The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
city, a city built on imagery that is both technological and nostalgic, the
metropolis contains both the present and the past-in-the-present, as in the
lingering shots of old bridges over the Seine interspersed with images of
Paris at the end of the millennium. This city is also the sine qua non for the
potential existence of every other metropolis, the confirmation of the planetary
city – a bit Paris, a bit Tokyo, Los Angeles and Berlin – as it appears
in Bis ans Ende der Welt.
Fashion circulates the body, and the city is its favourite backdrop, for it
is here that the flâneurs and flâneuses of signs move in a continuous
passage of desire, identity and relations. The mater-polis, the mother city,
embraces all that is haphazard, anonymous, reproducible, multicultural,
and a fragmented, multiple, masked identity, while at the same time creating
an illusion of absolute originality and exclusiveness in every gesture
exhibited, every pose assumed and every garment worn.
Both Yamamoto and Wenders love the confusion of the city; both feel
that urban identity is a question of image, of identity in and with the crowd.
Urban identity is ‘being for others’, the sense of which, linked to fetishism
in forms of bodily representation as perceived by Benjamin, both film
director and fashion designer have completely and passionately embraced,
as emerges from their dialogue. Artificers of two different creative
processes, in their respective occupations, they seek a coexistence between
inventiveness and memory, which may even take the form of a contrast, or
chiasmus, between two tensions. While he is talking, Yamamoto leafs
through a book of old portrait photographs by Auguste Sander: faces of
men and women in their working gear, bodies whose social role is recognizable
in their clothes, linked to a given task, to a temporal scansion of the
day, and of life. The metropolis deprives the garment of this function, theoretically
close to pure, essential form; it deprives bodies of their identification.
From profoundly within metropolitan culture, and with the mature
awareness of a distant memory, yet without any sense of nostalgia, the
designer focuses his energy on recovering this essence, this form.
‘To find the essence of a thing in the production process.’ Yamamoto’s
remark reveals his commitment to finding a sensorial identity for form and
body through the production and manufacture (including manual work) of
a garment. In his commentary Wenders says that he became curious about
Yamamoto’s fashion when he saw its effect on Solveig Dommartin:
‘Dressed like that she seemed transformed every time, as if those garments
gave her body a new role’ (Wenders 1998: 77).
The film shows the designer making a dress to measure directly on a
model’s body. As if he were writing on the woman’s body, the designer
stands back to get a better look, then goes up to take the measurements.
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