The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
The fact that the dog collar is losing ground is undoubtedly a sign of the
times, a conservative backlash in the Catholic world sanctioned by
‘Woytilanism’. And yet the Vatican doesn’t disdain promoting the most
kitsch forms of mass communication, such as the young American ‘papists’
welcoming John Paul II with all kinds of pious trinkets and gadgets
(including fake tiaras), like children in Disneyland wearing Mickey Mouse
hats. The aristocratic times of Pius XII 2 are long gone, as too are the times
of Don Milani and his anti-conformist Lettera a una professoressa (1967),
a famous essay on the need to abolish class distinctions within the educational
system.
While priests are returning to the rigours of the cassock, nuns seem quite
stable in their choice of a more secular habit. Whatever happened to the
sister in the white wing-tipped coronet? Toscani used it a few years ago in
his notorious photo of a nun kissing a priest (who was wearing a traditional
cassock), but it was only a whiff of déjàvu. Today nuns have other
things on their mind, from the priesthood for women to sexual distinctions
in theology.
For her part, the Madonna, that supreme model of femininity, is keeping
up with the times, trying to look as postmodern as possible, just as she did
in one of her presumed apparitions in eastern Slovenia, where she manifested
herself wearing a gold dress and crown à la Barbie, without veil or
rosary. The blood-tears of many statues of the Madonna may be taken as
an organic metaphor for a bodily covering that recounts her sad stories as
conceived in the collective imagination. Interesting that while Madonnas in
the West produce liquids, whether tears or blood, in the East there have
been cases reported of sacred statutes actually absorbing liquids!
Certainly, more ink has been consumed on the Devil’s apparel than on
God’s look. Perhaps rightly so, since dress always contains a diabolical
rhetoric.
A few years ago in Southern Italy a very strange bank robbery took
place: in order to hide his face the robber covered it, not with a mask, but
with a pair of boxer shorts! The episode both mocked and evoked the
imagery we usually associate with a criminal’s clothing. An Italian cartoon
hero, Diabolik, is emblematic of this kind of imagery: with a black stocking
over his head, he is transformed from a ‘normal’ person into a dangerous,
yet fascinating, criminal. The black stocking acts as a kind of initiation
robe, turning him into a recognizable type. Clothes and style (perhaps
expressed through a minor detail) thus become commonplaces through
which we can imagine the figure of the criminal.
These commonplaces draw on daily news bulletins, as in the case of the
bank robber with boxer shorts (providing us with a bizarre inventory of
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