The first jacket had narrow lapels and a narrow cut in the torso too, in a slubby, blended fabric that suggested linen but wasn’t; I wore its sleeves rolled to show the shiny teal-blue lining above my silver bracelets. This was the jacket I wore daily on my first trip to Paris. It served as a gateway drug to tailoring proper. I realize now that it cited the barest hint of glam. Several years later, after a series of thrifted stand-ins, I received my first writers’ grant and I bought, late in sale season, an early jacket by the Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester. The Antwerp Six were radiating abundant newness; all we read then was post-structuralist. Especially we cited and recited Gilles Deleuze’s book The Fold, which had been translated into English that year. ‘The characteristic of the baroque is the fold that goes on to infinity,’ we solemnly chanted. The jacket was cut like a fluid black shirt that swung out from narrowly fitted, slightly moulded shoulders; this sensual belling effect was subtly accented by some careful structural facing at the inner hem, to sketch a slouching line that was unrecognizably fresh in 1994, when the mainstream of fashion still subscribed to the ‘strong shoulder’ of what was then called power dressing. The lapels were deeply notched and rounded, stitched by hand at the edges. I wore it with everything for years, as others might superstitiously wear a fetishized pendant or a ring, believing in its influencing attributes, and in fact this jacket made the most haphazard T-shirt, the most lovesick bad mood, into a knowing statement. Although it was perfect over long grunge dresses and tattered bias-cut skirts, I especially wore it to write in, over silk pyjamas, feeling like a mildly Goth Sacheverell Sitwell. It seemed obvious that this jacket would write rigorously fluid, decoratively melancholic poems, and it did. I still keep the Belgian jacket, now with wilted lapels and gaping pockets, the light wool crepe fabric gone shiny at the hip where my satchel rubbed, with a feeling of gratitude as well as a sense of ethical responsibility to the preservation of an alternative history of tailoring. It was followed by an oddly puckered wool-and-nylon bolero by Comme des Garçons, found on eBay, this one with a stiff wide body and a high round collar that stood out from the collarbones like an early Balenciaga (the inside as the operation of the outside, croons Deleuze), then next another Comme des Garçons, with knitted sleeves that ended at the elbow, and a long, tightly ruched waist in a dense gabardine that gave to the proportional play the backbone of Saville Row. I had had a complex, night-long dream comparing Rei Kawakubo to Elsa Schiaparelli, which led, just as I woke, to the gnomic and lapidary statement Rei Kawakubo takes the politics of freedom seriously; for years afterward I searched assiduously for her gorgeously monstrous garments in consignment shops and thrift bins, with only minor success.
All of those jackets I wore over anything at all during the long era of intensive feminist theoretical study; they accompanied my ardent forays into Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto – for indeed I was no goddess – and the world-changing texts of Judith Butler, the shockingly liberating Gender Trouble, for which Foucault’s work on sexuality had begun to clear the way, as well as the denser, more philosophically challenging Bodies That Matter, which displaced the habitual feminization of materiality in favour of a rigorous historicization of concepts. ‘The category of women,’ she wrote, ‘does not become useless through deconstruction, but becomes one whose uses are no longer reified as “referents,” and which stand a chance of being opened up, indeed, of coming to signify in ways that none of us can predict in advance.’ I craved the unpredictable spaciousness of this opened-up category.
My most recent jacket, entirely worthy of this thrifted lineage of radical women tailors and philosophers, is by Limi Feu, the daughter of Yohji Yamamoto; I discovered it on eBay for forty euros. My heart is fire, she says. It’s double-breasted – my first ever double-breasted jacket, I should add – also in black gabardine, slightly cropped like a little sailor’s peacoat, edged down the high, wide-ish lapels on either side with a raw line of glistening tar. The armholes are cut close to the torso and the quite long sleeves end in belling cuffs, bordered also in tar. I say tar, realizing it is probably some sort of acrylic medium, but the effect is tar to the point where, wearing the jacket, one imagines its penetrating and dusky scent. The jacket’s back, rather than having the conventional small vent for ease of wearing, is aggressively slashed up to the shoulder blades, to reveal in a narrow vee, beneath the tarred edges, the wearer’s shirt, white and rumpled quite likely, or to expose bared the skin of the her back. This jacket has tempered my readings of Giorgio Agamben with an insouciant skepticism; it is of a spirit perhaps, with Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological queering of geometry. ‘What lines,’ she asks, ‘will cover the page when the woman philosopher inhabits the space by the writing table and takes up her pen?’ These garments, accompanying me in heavy, oversized suitcases or following me more recently in my movements between continents and academic residencies by slow-shipped container, form a geometry of thinking. Only the first one, the skimpy citation of glam by the now-disappeared T. Eaton company, has been lost.
