The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
Yet we do indeed ‘touch’ with our eyes and if they are left uncovered by
the Islamic veil, the western fashion à la belle epoque of a short veil worn
over a hat both veils and unveils them. Veiled eyes are large, languid and
unfathomable, mesmerizing behind the caress of an ostrich boa, the face
half-hidden by sumptuous fabrics, as in a Klimt painting. So what happens
to the gaze when the mechanical apparatus of a pair of glasses is placed in
front of the eyes?
Of all the masks ever invented for the face, glasses are generally those
most motivated by a practical need. Nevertheless, ever since they were
introduced to the West between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
(Marco Polo recounts that in China they were already in use at the court
of Kubla Khan) the practical function has had to come to terms with an
aesthetic function, as we can clearly see in early modern portraits of nobles
and notables. The aesthetic function introduces fashion details even in the
lenses, details that dictate shape, colour and type of material.
There is traditionally an unbridgeable gulf between glasses and feminine
charm: for example, a short-sighted Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a
Millionaire constantly hides hers in order better to seduce an ageing financier.
And again, Hitchcock uses glasses on women in many of his films in
order to highlight the contrast between sex appeal and lack of it, as in
Vertigo, or in order to portray a female character as ‘bad’. But even these
unattractive connotations of female eyewear must inevitably intersect with
their opposite: the undeniable fascination emanating from a pair of eyes
hidden behind dark glasses.
Summer brings to the fore the omnipresent vision of faces obscured by
dark glasses, even though their season is really eternal, especially in the
sunny climates of the Mediterranean. Sunglasses were invented at the end
of the nineteenth century, though the fashion for dark lenses only really
took off in the 1930s. Their success coincided with a decline in the use of
broad-brimmed hats and bonnets in women’s fashion. Sunglasses with
black frames and lenses à la Blues Brothers even precede the irreverent
blues duo, who turned them into a parodic and stylized sign. Parodic in
that they derided the role of this type of sunglasses in the jet set’s wardrobe
and stylized in that they transformed into a fashion and a cult object what
idols like Ray Charles (who appears in the film) and Stevie Wonder used
out of necessity.
In the golden world of Hollywood stars, dark heart-shaped lenses evoke
the 1950s image of Kubrick’s Lolita or voluptuous young maidens in
search of success in the age of the baby-boom. In the history of youth
styles, on the other hand, illustrious exponents of the fashion for thickrimmed
dark glasses were the British Mods, who adopted them as part of
66