Dressing up in Books (and Other Art Forms)

February 03 2010 — Helen Barnes-Bulley

Fashion and clothing have always played a pivotal role in the arts. Arguably, Cate Blanchett knew it when she partnered Giorgio Armani with the Sydney Theatre Company for their upcoming season, as did Sofia Coppola when she asked Manolo Blahnik to design shoes as sweet and sugared as candy for Mario Antoinette. In the December issue of Meanjin, Helen Barnes-Bulley looks costuming throughout the ages, from Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’ to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, and reveals how the smallest detail – an elegant ruffle, studded jacket or dishevelled hem – can lay a powerful accent over any scene. The full essay is available on our editions page, and you can read a brief extract below.

‘The solution to my life’, writes Alice Munro, ‘occurred to me one night while ironing a shirt.’

I think the revelation of the aesthetic delights of a shirt—a finely crafted shirt rather than a well-ironed one—came to me when Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) took off her jacket in the last touching scene of Warren Beatty’s film Reds. She is attending to John Reed (Warren Beatty), author of Ten Days that Shook the World, who is dying of typhus in a squalid hospital bed somewhere on the Black Sea coast. Her shirt is appropriately subdued in its colours—a kind of greenish-grey, and moving in that slithery-slippery way over her shoulders as only fine silk or crepe can do. (I think it was a silk shirt.) The collar was open and her sleeves rolled up to her elbows—she was in working-nursing mode, not trying to look glamorous. But of course movie stars in one sense always do look glamorous, and the simple shirt had an eloquence that enriched the scene aesthetically but also robbed it of the realism some might have felt it needed. She looked both practical and stylish in a way that a Russian peasant woman tending a soldier in the next bed might not. But, on the other hand, it was a shirt Natasha Rostov might have worn—albeit in a slightly different style back in 1812—or any other aristocratic character who has to strip down to her shirt sleeves to aid the dying hero (in Natasha’s case, Prince Andrei).

Reds was a film that relied on emotional power rather than realism; John Reed didn’t look much like Warren Beatty and not all that much action preceding the Russian Revolution was carried out to a resounding chorus of the Internationale, but romantic leftists probably responded to this evocation of one of the pivotal events of the twentieth century and of these two Americans caught up in it. Reed was so feted by the Bolsheviks that he was buried—after the scene with the shirt—in the Kremlin, alongside various revolutionary heroes who died before they could live to be purged by Stalin (and thereby lose any entitlement to a burial along the red walls). These were the walls Anna Akhmatova refers to in her poem ‘Requiem’, walls that mirror those outside which wives and mothers lined up two centuries earlier to beg mercy for their rebellious husbands and sons from Peter the Great. (There is a dramatic painting of this by the Russian artist Surikov, who specialised in historical themes, called The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy.)