At the Bastille flea market I did consider, to the point of active belief, that my newly acquired garment was Baudelairean; how many times had the poet visited his clothier with a subtle vision in mind, worked together with the patient tailor through many fittings and small alterations to achieve the vision, and then, very soon after leaving the shop with the beautiful garment, not having yet paid for it (since still in the early nineteenth century convivial neighbourly relationships with tradesmen were structured by means of credit), next have to pawn it, receiving some insufficient sum to keep at bay the antiques dealer he owed for a forged Poussin, or to partly pay off the hotel keeper, to avoid having to leave the shabby establishment under cover of night, leaving behind important books and prints and manuscripts – maybe even some drawings by Constantin Guys – or to appease the pharmacist for the medications that failed to heal his venereal disease, the opium that failed to calm his chagrin? There had been so many Baudelairean jackets, each part of the infinite cycle of clothing, pawning, borrowing, owing, which, continuously recombinant, functioned in his life as the cardinal directions or the cosmic elements did in ancient geometries. Surely some of the purloined jackets were still circulating in the rag cosmos. The poet was not alone in upholding this sartorial cosmology. Marx, too, while writing Capital in London, rhythmically pawned his coat and then borrowed to retrieve it; so determining was this mobile garment and its liquid value that he used its image to begin the great study of the production of value in modernity. ‘A coat is a use-value,’ Marx wrote, ‘that is determined by need.’ It was said that he could only go to the library to research his lifework on those days when his coat was out of hock. At such times Baudelaire, or so he wrote to his mother, seeking yet another small advance on his capital to again renew the cycle, would wear all of his shirts at once and not go out. So the coat was also a fungible money – at the pawnshop it represented to its temporary owner not its usefulness, but a mobile unit of value in itself. A coat became heating wood, coffee, a room, time.
Jackets and coats are awkward to pack in suitcases. If the season changes just as one moves on, often a jacket will be left behind, along with several books. What happened to my wide-collared late-1940s greatcoat, the one I wore with jazz shoes to cruise in the Luxembourg Gardens? After only a season of wear I had had to leave the fortuitous garment in one of the bare hotels, its lining torn to ribbons and the edges of the wide cuffs frayed, but I had loved that coat and the heavy swish of its hem above my ankles in the public gardens. When I came to this hamlet, dragging my huge suitcases over the threshold, I had not been able to divest myself of the collection of Japanese tailoring I had gathered over decades with the ritual secrecy of a committed addict, nor my collection of red-and-green Loebs in their bright and plain paper covers, nor my early diaries. This cottage is now my archive. I am not sure that this is what I imagined for my life in poetry as I strove away on my blue typewriter in chambres de bonnes in 1985, yet having achieved such an arc
hive I am not dissatisfied. In melancholic moments I refer to it as my hut, as it is very cheap, sparsely furnished, uninsulated, and heated by one wood stove. Many would consider it unsuitable for habitation. I can say that it does not leak. But if it is a hut, it is a dandiacal hut; all of my early urban fantasies, sartorial, perambulatory, philosophical, are now concentrated in its rough rafters and stone walls. My walks with my dog through the fields are theoretical experiments in the association of arcane concepts with a material history of margins. The landscape itself rhythmically conceals and reveals a tracing of the seizure and scarring of the earth by capital. Here I am not so much a recluse as an archivist of the ephemeral. This is one possible fate for the female thinker; this is one of the calmants of my heart.
