Journalism — Nilgün Yusuf

On Human Artefacts and Stopping the Clock

In geology, archaeology and palaeontology, the frozen is cause for celebration.

**Joan Crawford in** *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?* **1962. Director Robert Aldrich. Film still.**

Fossils, remains of Roman cities, dinosaur bones or a perfectly preserved woolly mammoth have
all become the focus of intense media attention, entertainment and education. Through these objects, worlds thought lost are re-imagined with increasing technical audacity, making the frozen a portal through which our imaginations can fly and alternative realities can be conjured.

Fashion, by contrast, is not so hot on the frozen – especially if the preserved happens to still be alive and kicking. The ageing ted, the resolute goth, the staunch classicist or the English eccentric, these are types who refuse to constantly modify their appearance in line with current mores because they have found something: a moment, an identity, a part of their lives, that they wish to preserve.1 While exposed to the same pressures as the rest of us, constantly buffeted by waves of ideal fashion through media, marketing, culture and society, they endure the ravages of time because they have chosen to stop the clock at a moment that feels significant, appropriate or pleasing. However, unlike the woolly mammoth, which is greeted with gasps of wonderment, these examples of the unfashionable are more ambiguously received. In 1945 historian James Laver went as far as pinning a mathematical equation to the phenomenon, claiming that after ten years, fashion is seen as hideous and after twenty years, it is ridiculous.2 So it is that fashion’s frozen are commonly dismissed, scorned or made fun of – views perpetuated by representations in film, photography and literature.

‘The stars are ageless, aren’t they?’ uttered Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s 1950 cinema classic, Sunset Boulevard. The tragic character, played by Gloria Swanson, presents a melodramatic and delusional case for not moving with the times. As a silent movie actress who failed to make the transition to talkies, Norma Desmond is stuck. As she glides around her Hollywood mansion, waiting for the moment when she will be adored once more (‘I was always big. It’s the pictures that got small.’) we are offered a morality tale on what happens to women who refuse to age gracefully and leave the stage, exit left, when their time is up. A similar message is sent in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? from 1962. Bette Davis’ interpretation of one time child star Baby Jane Hudson, visage garishly painted, lined, and framed by ringlets, is difficult to forget. The cruel tormentor of her crippled sister, her psyche is forever childlike, that of a cruel and spoilt infant, perhaps damaged by her childhood fame. Happiest when clad in baby doll ruffles, she never tires of recreating the act that she used to perform with her Daddy. That was her moment and that is where she chooses to stay. Through the tools of her performance, dress, make-up and hair, she is able to transport herself back to the time of her life. Like Norma Desmond, she is depicted as a deranged, disturbed woman – clearly not an advisable choice. Photographer Diane Arbus’ black and white portrait of former debutante Brenda Diana Duff Frazier is another poignant example of fashion’s shelved dolls. Duff Frazier, who in 1938 was Life Magazine’s ‘Girl of The Year’, is revisited twenty-eight years later by Arbus for Esquire magazine. We see her posing in bed (is she sick or is this a metaphor for life on hold?), wearing a white fur stole around her narrow shoulders, her fragile fingers holding a cigarette. She is a frail, fluttering, faded creature. In a 1965 series called ‘Fashion Independents’ for Harper’s Bazaar, Arbus points her camera at Mrs. T. Charlton Henry who by contrast resembles an ancient bird of prey. She twinkles in her best couture as she sits perched, bejewelled and impassive. While losing the battle against youth, these women present both stoicism and vulnerability. Arbus’ lens is compassionate and soulful. These women survive. Their wardrobes may be frozen but their pre-Botox faces are full of fallibility and humanity; every line is an experience, a story, a triumph or regret.

**Brenda Diana Duff Frazier in** *Esquire***, 1966. Photographer Diane Arbus.**

While such women are often regarded tragically – mourning a lost youth or former splendour – frozen men of fashion are commonly subjects of comic relief. Rod Stewart may now be approaching his seventies but he continues to sport the same bleached blonde hair that he had in the Seventies. Roberto Cavalli, Hugh Hefner and Peter Stringfellow wear similar deep suntans, ashes of jewellery and chest hair. The narrative seems to be that while women find it hard to part with their figure or looks, for certain men (whose wealth and success once invited female adoration) the anxiety is centred on their diminishing potency and virility. Rod Stewart may no longer be a rutting young stallion of a performer but his big hair remains, a symbol of his one time sexual allure and magnetism; a follicle link to when he was most powerful.

For Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Kray, the legendary British gangster of the 1950s and 1960s, life as he knew it stopped in 1968 – the year that he, alongside his twin brother Reginald, was given life imprisonment for murder. British tailor, Mark Powell, recalls that when he was commissioned to make a suit for Ronnie Kray in the 1980s, his exacting client wanted it ‘cut in exactly the style of a 1968 suit: single breasted, narrow lapels’.3 For the man doing time, the clock had literally stopped when the prison gates clanked behind him. Life would be forever 1968.

For those who concern themselves with fashionable matters, nothing could be worse than to be considered passé. After all, fashion is change and change is fashion. The fashionable are in a state of constant flux and transition; proud to be mirrors of change, works in progress. To be deemed out of step with the times, to be branded ‘last season’ carries both sartorial and social stigma. It is, as Laver tells us, ridiculous. Those in fashion observe those ‘out of fashion’ with fascinated pity or dismissive disdain. These belligerently unfashionable, set in sartorial aspic, are unsettling, perplexing, disturbing. The fashionable do not get on with the unfashionable; they are seen as unrefined, unsophisticated and irrelevant. The typical fashion response towards our frozen says something about cultural anxiety; the fear of ageing and death, as well as of being left behind.

Nevertheless, there are many things to admire in those who refuse to move with the times. These individuals have withstood consumerism’s onslaught and should be applauded for their fortitude and endurance. They have rejected the cyclical temptations laid before them and chosen a personal narrative of dress that retains its own authenticity and integrity. In fields across the arts and humanities, from sub-cultural theory and anthropology to social studies and fashion theory, there is a growing body of material around the ageing population that is perhaps an indication of a wider re-evaluation of the effect of time on fashion. There is no doubt that these individuals have a huge amount to offer the style connoisseur culturally, historically and semantically. Could these walking archives or human artefacts become the new icons of sustainability? After all, they are not supporting a system that exploits its workers and usurps the earth’s resources. Instead of scorned, our fashion mammoths should perhaps be seen as indispensable portals into worlds thought lost, alternative realities that offer up another way of life. By paying these image veterans their due respect, might we not learn to re-negotiate our own wardrobes and the fashion system itself?

1 A Bennett and P Hodkinson (eds), Ageing & Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity, Bloomsbury, London, 2012
2 J Laver, Taste and Fashion: From the French Revolution to the Present Day, G.G. Harrap Limited, London, 1945
3 Interview with the author, 2009

Senior Reviewer and Awards Panel, London Pub Theatres

Film features for Time Out

Harper's Bazaar

That’s Not My Age

Goodwood Magazine

Vestoj

On Human Artefacts and Stopping the Clock