🇬🇧 Hosted By: Olga Campofreda
What I learned from Simone de Beauvoir’s wardrobe (yes, more on fashion and literature)
Lately, I find myself more and more often being called upon to defend the relationship between fashion and literature, despite the fact that even today many people still seem to consider it an anomaly. Why does fashion need literature? people ask me (and it makes me laugh that the opposite is never asked, perhaps because the answer would be too obvious). And what do books and clothes possibly have in common?
At first, I enthusiastically tried to articulate points of connection. For example, I would say, there is this relentless search for the great classic, the universal novel capable of enduring beyond time, just like that iconic handbag that survives the rapid succession of trends; and then there is style, which (I discovered through studying) is a concept shared by both worlds and derives from the Latin word stylus, the pointed object used in antiquity to write on wax or clay tablets. Today, both in literature and in fashion, style is that thing which leaves a mark, which is not easily forgotten after reading a story or after meeting someone who is not only well dressed, but who stands out in a uniquely personal way.
Finally, there is the question of the plot: the plot of a book, the weave of a fabric. This point has often given me the perfect opening to say that, after all, both fashion and literature are ecosystems driven by the desire to tell stories. They do so by intertwining elements that signify themselves but also something beyond themselves, and in part, even without directly intending to, they always have something to say about the society and context that produced them.
And yet, although these observations are received with interest by my interlocutors, they are not enough to answer their questions, because on their own they fail to dismantle the prejudice, alive on both sides, that fashion belongs to the realm of frivolity while literature belongs to that of knowledge, often perceived as difficult and dusty.
Recently, during an afternoon of doomscrolling, I came across a post commenting on what the author considered the paradoxical choice of using Simone de Beauvoir’s image for an event related to the fashion industry. There is even an interview, the social media user pointed out, in which the French philosopher supposedly said that fashion was literally the last thing on her mind.
That made me smile.
It was obvious that the person who had written those remarks had not read the entire interview, published in The Observer under the title My Clothes and I and now easily accessible online.
I had first discovered the article thanks to Maria Luisa Frisa, during a fascinating conversation precisely about the renewed connection between fashion and literature. The piece was written by Cynthia Judah, a journalist who, together with photographer Jack Nisberg, visited Beauvoir’s home in 1960 to peek into her wardrobe and talk about clothes. It is true that right at the beginning of the conversation the intellectual gives a somewhat disconcerting answer: «I must tell you that I am not at all interested in clothes. I have so many other things to think about, so many other interests that they are not at all on my mind.» But these are only the opening lines of the interview. Paragraph after paragraph, in what becomes a long report from the writer’s home, we are introduced to her favorite garments, little coats, furs, dressing gowns, hats, each accompanied by its own story. Alongside the description of each object, Beauvoir delights in recounting the shopping trips that led to their purchase during her travels around the world, from Madrid to Moscow, from China to New York.
On that occasion, the philosopher confesses to the journalist that as a child she did not particularly care about clothes, which she instead associated with her parents and their overly bourgeois, conventional lifestyle. However, once she began teaching at the Sorbonne, she started to play with fashion, at first to help herself step into the role of a professor - fashion therefore as disguise, as the construction of a social role - and later to express herself, to the point that by her second year of teaching some female students had even started copying her.
I challenge anyone to read this interview without sensing all the joy and amusement the woman feels while talking about her clothes, pulling out the details of where each garment came from. As when, for example, she recounts a trip to New York and the hours she spent shopping there: «I had a lovely time: I bought a white coat, beautifully made - I still wear it - and a fur coat. I don’t know what sort it was but it was all fluffy.» Not to mention her exotic phase, when she developed a passion for silk blouses and dressing gowns. Purchases she could afford precisely thanks to her writing.
By the end of the conversation with the English journalist, it seems Beauvoir has let her guard down. Swept along by the power of stories, the adventures that had led to the acquisition of her personal “treasures”, the resistance that had prompted her at the beginning to declare herself completely uninterested in fashion begins to dissolve.
In the beginning, it was artists - writers, philosophers, aesthetes - who dictated the rules of style, priests of aesthetic meaning whom people regarded with fascination, admiration, and sometimes amusement. Then counterculture arrived. Around the middle of the twentieth century, a fracture emerged between fashion and literature, one that still survives today in the form of a stereotype: on the one hand, the glossy surface of the fashion world; on the other, intellectual commitment supposedly detached, even if only apparently, from matters of style and trends. In 1960 Simone de Beauvoir was one of the most prominent engagé intellectuals on the international scene, and it seems to me that her first answer in the interview was above all a perfunctory response. Or perhaps, and this is also likely, by fashion she meant “trend,” and in trends she saw conformity, she who had used clothes to tell the story of herself, her rigor, the refinement of her gaze.
What is certain is that more than sixty years after those declarations, something is changing, and to me it seems above all a matter of possibility: on one side, for literature, which thanks to fashion is able to expand its readership, gaining global visibility in contexts that are sometimes unexpected and that it would have struggled to reach on its own; on the other, for fashion, which thanks to literature emerges strengthened in its power to tell stories, adding further meanings to the galaxy of symbols of which it has always been composed.