’s collection. Though the seat is missing, the bronze frame is believed to have been owned by Merovingian king Dagobert I in the Middle Ages, with the arms and back added by Charles the Bald in the twelfth century. It was then used by Napoléon I for the Légion d’honneur.

  * The inimitable decorator Madeleine Castaing was born at the end of the nineteenth century in Chartres, France. Known for her eccentric personality and style (late in life, she wore false eyelashes with a black wig tied at her chin as a makeshift facelift), she carried this unique sensibility over into her interiors. Castaing loved literature and channeled Balzac and Proust, which she claimed to have read twelve times, in her décor. There was never one style, rather a mix of the likes of Napoleon III, English Regency, and Russian neoclassical, even Gothic, with flea market finds, faux marble, or plastic flowers. She loved blue, hated beige, but adored black. Leopard spots or tiny, green foliage scattered on black carpet, banana leaves as window shades were among her signatures. Castaing claimed to be against perfection, finding beauty in the unlikely and unfinished treatment, such as fading painted stripes, or old objects. She died in 1992 at ninety-eight years old, leaving behind her world, which famously became a hard-to-catalog 2004 Sotheby’s sale due to the mix of treasures.

  * All coral—angel skin pink, black acabar, rare blue akori, and Italian bianco or white—were once living as polyp creatures fixed to other ocean fauna, cannonballs, and even, as once documented, a human skull. The Mediterranean Sea and Italy are known for their coral, but it is found in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans as well. Even so, it was an unlikely commodity traded
between East and West, as was documented as far back as the first century by Pliny the Elder. Ancient Egyptians believed in the mystic powers of the rosy exoskeleton and carved scarabs from this precious material. The ancient Greeks believed it protected against poison and spells and was the petrified blood of Medusa that dripped into the sea. From India to Tibet to the Americas, coral is revered as an organic marvel turned talisman, imbued with magical meaning, just like the oyster’s pearl.

  * Ancient Egyptians would use clay eyes for both the dead and the living that lost their sight, using linen cloth to secure them within the sockets. Stone or glass suspended on a string eventually replaced these hand-painted balls. In 1579, Venetians created the first glass prosthesis to be worn within the eyelid. The French royal surgeon Ambroise Paré fashioned similar pieces from enameled gold, silver, porcelain, and, of course, glass. Elaborate hollow glass eyes began in Germany’s Black Forest in 1832 when Ludwig Müller-Uri’s young son lost his eye in an accident. Luckily, Müller-Uri happened to be a talented glassblower known for making realistic doll eyes by twisting strands of colored melted sand. Prior to this, peasant families were known for creating animal eyes used in taxidermy and similar pursuits. No matter how skilled the artisan, glass eyes can never see, but they alter what is seen before us.

  * Old guard couturier Paul Poiret was partly responsible for the start of pajamas leaving the bedroom for evenings out on the town. His popular satin harem pants began a trend continued by Edward Molyneux and Jeanne Lanvin, often with a pair of silk trousers worn beneath a tunic. The Allied governments encouraged daytime pajamas during the First World War. Silk, it was said, would keep you warm, and the easy silhouette allowed for work in the garden. The leisure class of the twenties and thirties, however, was already packing pajamas for vacation, along with their bikinis. Marlene Dietrich was known to wear them at the Lido in Venice, a style that eventually found its way stateside to winters in Palm Beach. In one of Zelda Fitzgerald’s letters to her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, she wrote about how obsessed she was with her new pair of sleepwear: “They’re the most adorably moon-shiny things on earth—I feel like a Vogue cover in ’em,” she said. Later on, Kurt Cobain would embrace the trend in his own way when he wore green pajamas to his wedding.