I went to Sheffield, wearing the Baudelairean jacket. It was an extremely mild and grey day in February. I travelled northwards by train from Paris. I wore no overcoat, just a loose and long white cotton men’s tuxedo shirt beneath the adored garment, whose breast pocket I had decorated, just the month before for the New Year’s festivities, with a flesh-pink silk pouf. I felt very dapper. I wore my now-greying hair in a loose pageboy and my fingernails habitually painted with the Chanel Rouge-Noir nail polish that I had begun to fetishize the moment I became aware of its existence, which coincidentally was the year I published my first book, so that always now I associate this high Goth colour with the thrill of first publication. I improvised a sort of cravat from a tatter of black lace. I would tell no one that my outré jacket was Baudelairean, preferring to keep private that part of my poetical fantasy. I carried only a small satchel, with some personal items, and a few copies of my book to distribute among my hosts. I was not staying for long. I would need no other costume.
I made my way to London, then paused there for a night. I was to stay with a friend and visit the Joseph Beuys exhibition hosted by the Tate before continuing on to Sheffield the next day. We were at this exhibition, my friend and I, discussing Beuys’s seriously ridiculous installation The Pack, in which a fleet of wooden dogsleds tumbles outwards, bearing grease-farded grey felt cargoes, fanning from the opened rear doors of a Volkswagen van, and as we rehearsed our reservations about Beuys’s shamanic proclivities, barely conscious of my gesture, I reached for the pink silk pouf to clean my glasses. From the breast pocket of the Baudelairean jacket, following the small flourish of the pink square, escaped a stream of small moths. Softly they fluttered over the dogsleds with their rolls of felt. Do moths also go for fat? I thought it was my own heart that was moth-ridden, such deep mortification did I feel, and when later we returned to my friend’s house, I hung my jacket outside the front door on a shrub, not willing to infect her elegant premises with my travelling scourge. I had already inaugurated the destruction of the part of the heritage of Joseph Beuys that was made out of felt, but at least my friend’s own tailoring and upholsteries would remain intact. The next morning as I left, I retrieved the jacket from its branch, and with an appalled awareness that the garment I wore was in fact alive, and exactly why it had been so cheap to buy at the usually bourgeois Bastille market, I continued to my destination.
In Sheffield the conventional pleasures of the experimental poetry event awaited. I was met by my hosts at the train station, itself a very Goth, worn-out fantasy with its rusting lacelike steel skeleton and expanses of roughly boarded-up glass between faux-medieval masonry arches. A thatch of bright band posters covered the hoardings and yellow-and-black emergency tape cordoned off the most decrepit parts of the station. There was garbage loosely heaped everywhere and several interior sand piles; the visual and spatial complexity was so absorbing that it was difficult to locate a door. The systems and infrastructures were continuing to erode, as they had been doing since the arrival of Thatcher in 1979, and the defunct industrial beauty of nineteenth-century train stations was no exception. Everything had been privatized or was about to be privatized except for poetry, which was worthless. These things, and others, about the depressed local economy, the fall of the social state, and the increasing precariousness of survival, were explained to me as I walked with my hosts to the pub where the reading would be held. Emboldened by our shared contempt for capital and our appreciation for difficult syntax, we drank a great deal. Plastic cups of red wine stained our lips black. We continued after the poetry reading to an Italian restaurant, ate heartily, danced between the tables after closing, and then went back to the house of the hosts. By then drunk, I had forgotten about the shameful condition of my jacket. I flung it over the back of an armchair with everyone’s coats, in a great dark tangle. We continued our drinking discussions.
Finally in very early morning it became time to leave. I had not yet checked into the hotel that my hosts had provided for my visit, together with a small stipend and the train ticket. Searching for my jacket among all the others in the heap of black cloth, I suddenly remembered the moths; I dissolved in laughter. When I explained my situation, my hosts recoiled. Like most poets I knew, they were great collectors of vintage tailoring and old cashmere and beautifully worn carpets and now I had in all likelihood infected their house. The more they recoiled, the louder I laughed. Nothing could be as ridiculous as this. I laughed till I wept. I would not be asked back. Tersely now I was accompanied to my hotel.
