The Clothed Body

Fashion Intertexts
the criminal’s wardrobe), as well as on representations invented by mass
communication, literature and cinema. While cartoons offer us Diabolik’s
stocking-mask and Disney’s Basset Band in numbered red T-shirts, the
Western depicts the villain in a shabby duster, with a bandana round his
neck ready to hide his face when he robs the next stagecoach or bank. In
Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino imagines metropolitan crooks dressed like the
Blues Brothers (see Chapter 10); Bigelow in Point Break has her bank
robbers wear masks of recent United States presidents; and in Kubrick’s A
Clockwork Orange before committing a crime, the thugs, who all wear
white, perform an elaborate dress and makeup ritual on themselves.
As cinema reveals, crime can be seen as a grotesque and provocative performance,
a public exhibition that requires the right clothes, whether for
practical 3 or spectacular reasons. Yet body signs also speak a secret language
of recognition within criminal groups themselves: for example, the
expensive, flashy ring worn by the Mafia boss on his little finger.
Rather than flaunting its distinctive features, however, the criminal’s
body often seeks absolute anonymity. Terrorists, for instance, usually
conduct a normal life (even in terms of their external body signs, such as
clothes and hairstyle) while they are planning and perpetrating their
crimes. 4
Actually the notion of crime is always relative to a social definition of
what is legal or illegal. And this is true both for what we define as crime
tout court and for the criminal sign: until recently western societies considered
the tattoo, for example, a mark of deviancy, whereas it is now a
respectable and highly desirable fashion sign. The prostitute’s outfit, too,
now takes on high-profile, aristocratic connotations in the right contexts:
night clubs and television shows (see Chapter 5) which allow for the diffusion
of otherwise lamentable tastes.
In the light of such rich and complex imagery, we might ask ourselves:
how and why we are led to believe that a person is dangerous because of
the way s/he looks (that totality of expressive signs, including dress and
appearance style, based on individual choice)? Isn’t there a risk of social
stereotyping in our evaluations, springing from a mechanism of selfdefence?
Notwithstanding stereotypes, the truly dangerous criminal is the
unpredictable one, obsessively, pathologically, even diabolically overturning
his/her social role or function: the policeman’s uniform that hides
the blade of a serial killer; the magistrate’s gown, a wad of banknotes; the
priest’s cassock, the squalid body of a paedophile. A rich inventory of
images tapped by literature and cinema alike, but also part of the nonfiction
of daily life, as we sadly learn from the news every day. So perhaps
the old adage that ‘wearing a habit doesn’t necessarily make you a monk’
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