The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
blond, cyclists wear little goatee beards. And so the dividing line between
competitive and seductive strategies is no longer visible.
Today nothing is left to chance in sports gear, with the curious exception
of the athletes from the independent states of the former Soviet Union, who
in 1992 were still wearing T-shirts with CCCP printed on them, since there
wasn’t any money to buy new ones. Thus, even in the world of sport,
fashion is a symptom of history.
Coco Chanel found inspiration in the world of sport, especially water
sports, for her popular sweaters and trousers for women, which she ‘stole’
from men’s wear. It is to her that we owe the twentieth century philosophy
of ‘sporting fashion’, that is, of proposing as everyday, casual wear garments
and cuts typical of sporting contexts (sailing, tennis, golf and horse-riding in
particular). But lately a new factor has been conditioning the relation
between sport and fashion: sports gear is no longer seen as something distinct
and separate from more elegant or formal attire. The mania for doing
sport at all costs has insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of daily life:
so the gym top is worn at work under a cardigan, the sweatshirt left on in
the office after the morning jog. Tokens of the illusion of an athletic life, at
least in terms of appearance.
In times of peace the open wound in the collective sensibility caused by
the violence of war remains as an ever-present memory and as a sign which
prompts reflection on the more habitual, frivolous and ephemeral aspects
of life. Fashion is commonly considered one of these; indeed, its chief characteristic
is that of signalling changes in everyday life. In the relation
between war and fashion, however, the idea of death and the consumption
of bodies and values is common to both (see Leopardi 1827). And this relation
has been well documented: in the twentieth century, fashion witnessed
tremendous upheavals during the periods of world war. In women’s
fashion the First World War marked the passage from long to short skirts
and, generally, to more sober, essential models, which was also in keeping
with the aesthetics of the artistic avant-garde of the time. World war,
impoverishing nations, shattering empires and for the first time mobilizing
the masses, left its signs on the clothed body too. The essentiality of forms
made possible the enjoyment en masse of models once only available to the
privileged few. As Laura Piccinini (1991) writes, the army clothed bodies:
the trench coat was used by the British in the trenches; the Burberry was
the raincoat of the RAF; and the cardigan was used in the Crimean War by
the British cavalry under the command of Lord Cardigan.
One could write a whole book on fashion around the time of the Second
World War, when the global, mass dimension of both turned them into
everyday phenomena. Well-known couturiers designed the troops’
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