The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
habit of wearing red underwear, which has no significant precedence in
popular dress prior to the modern age, suggests that clothes still have a
magical function today. Red – the colour of blood, source of life – is auspicious
for the new year and, at the same time, offers an occasion for an
implicit seduction rite, allowing both sexes to reveal that they are wearing
something red underneath. 3 This innocent erotic game merges with the
surreal power of contemporary fashion, which consists in overturning, literally,
the order of bodily coverings, exhibiting what is normally hidden
and putting what is underneath on top.
The new technological materials, 4 too, are well suited to our glittering
Christmas attire: clothes made of these materials seem straight out of a
NASA laboratory, or inspired by the magical PVC costume created by
Ferragamo for the Good Fairy in Andy Tennant’s Cinderella (Museo
Salvatore Ferragamo 1998: 80–81). Garments that create a trompe l’oeil
effect similar to a hologram, and clothed bodies as bright as Christmas
trees; the tree as the sylvan double of the human body, bedecked with
colour and light at Christmas, as if it were a body totem to propitiate.
In Northern Europe, on the feast of St Lucy’s Day (13 December),
images of the saint show her bearing gifts, dressed in brilliant white with
glowing candles on her head. This visible resplendence inverts the condition
of the saint’s blindness 5 and so light becomes a metaphor for the
magico-religious illumination of body and mind.
The ‘garment of light’ (like the traje de luz of the toreros) is a classic
example of a costume replete with ritual significance, through which magic
is reproduced in everyday practices. So dressing up for Christmas could be
seen not merely as a vain and futile consumer whim, but rather as a way
to embody, literally, certain values in order to escape from the terrible
Christmas Cat, emblem of the dark fate awaiting all those who haven’t the
will, or the means, to renew themselves at least once a year by shaking off
stereotypes.
In Woody Allen’s film Deconstructing Harry one of Harry’s wives, the
psychoanalyst interpreted in his fantasies by the lovely Demi Moore, has a
religious crisis at a certain point in her life. From a sensual, liberal and
worldly intellectual she becomes a strict Orthodox Jew. The change is
made strikingly visible on her body: low-cut blouses, miniskirts and long,
flowing hair are replaced by drab shawls, long skirts and neat hairdos.
Yet this austere ‘Jewish look’ that Woody Allen so irreverently pokes fun
at is not his own invention. In 1998 the Israeli Amos Ben Naeh attempted
to launch a corpus of fashion imagery inspired by religious orthodoxy. 6
The models in his agency lengthened their hems and sleeves, wore heavy
stockings and buttoned-up, high-necked tops, covered their heads and tied
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