It was a sprawling, worn-out place just across from the train station, and had not yet been visited by the glitzy scourge of provincial hotel renovation – no eggplant over-scaled paisley carpet, no smoky-mirrored dividing screens in the so-called breakfast room, no chrome-plated light fixtures hanging from exposed, black-painted ductwork in great bundled clumps. Instead it was simply and reassuringly nondescript. Brownish, I guess. The desk clerk discovered that I was not in their system – my registration had been lost. And what was more awkward, the hotel was entirely booked by a stag party. It was very late at night, and we all searched for a solution. It was decided that I could stay in what the clerk termed the ‘hospitality suite,’ the only uninhabited room that remained, a room not typically let out for entire nights. It was on the ground floor directly across from the back entry to the bar. I needed very much to sleep off my wine, so I accepted the proposition. My host left, satisfied that I’d been properly seen to.
This room was very large, and judging from the state of the carpet, had accommodated its share of parties. There were cigarette burns edging the few pieces of formica furniture, and in the middle of the room, the sagging bed was covered with a pink quilted nylon bedspread that seemed to have been there since the year of my birth. Not caring to witness the bedsheets, I fell on top of the pink coverlet, still wearing the infamous jacket, and slept.
I dreamt drunkenly of the origin of tailoring.
In the quite late utopia of my sleep, a sartorial aura distributed itself across the long textile era called modernity. I turned on the pink coverlet. The mediocrity of capital was parodied on a lapel. This meant that textile’s inherently mechanical reproducibility stretched in taut dialectic with the draper’s fold, repeating and repeating and repeating. I threw my sleeping arm across a stain. A she-tailor sliced into the continuous cloth of capital to cut a garment. This garment constructed the pure ideality of the androgynous form. Who was this tailor? I muttered and scowled without waking. The tailor was modernity’s mystic. I had not even removed my boots. She said that the tailored garment first developed in the Middle Ages as a fitted woollen underlayer for suits of metal armour. She said it was constructed in order to prevent chafing. Now my boots were chafing. She said that before the fourteenth century all garments were made of simple uncut squares and rectangles of cloth. The dream was very long. Now I was weaving rectangles. Folded rectangle was stitched to folded rectangle. All edges were woven selvedges. I kept sleeping. I kept stitching. She said that before armour the beautiful power of garments was the rhythm of folds. I felt the folded beauty in my sleep. She said that the folds were inconveniently uncomfortable beneath the snugly fitted armour. They clumped up and chafed and bruised the wearer
. Therefore the tailoring or cuts, drawing the garment close to the living skin. One part of the technique of tailoring was layering many mitred woollen pieces to mould a form. The woollen layers constituted a padding fitted to the body. She said that in so contriving the woollen padding, she transformed the suit of armour to a kind of furnace or chrysalis. From it the dandy inevitably emerged. I was waking, still a little moist, coyly fluttering the tails of my morning jacket.
Sunlight penetrated the hospitality suite. There was very little time, no time for breakfast. I had to catch my train. My mouth was not a good place. I stank. Also my jacket stank. It had been through a great deal. I recalled the moths.
In the far corner of the room was an armoire. What did an armoire have to do with the sort of hospitality this room proffered? It was not even formica; it looked like walnut. It was decoratively crested with a carved geometrical cornice, and a tarnished key dangling a scrap of ribbon emerged from its lock. It exuded a magnetic force. I opened it. The interior was lined in peculiar floral wallpaper. It was as if this armoire had materialized in the night, transubstantiated from a cheap hotel on the boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle in 1865. I saw hashish-emboldened stories in the shapes of the flowers. A wooden hanger hung on a hook. Otherwise the armoire was empty. There only one thing to do, and I did it with a kind of quick instinct, as would an artist who all at once, in her studio, perceives the only solution to a long-standing, worried-over metaphysical problem. I removed my jacket and hung it there, respectfully and tenderly buttoning its buttons and adjusting the fall of the shoulders on the wooden hanger. I closed the armoire, then ran for my train.
The Baudelaire Fractal Page 12